Books like Schnitzler's century by Peter Gay

Marshall Berman traces how 19th‑century revolutions, key writers, and modernist urban planning reshaped society, arguing that continual adaptation is essential for a truly modern civilization.

Autobiography of a gay American published in 1901 in St. Louis, Mo.

Nietzsche’s first book explores Greek tragedy, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and Wagner’s music, arguing that the fusion of Apollonian order and Dionysian ecstasy creates the highest art and offers insight into suffering.

"Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, did "more to help us understand the Russian Revolution than any other book I know." Now, in Natasha's Dance, this internationally renowned historian does the same for Russian culture, summoning the myriad elements that formed a nation and held it together.". "Beginning in the eighteenth century with the building of St. Petersburg - a "window on the West" - and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself - its, character, spiritual essence, history, and destiny. What did it mean to be Russian - an illiterate serf or an imperial courtier? And where was the true Russia - in Europe or in Asia? Figes skillfully interweaves the great works - by Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Stravinsky and Chagall - with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from eating, drinking, and bathing habits to beliefs about death and the spirit world. His fascinating characters range high and low; the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search the wilderness for the Kingdom of God; the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera's first superstar, won the heart of her owner, and shocked society by becoming his wife; the composer Stravinsky, who returned to Russia after fifty years in the West and discovered that the homeland the had left had never left his heart."--BOOK JACKET.

Working from classic texts of European and American writers―including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde―Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.

From Dawn to Decadence traces the arc of Western culture from the Renaissance to the present, blending historical analysis with literary insight.

Alice Walker shares her life as an activist, weaving essays on spirituality, feminism, race, and politics to argue that the world is saveable if we act.

Jay Winter's powerful new study of the collective remembrance of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Using a great variety of literary, artistic, and architectural evidence, Dr. Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration, and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'Modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914-1918, Dr. Winter instead argues that what characterized that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose, inevitably.

Did Dr. Strangelove's America really learn to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film would have us believe? What has that darkly satirical comedy in common with the impassioned rhetoric of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech or with the beat of Elvis Presley's throbbing "I'm All Shook Up"? They all, in Margot Henriksen's vivid depiction of the decades after World War II, are expressions of a cultural revolution directly related to the atomic bomb. Because there was little organized, extensive protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation until the 1980s, America's overall reaction to the bomb has been seen as acceptance or indifference. Henriksen argues instead that, in spite of the ease with which Cold War exigencies overrode all protests by scientists or others after the end of World War II, America's psyche was split as surely as the atom was split. In opposition to the "culture of consensus," which never questioned the pursuit of nuclear superiority, a "culture of dissent" was born. Its current of rebellion can be followed through all the forms of popular culture, and Henriksen evokes dozens of illuminating examples from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

"In the year 1800, the world suddenly found itself enmeshed in a web or mercantilism, war, and political intrigue, out of which a new world - our world - was struggling to be born. In this narrative historian Olivier Bernier provides us with a chronicle of that time, taking us on a journey around the world, providing a portrait of civilization at the dawn of the modern era.". "Bernier takes us inside the courts and parliaments of the major powers to listen in on the political discourse of the day. He leads us into the boudoirs and ballrooms of the rich, the cramped homes of the middle class, and the hovels of the poor to provide as intimate glimpse of the private lives of the first modern men and women. And he explores the seminal works of such masters as Beethoven, Goethe, David, and Hokusai to shed new light on the revolutionary trends that were taking shape in the arts, architecture, science, and philosophy." "The World in 1800 is an irresistible read for scholars and history buffs alike."--BOOK JACKET.

This text explores the enigma of 17th-century Holland, a nation that attained an unprecedented level of affluence, yet lived in constant dread of being corrupted by prosperity. Examines seventeenth-century Dutch life, history, and culture.