Most of the questions below are wide-open and general; they are meant to inspire thought, not to yield a single "right answer." In writing your paper, you will want to focus on a specific example or two. Support your analysis with reference to secondary sources and develop your own argument through interpretation of primary-source material.(Bold-faced text below is a link to relevant bibliographical suggestions.)

Your paper should be approximately seven pages long, double-spaced, in 11- or 12-point font, with one-inch margins. Papers that are less than six full pages or more than ten will be severely penalized. Late papers will lose 1/3 of a grade for each day they are late. In addition to your lecture notes and Merriman's History of Modern Europe, you should consult at least some of the works listed as "Further Reading." If you are writing about one of the primary sources (texts from the time) that we discussed in class, remember to look at the full version of it, rather than simply the selections we discussed. Where appropriate, you should also use some of the recommended on-line resources. For further guidance on paper writing, see:

          • Dr. Spang's guidelines for paper writing
            • Indiana University's Writing Tutorial Service (html-version of the "pamphlets" opens in a web browser)
             • William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style (1918)—a classic

1. Class and gender identities interacted in multiple ways in the nineteenth-century city. Concentrating on the case of consumerism and the department store, describe the key features of working-class male identity. One key primary source is Zola's, The Ladies Paradise (on-line here or available in the library). Below are a number of potentially useful secondary sources (books and articles in the library). By reading through their footnotes and bibliographies, you should be able to identify other potential primary sources. You could also try searching on-line for nineteenth-century advertising. (I have included works on middle-class masculinity in the following suggestions for reading, because working-class masculinity was related to middle-class masculinity in some way. The question remains: how are they related to each other?)

Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (1989).
Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939 (1999).
Christopher Hosgood, " 'Mercantile Monasteries': Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain," Journal of British Studies 38:3 (July 1999), [available in the library or on-line via JSTOR].
Micheal Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store (1980).
Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (1998).
Donald Reid, "In the Name of the Father: A Language of Labour Relations in Nineteenth-Century France," History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), 1-22.
Mary Louise Roberts, "Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture," American Historical Review 103:3 (June 1998), 817-844 [available in the library or on-line via JSTOR].
John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England (1999).
John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (2005).

2. To what extent did the 1871 unification of Germany constitute a "revolution"?

David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (1998).
H. Böhme, The Foundation of the German Empire: Select Documents (1971).
John Breuilly, The Formation of the First German Nation-State (1996).
Hajo Holborn, "Bismarck's Realpolitik," Journal of the History of Ideas 21:1 (1960), 84-98 [available in the library or on-line via JSTOR].
                German History Documents and Images


3. In what ways did the First World War change the definition of "war"? In answering this question, you will probably want to concentrate on a single national context and to consider the question primarily from the perspective of one of the following: military strategists/commanding officers; ordinary soldiers; non-combatants.

Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War, 1914-1918 (1992).
Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14-18: Understanding the Great War (2003).
David French, The British Way in Warfare (1990).
Michael Howard, "World War One: The Crisis in European History," Journal of Military History 57:5 (1993), 127-138, [available in the library or on-line via JSTOR].
Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany 2004).
Steven Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9:1 (summer 1984) 58-107 [available in the library or on-line via JSTOR].   
             World War One Document Archive            Great War Different (magazines, children's books, etc.)       Posters and Postcards of the World Wars

4. Compare and contrast Engels's On the Condition of the Working Class in England with Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto. In writing this paper, you will want to focus primarily on these two texts, but you will want to consider multiple perspectives, including style, word choice, and intended audience as well as "content." How do style and meaning relate to each other in these two texts?
                    Reading the People       Knowing History, Making Revolutions

5. It is a convenient shorthand to refer to "the Revolutions of 1848," as if all uprisings in that year were part of a related phenomenon. Concentrating on two cases only, examine the extent to which these uprisings were (or, were not) related to each other.
                                 Revolutions of 1848            Europe and Nationalism post-1848