Research Guides: HIST 3367: Europe in the Age of Absolutism & Revolutions: Find Books

Librarian

Contact:

936-294-1520
kclaunch@shsu.edu
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Purpose

This guide is intended to provide a starting point for researching topics related to Europe in the Age of Absolutism and Revolutions (1648-1815).

This guide is not comprehensive; it does not list all of the resources on this topic or in related disciplines owned by the Library or available on the Internet. This guide serves merely as a starting point for research.

"More often known as despotism in the eighteenth century, absolutism was a form of strong individual rule... Its converse was either limited rule by a monarch confined by laws and consultative assemblies, or republicanism, which was confined to smaller powers."
A Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century World History (1994), pg. 1

Required Book - Available in the Library!

Europe, 1648-1815: From the old regime to the age of revolution by Winks & Kaiser (2004)

On Reserve - Ask for it at the Library Service Desk!

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Other Reference Books

Europe, 1450-1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
Call Number: Read Online
Europe, 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire
Call Number: Read Online
Absolutism and the Scientific Revolution, 1600-1720: A Biographical Dictionary
Call Number: Read Online
Provides information on more than 400 individuals who created and played a role in the era's intellectual and cultural activity. Focus is on cultural figures--those whose inventions and discoveries contributed to the scientific revolution, those whose line of reasoning contributed to secularism, groundbreaking artists like Rembrandt, lesser known painters, and contributors to art and music.
The Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: A political, social, and military history
Call Number: REF DC220 .E53 2006 volume 1-3 (2nd floor)
Last volume contains primary source documents, including first-hand accounts of battles, treaty texts, key state papers, and more. Also includes 65 maps, including depictions of Europe at the start and conclusion of the wars; major battles and campaigns, including troop movements; and the political changes produced by major treaties and international conferences.
A Dictionary of Eighteenth Century World History by Jeremy Black and Roy Porter (eds.)
Call Number: REF D286 .D53 1994 (2nd floor)
Publication Date: 1994
The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime
Call Number: DC148 .O94 2012 (4th floor)

A Sampling of Books in the Main Collection

Global Crisis: War, climate change and catastrophe in the seventeenth century
Call Number: Read Online - Or print is available: D247 .P37 2013 (4th floor)
Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides - the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread. A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of 'natural' as well as 'human' archives transforms our understanding of the World Crisis.
Revolutions Without Borders: The call to liberty in the Atlantic world
Call Number: Read Online - Or print is available: E18.75 .P65 2015 (4th floor)
This expansive history explores how the revolutionary ideas that spurred the American and French revolutions reverberated far and wide, connecting European, North American, African, and Caribbean peoples more closely than ever before. Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. Polasky analyzes the paper records--books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more--to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal.
Women in Eighteenth Century Europe
Call Number: HQ1587 .H86 2010 (4th floor)
This is a comprehensive and deeply perceptive study of women's experience across the European continent into Russia and the Ottoman Islamic East. In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women's opportunities and worldview - long before the various women's suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics.
Absolutism in Central Europe
Call Number: Read Online
Absolutism in Central Europe is about the form of European monarchy known as absolutism, how it was defined by contemporaries, how it emerged and developed, and how it has been interpreted by historians, political and social scientists. This book investigates how scholars from a variety of disciplines have defined and explained political development across what was formerly known as the'age of absolutism'. It assesses whether the term still has utility as a tool of analysis and it explores the wider ramifications of the process of state-formation from the experience of central Europe from the early seventeenth century to the start of the nineteenth.
Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in France
Call Number: Read Online
Mazarin was the model statesman of the early modern period in French history. This book follows his career from pupil of the Jesuits, through legate in Paris and Avignon, to service for Louis XIII and beyond. Mazarin's role in the survival of absolute monarchy during the upheavals of the Fronde and his guidance of the young Louis XIV are given full weight. His crucial part in many diplomatic exchanges, and in particular those which brought an end to the Thirty Years War and the Franco-Spanish War, is examined in detail. His life is placed in the context of a study of the times, highlighting the rapidly changing nature of government.
Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism
Call Number: QB36.G2 B54 1993 (3rd floor)
Galileo, Courtier is Mario Biagioli's radical reinterpretation of Galileo's career. In the early baroque court of the Medicis and the Vatican, Galileo fashioned both his career and his science to the demands of patronage and its complex systems of power and prestige. Where other writers make distinctions between Galileo the scientist and Galileo the courtier, Biagioli demonstrates that the two cannot be separated. He argues that Galileo's courtly role was integral to his science - the questions he chose to examine, his methods, even his conclusions. Biagioli focuses on the period between 1610, when Galileo became philosopher and mathematician to the Medici, and 1633, when he was tried and his theories were condemned. Through Galileo's experience, Biagioli explores the limits patronage imposed on the practice of science - limits that were transformed by the new scientific institutions developed in the decades after Galileo's trial. Informed by currents in sociology, cultural anthropology, and literary theory, Galileo, Courtier is neither a biography nor a conventional history of science. It is, rather, a fascinating cultural and social history highlighting the workings of power, patronage, and credibility in the development of science.
How Modern Science Came into the World: Four civilizations, one 17th-century breakthrough
Call Number: Read Online - Or print is available: Q125 .C537 2010 (3rd floor)
Proposes a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet narrowly interconnected, revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years' duration. This vision enables him to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world. It also enables him to explain how half-way into the 17th century a vast crisis of legitimacy could arise and, in the end, be overcome.
Victor Amadeus II: Absolutism in the Savoyard State, 1675-1730
Call Number: DG618.53 .S95 1983 (4th floor)
The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, C. 1760-1840
Call Number: JC491 .A345 2010 (4th floor)
A distinguished international team of historians examines the dynamics of global and regional change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Providing uniquely broad coverage, encompassing North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and China, the chapters shed new light on this pivotal period of world history. Offering fresh perspectives on the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, the break-up of the Iberian empires, and the Napoleonic Wars, the volume also presents ground-breaking treatments of world history from an African perspective, of South Asia's age of revolutions, and of stability and instability in China. The first truly global account of the causes and consequences of the transformative 'Age of Revolutions.'

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Subject Headings

Subject headings allow you to find books according to broader and narrower topics.

Below are sample subjects. To browse for different, broader, or narrower subjects, go to the library catalog and click "Exact Search." Enter a term and click "subject."

You can start browsing for a broad subject like Education, then look for more specific subjects, such as Education England History 18th century.

Once you know some subject headings, you can also just use them as keywords during an advanced search, using the subject row.

Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648
Europe History 1648-1789
Europe History 1789-1815
Europe Economic conditions 18th century
Revolutions Europe History 18th century
Revolutions--History--18th century.
France History 1789-1815
France History Louis XIV, 1643-1715
France--Politics and government--17th century.
Louis XIV, King of France, 1638-1715.
Napoleon--I--Emperor of the French--1769-1821.
Enlightenment Europe
Europe Intellectual life 17th century
Science, Renaissance
Science History 17th century
Science England History 17th century
Science France History 17th century

Browse the Collection

An excellent way to discover additional resources is to browse for books in relevant call number ranges.

To discover the call number ranges for broader, narrower, or different subjects, consult the Library of Congress Classification Outline.

D -- World History and History of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Etc.

D1 - D2027 - History, General
- D219 - D234 - 1453-1648
- D242 - D283.5 - 1601-1715. 17th century
  - D251 - D271 - Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648
  - D274.5-6 - Anglo-French War, 1666-1667
  - D275 - D276 - War of Devolution, 1667-1668
  - D277 - D278.5 - Dutch War, 1672-1678
  - D279 - D280.5 - War of the Grand Alliance, 1688-1697
  - D281 - D283.5 - War of Spanish Succession, 1701-1714
  - D284 - D297 - 1715-1789. 18th century
- D291 - D294 - War of Austrian Succession, 1740-1748
- D297 - Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763
- D299 - (D475) - 1789
- D301 - D309 - Period of the French Revolution
- D351 - D400 - 19th century. 1801-1914/1920
DC - History of France, Andorra, and Monaco
- DC120.8 - D130 - 1589-1715. Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV
- DC131 - D138 - 1715-1789. 18th century. Louis XV, Louis XVI
- DC139 - D249 - Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, 1789-1815
DD - History of Germany
- DD190 - D199 - 1648-1815. 18th century. French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period
DG - History of Italy and Malta
- DG538 - D583.8 - Modern, 1492
- DG539 - D545.8 - 16th-18th centuries -
- DG546 - D549 - 1792-1815. Napoleonic period
- DG548 - D549 - Kingdom of Italy
DK - History of Russia, Soviet Union, Former Soviet Republics, and Poland
- DK112.8 - D264.8 - House of Romanov, 1613-1917
DP - History of Spain and Portugal
- DP170 - D189 - 1516-1700. Habsburgs
- DP192 - D200.8 - 1700-1808. Bourbons
- DP201 - D232.6 - 1808-1886. 19th century
  - DP204 - D208 - 1808-1814. Napoleonic period
  - DP212 - D220 - 1814-1868. Bourbon restoration