finally, war, over what would replace it. Between 1815 and 1820,
the first constitutions and representative assemblies appeared on
German soil, opening a long period of experimentation and learn-
ing as state after state groped its way toward something approach-
ing a working party system -- and provoking a half century of
struggle over parliamentary challenges to the authority of mon-
archs. And during the 1810s and 1820s, industrialism began to
accelerate, leading to intense debates over whether or not to put
barriers in its path. By 1871, all three of these issues were resolved.
How they were settled is the subject of the chapters that follow.

In pursuing this story, we will notice that the German view of
the past changed. By the late eighteenth century, many educated
men and women began to turn to the history of previous eras for
inspiration in the present. Ancient Greece, in particular, was held
up as a model for opening the state to intellectuals and wealthy
commoners previously excluded from participation in government.
During the Napoleonic Wars this yearning for antiquity as an
expression of dissatisfaction with present times became more wide-
spread. By the 1820s and 1830s, the Middle Ages emerged as a
competing backward-looking vision of the future. Conservatives
turned to the medieval epoch as a pattern for reactionary mea-
sures, while, in contrast, nationalists expropriated the same period
to generate excitement for German unification. Significantly
enough, these political issues spilled over into music, art, architec-
ture, literature, and academic history. Only with the resolution of
the German Question in 1871 did this political and cultural
engagement with the past begin to lose intensity.

As many readers will know, the decades from 1789 to 1871 -- or the
greater part of this period -- have been the subject of many previous
works. Indeed it is humbling to consider the names of just some of
these authors: Heinrich von Treitschke, Franz Schnabel, Thomas
Nipperdey, Hans Ulrich Wehler, and James Sheehan. The publish-
ers were correct in believing, however, that another rendering was
justified. For one thing, even the most recent works -- those of
Wehler and Sheehan -- are now a decade old. And scholarship has
raced forward, generating many significant new publications that

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