First published in 1986, this book examines poverty and changing attitudes towards the poor and charity across England, France and Italy. It discusses the causes of poverty and the distinctions between the poor and the class-conscious proletariat. Taking early nineteenth-century Italy as a special study, it uses the exceptionally rich documentary sources from this time to examine such issues as charity, repression, the reasons why families suffered poverty and what strategies they adopted for survival. In this study, Stuart Woolf takes full account of recent work in historical demography and in sociological studies of poverty and the welfare state to produce this original and thoughtful work. This book will be of interest to those studying the history of poverty, class and the welfare state.

Product Description: Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man is a book written by the Italian author, Primo Levi. It describes his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Red Army...read more

Product Description: Domestic Strategies offers a new reading of the historical sources in order to understand the social relations and strategies of laboring families toward the organization of productive processes and institutional arrangements in early modern Europe...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Nationalism is virtually impossible not to identify oneself with a nation-state, and yet nationalism is historically a modern phenomenon. This reader of classic texts draws on authors spanning a chronological period and from a variety of European countries - including John Stuart Mill and Otto Bauer - to explore the theme of nationalism in Europe...read more

Product Description: Aimed primarily at students and undergraduates, this text covers Italian history between the period 1700-1860.

Product Description: Histories of the Napoleonic period are almost exclusively biographies of the man, or political-military accounts of his wars. But such wars were only the first stage in a far more ambitious programme; the establishment of a rational state which would force the pace of modernising society...read more