Guarding the House of the Dead

The heredity of the common readmission policy dates back to the nineteenth century. A birds eye view of the history of European readmission agreements shows that European States concluded numerous agreements in the period roughly from the early nineteenth century until the Second World War. This chapter highlights some of the early nineteenth and twentieth century European readmission agreements, and the particulars of the conclusion of readmission agreements in the 1950s/60s, and the 1990s. This is followed by an outline of early common readmission policy. The early common readmission policy refers to policy in the area of readmission up until the advent of European Community competence to conclude readmission agreements with third countries with the entry into of the Treaty of Amsterdam on 1 May 1999.Keywords: early common readmission policy; European readmission agreements; nineteenth century; second world war; twentieth century

Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Reviewed by: History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century Maureen Konkle (bio) History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. By Steven Conn. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 276. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.00.) Steven Conn's book serves as an overview of the disciplining of Native peoples in the nineteenth-century United States: he describes how, by the close of the century, knowledge about Native peoples had been confined to anthropology, and Native peoples themselves confined to realm [End Page 518] of culture and excluded from history. His narrative account of the movement of knowledge about Indians from the missionaries, travelers, and government officials who produced it in the late eighteenth century to the certified university-ensconced anthropologists who took hold of it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is especially useful. But his interpretation of the material falls flat, betraying his lack of expertise in Native history. It's common in literary studies for a scholar to write a book about Indians without sustained experience in the field, less so in history. Conn so scrupulously limits his analysis on the one hand, and rests his arguments on mistaken assumptions about Native history on the other, that the book becomes less than the sum of its parts. Conn freely admits that he is "no historian of Native America," and that his book is not about the representation of Indians. It is rather, he writes, an intellectual history of those who studied Indians that, he insists, can reveal how that study "shaped the American mind" and more particularly "[defined] American science and social science, and "shaped conceptions of the nation's history" (5). He makes three principal claims: that Native peoples "posed fundamental challenges to the way EuroAmericans understood the world"; that the emergence of natural science rather than the Bible as an explanation for the existence of Native peoples "shaped the transition from a sacred world view to a secular one"; and that the necessity of explaining the existence of Native peoples influenced the changing definitions of history itself (5). Thus, Conn is interested in history as a discipline rather than the history of Native peoples in the United States. He surmises that "intellectual encounters" with Native peoples caused EuroAmericans to separate history from myth and from culture and also "from the realm of the past" (6). Over the nineteenth century, Conn argues, EuroAmericans excluded Native peoples from history itself. The book includes an introductory chapter on images of Indians in nineteenth-century art as exemplifying the transformation of Native peoples from historical figures to representative manifestations of cultures; subsequent chapters on the study of Native languages, archaeology, and anthropology; and a concluding chapter on Native peoples and U.S. historiography in the era. The most fundamental problem with the book is Conn's insistence that history as a discipline and the history of Native-EuroAmerican relations can be separated such that those "intellectual encounters" have little or nothing to do with political relations. Historians in this book are sincere if ethnocentric people who try very hard to understand Indians; [End Page 519] the possibility that they might be part of a larger system of thinking about and managing Native peoples, justifying and maintaining white authority, receives little or no attention. This absence of attention to the politics of knowledge might explain—at least in part—Conn's simply wrong assertion that Native peoples are gradually removed from history over the course of the nineteenth century. Conn observes that in the early nineteenth century, EuroAmerican writers like James Fenimore Cooper "included" Indians in their historical accounts of America, but with the emergence of professional historians of the United States like George Bancroft in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Indians began to be shifted out of U.S. history into ethnology and then anthropology. Conn argues that this "inclusion" of Native peoples in the history of the United States is in itself evidence of the historicizing of Indians, and thus Cooper's last of the Mohicans can be said to be a historical Indian, since Cooper used John Heckewelder's work to describe his...

—Using our own observations and published records, we discuss the breeding range, number, and distribution of Gyrfalcons (Falco rusticolus) on the West Siberian plain. We show that the currently accepted assessment of Gyrfalcon numbers appears to be underestimated. The southern limit of the species’ breeding range should be defined south of forest-tundra. With the predicted northward expansion of forest due to climate change, West Siberian and neighboring Gyrfalcons of subspecies F. r. intermedius appear preadapted to such habitat and may be favored by its expansion. These considerations call for increased efforts to survey the region for the presence of nesting Gyrfalcons. Received 22 March 2011, accepted 23 May 2011. POKROVSKAYA, I., AND G. TERTITSKI. 2011. Number and distribution of Gyrfalcons on the West Siberian Plain. Pages 267–272 in R. T. Watson, T. J. Cade, M. Fuller, G. Hunt, and E. Potapov (Eds.). Gyrfalcons and Ptarmigan in a Changing World, Volume II. The Peregrine Fund, Boise, Idaho, USA. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.4080/gpcw.2011.0305

Forest meadows is a characteristic vegetation type of the forest landscapes fr om the Altai-Sayan mountains on the east to the Southern Urals on the west. Communities inhabit open sites that were formed during natural or anthropogenic dynamic of zonal forests. It is the main reason of the floristic origina­lity of the meadows, as reflected by the presence of numerous forest species. Our study is based on the analysis of 573 relevés from 27 associations represented in the previous publications. All forest meadows of the Southern Siberia and Southern Urals are included in the order Carici macrourae–Crepidetalia sibiricae Ermakov et al. 1999 (Ermakov et al., 1999). Among the differential species (d. s.) are common forest herbs: Aegopodium podagraria, Brachypodium pinnatum, Bupleurum aureum, Calamagrostis arundinacea, Crepis sibirica, Dracocephalum ruyschiana, Geranium pseudosibiricum, Hieracium umbellatum, Lilium pilosiusculum, Lupinaster pentaphyllus, Pulmonaria mollis, Rubus saxatilis. CA-ordination shows that the moisture and geographical position are the most important factors influencing the differentiation of forest meadows. Strict dissimilarity in species composition is found between 3 regions — the Altai-Sayan mountains, West Siberian Plain and Southern Urals. The order Carici macrourae–Crepidetalia sibiricae includes three regional alliances. The alliance Crepidion sibiricae Mirkin ex Ermakov, Maltseva et Makunina 1999 (d. s.: Aegopodium podagraria, Brachypodium pinnatum, Bupleurum aureum, Calamagrostis arundinacea, Crepis sibirica, Dracocephalum ruyschiana, Geranium pseudosibiricum, Hieracium umbellatum, Lilium pilosiusculum, Lupinaster pentaphyllus, Pulmonaria mollis, Rubus saxatilis) unites meadows of piedmonts and low mountains of the Altai, Kuznetsk Alatau and Salair. The alliance Heracleo sibirici–Geranion bifolii all. nov. (d.s.: Cirsium setosum, Geranium bifolium, Hera­cleum sibiricum, Poa palustris, Populus tremula, Veronica longifolia, Vicia megalotropis) occurs almost all over the southern part of the West Siberian Plain (Lashchinsky, Tishchenko, 2011; Tishchenko, 2015). The coenoses inhabit the edges of the deciduous ­forests. The alliance Polygonion krascheninnikovii Kashapov 1985 (d. s.: Bistorta major, Geum rivale, Hylotelephium triphyllum, Rumex acetosa, Stachys officinalis, Trifolium medium, Veronica chamaedrys, Viola tricolor) represents communities of the Southern Urals forest belt (Kashapov, 1985; Filinov et al., 2002; Yamalov et al., 2012). Three regional alliances of forest meadows well correspond to the syntaxonomy structure of the class Brachypodio pinnati–Betuletea pendulae Ermakov et al. 1991 with three orders — Carici macrourae–Pinetalia sylvestris Ermakov et al. 1991 (mostly Altai-Sayan mountains), Calamagrostio epigeii–Betuletalia pendulae Korolyuk ex Ermakov et al. 2000 (West Siberian Plain) and Chamaecytiso ruthenici–Pinetalia sylvestris Solomeshch et Ermakov in Ermakov et al. 2000 (Southern Ural). Ranges of this forest orders overlap the areas of corresponding meadow alliances in general. The coniferous and deciduous forests are replaced by grasslands in natural or anthropogenic chronosequences leading to a floristic similarity ­between forest and meadow communities. The moisture gradient is significant for the species composition of meadows. It determines the division of alliances into suballiances of moderately moist and dry forest meadows. Many of xeromesophytes of the class Festuco-Brometea Br.-Bl. et Tx. ex Klika et Hadać 1944 and the order Galietalia veri Mirkin et Naumova 1986 are used as differential species of dry forest meadow suballiances. In diagnosis of moderately moist communities we use forest ­hygromesophytes. The suballiance Crepidenion sibiricae suball. nov. unites moderately moist forest meadows of humid and subhumid regions of the Altai-Sayan mountains. The associations of Aconito barbati–Vicenion unijugae suball. nov. prefer drier habitats. The alliance Anthrisco sylvestris–Aconitenion volubilis suball. nov. is restricted to the Ob-Irtysh watershed (south-eastern regions of the West Siberian Plain). The communities are located at the edges of wet deciduous forests. The west siberian suballiance Heracleo sibirici–Artemisenion macranthae suball. nov. is widespread in southern part of forest zone and northern part of forest-steppe zone. The suballiance Polygonenion krasсheninnikovii Mukhamediarova ex Yamalov et Sultangareeva 2010 represents ­moderately moist meadows of the Southern Ural mountain forest belt. Communities are common both on gentle slopes and in river valleys wh ere they occupy edges and clearings in pine and pine-birch ­forests. Dry variants of forest meadows are included in the suballiance Amoriо montanae–Polygonenion krasсheninnikovii Yamalov suball. nov. These communities are common both on convex slopes and hilltops as well as in dry habitats of river valleys in forest belt along the Southern Urals and forest-steppe belt of the South-Eastern Urals. The analysis of moisture conditions using species indicator values (Korolyuk, 2006) shows similar borderlines between the moderately moist and dry forest meadows: near 61 grade in the Altai-Sajan and Ural mountains, 62 grade — for the West Siberian Plain with wide distribution of the waterlogged landscapes. The analysis of forest meadows demonstrates the necessity in the revision of some associations and subassociations. Formally defined differential species in many cases differ from ones proposed by authors of syntaxa. Some associations are represented by a few relevés and need an additional data. Ecological ranges of some syntaxa along the moisture gradient are overlapped that explains the importance of ecological and geographical analysis of associations and subassociations.

Reviewed by: Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century by Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow Dominique Bourassa Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century. By Trevor Herbert and Helen Barlow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xi, 353 p. ISBN 9780199898312. $74] Music example, illustrations, facsimiles, appendices, bibliography, index. In his classic work on military music, Henry George Farmer noted that “during the past half-century, literature in all other branches of musical art has grown enormously and is still being poured out at a bewildering rate—yet works treating of military music, of its history, or of its theory, are conspicuously rare, and may be counted almost on the fingers of one hand” (Henry George Farmer, The Rise & Development of Military Music: Military Music and its Story [London: Wm. Reeves, [1912]], vi). These findings, set forth over a century ago, still ring true today. Despite military music’s ubiquity, the literature on this subject is sparse, and even general music histories continue to ignore it. Under these circumstances, Trevor Herbert’s and Helen Barlow’s Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century is a welcome addition. Herbert and Barlow point out that their “book is primarily about the music of the British army” (p. 15). Their research is based on an impressive array of primary sources (military regulations and other military and governmental publications, personal diaries, letters, local archives) and secondary sources. Herbert and Barlow’s long nineteenth century lasts from the 1770s to 1914. They choose not to begin in 1789 as is usually done, because it is from the earlier date “that one can discern a regular and continuous pattern of the employment of bands of music” (p. 4). The result is a fascinating and wide-ranging book “on the phenomenon of [British] military music” (p. 9) at home and abroad. In the introduction, Herbert and Barlow explain that the history of military bands can be divided into three periods: the late eighteenth century, during which military bands were not officially part of the British army, but instead were formed of professional musicians paid and maintained by officers; the early nineteenth century, a time of consolidation characterized by regiments maintaining bands formed of soldiers led by foreign (often German) civilian bandmasters; and the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of centralization, professionalization, and standardization (pp. 6–7). The authors explore these developments in eleven chapters that follow “a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach” (p. 15). Chapter 1 sets the scene by briefly considering signal instruments (drums, fifes, trumpets, bagpipes), which existed well before the late eighteenth century. These instruments served “as primary modes of communication between commanding officers and men” (p. 17): drums, for example, regulated marching; trumpets transmitted orders and signals. In chapter 2, Herbert and Barlow study the changing status of bands as a British military institution in the [End Page 706] late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries: their organization, instrumentation (including janissary instruments), their role in the life of officers and regiments, and their positive impact on recruitment. The expansion of the military throughout the nineteenth century had beneficial consequences (in terms of numbers, pay, etc.) for military musicians and for their families as well (chap. 3). In chapter 4, the authors explore in more detail the evolving instrumentation and repertoire of military bands up to 1857, and survey the commercial infrastructures that supported them. They investigate provincial auxiliary forces (militia, yeomanry, and volunteers) before 1840 (chap. 5). Since most militia musicians had no prior musical experience, music training in militia bands “must be seen as the most important development in the supply of wind instrumentalists” in the early nineteenth century (p. 108). At the same time, the popularity of military tunes led to the publication of piano transcriptions that in turn fed the rapidly growing “provincial domestic piano market” (p. 121). The emerging need for uniform, systematic, professional training of military musicians led to the founding of Kneller Hall in 1857, which took the name of the Royal Military School of Music in 1887 (chap. 6). It became “a central agency for the control and standardization of military music” (p. 149). The...

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Patriarchy Challenged? Women and Work in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire - Women's Work in Agricultural Production: Nineteenth-Century Norfolk and Suffolk - Schooling for Social Control: the Early Nineteenth Century - Religion, Reading and Really Useful Knowledge - An Education of Principle: the Later Nineteenth Century - Schooling for Domesticity? The Later Nineteenth Century - What a Woman Knows: the Significance of Education in the Lives of Working-Class Women - From the Past to the Present - Bibliography - Index

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood

<i>Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany</i>. By Sarah L. Leonard. Material Texts. Edited by Roger Chartier et al.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. viii+258. $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (e-book).

Reviewed by: Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia David Shneer Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, by ChaeRan Y. Freeze. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2002. 399 pp. $65.00 (c); $29.95 (p). If today conservatives lament the high divorce rate of Americans in 2002, what would they have thought of Jews living in tsarist Russia, who divorced at rates higher than today’s American rates? ChaeRan Freeze, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Brandeis University, uncovers these seemingly shocking statistics in her brilliantly researched book, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, and shows how Russian Jewish marriage and divorce operated and changed throughout the nineteenth century. Freeze concludes that patterns of Jewish marriage and divorce in Russia [End Page 153] counter previous understandings about how marriage, divorce, and the family had changed over time. Most scholars of the family suggest that divorce rates increased during the nineteenth century as modernization, mobility, education, and new expec tations about conjugal life changed each partner’s, but especially women’s, expectations about what to expect from marriage. In theory, people came together for love rather than to please the parents, and the economics of the family changed, making divorce a financial possibility for more people. But Freeze argues that “the Jews showed the contrary tendency with modernization: from astronomically high divorce rates in the early nineteenth century, they demonstrated a striking tendency to reduce, not increase, the divorce rate” (p. 146, emphasis in original). In what might be Freeze’s most startling statistic, in 1845, the province of Vilna registered more divorces than marriages, the only time Freeze found such a statistic in her research. Freeze allows that her research sample, which was by definition limited to those locales whose documents were preserved, might not be able to be generalized. But she does her best to provide a cross- section of Russian Jewish society by bringing in material from a variety of places such as Vilna, an urban city in the North, and Korostyshev, a small predominantly hasidic shtetl in the Ukranian south. Unlike their Orthodox Christian neighbors and unlike Jews in other parts of Europe, Russian Jews had no hang-ups about dissolving unions. Much of Freeze’s book focuses on the messy details of couples coming together, and more important for Freeze, dissolving their marriages. In the early nineteenth century, Jews married at a young age for a variety of reasons—procreation in the face of high mortality rates, avoiding the tsarist draft, and the maintenance of parental control over their children. In 1851, the mean age of marriage was 19.5 for women and 23.4 for men, although average marrying age varied depending on geography, class, and degree of urbanization. Freeze also describes what were called “panic marriages,” when families married their children off at a very young age to create stability in times of crisis. She shows that those involved in the marriage business often fanned fears of instability to increase the rate of panic marriages and boost business But the age of Jewish marriage increased through the second half of the century so that by 1900, the Jewish age of marriage in Vilna was 23.2 for women, 26.3 for men, the highest marrying age of any religious group in the Russian Empire. In her examination of the reasons for the age increase, Freeze brings social, cultural, and political history together. She shows that Jews married at an older age not just because women had a larger voice in negotiating families; not just because the Russian state was taking a greater interest in families; and not just because child mortality rates were dropping, but because of all of these factors. And the complexities of marriage fore shadowed the even more complicated cultural phenomenon of Jewish divorce, which is central to Freeze’s story. For Russia’s Jews divorce was a legal, more than a spiritual, issue. The rituals surrounding divorce were as technical and legalistic as the rituals for marriage. [End Page 154] Documents exchanged hands, courts examined the grounds for divorce to determine their legitimacy, witnesses gave testimony, property was divided, and custody of the children was determined. The...

Peddlers, Poems, and Local Culture:The Case of Jonathan Plummer, a "Balladmonger" in Nineteenth-Century New England Michael Cohen (bio) In "Yankee Gypsies," an essay first published in the 1840s, John Greenleaf Whittier describes a mode of itinerancy that characterized rural life during the first decades of the nineteenth century. According to his essay, life on the Whittier family's isolated farm in Haverhill, Massachusetts, was periodically enlivened by the appearance of a collection of types who interrupted farm routine by begging, preaching, peddling, singing, or sleeping in the barn. In an extended paragraph, Whittier details the visits of one particular character: Twice a year, usually in the spring and autumn, we were honored with a call from Jonathan Plummer, maker of verses, pedler [sic] and poet, physician and parson,—a Yankee troubadour,—first and last minstrel of the valley of the Merrimac, encircled, to my wondering eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality. He brought with him pins, needles, tape, and cotton-thread for my mother; jack-knives, razors, and soap for my father; and verses of his own composing, coarsely printed and illustrated with rude wood-cuts, for the delectation of the younger branches of the family. No lovesick youth could drown himself, no deserted maiden bewail the [End Page 9] moon, no rogue mount the gallows, without fitting memorial in Plummer's verses. Earthquakes, fires, fevers, and shipwrecks he regarded as personal favors from Providence, furnishing the raw material of song and ballad. Welcome to us in our country seclusion as Autolycus to the clown in Winter's Tale, we listened with infinite satisfaction to his readings of his own verses, or to his ready improvisation upon some domestic incident or topic suggested by his auditors. When once fairly over the difficulties at the outset of a new subject, his rhymes flowed freely, "as if he had eaten ballads and all men's ears grew to his tunes."1 Jonathan Plummer was a real poet with some notoriety in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century, and "Yankee Gypsies" offers oblique glimpses into the culture of poetry his work reflects. This essay will examine Plummer's career and culture, but it aims at something beyond a thick description of rural New England poetry circa 1800. By analyzing this peddler-poet and his milieu, I want also to question some critical assumptions often made about "poetry" in general and nineteenth-century American poetry in particular. Most twenty-first-century readers and critics are comfortable with the idea that "poetry" is "a" genre and that "poems" have an ultimate, textual existence that transcends the particular media, formats, or institutions in and through which they circulate at any given time. Such assumptions, I argue, make it difficult to grasp the social functions and meanings of poems—particularly broadside poems like Plummer's that took both oral and print forms—in pre-twentieth-century contexts. One critical value of Plummer's career is that it illuminates the extent to which "poetry" in the early nineteenth century was a conflicted literary domain rather than a single, coherent literary category. These questions arise: What happens to "poetry" if we think of poems as potentially cheap, disposable, timely, and local? What are the social uses and meanings of poems in such a culture? And how does an attention to genre, format, and medium [End Page 10] change our understanding of poetry in nineteenth-century culture? Plummer's career provides an opportunity, not to recover an earlier or more authentic origin for "American poetry," but instead to show how poems had surprising social and political uses in the early nineteenth century. Whittier's essay, despite its nostalgic sheen, portrays a rural culture defined by vagrancy, homelessness, and decentralization. This depiction of the New England hinterland is at odds with the styles of colonial nostalgia that emerged during the postbellum years, when Whittier's best-selling 1866 poem Snow-bound strongly impressed a domestic ideal of rusticity upon the public imagination.2 In Snow-bound Whittier characterizes the poetic culture of his youth as a scene of school texts, oral songs, and folklore, told and retold around the fireside by an intimate collective of...

We use a network of cores from 77 peatland sites to determine controls on peat C content and peat C accumulation over the last 2000 years (since 2 ka) across Russia's West Siberian Lowland (WSL), the world's largest wetland region. Our results show a significant influence of fossil plant composition on peat C content, with peats dominated by Sphagnum having a lower C content. Radiocarbon‐derived C accumulation since 2 ka at 23 sites is highly variable from site to site, but displays a significant N–S trend of decreasing accumulation at higher latitudes. Northern WSL peatlands show relatively small C accumulation of 7 to 35 kg C m−2 since 2 ka. In contrast, peatlands south of 60°N show larger accumulation of 42 to 88 kg C m−2. Carbon accumulation since 2 ka varies significantly with modern mean annual air temperature, with maximum C accumulation found between −1 and 0°C. Rates of apparent C accumulation since 2 ka show no significant relationship to long‐term Holocene averages based on total C accumulation. A GIS‐based extrapolation of our site data suggests that a substantial amount (∼40%) of total WSL peat C has accumulated since 2 ka, with much of this accumulation south of 60°N. The large peatlands in the southern WSL may be an important component of the Eurasian terrestrial C sink, and future warming could result in a shift northward in long‐term WSL C sequestration.

Scholars, the general public, and special collections libraries are increasingly aware of the importance of visual images in examining the past. With the proliferation of sophisticated digitization technologies, researchers now have the opportunity to "see" images in new ways. No longer considered secondary to text and used merely to illustrate the written word, visual materials are taking their rightful place as primary evidence that document the past and influences our understanding of the present. The Library Company of Philadelphia supports this continuing focus on the historical importance of visual culture.

This is a book about Iberian and Latin American elites' attempts to think through the momentous changes they were experiencing in the late eighteenth and, above all, the early nineteenth centuries—the “tiempos críticos” of the book's title, marked by the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia in Europe and the wars of independence in Latin America. Historical ruptures confront people with intellectual as well as social and political challenges, and the rupture with which the book is concerned was particularly dramatic. It was in fact so dramatic that, to many, time itself appeared to acquire a sort of historical agency. “El tiempo es progresista, más verdadero progresista que los hombres,” the Spanish politician Joaquín Francisco Pacheco wrote in 1840, while the Colombian José María Samper believed that the new Hispanic American republics were being “impulsada[s] hacia la libertad y el progreso por el espíritu del tiempo” (pp. 96–97; emphasis in original). The early nineteenth century, the book argues, compelled observers to come to grips not just with changing times but with changes in the nature of the human experience of time.Conceptually, many of the chapters take their bearings from Reinhart Koselleck's investigation into the changing experience of time that, after the French Revolution, flooded into all spheres of life. The fact that history had always appeared to move glacially but was now appearing to run at a gallop meant that the past lost its ability to predict the future. As kings lost their heads and soldiers moved into battle to change the accepted organization of society, experience no longer oriented people in the world. To guide or justify their actions, people increasingly looked toward the future. While Koselleck developed his argument largely with reference to central European history, the authors of this volume argue that it holds as much for the history of the Iberian Peninsula and its erstwhile American colonies.Of the book's thirteen chapters, two deal largely with (to this reviewer, forbiddingly abstract) theoretical issues about the history of time and temporality, making only sparse reference to some source material from Mexico and Venezuela. The rest of the chapters are largely empirical in nature and are based on a reading of primary sources such as dictionaries, newspapers, books, and parliamentary debates. The period most covered is the first half of the nineteenth century, though a few authors venture into earlier and later periods, and one even makes a foray into the mid-twentieth century. Geographically, the book has chapters about Spain, Venezuela, Peru, Río de la Plata, Colombia, Mexico, and the Hispanic world taken together. But the country getting the most attention is Brazil, the subject of the volume's final four chapters: one on revolutionary conceptions of time in the independence period, one on the concept of prudence in early nineteenth-century political thought, one on the notion of “regreso” in 1838–40 parliamentary debates, and one on representations of the geographical dyad sertão/litoral—the former space imagined as stuck in a barbarous past, the latter as promising a civilized future—between 1830 and 1860.The book thus offers a plentiful menu of work from which readers might choose according to their temporal and geographical interests. Those looking for a synoptic statement of the book's main arguments will find it in Javier Fernández Sebastián's empirically rich and admirably lucid chapter on how elites in the Hispanic world perceived the relationship between past, present, and future from the late colonial period until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Fernández shows that a new interest in progress began to take hold of those elites in the late eighteenth century, when this interest already coincided with the emergence of another idea: that of the Americas as a new political subject. Those two ideas merged when Latin America became independent: for a while, a number of European and Latin American writers thought of the region as having thrown off the shackles of the past and therefore as peculiarly aligned with the promise of human progress and of “un futuro próspero y feliz” (p. 94). With the passage of time, however, the future ceased to appear as a simple horizon for the realization of human progress, and by the second half of the nineteenth century it had become instead a subject of contention between different ideologies and political forces, each with different ideas of what “un futuro próspero y feliz” should look like.The essays in Tiempos críticos offer a history of ideas that is largely set in the Age of Revolutions. They are aimed at an audience of intellectual historians, who will have to debate to what extent the future-oriented notions of historical time diagnosed by the book's contributors were truly novel, and to what extent they picked up on habits of thinking that had developed in previous periods of rapid and unexpected change, such as during Europe's so-called discovery and colonization of the Americas 300 years earlier.