1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport

Eighteen forty-eight was a change year. A series of liberal revolutions exploded from one end of Europe to the other, toppling governments from France to Hungary to many of the small German and Italian states. The revolts rank in the annals of upheaval alongside the American Revolution in 1776, the French Revolution in 1789 and the end of European Communism in 1989. This book describes the uprisings of that year while making clear their modern resonance. The revolutionaries were overmatched by near-impossible challenges that sound remarkably familiar today. They had to wrestle with the demons of nationalism, which threatened to drag liberal revolutions down into the muck of ethnic conflict. They had to forge new constitutional orders that could temper violent radicalism. And they had to confront the grinding poverty and social misery of the freshly empowered masses, who had unattainable expectations for economic growth and social equality. I did not know much about this before I started reading 19th century fiction that is set in this time, and how transformative it was for Europe. This is not scintillating reading, mind you, but there is a lot of good perspective contained within.