Paul Halsall presents an excerpt from a series of addresses to the German Nation by German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). The excerpt is provided as part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The addresses were written by Fichte in response to the Emperor of the French Napoleon I (1769-1821) taking control of Germany.

The first English translation for almost a century of Fichte's addresses to the German nation.

Victorian medievalism physically transformed the streets of Britain It lay at the root of new laws and social policies It changed religious practices It deeply coloured national identities And it inspired art literature and music that remains influential to this day Sometimes driven by nostalgia but also often progressive and futurefacing this widereaching movement which reached its peak during the reign of Queen Victoria looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods spanning a thousand years in order to inspire and vindicate cultural political and social change Medievalism was pervasive in Victorian literature with texts ranging from translated sagas to pseudomedieval devotional verse to tripledecker novels It became a dominant architectural mode transforming the English landscape with 75% of new churches built on a 'Gothic' rather than a classical model as well as museums railway stations town halls and pumping stations It was appealed to by both Whigs and Tories But it also permeated domestic life influencing the popularity of beards the naming of children and the design of homes and furniture This landmark study is an attempt to draw together for the first time every major aspect of Victorian medievalism and to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant including intellectual history religious studies social history literary history art history and architecture Bringing together the expertise of 39 experts from different subject areas it reveals the pervasiveness and multifaceted character of the movement in the nineteenth century and explains its continuing legacy today

The self has a history. In the West, the idea of the soul entered Christianity with the Church Fathers, notably Augustine. During the Renaissance the idea of the individual attained preeminence, as in the works of Montaigne. In the seventeenth century, philosophers such as Descartes formulated notions of selfhood that did not require a divine foundation; in the next century, Hume grew skeptical of the self's very existence. Ideas of the self have changed markedly since the Romantic period and most scholars today regard it as at best a mental construct. First-person genres such as diaries and memoirs have provided an outlet for self-expression. Protestant diaries replaced the Catholic confessional, but secular diaries such as Pepys's may reveal yet more about the self. After Richardson, novels competed with diaries and memoirs as vehicles of self-expression, though memoirs survived and continue to thrive, while the diary has found a new incarnation in the personal blog. Writing the Self narrates the intertwined histories of the self and of self-expression through first-person literature.