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As sport increased in popularity in the nineteenth century, the emerging mass media were there to both contribute to public interest and then to benefit from it, creating a synergism that has lasted until the present. The media–sport partnership mainly promoted the development of spectator sports, both amateur and professional, submerging (though not ignoring) participant sports.

Historians use cookbooks as primary source documents in much the same way they use any written record of the past. A primary source is a text written by someone in the past, rather than a secondary source which is commentary by a historian upon the primary sources. As with any document, the historian must attempt to answer five basic questions of provenance and purpose if possible. Who wrote the cookbook? What was the intended audience? Where was it produced and when? Why was it written? There are ways the historian can read between the lines of the recipes, so to speak to answer questions that are not directly related to cooking or material culture but may deal with gender roles, issues of class, ethnicity and race. Even topics such as politics, religion and world view are revealed in the commentary found in cookbooks and sometimes embedded in what appears to be a simple recipe. The most valuable of cookbooks and related culinary texts also reveal what we might call complete food ideologies.

This chapter begins by outlining the ways in which ‘Enlightenment’ has been constructed, by contemporaries, philosophers, and historians. Historical study of Enlightenment only began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century, but developed rapidly from the 1970s, expanding its scope geographically, socially, and intellectually. Since 1989 there has been a reaction against the multiplication of ‘Enlightenments’, as historians have become anxious to defend the Enlightenment’s ‘modernity’. This chapter, however, resists the equation of Enlightenment with modernity, arguing that historical reconstruction of Europe’s Enlightenment should be grounded in its eighteenth-century contexts. Successive sections are devoted to re-assessing its contributions to the critique of religion and the defence of toleration, to the understanding of human nature, society and political economy, and to the growth of a ‘public sphere’ and the formation of ‘public opinion’. The conclusion is that there was no high road from Enlightenment to Revolution.

Although Nazism was destroyed totally and decisively at the end of World War II, the relationship of intellectuals to it as the years passed thereafter never proved simple. Its formation and evolution depended above all on two factors. First, intellectuals drew on traditions of conceptualising the nature of the Nazi ideology and Adolf Hitler's regime forged before the war: anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism. Second, an evolving politics of recognition of the particularities of Hitler's agenda, and especially his unique animus towards the Jewish people, proved crucial. The persistence of the earliest traditions of interpreting and denouncing Nazism has been drastically understated in conventional narratives of the postwar history of Europe. It may have been surprising that Christianity, even Christian anti-totalitarianism, could enjoy a massive renaissance in the immediate postwar years, given the active and tacit support which many Christians had lent Nazism in Germany and across the continent. France's case shows that – as elsewhere in the interregnum years between World and Cold War – there was no inevitability to the anti-fascist expulsion of Jewish victimhood from perception and memory.

This essay traces intellectual developments behind some of the main forms of nationalism. It focuses on the ideas of a few highly reflective writers who discussed national issues in a general way, and who developed key concepts and arguments used in nationalist politics. Against the view that nationalism had no advocates among the greatest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers, I show that Rousseau, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and Mill did offer powerfully reasoned arguments in defence of national values and politics. Some of nationalism’s early philosophical defenders were, however, also its most perceptive critics. They saw the formation of national states as a necessary, yet highly problematic, solution to problems of internal legitimacy and external defence.

During the American Revolution, print emerged as a medium to describe conversion experiences, to exhort to virtue, to plead for votes, to amuse, and to scandalize. Printed texts enabled ideas to float from one mind to another. Imprints and newspapers both experienced dramatic growth, in part due to advances in papermaking, typesetting, and bookbinding. The heart of early Republican print culture, though, was not books, but ephemera. Much of the power of print depended on Americans' ability to read. The new United States was a highly literate and schooled society. The first federal copyright law, passed in 1790, spurred the transition from printers to publishers, while the Sedition Act resulted in the significant expansion of the Republican press. Aside from newspapers, almanacs and magazines flourished in the decades after the Revolution.

This chapter addresses the paradox that, despite its prevalence in national and global cultures, sport fails to receive due attention from historians interested in the problem of “modernity.” Yet, the history of sport’s rise to its current place in popular culture, combined with its boundedness as phenomenon, serves as a powerful lens on the intersecting processes that historians have identified as the hallmarks of this modernity—economic transformation, urbanization, the invention of “traditions,” and the construction of coexisting and disparate identities, not to mention broader vectors of social change encompassed in the parallel projects of domestic amelioration and the colonial “civilizing mission,” along with their nationalist and globalist or neoimperial successors. The chapter offers a broad overview in the career of sport as reflections of modernizing processes that have long interested historians while suggesting that sport’s history also complicates many of these historical perspectives.