After more than two hundred years the reputation of Daniel Defoe has become solidly entrenched in the history of English literature. No respectable anthology of eighteenth century writing would omit mention of this considerable name, and at least a fragment of either ‘Robinson Crusoe’ or ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’. Discussion of the development of the English novel generally begins with the name of Defoe: He is seen as being either the father, or as being the vital link connecting the earlier moral fable and the modern complex novel. In either case, his name and his work assume the significance of a central pivot in the history of the narrative.

The main features of Scottish history during the eighteenth century consist of the economic revival followed by social changes which in turn precipitated the political awakening of the mass of the people. Prior to the Union and even well into the eighteenth century Scotland remained very poor. This state of poverty to a greater or lesser degree was common to all. If the farmer, the artisan, cottager and labourer suffered poverty the gentry experienced acute and chronic lack of money. In this predominantly agricultural country both the lowly and the high-born concentrated most of their energies to eke out from the land as best an existence as possible.

The Armenian question as a whole has been lost sight of in the tangle of events and alliances that preceded the First World War. As the complicated diplomatic background of this period has been treated elsewhere, no attempt has been made to include it here. Where outside events had a direct influence on the question; however, mention has been made of them. [...]

From the beginning Soviet education was characterized by an incessant conflict between theory and practice, the battle shifting from one sector of the educational front to another depending on the circumstances and personalities involved. Ideologists, theorists, and idealists on the one hand, and die-hard practical realists on the other, conducted a tug-o-war with the latter inevitably coming out of the conflict victorious. Not even in a country as totally dedicated to a dogma as the Soviet Union is to Marxism (at least on the surface) can education ignore realities, and develop as though in a vacuum. Like anywhere else, education in Russia was shaped primarily not by the dreams of a few visionaries but by the naked truth of economic conditions and social or even military pressures.

While still in Africa, and nearing the end of an epic expedition that had brought him across the heart of the African continent from Zanzibar to the Congo estuary on the Atlantic coast, Henry M. Stanley wrote the following letter to his co-sponsor, the Daily Telegraph, the letter appearing in that paper on 12 November, 1877. Stanley was indeed showing foresight, both commercial and political, for he was anticipating by only a few years the tremendous 'scramble' for Africa that was to engage the European Powers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

"In the nineteenth century the white has made a man out of the black, and in the twentieth, Europe will make a world out of Africa." These words, written by W. G. Blaikie, author of "Life of Livingstone," express the fairly general attitude of the last twenty years of the nineteenth century in Britain. Africa, a few years earlier, had been comparatively unknown, except along the coast lines. Livingstone, with his adventurous and noble feats, had changed this greatly, and had made Africa a focal point of interest, not only for the casually curious, but also for the statesman, merchant, and missionary.

Much has been written about the history of Scotland in the sixteenth century, or rather, much has been written about that romantic, intriguing, mysterious, "tragic", and perhaps, slightly foolish, figure, Mary, Queen of Scots. Despite this large outpouring of literature, much of it polemical, and intended mainly to denigrate, or to exalt, Mary, important aspects and persons of the period have been neglected. The sixteenth century was an important turning point in European history. [...]

Missing pg. 655. / The Ukrainian Republic was formed both constitutionally--internally, and diplomatically -- externally, in the period of a year, between March 1917 and March 1918, to reach a consolidation appropriate to a fully developed state. [...]

The phrase 'the system of the double majority' is a familiar one in Canadian histroriography. Despite this, double majority has never had a single study devoted it. [...]

In 1870 Canada completed the acquisition of Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company, and Manitoba entered Confederation as the fifth province. The Manitoba Act -- a law of the federal government, and the constitution of the new province -- established the official status of the French language in the Northwest, and continued the practice, begun by the Hudson's Bay Company's old Council of Assiniboia, of supporting from public funds separate Roman Catholic and protestant school systems. [...]