1. Why was England seen by any as the model liberal nation in the middle decades of the nineteenth century?
2. How did the competition between political parties promote reform in Victorian England?
3. In what way did the Reform Bill of 1867 usher in a new era in British politics?
4. In England between 1860 and 1914, why did the middle class and the workers often strive together for reform?
5. How did Louis Napoleon's policies lead some people to view him as a liberal, even a socialist, and others to see him as a conservative?
6. What was the general crisis of liberalism after 1870?
7. How did conservatives attempt to win over the masses after 1870?
8. On what basis do historians disagree about the merits of the Bismarckian legacy to Germany?
9. Nationalism created a consensus supporting those who unified Germany and Italy for almost a generation after 1870. What economic, social, and political conflict seemed to undermine that consensus before World War I? Discuss this changed view of nationalism?
10. How did the ideology of official nationality undermine liberal reforms and inhibit industrialization in tsarist Russia?
11. How did industrial backwardness inhibit tsarist Russia's attempts to achieve Great Power status?
12. What were the factors that raised the United States to a Great Power by 1914?
13. How were economic and social conditions connected to political crises in the Great Powers in the era before World War I?