As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports. - Eric Hobsbawm

[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

These three factors—the influence of the French Revolution, the rational economic argument of civil servants, and the greed of the nobility, determined the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia between 1807 and 1816.

It is easier to formulate questions than answers, and this paper has taken the easier way rather than the more difficult. And yet, perhaps to ask questions, especially about the experiences we tend to take for granted, is not a valueless occupation. We swim in the past as fish do in water, and cannot escape from it. But our modes of living and moving in this medium require analysis and discussion. My object has been to stimulate both.