The history of working-class housing has become an imporatnt area of urban studies in recent years, as detailed investigations of building activities and property relations uncover the origins of housing initiatives. The growth of cities in the industrial North of England created their own peculiar building styles and housing problems, whilst the great metropolis of London continued to attract thousands of families into its eternal slums. There were also the new boom towns of manufacturing Britain, specialising in particular products as a regional division of productive expertise emerged. Swindon and Crewe flourished in the railway age of the nineteenth century, whilst Barrow and Jarrow belonged to a later period of iron and steel shipbuilding. The latter settlements were dominated not only by a few vital products, but by a handful of large companies with massive resources, which enabled them to undertake the housing of their first workers. These accounts may be complemented by the evidence of working-class dwellings in the early textile villages and larger industrial colonies of Lancashire and West Riding, or by the scattered documentation on the colliery villages which persisted through the major coal fields well into the twentieth century.

August Becker, wegen seines roten Barts der „rote” Becker genannt, war zunächst - in den dreissiger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts – in der hessischen radikal-liberalen Bewegung, dann in der deutschen kommunistischen bzw. sozialistischen Bewegung des Vormärz eine führende Persönlichkeit. Bis zu seiner Emigration nach Amerika (1853), wo er im deutschsprachigen Journalismus erneut hervortrat, spielte er – nicht zuletzt während der Jahre 1848–49 – eine aktive Rolle in den wechselvollen Geschicken der deutschen Demokratie. Sein Leben war abenteuerlich, bohemienhaft und unsicher. Wenn auch sein Denken nicht immer die Kraft und Kohärenz besass, die das Denken anderer Revolutionäre aufwies, strahlte er doch immer Mut und moralische Stärke aus. Ein autobiographischer Beleg dafür ist sein in Karl Gutzkows Telegraph fur Deutschland, einem der liberalsten deutschen Blatter der damaligen Zeit, veroffentlichtes Gedicht „Bei alle dem”, in dem er seine Einstellung zum Leben darstellt.

Despite the fact that the views of Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918) on the World War cannot be studied in his voluminous collected works – the editor abruptly terminated the edition with an article Plekhanov published on the eve of the war's outbreak – his position is broadly familiar to students of Russian and international socialism. Thanks to his substantial published writings from September 1914 to March 1917 scattered through the press of at least five countries, a two volume collection of his articles and speeches for the remainder of 1917, and several brief secondary accounts, it is possible to trace Plekhanov's wartime outlook. By contrast, little is known of his political initiatives, associations and conflicts during the war years. A considerable share of his correspondence and other personal papers – the kind of material likely to illuminate these aspects – has been printed by the Dom Plekhanova, the Leningrad repository that holds almost all of them.