"The most amazing epoch the world has yet seen": So Jerome Blum characterizes the 1840s, the decade when the modern era began. It was the fruit of the creative endeavors of a unique generation of geniuses then reaching maturity. In 1840, Dickens was twenty-eight, Marx twenty-two, Engels twenty, Bismarck twenty-five, Turgenev twenty-two, Dostoyevsky nineteen, Darwin thirty-one, Helmholtz nineteen, Thackeray twenty-nine, Courbet twenty-one, and Cavour thirty.

Filled with youthful self-confidence, this generation, writes Blum, sought change in every sphere of life.

"Revolution" occurred throughout society - in communications and transportation via the electric telegraph, railway networks, ocean steamships, photography, global mail; in social relations with the dawning of a social consciousness among the upper classes and the emergence of radical social movements; in science with the unprecedented discoveries of the physical world; in the arts with the new Realism.

Blum focuses on the five dominant European powers, Great Britain, France, Austria, Germany, and Russia. Each in its own way underwent immense political change as autocratic absolutism began to give way and early steps were taken toward the modern social welfare state.

Besides its intellectual rigor, what makes In the Beginning such engrossing and vital reading is Blum's skill in portraying the key individuals responsible for the changes and those who opposed them - colorful, important figures like Michael Faraday, Auguste Comte, Robert Peel, Tsar Nicholas I, Giuseppe Mazzini, Friedrich List, Lord Ashley, George Hudson, Etienne Cabet, Pierre Proudhon, Rowland Hill, Vissarion Belinsky, and many others.

In the Beginning is a triumph of scholarship and perception by one of the leading historians of our time.