A History of Our Own Times From the Accession of Queen Victoria to the General Election of 1880, Volume IV - Justin McCarthy

The fourth and concluding volume of this history of Victorian Britain opens with the brutal repression in 1865 of a rebellion by ex-slaves in Jamaica. Then in 1867, the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, takes his celebrated "leap in the dark" with the passage of the most comprehensive expansion of manhood suffrage in British history. The Fenian movement agitates unsuccessfully for Irish independence. British trade unions win the right to organize. William Ewart Gladstone launches his great reform ministry by abolishing in Ireland the hated Anglican establishment and follows with a flood of bills reforming education, the British army, and poor relief. The period closes with the imperialist adventures of Benjamin Disraeli's last ministry and the pageantry of the Congress of Berlin, at which Disraeli and Bismarck conclude the negotiations ending the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. - Summary by Pamela Nagami, M.D.