The struggle between the forces of modernity, and those who resisted and denied it, provides the underlying theme of this volume. Using a wide array of sources, and drawing parallels with processes elsewhere in Europe, the contributors focus on such topics as secularization and the church, education and irredentism, shifts in the language of political contention, and feminist awareness in prose. Historical writing on Greece in this era has tended to concentrate on facts and on the roles of individuals and foreign powers. The papers here, which derive from research presented to a conference at King's College London in 1995, aim rather to look at the potency of social forces and groupings, and offer a critical and often revisionist account of the fundamental changes in society that marked the period from the 1860s to the start of the 20th century.