Paul Miliukov (Author) Graeme Newman (Editor and Introduction)

Russia, To-Day and To-Morrow A Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint

In the winter of 1921, a defeated statesman stood before American audiences in Boston, New York, and Chicago and delivered one of the most extraordinary eyewitness accounts of the Russian Revolution ever recorded.

Paul N. Miliukov was no distant observer. As founder and leader of Russia's Constitutional Democratic Party — the "Kadets" — he spent two decades fighting for a liberal, constitutional Russia inside the Tsarist Dumas. When the monarchy finally fell in 1917, he became Foreign Minister of the new Provisional Government, only to be forced from office within ten weeks over his insistence that Russia honor its wartime commitments to the Allies. He watched the country he had tried to build collapse first into radicalism, then into Bolshevik dictatorship — and he lived to explain why.

Russia, To-Day and To-Morrow is his reckoning: a sweeping, first-hand analysis of why the Revolution could not be averted, how the Bolsheviks seized and held power, what their regime meant for Russia's many nationalities, and how the Civil War, foreign intervention, and the catastrophic famine of 1921 reshaped the country. Miliukov writes as a trained historian even as he writes as a casualty of the events he describes — a rare combination that makes this book both an argument and an irreplaceable primary source.

This edition presents Miliukov's original 1922 text in a newly reset, corrected format, with the original maps and statistical tables restored to their places in the narrative, and a new introduction situating the book — and its author — in their historical moment.

What's inside:

• Eleven chapters tracing the Revolution from its roots in Tsarist autocracy through the rise and "decline" of Bolshevism

• Eyewitness analysis of the 1917 Revolutions, the Civil War, and Anti-Bolshevist Russia

• A full chapter on the 1921 famine and its human toll

• Original maps of Anti-Bolshevist Russia, the Soviet famine zones, and Japanese-occupied Siberia

• Contemporary statistics on population, industry, agriculture, and education under Bolshevik rule

• A new scholarly introduction on Miliukov and his place in Russian history

For readers of Russian history, the Revolution, and the century of ideological conflict it set in motion, Russia, To-Day and To-Morrow offers something no later history can replace: the voice of a man who helped shape the events — and lost.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.232.

Communist Russia: The Hammer and the Scythe is Anne O'Hare McCormick's vivid firsthand account of the Soviet Union a decade after the Russian Revolution. Based on a series of articles originally written for The New York Times, the book chronicles her travels through Moscow, Leningrad, the countryside, factories, collective farms, and government institutions as she sought to understand the world's first communist state. McCormick emphasizes that her work is not a theoretical study or political manifesto but an eyewitness exploration of a nation undergoing immense and often bewildering transformation.

Published in 1929, the book examines the emergence of the Soviet ruling class, the lives of workers and peasants, the role of women, religion, art, education, and the growing influence of Communist ideology. Rather than offering simple praise or condemnation, McCormick presents Soviet Russia as a vast social experiment whose ultimate outcome remained uncertain. Her perceptive observations, balanced prose, and willingness to question both Soviet claims and Western assumptions make Communist Russia: The Hammer and the Scythe an important contemporary record of one of the twentieth century's most significant political revolutions.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 233p.

by Charles Mercier (Author), Graeme Newman (Editor) Format: Paperback

What is insanity? A disease of the mind? A disorder of the brain? Or a failure of human beings to adjust to the world around them?

First published in 1901, Charles Mercier's Sanity and Insanity remains one of the most provocative and accessible explorations of mental disorder ever written. Rejecting superstition, moral condemnation, and simplistic medical explanations, Mercier sought to understand insanity scientifically—through the relationships among the brain, the mind, behavior, heredity, and the social environment.

In this classic work, Mercier argues that insanity is not merely a collection of strange thoughts or unusual beliefs. Rather, it is a disorder of the individual's ability to adjust to life's circumstances. Drawing on psychiatry, psychology, law, biology, and philosophy, he examines questions that remain central today:

• What distinguishes sanity from insanity?

• How are mind and brain related?

• What role does heredity play in mental illness?

• Why do stress, trauma, and life changes trigger mental breakdowns?

• How should society understand responsibility, crime, and mental disorder?

This new edition, edited and introduced by distinguished criminologist Graeme R. Newman, places Mercier's ideas in historical and scientific context. The introduction examines Mercier's influential theories of heredity and mental illness in light of contemporary psychiatric genetics, showing both where he anticipated modern science and where later discoveries have transformed our understanding of mental disorder.

Part history, part psychology, and part philosophy of mind, Are You Mad? offers modern readers a fascinating window into the origins of scientific psychiatry and the enduring debate over what it means to be sane.

For students, scholars, clinicians, criminologists, and anyone interested in the history of mental health, this remarkable work remains as challenging and relevant today as when it first appeared more than a century ago.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 286p.

by Charles Mercier (Author), Graeme Newman (Author)

What is madness? How does reason fail? When does unusual behavior become mental illness? And what responsibilities do society, medicine, and the law have toward those whose minds are disordered?

Originally published in the early twentieth century, Charles Mercier's A Textbook of Madness and Other Mental Diseases is one of the most influential and intellectually ambitious works in the history of psychiatry. A pioneering psychiatrist and leading authority on insanity, Mercier sought to do more than describe mental illness—he attempted to explain its nature, causes, classification, and relationship to human conduct.

Rejecting the conventional view that insanity is simply a disorder of thought, Mercier argued that madness is fundamentally a disorder of conduct. Through careful observation and analysis, he developed a comprehensive theory linking desire, will, feeling, thought, and memory to the ways individuals function in society. His groundbreaking hierarchical model of the mind anticipated many modern concerns with judgment, self-control, insight, and behavioral regulation.

This new edition features an extensive introduction by renowned criminologist Graeme R. Newman, placing Mercier's work within the context of modern psychiatry, psychology, criminology, neuroscience, and forensic mental health. Newman explores the enduring relevance of Mercier's ideas and their continuing influence on debates surrounding mental illness, criminal responsibility, social control, and human behavior.

Inside this volume, readers will discover:

• Mercier's pioneering definition of insanity as a disorder of conduct

• A detailed hierarchical theory of mental functioning

• Early classifications of mental illness and their historical development

• Analyses of delusions, hallucinations, dementia, paranoia, mania, and melancholia

• Discussions of crime, punishment, and criminal responsibility

• The legal treatment of insanity in Britain during the early twentieth century

• Insights into the social, biological, and psychological causes of mental disorder

• A scholarly introduction connecting Mercier's theories to contemporary research

Part historical document, part psychiatric treatise, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of human behavior, A Textbook of Madness and Other Mental Diseases remains an essential work for students and scholars of psychiatry, psychology, criminology, law, sociology, and the history of medicine.

More than a century after its first publication, Mercier's enduring questions continue to resonate: What is sanity? What is madness? And how should society respond when the boundaries between them become uncertain?

An indispensable classic of psychiatric thought, now available in a modern scholarly edition.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 218p.

by Charles Mercier (Author), Graeme Newman (Author)

In 1901, the physician and alienist Charles Mercier set out to do something almost nobody had attempted: build one complete theory of mind that covered sanity and insanity alike, on the theory that you cannot understand madness until you understand the ordinary mind it departs from. The result is this book — four hundred pages of sustained, systematic ambition, mapping sensation, thought, will, memory, pleasure, pain, and the sense of self as a single connected machine, with delusion treated not as a foreign invasion of the mind but as ordinary belief, strained past its working tolerance.

It is a genuinely strange book to read now, and that is exactly why it's worth reading. Mercier's nervous system runs on "motion," flowing through tissue like steam through pipework — a mechanical metaphor pushed further than the science of the day could really support. He proposes scrapping the syllogism in favor of six modes of reasoning entirely his own invention, argued with total seriousness across a hundred pages, and it persuaded almost nobody. His system did not outlast the decade. And yet buried inside the wreckage of that system is a genuinely durable idea: that delusion sits on a continuum with everyday belief, rather than in a category of its own — a claim psychiatry spent most of the twentieth century arguing its way back to.

This new edition presents Mercier's text in full, extensively cleaned of over a century of accumulated OCR and scanning damage, with British-Victorian spelling and phrasing left exactly as written. A new critical introduction by Graeme R. Newman situates the book against its contemporaries — it appeared eleven years after William James's Principles of Psychology and just before Freud reached English readers — and reads it honestly: neither a lost masterpiece nor a curiosity, but a serious system that got some of the biggest questions in psychiatry wrong in interesting ways, and one genuinely important thing right early.

What's inside:

• The complete original text of Mercier's 1901 classic, unabridged

• A new critical introduction assessing Mercier's system against James, Freud, and the psychiatry that followed

• Extensive restoration of scan-damaged passages, with any unrecoverable material left honestly marked rather than guessed at

• Six major sections: Sensation, Thought, Volition, Memory, Pleasure and Pain, and Subject-Consciousness

Companion volume: How to Run a Lunatic Asylum, Mercier's 1894 administrative manual, applies the same systematizing temperament at the scale of the institution rather than the mind.

For readers who enjoy:

• The history of psychiatry and psychology before Freud

• Victorian and Edwardian systems of thought — ambitious, confident, and often wrong in illuminating ways

• Primary sources that reward a critical rather than a reverent reading

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 397p.