The unexpected death of Adolf Johann Cord Rüter on August 11, 1965, has deeply affected his colleagues and co-workers, his students and his friends. But if for them all his decease was a grievous personal loss, for his country it was more; both the pursuit and the teaching of history have suffered inestimably through his passing. In the following pages an attempt will be made to give a brief outline of Rüter's work as a historian and a professor of history, an account of his activities as director of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam being left to a more competent hand.

The importance of the “Lavrists” or “Vperedovtsy”, named after the publication Vpered (Forward) (1873–1877) founded and edited by Peter Lavrovich Lavrov, in the evolution of the socialist ideas and groups in Russia has been recognized by historians from Alphonse Thun to Franco Venturi. The journal's role in the dissemination of the socialist credo among Russian Jews has never been seriously disputed, although seldom recorded in concrete terms.

In the first months of 1865 artisan and middle class Reformers in London established the Reform League with the publicly stated political goals of “manhood suffrage and the ballot”. Reflecting a new political awareness among artisan workingmen as well as a realization that workingmen and sympathetic bourgeois Reformers might achieve more when agitating together, the League resulted from experiences and associations in several recent working class and bourgeois campaigns, concerns, and agitations. London artisans, for instance, had been involved in trade unions (both amalgamated and local), the London Trades Council, Trades Union Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association, Workingmen's Garibaldi Committee, Universal League for the Improvement of the Working Classes, and International Working Men's Association (“First International”). They also joined organizations and campaigns more closely associated with the middle classes: temperance groups, Liberation Society, National League for Polish Independence, Emancipation Society, and Ballot Society. Here the artisans met bourgeois Reformers who helped establish and finance the Reform League.

Der Revolution des Jahres 1848 gingen wichtige politische Ereignisse in mehreren Ländern Europas voraus. Die Niederwerfung des Krakauer Aufstandes 1846 und die auf die Einverleibung der Herzogtümer Schleswig-Holstein gerichtete dänische Politik wurden von allen fortschrittlichen Kräften abgelehnt. Der Ausgang des Schweizer Sonderbundkrieges war in den liberalen Kreisen Europas mit Genugtuung aufgenommen worden.

In the Northern textile areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire, the unskilled laborer's hostility to the new industrial middle classes led him to Chartism but not to class-consciousness, the recognition that his interests differed not only from the middle classes but from the upper classes as well. The unskilled workingman's antagonism to the middle classes did not depend upon developing feelings of working class solidarity nor was it directed towards the older rural gentry. When the unskilled worker reacted against the middle classes in the 1830's and ̓40's he was not yet prepared economically or psychologically for independence or class action.