The best introductory text on 1848 is the second edition of Jonathan Sperber's The European Revolutions, 1848 - 1851. Sperber wrote a very clear and comprehensive survey of the Revolutions that covers why they originated and how they failed. Much of 1848 historiography is dominated by events in Germany and revolves around what A. J. P. Taylor (stealing from Trevelyan) called "the turning point in history that failed to turn." The older historiographic line was that 1848 offered a chance at German unification under democratic auspices and the failure of the Paulskirche parliament meant Germany would unify under illiberal ideals that culminated into Hitler. This narrative has come under increasing attacks by historians such as Sperber in his Rhineland Radicals or Brian Vick's Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity. 1848 was also a European-wide event and the anthology Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform edited by Dieter Dowe, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Dieter Langewiesche, and Sperber is a thick (the paperback weighs over three pounds) and comprehensive discussion of 1848. The contributors to the anthology 1848-A European Revolution?: International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 edited by Axel Körner tack to a transnational approach to 1848 and have good insights into how 1848 failed to latch onto popular memory, hence the revolutions' absence in a number of history curricula.

As for the nationalist v socialist character of 1848, the unhelpful answer is they were both and neither. Nationalism as a political and social idea was in a early stages of its development in 1848. The evolution of the historiography of the German 1848 should warn against dividing nationalism into "good" and "bad" varieties; the Paulskirche liberals could be quite illiberal when it came to acknowledging the rights of non-German ethnic minorities and many of them adjusted quite easily to the more strident national chauvinism of the Bismarckian age. And if nationalist thought was still immature and protean in 1848, then socialism as a political force was still in its infancy. Although Europe had witnessed many examples of utopian socialist experiments prior to 1848, the Vormärz period saw the arrival of more systematic attempts to resolve the social question. Moreover, the nascent industrial revolution also created a new set of social conditions and issues for various thinkers. The idea that the old Congress of Vienna system could not handle these changes was quite palpable among the growing educated and under-employed strata of European society.

What all of this meant was that the revolutionary events of 1848 created a degree of strange ideological bedfellows and allies. The young Marx's writings in the run-up and early days of 1848 were decidedly un-Marxist in tone compared to his later writings. The failures of 1848 likewise provided something akin to a foundational mythology for the post-1848 socialist movement. A number of socialist parties would stress the blood shed in the counterrevolution as a martyrdom for the movement of the peoples. In the meantime, a number of nationalists groups treated 1848 as a sort of embarrassing interlude on the path to national unification. So the memory of 1848 that emerged by the late-nineteenth century was both as a forgotten and remembered event. These memory politics as well as the kaleidoscopic array of temporary alliances during 1848 makes it difficult to pigeonhole 1848 as a specific type of revolution, be it national, socialist, or democratic.