A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
“No one remembers when and why I started calling my father Bondhu. It was a strange way to address a father, as the word means ‘friend’ in Bengali. . . . As I got older, I became very self-conscious about such an odd name . . . and yet I cannot explain why I could not switch to the more acceptable Baba or something similar.”
Just as Kunal Sen, son of actor Gita Sen and filmmaker Mrinal Sen, was approaching adolescence, his father’s cinematic celebrity was reaching new heights. In this memoir, Kunal reflects on growing up in a middle-class household in South Calcutta, where his father’s Marxist beliefs and unrelenting urge “to be challenged and contradicted” often collided with the practical challenges of making a living. Through it all, what emerges is a picture of a family’s unyielding commitment to the craft of cinema, the risks each of its members took, and their endearing sense of humor. Celebrating Mrinal Sen’s birth centenary in 2023, Bondhu takes us on an intimate journey of a son attempting to reconcile his father’s public and private selves.
The theme of the meeting, “Ports, Hubs and Bridges: Key Links in Anthropological Theory and Practice,” is a reference to the important interconnections found not only within the discipline among the various types of anthropologies, but also between the anthropological professional and those whom anthropologists teach, rely on for information, or otherwise focus on in their research.
The papers in this volume elaborate upon bridges that can be or have been built in theory, pedagogy, and practice, and in a variety of cultural contexts. They are organized in three groups.Part I consists of papers that emphasize theory and conceptual issues; part II is for papers about teaching and practice; and, part III is for papers with an ethnography focus.
In advance of the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review, Jonathan Shaw argues persuasively for the need to rethink how governments and Whitehall devise their strategies and reach crucial decisions. Beginning with the review’s often imprecise use of language, Shaw challenges the assumptions that underlie the British government’s current practices. Ultimately, he suggests how Whitehall can improve its approaches and, equally important, its credibility.
The most successful bandleader of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was an entertainment icon who played a major role in the mainstreaming of jazz. Whiteman and his band premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Duke Ellington acknowledged his achievements. His astonishing ear for talent vaulted a who’s who of artists toward prominence. But Whiteman’s oversized presence eclipsed Black jazz musicians while his middlebrow music prompted later generations to jettison him from jazz history.
W. Anthony Sheppard’s collection of essays confronts the racial implications of Whiteman’s career. The contributors explore Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking his work and influence in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, and the music publication industry, and following him behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, into the courtroom, and on television.
Multifaceted and cutting-edge, Beyond the Bandstand explores the racial politics and artistic questions surrounding a controversial figure in popular music.
Contributors: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Stephanie Doktor, John Howland, Katherine M. Leo, Sarah Caissie Provost, W. Anthony Sheppard, Catherine Tackley, Elijah Wald, and Christi Jay Wells
Before Before offers a rare portrait of everyday people, with particular focus on the lives of women and girls, before the brutal war of 1991 tore the country apart. Through Small’s account of immersion in another world as she witnessed injustice and was welcomed as a friend, readers are invited to explore the shared ground of our humanity.
While exploring the evolution of brewing technology and how it mirrors technological changes on a wider economic scale, Smith travels from Mexico to Milwaukee, Beijing, Bruges, and beyond to give a legion of beer brands their due. He then delves into the growth of beer-drinking culture and food-beer pairings and provides information on beer-related museums, festivals, publications, and websites. He also provides a selection of recipes that will be enhanced with the downing of a glass or two of the amber nectar. Containing a wealth of detail in its concise, wonderfully illustrated pages, Beer will appeal to connoisseurs and casual fans alike.
In this provocative collection of essays, renowned architect Daniel Solomon delves into the complexities of what makes a city vibrant. Acknowledging that a city is not a static thing, he argues we need to pay more attention to nurturing what he calls “continuous cities.” In such a city, he says, “new buildings, new institutions, and new technologies don’t rip apart the old and wreck it. They accommodate, they act with respect, and they add vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.”
Continuity, he explains, is the way to promote sustainability— and contrary to what the advocates of “modern architecture” claim, he insists that honoring the traditional ways of city building still provides a solid foundation for places to grow, evolve, be modern.
However fond you are of your city, or however much you feel it needs improvement, this short collection of essays offers an enticing vision of the future. All of our cities have a past worth examining, a richness of experience that can shape the future in wonderful, surprising ways. Solomon’s prose is thought-provoking and inspiring, well worth keeping close by wherever you do your reading—be it your bedside, couch, a park, or on the metro.
In addition to following high-profile artists such as American photographer Lee Miller, Speck recounts the experiences of nurses, voluntary aides, and ambulance drivers who found the time to create astonishing artworks in the midst of war zones. She also describes the feelings of disempowerment revealed in the work done by women distant from the conflict. As Speck shows, women artists created highly charged emotional responses to the threats, sufferings, and horrors of war—the constant fear of attack, the sorrow of innocent lives destroyed, the mass murders of people in concentration camps, and the unimaginable aftermath of the atomic bombs. The first book to explore female creativity during these periods, Beyond the Battlefield delivers an insightful and meditative examination of this art that will appeal to readers of art history, war history, and cultural studies.
Using the work of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, Spellman examines how interpreting physical remains gives us insight into prehistoric perspectives on death. He traces how humans have died over the centuries, both in the causes of death and in the views of actions that lead to death. He spotlights the great philosophical and scientific traditions of the West, which did not believe in an afterlife or see the purpose of bereavement, while also casting new light on the major religious beliefs that emerged in the ancient world, particularly the centuries-long development of Christianity. He delves into three approaches to the meaning of death—the negation of life, continuity in another form, and agnosticism—from both religious and secular-scientific perspectives.
Providing a deeper context for contemporary debates over end-of-life issues and the tension between longevity and quality of life, A Brief History of Death is an illuminating look at the complex ways humans face death and the dying.
“Ours is music with built-in hatred,” said Pete Townshend. A Band with Built-In Hate pictures the Who from their inception as the Detours in the mid-sixties to the late-seventies, post-Quadrophenia. It is a story of ambition and anger, glamor and grime, viewed through the prism of pop art and the radical leveling of high and low culture that it brought about—a drama that was aggressively performed by the band. Peter Stanfield lays down a path through the British pop revolution, its attitude, and style, as it was uniquely embodied by the Who: first, under the mentorship of arch-mod Peter Meaden, as they learned their trade in the pubs and halls of suburban London; and then with Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, two aspiring filmmakers, at the very center of things in Soho. Guided by contemporary commentators—among them, George Melly, Lawrence Alloway, and most conspicuously Nik Cohn—Stanfield describes a band driven by belligerence and delves into what happened when Townshend, Daltrey, Moon, and Entwistle moved from back-room stages to international arenas, from explosive 45s to expansive concept albums. Above all, he tells of how the Who confronted their lost youth as it was echoed in punk.
The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television bridges nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies in pursuit of an ambitious, antisocial, arrogant, and aggressively individualistic mode of hero from his inception in Byron’s Manfred, Childe Harold, and Cain, through his incarnations as the protagonists of Westerns, action films, space odysseys, vampire novels, neo-Gothic comics, and sci-fi television. Such a hero exhibits supernatural abilities, adherence to a personal moral code, ineptitude at human interaction (muddled even further by self-absorbed egotism), and an ingrained defiance of oppressive authority. He is typically an outlaw, most certainly an outcast or outsider, and more often than not, he is a he. Given his superhuman status, this hero offers no potential for sympathetic identification from his audience. At best, he provides an outlet for vicarious expressions of power and independence. While audiences may not seek to emulate the Byronic hero, Stein notes that he desires to emulate them; recent texts plot to “rehumanize” the hero or to voice through him approbation and admiration of ordinary human values and experiences.
Tracing the influence of Lord Byron’s Manfred as outcast hero on a pantheon of his contemporary progenies—including characters from Pale Rider, Unforgiven, The Terminator, Alien, The Crow, Sandman, Star Trek: The Next Generation,and Angel—Atara Stein tempers her academic acumen with the insights of a devoted aficionado in this first comprehensive study of the Romantic hero type and his modern kindred.
Atara Stein was a professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. Her articles on the development of the Byronic hero have appeared in Popular Culture Review, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Genders, and Philological Quarterly.
Long isolated by rigid military rule, Burma, or Myanmar, is one of the least known, significantly sized states in the world. Possessed of a rich cultural history yet facing a range of challenges to stability and growth, it has struck the imaginations of those concerned not only with geopolitical or trade affairs but also with poverty, health, and human rights. David I. Steinberg sheds new light on this reclusive state by exploring issues of authority and legitimacy in its politics, economics, social structure, and culture since the popular uprising and military coup of 1988.
Exploring the origins of that year’s tumultuous events, Steinberg analyzes a generation of preceding military governments and their attempts to address the nation’s problems. He focuses on the role of the military, the effects of Burma’s geopolitical placement, the plight of the poor, the destruction of civil society, and rising ethnic tensions. While taking into account the importance of foreign observers as counterpoints to official views, suppliers of economic aid, and advocates of reform, Steinberg contends that ultimately, the solutions to Myanmar’s varied problems lie with the Burmese themselves and the policies of their government.
The paperback edition includes a postcript that reveals the most current and critical issues facing Burma since the publication of the original hardcover in March 2001. Steinberg brings readers up to date on the recent release of political prisoners, economic and military conditions, United Nations actions, and the complex, ever-changing relationship between Thailand and Myanmar.
In May 1782, Colonel William Crawford led over 450 volunteers across Ohio to attack British-allied Native Americans who had been raiding the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia for years. An experienced yet reluctant commander, Crawford and his men clashed with a similarly sized force of British Rangers and Wyandot, Delaware, and Shawnee Indians on the Sandusky River in early June. After three days, the Americans were routed in one of the worst defeats American arms suffered on the frontier during the American Revolution. During the retreat, Native American warriors captured dozens of men, including Colonel Crawford. Many were horrifically tortured to death in revenge for the Gnadenhutten massacre earlier that spring, when American volunteers bludgeoned nearly one hundred unarmed and unresisting Delaware Indians to death.
The Battle of Upper Sandusky, 1782 places military operations at the forefront of events in the waning months of the American Revolution on the frontier. Importantly, it gives long-deserved credit to Native American leaders, particularly Dunquat of the Wyandot and Hopocan of the Delaware, for their roles and commands on the battlefield. For over two centuries, their victory was attributed to the presence of British Rangers and a few officers, but Dunquat and Hopocan made the critical decisions before and after the battle while Native American warriors constituted the bulk of their army.
The book also reconsiders the effectiveness of American operations. Crawford was an unenthusiastic commander who had to be talked into leading the campaign to help prevent a repeat of the Gnadenhutten massacre. Despite his long service on the frontier and experience in the Continental Army, Crawford failed to unite his ad hoc command, suffered from constant indecision, and could not put his own stamp on the campaign. The unprofessional nature of his army also contributed to its defeat as it lacked organization, experience, leadership, training, and standardization.
The presence of Simon Girty, demonized by Americans on the frontier as a turncoat, and the gruesomeness of Crawford’s execution focused stories about the campaign on those two individuals, rather than the military operations themselves or the Indians who won the victory. Myths were accepted as fact. Afterward, interest in the campaign and the combatants faded. The Battle of Upper Sandusky, 1782 gives Crawford’s campaign its proper place as one of the largest battles between frontier forces and Native Americans during the Revolutionary War.
First published in 1938 as the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 120, this study is a classic in the field of Great Basin ethnology. Steward is considered one of the foremost exponents of cultural evolution in the United States, and his work is a major contribution to the study of social organization and to North American ethnography.
Winner of the 2002 Booker Worthen Literary Prize
American Association of State and Local History Award 2003
Stockley takes on this silence and shows that it resulted from sustained official efforts to convince the public that only blacks who had resisted lawful authority were killed. He shows too that it is part of a larger silence in which the fear and terror that were the daily staples of the African American experience have been summed up all too easily in the term "Jim Crow" in a failure to fully confront the anguish of the period.
In The Battle of Gloucester, 1777, archaeological historian Garry Wheeler Stone, with the assistance of historian Paul W. Schopp, recreates this minor but important clash during the Philadelphia campaign. Relying on both primary source documents and the latest archaeological interpretations, the authors have determined the course of this fascinating “battle,” as Benjamin Franklin later proclaimed it to be. As a result of this action, when Washington requested that Lafayette be given a division, Congress agreed. On December 4, 1777, the marquis, promoted to major-general, took command of the brigades of Generals Woodford and Scott to begin what would be a glorious career in American service.
Small Battles: Military History as Local History
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Series Editors
Small Battles offers a fresh and important new perspective on the story of America’s early conflicts. It was the small battles, not the clash of major armies, that truly defined the fighting during the colonial wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the hostilities on the frontiers. This is dramatic military history as seen through the prism of local history—history with a depth of detail, a feeling for place, people, and the impact of battle and its consequences that the story of major battles often cannot convey. The Small Battles series focuses on America’s military conflicts at their most intimate and revealing level.
Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern’s vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.
One of the oldest surviving pieces of Turkish literature, The Book of Dede Korkut can be traced to tenth-century origins. Now considered the national epic of Turkey, it is the heritage of the ancient Oghuz Turks and was composed as they migrated westward from their homeland in Central Asia to the Middle East, eventually to settle in Anatolia. Who its primary creator was no one knows, the titular bard, Dede Korkut, being more a symbol of Turkish minstrelsy than a verifiable author. The songs and tales of countless minstrels lay behind The Book of Dede Korkut, and in its oral form the epic was undoubtedly subject to frequent improvisation by individual performers. Partly in prose, partly in verse, these legends were sung or chanted in the courts and camps of political and military leaders. Even after they had been recorded in written form, they remained part of an oral tradition.
The present edition is the first complete text in English. The translators provide an excellent introduction to the language and background of the legends as well as a history of Dede Korkut scholarship. These outstanding tales will be of interest to all students of world mythology and folklore.
In Blind Spot, Myriam Tadessé exposes the difficulty, even the impossibility, for France to truly understand and celebrate the lived realities of mixed or biracial French citizens. What the French word métis—which translates to “half-breed” or “mixed-race”—hides is how central the notion of race actually is in a society that claims to repudiate it. The French film and theater world, in which Tadessé has made her career, appears unable to confront the individuality of the performers. They are required to correspond to categories—often based on race—that don’t allow for biracial identities. This classification not only contradicts France’s asserted ideals but also views as anomalies those who defy ethno-racial assumptions.
Drawing on her personal experiences as a biracial Ethiopian-French woman and her family history, Tadessé explores the realities of life for mixed-race individuals in France through her searing and honest memoir.
The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook continues to showcase the best academic debates, discussions, and research published in the prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy from the previous year. This volume brings together specially selected articles, covering the most up-to-date topics in Chinese cinema studies appearing for the first time in English, in order to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies, as well as to encourage new conversations.
This book is the latest offering in Intellect China Library series, which publishes work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English-language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies, visual arts, performing arts, media, and cultural studies, the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.
In this fascinating account of the critical final campaign against Nazi Germany on the western front, Reginald W. Thompson focuses on both the command decisions by the British and American generals and the performance of the enlisted men in order to explain the complex series of events that led to the German defeat in World War II. During the planning and run-up to what was intended to be a massive joint British and American push across the Rhine River and into the heart of Germany, the Allies encountered unexpected setbacks. Operation Market-Garden, the Allied aerial assault of the Low Countries, ended in disaster, while the attack through the Hu¨rtgen Forest was met by unexpected heavy resistance due to the build-up for the German surprise counterstrike planned for December 1944, what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. The author identifies the attack on the town of Schmidt in the Hu¨rtgen Forest as the key battle that set in motion a series of events that both prolonged the war and shaped Allied strategy in their effort to cross the Rhine. Here the reader will learn the chain of decisions that allowed the Allies to pressure German forces between the Roer and Rhine rivers and move on Cologne, Dusseldorf, and other key points, including the famous bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, near Bonn. Based on both American and British official reports and the author’s independent research and originally published in 1958, The Battle for the Rhineland is a lucid, balanced, and engaging account of a critical period in Western Europe during the Second World War.
From its roots in ancient Greek herbal medicine, the popular spirit we now know as gin was first established by the Dutch in the sixteenth century as a juniper-infused tincture to cure fevers. During London’s “gin craze” in the eighteenth century, the spirit gained popularity—and notoriety—as consumption increased rapidly. In recent years, gin has enjoyed a resurgence, with botanical flavorings offering refined new ways to enjoy the classic cocktail.
With this volume, Chris Thorogood and Simon Hiscock provide an account of how gin has been developed and produced. A diverse assortment of aromatic plants from around the world have been used in the production of gin over the course of several centuries, and each combination of botanicals yields a unique flavor profile that equates to more than the sum of its parts. Understanding the different types of formulation, and the main groups of plants used therein, is central to appreciating the drink’s complexities and subtleties. Garnished with sumptuous illustrations of the plants that tell the story of this complex drink, this enticing book delves into the botany of gin from root to branch. As this book’s extraordinary range of featured ingredients shows, gin is a quintessentially botanical beverage with a rich history like no other.
La reconnaissance des beautés arbitraires se heurte à l’absolu d’un modèle antique qu’il est temps de contredire. Car il n’est rien de fixe, ni d’immuable dans l’arbitraire de la beauté, tout entier laissé à l’imagination du peintre, du poète, de l’architecte ou du musicien… Beauté chimérique opposée à la beauté véritable, elle revêt soudain valeur de rareté et de distinction et se transforme en beauté nécessaire, liée à l’invention de formes nouvelles qui peuvent plaire et toucher universellement. Entre caprice et convention, non-sens et vraisemblance, raison et sentiment, beautés essentielles et arbitraires échangent leurs rôles pour représenter différemment le monde et ses figures.
The authors also examine the place of traditional architectural theory in a modern context – Post-Modern architecture in India has often sought to recapture a spirit of the past, and yet been reluctant to engage with traditional theory. By chronicling the gradual eclipse of Indian architectural theory, the authors explain how this reluctance arose; they also describe the need and the terms for a fresh engagement with it. The result is an architectural biography of a city, and a concise history of Indian architectural theory over the last 300 years.
This book on Jewish culture and literature focuses on the “quiet” decades of the nineteenth century, a scarcely written-about period of time in Bohemian Jewish history. Using a myriad of sources, including travelers’ accounts, poems, essays, short stories, guides, and newspaper articles, the volume explores Jewish expression, Jewish-Czech relations, and the changing attitudes toward Jews between the 1820s and 1880s. It offers close readings of writers like Karel Havlíćek Borovský, Ján Kollár, Siegfried Kapper, and Jan Neruda, as well as lesser-known authors and sources. Combining skillful sustained analysis, judicious argumentation, and elegant writing, the book is a truly enriching reading experience.
Backward Glances is the first gay urban history of its kind, examining these issues across a range of cultural material, including novels, poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings, the internet, and fragments of writing about the city such as Whitman's notebooks and David Hockney's graffiti. It provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern Western city.
Backward Glances is aimed at all those interested in the culture of the city, queer cultural history and the appropriation of public space.
Bodleian Library Souvenir Guide covers more than four centuries of the library’s most celebrated architecture, taking a look back at the contributions of famous architects like Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. In addition to the buildings themselves, the book illustrates some of the Bodleian’s most exquisite stonemasonry and statuary found there. It also provides translations to the intriguing Latin inscriptions that adorn many of the buildings and mark key moments in the library’s history. The book is brought up-to-date with a description of subsequent renovations, including the addition of the state-of-the-art Weston Library to house the library’s special collections.
In 1949, a small book had a big impact on education. In just over one hundred pages, Ralph W. Tyler presented the concept that curriculum should be dynamic, a program under constant evaluation and revision. Curriculum had always been thought of as a static, set program, and in an era preoccupied with student testing, he offered the innovative idea that teachers and administrators should spend as much time evaluating their plans as they do assessing their students.
Since then, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction has been a standard reference for anyone working with curriculum development. Although not a strict how-to guide, the book shows how educators can critically approach curriculum planning, studying progress and retooling when needed. Its four sections focus on setting objectives, selecting learning experiences, organizing instruction, and evaluating progress. Readers will come away with a firm understanding of how to formulate educational objectives and how to analyze and adjust their plans so that students meet the objectives. Tyler also explains that curriculum planning is a continuous, cyclical process, an instrument of education that needs to be fine-tuned.
This emphasis on thoughtful evaluation has kept Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction a relevant, trusted companion for over sixty years. And with school districts across the nation working feverishly to align their curriculum with Common Core standards, Tyler's straightforward recommendations are sound and effective tools for educators working to create a curriculum that integrates national objectives with their students' needs.
Where is the line that separates the “normal” from the “abnormal”? Liubov, a young Ukrainian woman of small nobility, struggles with this question in Lesia Ukrainka’s The Blue Rose. Living in Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century, she finds herself outside the norms for a woman: she reads “thick books,” follows music and art, and is interested in science and psychology. She hosts a salon and challenges men in discussions about politics and culture. Liubov is also an orphan whose mother died in an asylum, and she worries about inheriting her mother’s disease as well as passing it on to future children. When Liubov falls in love with Orest, she proposes a radical solution to her dilemma: to pursue something as rare as a blue flower—“pure love” that foregoes the physical and abandons the requirement of marriage and motherhood.
In her commanding debut as a playwright, Ukrainka created a deep psychological rendering of an unattainable ideal. The Blue Rose highlights themes such as women’s struggles for liberation, social progress and its reliance on science, and resistance to change in traditional societies. Written in sophisticated Ukrainian, Ukrainka’s nuanced play helped Ukrainian culture break free of the Russian imperial mold that sought to first provincialize and then erase it. Presented here in contemporary English translation, The Blue Rose illuminates Ukraine’s intellectual history and its connections with Western culture.
Where is the line that separates the “normal” from the “abnormal”? Liubov, a young Ukrainian woman of small nobility, struggles with this question in Lesia Ukrainka’s The Blue Rose. Living in Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century, she finds herself outside the norms for a woman: she reads “thick books,” follows music and art, and is interested in science and psychology. She hosts a salon and challenges men in discussions about politics and culture. Liubov is also an orphan whose mother died in an asylum, and she worries about inheriting her mother’s disease as well as passing it on to future children. When Liubov falls in love with Orest, she proposes a radical solution to her dilemma: to pursue something as rare as a blue flower—“pure love” that foregoes the physical and abandons the requirement of marriage and motherhood.
In her commanding debut as a playwright, Ukrainka created a deep psychological rendering of an unattainable ideal. The Blue Rose highlights themes such as women’s struggles for liberation, social progress and its reliance on science, and resistance to change in traditional societies. Written in sophisticated Ukrainian, Ukrainka’s nuanced play helped Ukrainian culture break free of the Russian imperial mold that sought to first provincialize and then erase it. Presented here in contemporary English translation, The Blue Rose illuminates Ukraine’s intellectual history and its connections with Western culture.
A leading historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, Ullrich demonstrates that the “Founder of the Reich” was in fact an opponent of liberal German nationalism. After the wars of 1866 and 1870, Bismarck spent the rest of his career working to preserve peace in Europe and protect the empire he had created. Despite his reputation as an enemy of socialism, he introduced comprehensive health and unemployment insurance for German workers. Far from being a “man of iron and blood,” Bismarck was in fact a complex statesman who was concerned with maintaining stability and harmony far beyond Germany’s newly unified borders.
Comprehensive and balanced, Bismarck shows us the post-reunification value of looking anew at this monumental figure’s role in European history.
Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) has gone down in history as the Iron Chancellor, a reactionary and militarist whose 1871 unification of Germany put Europe on a path of disaster leading up to World War I. But, as this new edition of his accessible biography shows, the real Bismarck was a far more complex character.
A leading historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, Volker Ullrich demonstrates that Bismarck—the “Founder of the Reich”—was, in fact, an opponent of liberal German nationalism. After the wars of 1866 and 1870, Bismarck spent the rest of his career working to preserve peace in Europe and to protect the empire he had created. Despite his reputation as an enemy of socialism, he introduced comprehensive health and unemployment insurance for German workers, and he was concerned with maintaining stability and harmony far beyond Germany’s newly unified borders. Comprehensive and balanced, Bismarck shows us the value of looking anew at this monumental figure’s role in European history.
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