In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1941 and 2018 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frames, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site.

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD TRUST PRIZE FOR HISTORY
Over the past several decades, the history of the American Revolution in the South has undergone a transformation to better incorporate regional events into the greater narrative of the war. Among these events was the vicious “backcountry” war from the Georgia border, across the South Carolina wilderness, to the North Carolina Piedmont between rebel Americans and loyalist and British forces. Centered in South Carolina, this running battle saw some of the most intense and continuous fighting of the war, and from its skirmishes, feints, and sieges, three key leaders emerged: American partisans Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion and Thomas “Gamecock” Sumter, and British Legion commander Banastre “Bloody Ban” Tarleton.
            For the first time, Backcountry War: The Rise of Francis Marion, Banastre Tarleton, and Thomas Sumter by Andrew Waters frames the history of these three men into in a single narrative, focusing on the events of 1780 in South Carolina that witnessed their collective ascendance from common soldiers to American legends. It was a time when British victories at Charleston and Camden left the Continental Army in tatters and the entire American South vulnerable to British conquest. Yet in those dark hours, Sumter, Marion, and others like them rose in the swamps and hills of the South Carolina wilderness. Fighting a wildly successful partisan war against better trained and better equipped British forces, including Tarleton’s British Legion, with victories at lesser-known places like Hanging Rock and Nelson’s Ferry, they gained precious months for the reorganizing Continental Army. Their collective efforts led to the stunning American victory at Cowpens and a stalemate at Guilford’s Courthouse the following year that finally convinced British general Charles Cornwallis to abandon the Carolinas for Virginia. 
            With background biographies of its three main protagonists, a thorough sketch of Great Britain’s Southern Strategy, and a sociocultural examination of the South Carolina frontier in the years leading up to the American Revolution, Backcountry War offers a fresh perspective on an extraordinary chapter of American history and a compelling account of the deadly contest between three of the war’s most charismatic leaders. 
 

In 1847, in the third year of Ireland's Great Famine and the thirteenth year of their rent strike against the Crown, hundreds of tenant farmers in Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, were evicted by the Queen's agents and shipped to New York. Mary Lee Dunn tells their story in this meticulously researched book. Using numerous Irish and U.S. sources and with descendants' help, she traces dozens of the evictees to Rutland, Vermont, as railroads and marble quarries transformed the local economy. She follows the immigrants up to 1870 and learns not only what happened to them but also what light American experience and records cast on their Irish “rebellion.”

Dunn begins with Ireland's pre-Famine social and political landscape as context for the Ballykilcline strike. The tenants had rented earlier from the Mahons of Strokestown, whose former property now houses Ireland's Famine Museum. In 1847, landlord Denis Mahon evicted and sent nearly a thousand tenants to Quebec, where half died before or just after reaching the Grosse Ile quarantine station. Mahon was gunned down months later. His murder provoked an international controversy involving the Vatican. An early suspect in the case was a man from Ballykilcline.

In the United States, many of the immigrants resettled in clusters in several locations, including Vermont, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, and New York. In Vermont they found jobs in the marble quarries, but some of them lost their homes again in quarry labor actions after 1859. Others prospered in their new lives. A number of Ballykilcline families who stopped in Rutland later moved west; one had a son kidnapped by Indians in Minnesota. Readers who have Irish Famine roots will gain a sense of their own “back story” from this account of Ireland and the native Irish, and scholars in the field of immigration studies will find it particularly useful.

As readers of classic Russian literature know, the nineteenth century was a time of pervasive financial anxiety. With incomes erratic and banks inadequate, Russians of all social castes were deeply enmeshed in networks of credit and debt. The necessity of borrowing and lending shaped perceptions of material and moral worth, as well as notions of social respectability and personal responsibility. Credit and debt were defining features of imperial Russia’s culture of property ownership. Sergei Antonov recreates this vanished world of borrowers, bankrupts, lenders, and loan sharks in imperial Russia from the reign of Nicholas I to the period of great social and political reforms of the 1860s.

Poring over a trove of previously unexamined records, Antonov gleans insights into the experiences of ordinary Russians, rich and poor, and shows how Russia’s informal but sprawling credit system helped cement connections among property owners across socioeconomic lines. Individuals of varying rank and wealth commonly borrowed from one another. Without a firm legal basis for formalizing debt relationships, obtaining a loan often hinged on subjective perceptions of trustworthiness and reputation. Even after joint-stock banks appeared in Russia in the 1860s, credit continued to operate through vast networks linked by word of mouth, as well as ties of kinship and community. Disputes over debt were common, and Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia offers close readings of legal cases to argue that Russian courts—usually thought to be underdeveloped in this era—provided an effective forum for defining and protecting private property interests.

In June 1622, the silver mining metropolis of Potosí, Bolivia, erupted in gangland violence, only halted three years later by a viceroy’s blanket amnesty. Basque immigrants were at the center of the controversy, squaring off against nearly a dozen other nations known collectively as Vicuñas. At stake were the world’s richest silver mines, a means to wealth and power in the Americas, Europe, and beyond.

As mines flooded and Indigenous workers died or fled, the city descended into a maelstrom of swordfights, gun battles, ambushes, sniper attacks, and summary executions. Though its roots were economic, the Basque-Vicuña conflict strained the sinews of Habsburg global governance even as it exposed festering local tensions, only some of which were unique to Potosí.

This rich collection of original sources, all of them archival documents housed in Bolivia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, consists of contemporary eyewitness accounts from several perspectives, allowing readers to play historian. All sources have been expertly translated and carefully annotated in a manner that will engage students and scholars alike. Basques and Vicuñas at the Mouth of Hell includes an extensive introduction, seven vital documents in translation, and appendices on everyday life in 1620s Potosí and on the historiography of this watershed episode of colonial violence.
 

In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable-it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age-that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule.

Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas-personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa.

Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold.

The Marquis de Lafayette, a nineteen-year-old French youth, arrived in Philadelphia at the end of July 1777. He was a rich aristocrat, but he was unpretentious, charming, and eager to learn. Introduced to George Washington, he joined the commander-in-chief at the Battle of Brandywine in September, where he proved that he was courageous. Soon after, the British occupied Philadelphia and prepared to control the Delaware River, vital as a supply route. In November, the marquis volunteered to go to New Jersey with Major General Nathanael Greene and a detachment sent to defend Fort Mercer, a Delaware River fort controlling shipping access to Philadelphia. Mercer was threatened by an approaching enemy column led by Lord Charles Cornwallis. The Continentals were unable to reach Fort Mercer in time to save it, but Lafayette had ridden ahead of Greene to reconnoiter. He discovered a 350-man picket of German riflemen (jägers) guarding Cornwallis’s camp, and with ten light dragoons, 150 riflemen from Daniel Morgan’s Rifle Corps, and perhaps 200 New Jersey militia, he attacked. In forty-five minutes, Lafayette’s little band drove the jägers back two and a half miles, almost to Cornwallis’s camp. When the news of Lafayette’s small victory reached the Continental Congress at York, Pennsylvania, the delegates were elated—this was the only good news amid the gloom over the loss of Philadelphia and control of the Delaware River. Massachusetts delegate James Lovell relayed a glowing account of the skirmish to John Adams, concluding with “Genl. Greene says the Marquis seems determined to court Danger. I wish more were so determined.” 
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.

Mexico features prominently in the literature and personal legends of the Beat writers, from its depiction as an extension of the American frontier in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to its role as a refuge for writers with criminal pasts like William S. Burroughs. Yet the story of Beat literature and Mexico takes us beyond the movement’s superstars to consider the important roles played by lesser-known female Beat writers. 
 
The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its culture in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. It also devotes individual chapters to women such as Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger, who each made Mexico a central setting of their work and interrogated the misogyny they encountered in both American and Mexican culture. 
 
The Beats in Mexico not only considers individual Beat writers, but also places them within a larger history of countercultural figures, from D.H. Lawrence to Antonin Artaud to Jim Morrison, who mythologized Mexico as the land of the Aztecs and Maya, where shamanism and psychotropic drugs could take you on a trip far beyond the limits of the American imagination.

Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the little-known author of Beauty and the Beast, was a successful novelist and fairytale writer in mid eighteenth-century France. While her novels are rarely read today, her compelling fairytale has become universally recognized. This edition is the first integral English translation of Villeneuve’s original tale. The introduction seeks to illuminate the publication of Beauty and the Beast in its historical and literary context, and brings to life the dynamic female characters that first populated this enchanting tale: the courageous Beauty, the Fairy Queen, the Amazon Queen, the Lady Fairy, and the powerful, but mischievous elderly fairy.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series volume 74

Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens’s early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out. Like the hero of Dombey and Son, he remained haunted by “what might have been, and what was not.”

In his own lifetime, Dickens was without rivals. He styled himself simply “The Inimitable.” But he was not always confident about his standing in the world. From his traumatized childhood to the suicide of his first collaborator and the sudden death of the woman who had a good claim to being the love of his life, Dickens faced powerful obstacles. Before settling on the profession of novelist, he tried his hand at the law and journalism, considered a career in acting, and even contemplated emigrating to the West Indies. Yet with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and a groundbreaking series of plays, sketches, and articles, he succeeded in turning every potential breakdown into a breakthrough.

Douglas-Fairhurst’s provocative new biography, focused on the 1830s, portrays a restless and uncertain Dickens who could not decide on the career path he should take and would never feel secure in his considerable achievements.

The 1963 publication of Thomas Pynchon’s V. changed the landscape of American fiction. Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. offers a detailed examination of the dramatic transformations that took place as Pynchon’s foundational novel went from typescript to published work. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft develop and deploy a rich theory of genetic narratology to examine the performance of genre in the novel. Pushing back against the current dominance of cognitive narratology, they discuss focalization, character construction, and evocation of consciousness as clues to Pynchon’s developing narratology of historical fiction. Their theoretical interventions offer an important and timely corrective to the field of narratology with a method that brings the author back into the analytical frame. 

Herman and Krafft use as their guide the typescript of V. that surfaced in 2001, when it was acquired by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, as well as Pynchon’s editorial correspondence with Corlies Smith, his first editor at J. B. Lippincott. Becoming Pynchon assembles a comprehensive and unequaled picture of Pynchon’s writing process that will appeal both to Pynchonians and to postmodernism scholars more broadly. 

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious of Hitler’s concentration camps—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. Before Auschwitz unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extralegal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies toward Jews and in plans to create a racially pure Third Reich.

Investigating more than a dozen camps, from the infamous Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen to less familiar sites, Kim Wünschmann uncovers a process of terror meant to identify and isolate German Jews in the period from 1933 to 1939. The concentration camp system was essential to a regime then testing the limits of its power and seeking to capture the hearts and minds of the German public. Propagandized by the Nazis as enemies of the state, Jews were often targeted for arbitrary arrest and then routinely subjected to the harshest treatment and most punishing labor assignments in the camps. Some of them were murdered. Over time, shocking accounts of camp life filtered into the German population, sending a message that Jews were different from true Germans: they were portrayed as dangerous to associate with and fair game for acts of intimidation and violence.

Drawing on a wide range of previously unexplored archives, Before Auschwitz explains how the concentration camps evolved into a universally recognized symbol of Nazi terror and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.

An account of the systemic failures that led to the Grenfell tower fire.

The 2017 Grenfell tower fire in London was a “slow disaster,” the product of a long accumulation of faults and errors that resulted from erroneous assumptions and organizational and governmental decision-making. This book offers a critical perspective on the systematic failures that lead to one of the greatest tragedies in Britain in our time.
 
Before Grenfell is a poignant and timely analysis of risk, fire, and safety in postwar Britain. Tracing the evolution of state housing policy in relation to multistory housing since the mid-1950s, the book adds to a burgeoning history of the British experience of fire and safety in high-rises and investigates a latent housing crisis in contemporary Britain against a backdrop of increasingly deregulated urban building development. Drawing on public inquiries, newspaper accounts, and oral histories, Shane Ewen details other avoidable disasters, including the Ronan Point tower block explosion in 1968, the Summerland leisure center fire in 1972, and the Bradford City Football Club fire in 1985. The book closes with a powerful chapter on fire safety campaigners, including survivor groups, who are seeking justice for the victims of fire disasters. Before Grenfell aims to exert pressure on policy-makers to act on the lessons of fatal disasters in order to both prevent future casualties and establish a legacy for those who lost their lives.

During the struggle for decolonization, Frantz Fanon argued that artists who mimicked European aestheticism were “beginning at the end,” skipping the inventive phase of youth for a decadence thought more typical of Europe’s declining empires. Robert Stilling takes up Fanon’s assertion to argue that decadence became a key idea in postcolonial thought, describing both the failures of revolutionary nationalism and the assertion of new cosmopolitan ideas about poetry and art.

In Stilling’s account, anglophone postcolonial artists have reshaped modernist forms associated with the idea of art for art’s sake and often condemned as decadent. By reading decadent works by J. K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde alongside Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Mahon, Yinka Shonibare, Wole Soyinka, and Bernardine Evaristo, Stilling shows how postcolonial artists reimagined the politics of aestheticism in the service of anticolonial critique. He also shows how fin de siècle figures such as Wilde questioned the imperial ideologies of their own era.

Like their European counterparts, postcolonial artists have had to negotiate between the imaginative demands of art and the pressure to conform to a revolutionary politics seemingly inseparable from realism. Beginning at the End argues that both groups—European decadents and postcolonial artists—maintained commitments to artifice while fostering oppositional politics. It asks that we recognize what aestheticism has contributed to politically engaged postcolonial literature. At the same time, Stilling breaks down the boundaries around decadent literature, taking it outside of Europe and emphasizing the global reach of its imaginative transgressions.

The Nazi 1933 Civil Service Law and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws are often considered the first anti-Jewish decrees in interwar Europe. Mária M. Kovács convincingly argues that Hungary’s numerus clausus law of 1920, which introduced a Jewish quota at Hungary’s institutions of higher learning, was, in fact, interwar Europe’s first antisemitic law. By defining—and discriminating against—Jews as a separate “racial” or “national” group, it abrogated the principle of equal rights that had been enshrined into law; as such, it marked an abrupt reversal of Jewish emancipation in Hungary. Moreover, the numerus clausus law set the stage for subsequent “Jewish Laws” (in the late 1930s and early 1940s) that sought to solve Hungary’s “Jewish Question” by means of extraordinary legal measures that targeted Jews alone. This book examines the origins and implementation of the numerus clausus, as well as the attempts to dampen its impact on Hungary’s international reputation, focusing on the debates surrounding it promulgation (1920), its modification (1928) and its eventual application to other areas of Jewish life (1938–45).

Vernacular responses have been crucial for communities seeking creative ways to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. With most people locked down and separated from the normal ebb and flow of life for an extended period of time, COVID-19 inspired community and creativity, adaptation and flexibility, traditional knowledge, resistance, and dynamism. Removing people from assumed norms and daily lives, the pandemic provided a moment of insight into the nature of vernacular culture as it was used, abused, celebrated, critiqued, and discarded. In Behind the Mask, contributors from the USA, the UK, and Scandinavia emphasize the choices that individual people and communities made during the COVID pandemic, prioritizing the everyday lives of people enduring this health crisis.
 
Despite vernacular’s potential nod to dominant or external culture, it is the strong connection to the local that grounds the vernacular within the experiential context that it occupies. Exploring the nature and shape of vernacular responses to the ongoing public health crisis, Behind the Mask documents processes that are otherwise likely to be forgotten. Including different ethnographic presents, contributors capture moments during the pandemic rather than upon reflection, making the work important to students and scholars of folklore and ethnology, as well as general readers interested in the COVID pandemic.
 

A new history illuminates the Society of Jesus in its first century from the perspective of those who knew it best: the early Jesuits themselves.

The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over.

Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society’s foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit’s personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole—an attitude that helps explain the Society’s widespread appeal from its first days.

Focusing on the Jesuits’ own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code—a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today.

Drawing on evidence from a wide collection of surviving family papers, Beloved Children is a valuable contribution to literature available concerning childhood history in pre-industrial Central Europe.

With the aid of detailed case studies, the volume illustrates every aspect of Hungarian childhood in the early modern age from a variety of contrasting perspectives—birth, care, education, marriage, orphanhood and death. The book also includes a unique portrayal of family life in the Hungarian aristocracy.

Beloved Children is a comprehensive study examining topics such as family intimacy, paternal and maternal attitudes, providing the reader with a valuable insight into a child’s life in Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Step into Ernst Wolzogen's Motley Theater, Max Reinhardt's Sound and Smoke, Rudolf Nelson's Chat noir, and Friedrich Hollaender's Tingel-Tangel. Enjoy Claire Waldoff's rendering of a lower-class Berliner, Kurt Tucholsky's satirical songs, and Walter Mehring's Dadaist experiments, as Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down.

Fads and fashions, sexual mores and political ideologies--all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of modern German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstable yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism. By situating cabaret within Berlin's rich landscape of popular culture and distinguishing it from vaudeville and variety theaters, spectacular revues, prurient "nude dancing," and Communist agitprop, Jelavich revises the prevailing image of this form of entertainment.

Neither highly politicized, like postwar German Kabarett, nor sleazy in the way that some American and European films suggest, Berlin cabaret occupied a middle ground that let it cast an ironic eye on the goings-on of Berliners and other Germans. However, it was just this satirical attitude toward serious themes, such as politics and racism, that blinded cabaret to the strength of the radical right-wing forces that ultimately destroyed it. Jelavich concludes with the Berlin cabaret artists' final performances--as prisoners in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt.

This book gives us a sense of what the world looked like within the cabarets of Berlin and at the same time lets us see, from a historical distance, these lost performers enacting the political, sexual, and artistic issues that made their city one of the most dynamic in Europe.

Beside the Bard argues that Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational political and cultural affiliations. This fluid conception of the nation may accommodate a post-Union British self-identification, but it also recognizes the instrumental and historically contingent nature of “Britishness.” Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, literati or autodidacts, poets such as Alexander Wilson, Carolina Olyphant, Robert Tannahill, and John Lapraik, among others, adamantly refuse to imagine a single nation, British or otherwise, instead preferring an open, polyvocal field, on which they can stage new national and personal formations and fight new revolutions. In this sense, “Scotland” is a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Electrifying when first delivered in 1973, legendary in the years since, Dieter Henrich's lectures on German Idealism were the first contact a major German philosopher had made with an American audience since the onset of World War II. They remain one of the most eloquent explanations and interpretations of classical German philosophy and of the way it relates to the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Thanks to the editorial work of David Pacini, the lectures appear here with annotations linking them to editions of the masterworks of German philosophy as they are now available.

Henrich describes the movement that led from Kant to Hegel, beginning with an interpretation of the structure and tensions of Kant's system. He locates the Kantian movement and revival of Spinoza, as sketched by F. H. Jacobi, in the intellectual conditions of the time and in the philosophical motivations of modern thought. Providing extensive analysis of the various versions of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, Henrich brings into view a constellation of problems that illuminate the accomplishments of the founders of Romanticism, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, and of the poet Hölderlin's original philosophy. He concludes with an interpretation of the basic design of Hegel's system.

In its early transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, Spain rapidly embraced neoliberal practices and policies, some of which directly impacted cultural production. In a few short years, the country commercialized its art and literary markets, investing in “cultural tourism” as a tool for economic growth and urban renewal. The artist novel began to proliferate for the first time in a century, but these novels—about artists and art historians—have received little critical attention beyond the descriptive. In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors—Julio Llamazares, Ángeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas—whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors' ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public.

Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced re-creation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.

On 17 August 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender that also brought an end to the Second World War in Asia, Indonesia declared its independence. The declaration was not recognized by the Netherlands, which resorted to force in its attempt to take control of the inevitable process of decolonization. This led to four years of difficult negotiations and bitter warfare.

In 2005, the Dutch government declared that the Netherlands should never have waged the war. The government’s 1969 position on the violence used by the Dutch armed forces during the war remained unchanged, however: although there had been ‘excesses’, on the whole the armed forces had behaved ‘correctly’. As the indications of Dutch extreme violence mounted, this official position proved increasingly difficult to maintain. In 2016, the Dutch government therefore decided to fund a broad study on the dynamics of the violence. The most important conclusions of that research programme are summarized in this book. The authors show that the Dutch armed forces used extreme violence on a structural basis, and that this was concealed both at the time and for many years after the war by the Dutch government and by society more broadly. All of this – like the entire colonial history – is at odds with the rose-tinted self-image of the Netherlands.

This memoir about the experiences of German occupation during the siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) was written by Moscow-born Evdokiia Vasil’evna Baskakova-Bogacheva (1888–1976), an émigré in Australia, at the age of eighty-one. The text had been forgotten in the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco since 1970 until the editors of this volume discovered it.

In the memoirs, after accounting on her youth spent against the background of the First World War and of the two Russian revolutions of 1917, Evdokiia describes the inferno of the Nazi occupation as experienced in a suburb of Leningrad in 1941-43. She survived for nearly two years almost on the front line, within a few kilometers of the blockade ring. As a medical practitioner, she became useful for the occupational authorities and the ever-shrinking town population, until her family was evacuated to the west in October 1943. Besides hunger, discord, disease, the hunt for food and firewood, along with violence and death, Evdokiia’s account deals with various forms of cooperation between Soviet citizens and the new authorities.

All the events she recalls can be confirmed through other sources. The introduction and the detailed notes to the text help the reader to locate Evdokiia’s recollections in time and place, and situate them in their historical context. 

Big Books in Times of Big Data examines recent trends of size and scale in the novel in terms of the shift from the bound book to the newer materialities of the digital. Using a wide-ranging international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, Van de Ven reflects on the place of big book-bound literature in a media genealogy which includes film and television but also online databases, social media, selfies, and Global Information Systems. This study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book—as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, mediality, gender, and power. Van de Ven takes us into a contested bookish terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and readerly comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of ‘binging’ and serial consumption.

This Biographical Dictionary describes the lives, works and aspirations of more than 150 women and men who were active in, or part of, women’s movements and feminisms in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe. Thus, it challenges the widely held belief that there was no historical feminism in this part of Europe. These innovative and often moving biographical portraits not only show that feminists existed here, but also that they were widespread and diverse, and included Romanian princesses, Serbian philosophers and peasants, Latvian and Slovakian novelists, Albanian teachers, Hungarian Christian social workers and activists of the Catholic women’s movement, Austrian factory workers, Bulgarian feminist scientists and socialist feminists, Russian radicals, philanthropists, militant suffragists and Bolshevik activists, prominent writers and philosophers of the Ottoman era, as well as Turkish republican leftist political activists and nationalists, internationally recognized Greek feminist leaders, Estonian pharmacologists and science historians, Slovenian ‘literary feminists,’ Czech avant-garde painters, Ukrainian feminist scholars, Polish and Czech Senate Members, and many more. Their stories together constitute a rich tapestry of feminist activity and redress a serious imbalance in the historiography of women’s movements and feminisms.

Bio-Imperialism focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.
 

On the subject of science in Nazi Germany, we are apt to hear about the collaboration of some scientists, the forced emigration of talented Jewish scientists, the general science phobia of leaders of the Third Reich--but little detail about what actually transpired. Biologists under Hitler is the first book to examine the impact of Nazism on the lives and research of a generation of German biologists. Drawing on previously unutilized archival material, Ute Deichmann, herself a biologist, explores not only what happened to the biologists forced to emigrate but also the careers, science, and crimes of those who stayed in Germany.

Biologists under Hitler combines exhaustive research with capsule biographies of key scientists to overturn certain assumptions about science under the Nazi regime. Biological research, for instance, was neither neglected nor underfunded during World War II; funding by the German Research Association (DFG) in fact increased tenfold between 1933 and 1938, and genetic research in particular flourished. Deichmann shows that the forced emigration of Jews had a less significant impact in biology than in other fields. Furthermore, she reveals that the widely observed decline in German biology after 1945 was not caused primarily by the Third Reich's science policy or by the expulsion of biologists but was due to the international isolation of German scientists as part of the legacy of National Socialism. Her book also provides overwhelming evidence of German scientists' conscious misrepresentation after the war of their wartime activities. In this regard, Deichmann's capsule biography of Konrad Lorenz is particularly telling.

Certain to be regarded as the most thorough and comprehensive account of biological science in Nazi Germany, Biologists under Hitler will interest historians of science, historians of the Nazi era, and biologists, as well as those who wish to learn about the relationship between scientific truth and political realities.

In this book, Makarychev and Medvedev examine the importance of biopolitics in fueling Russia’s confrontation with the West. In their view, the development of Putin’s illiberal authoritarianism was largely triggered by what they call a biopolitical turn. This shift is exemplified by the use of an increasing number of regulatory mechanisms to discipline and constrain the human body. Such political practices concern issues of sexuality, reproductive behavior, adoption, fertility, family planning, public hygiene, and demography. This turn created a new disciplinary framework for the population and the elite. Bans and restrictions of a biopolitical nature, became one of the main tools for articulating the rules of belonging in the political community and drawing its political boundaries. Biopolitical discourses have taken up the core of the Russian identity formation, which contrasts a positive “conservative Russia” with a supposedly vicious “liberal West.”

The presentation of the political genealogy of the body-centric structures of power and hegemony in Russia implies their transformation from bio- to necropolitics. Necropolitical (repressive and life-depriving) components are inscribed in the biopolitical regimes of power: they form the core of Putin’s rule over Russia and are a key factor behind the war against Ukraine. 

Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years.

In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps.

Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated.

Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.

Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.

"Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience—in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin's destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu's leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao's Red Guards.

As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.

Exploring the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives

At a moment in U.S. history with repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois is the first book to consider the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that nonetheless remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and class status in literary texts, Candice M. Jenkins reminds us that the conflicted relation of the black subject to privilege is not, solely, a recent phenomenon.

Focusing on works by Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Danzy Senna, Rebecca Walker, Reginald McKnight, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, and Michael Thomas, Jenkins shows that the seemingly abrupt discursive shift from post–Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter, from an emphasis on privilege and progress to an emphasis on vulnerability and precariousness, suggests a pendulum swing between two interrelated positions still in tension. By analyzing how these narratives stage the fraught interaction between the black and the bourgeois, Jenkins offers renewed attention to class as a framework for the study of black life—a necessary shift in an age of rapidly increasing income inequality and societal stratification.

Black Bourgeois thus challenges the assumed link between blackness and poverty that has become so ingrained in the United States, reminding us that privileged subjects, too, are “classed.” This book offers, finally, a rigorous and nuanced grasp of how African Americans live within complex, intersecting identities.

In this masterful account, a historian of science surveys the molecular biology revolution, its origin and continuing impact.

Since the 1930s, a molecular vision has been transforming biology. Michel Morange provides an incisive and overarching history of this transformation, from the early attempts to explain organisms by the structure of their chemical components, to the birth and consolidation of genetics, to the latest technologies and discoveries enabled by the new science of life. Morange revisits A History of Molecular Biology and offers new insights from the past twenty years into his analysis.

The Black Box of Biology shows that what led to the incredible transformation of biology was not a simple accumulation of new results, but the molecularization of a large part of biology. In fact, Morange argues, the greatest biological achievements of the past few decades should still be understood within the molecular paradigm. What has happened is not the displacement of molecular biology by other techniques and avenues of research, but rather the fusion of molecular principles and concepts with those of other disciplines, including genetics, physics, structural chemistry, and computational biology. This has produced decisive changes, including the discoveries of regulatory RNAs, the development of massive scientific programs such as human genome sequencing, and the emergence of synthetic biology, systems biology, and epigenetics.

Original, persuasive, and breathtaking in its scope, The Black Box of Biology sets a new standard for the history of the ongoing molecular revolution.

The Blackburn Buccaneer was the first jet aircraft that was especially designed for very low flying under the radar at high subsonic speeds. It was developed in the fifties and entered service at the Royal Navy in 1962. Later, it also flew as an attack bomber at the R.A.F. and it even played a role during the Gulf War in 1991, before being retired in 1994 after an operational career that spanned three decades.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Algerian piracy in the Mediterranean loomed large in the American imagination. An estimated seven hundred American citizens, sailors, and naval officers were taken captive over the course of the Barbary Crises (1784–1815), and this overseas danger threatened to grow and irreparably harm the young republic.

Blood and Ink reconstructs the largely forgotten influence of these early American conflicts with North Africa on notions of publicity, print culture, and racial and national identity from independence to the Civil War. Exploring the extensive archive of texts inspired by the conflicts—from captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poems to broadsides, travel narratives, children’s literature, newspaper articles, and visual ephemera—Jacob Crane connects anxieties surrounding North African piracy and white slavery to both the development of American abolitionism and representations of transatlantic African and Jewish identities in the early national and antebellum periods.

The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire.

“We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol.

Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines.

With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.

Addresses the political and aesthetic evolution of African American literature and its authors during the Cold War, an era McCarthy calls “the Blue Period.”

In the years after World War II, to be a black writer was to face a stark predicament. The contest between the Soviet Union and the United States was a global one—an ideological battle that dominated almost every aspect of the cultural agenda. On the one hand was the Soviet Union, espousing revolutionary communism that promised egalitarianism while being hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand was the United States, a country steeped in racial prejudice and the policies of Jim Crow.

Black writers of this time were equally alienated from the left and the right, Jesse McCarthy argues, and they channeled that alienation into remarkable experiments in literary form. Embracing racial affect and interiority, they forged an aesthetic resistance premised on fierce dissent from both US racial liberalism and Soviet communism. From the end of World War II to the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, authors such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paule Marshall defined a distinctive moment in American literary culture that McCarthy terms the Blue Period.

In McCarthy’s hands, this notion of the Blue Period provides a fresh critical framework that challenges long-held disciplinary and archival assumptions. Black writers in the early Cold War went underground, McCarthy argues, not to depoliticize or liberalize their work, but to make it more radical—keeping alive affective commitments for a future time.

In 2011, the centennial of Tennessee Williams’s birth, events were held around the world honoring America’s greatest playwright. There were festivals, conferences, and exhibitions held in places closely associated with Williams’s life and career—New Orleans held major celebrations, as did New York, Key West, and Provincetown. But absolutely nothing was done to celebrate Williams’s life and extraordinary literary and theatrical career in the place that he lived in longest, and called home longer than any other—St. Louis, Missouri.

The question of this paradox lies at the heart of this book, an attempt not so much to correct the record about Williams’s well-chronicled dislike of the city, but rather to reveal how the city was absolutely indispensable to his formation and development both as a person and artist. Unlike the prevailing scholarly narrative that suggests that Williams discovered himself artistically and sexually in the deep South and New Orleans, Blue Song reveals that Williams remained emotionally tethered to St. Louis for a host of reasons for the rest of his life.

This illuminating book makes the case for a tradition of African American detective fiction—novels written by black Americans about black detectives and incorporating distinctly African American tropes and themes. Beginning with Pauline Hopkins in 1901, black authors consciously altered and subverted the formulas of detective fiction in significant ways. Such writers as J. E. Bruce, Rudolph Fisher, Chester Himes, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major created a new genre that responded to the social and political concerns of the black community.

Examining the work of these authors, Stephen Soitos frames his analysis in terms of four uniquely African American tropes: altered detective personas, double-consciousness detection, black vernaculars, and hoodoo. He argues that black writers created sleuths who were in fact “blues detectives,” engaged not only in solving crimes, but also in exploring the mysteries of black life and culture.

Soitos grounds his study in African American literary theory, particularly the work of Houston Baker, Bernard Bell, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He offers both a new way of conceiving black detective fiction and a series of insightful readings of books in this genre.

Body Language examines the complex intersections of British eighteenth-century comic fiction and medical discourse. By engaging medical writings of renowned and widely-read physicians of the Enlightenment such as John Freind, Thomas Sydenham, Albrecht von Haller, John Whytt, and William Cullen, with novels of humor by Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox, Alves explains how medicine shaped comic language by dramatizing female-specific phenomena like menstruation, hysteria, nervous disorders, and pregnancy. In these novels, the medical belief that women are incapable of bodily self-regulation becomes an imperative for policing women’s bodies and highlights the enduring shortcomings of patriarchal systems. Ultimately, these comic representations offer a counternarrative of women’s bodies, agency, and selfhood, exposing masculine anxieties about the effectiveness of marriage to regulate women’s sexuality.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

An erudite exploration of transgressive language from the Renaissance by one of Europe’s greatest living philosophers. 

This book explores how early modern authors broke linguistic boundaries, creating new words and languages that challenged traditional grammar and lexicon, providing historical insight into today’s debates on the politics of language.  Through a scholarly analysis by Giorgio Agamben, the text delves into the boundary-shifting language of the Renaissance, exemplified by giants like Pantagruel and Gargantua, whose outsized bodies mirror the vastness of their speech.  The macaronic language invented by Teofilo Folengo, blending Latin and vernacular, embodies a linguistic rebellion that transforms language into a tangible, unruly force. Featuring illustrations from the Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel and Folengo’s Baldo, this volume offers a vivid portrayal of language as a physical, dynamic entity that defies grammatical norms. 

Built by Boeing, designated as B-47 and named the Stratojet, this plane was quantum leap in aircraft development. Initially Boeing entered the unknown when they started this project, but soon it would be evident that Strategic Air Command would have its multi-engine jet bomber with a speed performance similar to the latest jet fighters...

In his novel Miriam Coffin, or The Whale-Fishermen (1834), Joseph C. Hart proclaimed that his characters were “a bold and hardy race of men,” who deserved the “expressive title of American Whale-Fishermen.” Hart was not the only American author to applaud these physical laborers as the embodiment of national manhood. Heroic portraits of whalers first appeared in American literature during the 1780s, and they proliferated across time. Writers as various as Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman celebrated the talents of the seafarers who transformed the New England whale fishery into a globally dominant industry. But these images did not go unchallenged. Alternative visions—some of which undermined the iconic status of the trade and its workers—began to proliferate. Even so, these depictions did very little to dismantle the notion that whaling men were prime exemplars of a proud American work ethic.

To explain why this industry had such a widespread and enduring impact on American literature, Jennifer Schell juxtaposes and analyzes a wide array of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century whaling narratives. Drawing on various studies of masculinity, labor history, and transnationalism, Schell shows how this particular type of maritime work, and the traits and values associated with it, helped to shape the American literary, cultural, and historical imagination. In the process, she reveals the diverse, flexible, and often contradictory meanings of gender, class, and nation in nineteenth-century America.

In rural South African clinics, Black nurses played critical roles. Charged with administering valuable and life-saving health care measures despite a lack of equipment and personnel, these nurses had to navigate the intersections of traditional African healing practices, changing gender relations, and increasing educational and economic opportunities for South Africa’s Black middle class between the 1960s and 1980s.
 
Leslie Anne Hadfield compellingly demonstrates how these women were able to successfully carve out their own professional space and reshape notions of health and healing in the Eastern Cape. Bringing forth the stories of these nurses in their own voices, A Bold Profession is an homage to their dedication to the well-being of their communities. Hadfield sheds light on the struggles of balancing commitment to career and family lives during an oppressive apartheid. The volume fills an important gap for scholars studying the history of women, nursing, and health care in South Africa, illuminating the humanity of health care workers.

The rise of the Bolsheviks is an epic Russian story that now has a definitive end. The major historian of the subject, Adam Ulam, has enlarged his classic work with a new Preface that puts the revolutionary moment, and especially Lenin, in perspective for our modern age.

Bombs are as old as hatred itself. But it was the twentieth century--one hundred years of incredible scientific progress and terrible war--that brought forth the Big One, the Bomb, humanity's most powerful and destructive invention. In The Bomb: A Life, Gerard DeGroot tells the story of this once unimaginable weapon that--at least since 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945--has haunted our dreams and threatened our existence.

The Bomb has killed hundreds of thousands outright, condemned many more to lingering deaths, and made vast tracts of land unfit for life. For decades it dominated the psyches of millions, becoming a touchstone of popular culture, celebrated or decried in mass political movements, films, songs, and books. DeGroot traces the life of the Bomb from its birth in turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early adulthood in Nagasaki and Bikini, Australia and Kazakhstan to maturity in test sites and missile silos around the globe. His book portrays the Bomb's short but significant existence in all its scope, providing us with a portrait of the times and the people--from Oppenheimer to Sakharov, Stalin to Reagan--whose legacy still shapes our world.

Patrice Gueniffey is the leading French historian of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. This book, hailed as a masterwork on its publication in France, takes up the epic narrative at the heart of this turbulent period: the life of Napoleon himself, the man who—in Madame de Staël’s words—made the rest of “the human race anonymous.” Gueniffey follows Bonaparte from his obscure boyhood in Corsica, to his meteoric rise during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns of the Revolutionary wars, to his proclamation as Consul for Life in 1802. Bonaparte is the story of how Napoleon became Napoleon. A future volume will trace his career as emperor.

Most books approach Napoleon from an angle—the Machiavellian politician, the military genius, the life without the times, the times without the life. Gueniffey paints a full, nuanced portrait. We meet both the romantic cadet and the young general burning with ambition—one minute helplessly intoxicated with Josephine, the next minute dominating men twice his age, and always at war with his own family. Gueniffey recreates the violent upheavals and global rivalries that set the stage for Napoleon’s battles and for his crucial role as state builder. His successes ushered in a new age whose legacy is felt around the world today.

Averse as we are now to martial glory, Napoleon might seem to be a hero from a bygone time. But as Gueniffey says, his life still speaks to us, the ultimate incarnation of the distinctively modern dream to will our own destiny.

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as Thoreau's countless admirers know, there is more to the man than Walden. An engineer, poet, teacher, naturalist, lecturer, and political activist, he truly had multiple lives to lead, and each one speaks forcefully to us today.

Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer on a variety of topics, some that we readily associate with him, some that may be surprising. Each volume includes selections from his familiar published works as well as from less well known lectures, letters, and journal entries. The books include original engravings by renowned illustrator and book artist Barry Moser.

The question of how Islam arrived in India remains markedly contentious in South Asian politics. Standard accounts center on the Umayyad Caliphate’s incursions into Sind and littoral western India in the eighth century CE. In this telling, Muslims were a foreign presence among native Hindus, sowing the seeds of a mutual animosity that presaged the subcontinent’s partition into Pakistan and India many centuries later.

But in a compelling reexamination of the history of Islam in India, Manan Ahmed Asif directs attention to a thirteenth-century text that tells the story of Chach, the Brahmin ruler of Sind, and his kingdom’s later conquest by the Muslim general Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE. The Chachnama has long been a touchstone of Indian history, yet it is seldom studied in its entirety. Asif offers a close and complete analysis of this important text, untangling its various registers and genres in order to reconstruct the political vision at its heart.

Asif challenges the main tenets of the Chachnama’s interpretation: that it is a translation of an earlier Arabic text and that it presents a history of conquest. Debunking both ideas, he demonstrates that the Chachnama was originally Persian and, far from advancing a narrative of imperial aggression, is a subtle and sophisticated work of political theory, one embedded in both the Indic and Islamic ethos. This social and intellectual history of the Chachnama is an important corrective to the divisions between Muslim and Hindu that so often define Pakistani and Indian politics today.

Two French Protestant refugees in eighteenth-century Amsterdam gave the world an extraordinary work that intrigued and outraged readers across Europe. In this captivating account, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt take us to the vibrant Dutch Republic and its flourishing book trade to explore the work that sowed the radical idea that religions could be considered on equal terms.

Famed engraver Bernard Picart and author and publisher Jean Frederic Bernard produced The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, which appeared in the first of seven folio volumes in 1723. They put religion in comparative perspective, offering images and analysis of Jews, Catholics, Muslims, the peoples of the Orient and the Americas, Protestants, deists, freemasons, and assorted sects. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, the work was a resounding success. For the next century it was copied or adapted, but without the context of its original radicalism and its debt to clandestine literature, English deists, and the philosophy of Spinoza.

Ceremonies and Customs prepared the ground for religious toleration amid seemingly unending religious conflict, and demonstrated the impact of the global on Western consciousness. In this beautifully illustrated book, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt cast new light on the profound insight found in one book as it shaped the development of a modern, secular understanding of religion.

Catalan-language publishers were under constant threat during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–75). Both the Catalan language and the introduction of foreign ideas were banned by the regime, preoccupied as it was with creating a "one, great, and free Spain." Books against Tyranny compiles, for the first time, the strategies Catalan publishers used to resist the censorship imposed by Franco's regime.

Author Laura Vilardell examines documents including firsthand witness accounts, correspondence, memoirs, censorship files, newspapers, original interviews, and unpublished material housed in various Spanish archives. As such, Books against Tyranny opens up the field and serves as an informative tool for scholars of Franco's Spain, Catalan social movements, and censorship more generally.

This book, available for the first time in English, offers a thorough introductory reading of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most remarkable and influential writers of the twentieth century. Julio Premat, a specialist in the field of Borges studies, presents the main questions posed by Borges's often paradoxical writing, and leads the novice through the complexity and breadth of Borges's vast literary production.

Originally published in French by an Argentine ex-pat living in Paris, Borges includes the Argentine specificities of Borges’s work—specificities that are often unrecognized or glossed over in Anglophone readings.

This book is a boon for university students of philosophy and literature, teachers and researchers in these fields who are looking to better understand this complex author, and anyone interested in the advanced study of literature. Somewhere between a guidebook and an exhaustive work of advanced research, Borges is the ultimate stepping-stone into the deeper Borgesian world.

At a time in which many in the United States see Spanish America as a distinct and, for some, threatening culture clearly differentiated from that of Europe and the US, it may be of use to look at the works of some of the most representative and celebrated writers from the region to see how they imagined their relationship to Western culture and literature. In fact, while authors across stylistic and political divides—like Gabriela Mistral, Jorge Luis Borges, or Gabriel García Márquez—see their work as being framed within the confines of a globalized Western literary tradition, their relationship, rather than epigonal, is often subversive.

Borges and Kafka, Bolaño and Bloom is a parsing not simply of these authors' reactions to a canon, but of the notion of canon writ large and the inequities and erasures therein. It concludes with a look at the testimonial and autobiographical writings of Rigoberta Menchú and Lurgio Gavilán, who arguably represent the trajectory of Indigenous testimonial and autobiographical writing during the last forty years, noting how their texts represent alternative ways of relating to national and, on occasion, Western cultures. This study is a new attempt to map writers' diverse ways of thinking about locality and universality from within and without what is known as the canon.