Workers' self-management was one of the unique features of communist Yugoslavia. Goran Musić has investigated the changing ways in which blue-collar workers perceived the recurring crises of the regime. Two self-managed metal enterprises, one in Serbia another in Slovenia, provide the frame of the analysis in the time span between 1945 and 1989. These two factories became famous for strikes in 1988 that evoked echoes in popular discourses in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on interviews, factory publications and other media, local archives, and secondary literature, Musić analyzes the two cases, going beyond the clichés of political manipulation from the top and workers' intrinsic attraction to nationalism.
The author explains how, in the later phase of communist Yugoslavia, growing social inequalities among the workers and undemocratic practices inside the self-managed enterprises facilitated the spread of a nationalist and pro-market ideology on the shop floors. Yet rather than being a mass taken advantage of by populist leaders, the working class Musić presents is one with agency and voice, a force that played an important role in shaping the fate of the country. The book thus seeks to open a debate on the social processes leading up to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period.

It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: • How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. • How associa­tions employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. • And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.T

Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade. 

The story of maize and mămăligă provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work.

How did political power function in the communist regimes of East Central Europe after 1945? Making Sense of Dictatorship addresses this question with a particular focus on the acquiescent behavior of the majority of the population until, at the end of the 1980s, their rejection of state socialism and its authoritarian world.

The authors refer to the concept of Sinnwelt, the way in which groups and individuals made sense of the world around them. The essays focus on the dynamics of everyday life and the extent to which the relationship between citizens and the state was collaborative or antagonistic. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of life in this period, including modernization, consumption and leisure, and the everyday experiences of “ordinary people,” single mothers, or those adopting alternative lifestyles.

Empirically rich and conceptually original, the essays in this volume suggest new ways to understand how people make sense of everyday life under dictatorial regimes.

Materializing Magic Power paints a broad picture of the dynamics of popular religion in Taiwan. The first book to explore contemporary Chinese popular religion from its cultural, social, and material perspectives, it analyzes these aspects of religious practice in a unified framework and traces their transformation as adherents move from villages to cities.

In this groundbreaking study, Wei-Ping Lin offers a fresh perspective on the divine power of Chinese deities as revealed in two important material forms—god statues and spirit mediums. By examining the significance of these religious manifestations, Lin identifies personification and localization as the crucial cultural mechanisms that bestow efficacy on deity statues and spirit mediums. She further traces the social consequences of materialization and demonstrates how the different natures of materials mediate distinct kinds of divine power.

The first part of the book provides a detailed account of popular religion in villages. This is followed by a discussion of how rural migrant workers cope with challenges in urban environments by inviting branch statues of village deities to the city, establishing an urban shrine, and selecting a new spirit medium. These practices show how traditional village religion is being reconfigured in cities today.

This scathing, at times humorous, and always insightful memoir by exiled Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai, provides one of the most poignant and human portraits of life in Hungary between the German occupation in 1944 and the solidification of communist power in 1948. Both a fervent anti-fascist and anti-communist, Márai draws a vivid portrait of the Hungarian peasantry and middle-class during this period, while delivering a telling indictment of the communist system from which he fled. Witty, aphoristic and psychologically clear-sighted, this memoir depicts the tragedy and pathos of a crucial period in the post-war history of a nation which has been 'central' to both the communists and the post-communist history of our times.

This account of historical politics in Ukraine, framed in a broader European context, shows how social, political, and cultural groups have used and misused the past from the final years of the Soviet Union to 2020. Georgiy Kasianov details practices relating to history and memory by a variety of actors, including state institutions, non-governmental organizations, political parties, historians, and local governments. He identifies the main political purposes of these practices in the construction of nation and identity, struggles for power, warfare, and international relations.

Kasianov considers the Ukrainian case in the context of a global increase in the politics of history and memory, with particular emphasis on a distinctive East-European variety. He pays special attention to the use and abuse of history in relations between Ukraine, Russia, and Poland.

In The Modern Balkans, historian Richard C. Hall gives a complete account of the historical events that have shaped the Balkan region of Southeastern Europe. Originally separated from the rest of Europe by culture, politics, and economics, the Balkans have slowly been integrating into Western Europe since the nineteenth century. But this process of economic and political development, following the Western European model, has been far from smooth in the Balkans. As Hall explains, it has often been marked by violence and destruction, the result of many wars and rebellions. Though Soviet power imposed a nearly fifty-year peace in the region, the collapse of the Soviet Union renewed conflict that continued through the end of the twentieth century. Hall concentrates here on the significant political and economic events that have had the greatest impact on the role of the Balkans in Europe; in particular, he examines the development of national states in the nineteenth century, the influence of the two world wars, and the collapse of Yugoslavia.

This clear and concise history of the Balkan Peninsula will appeal to readers and scholars interested in European history and the Balkans’ unique role in it.

From the very first days of their large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian invaders have made exceptional efforts to interact with the war memorial landscape of the newly occupied territories. This landscape consists of tens of thousands of monuments, mostly in small towns and villages, commemorating the Second World War and other conflicts, including Ukraine’s resistance against Russia since 2014. The Russians have destroyed some of these memorials, renovated others, and built new monuments amid continued fighting. They also used war memorials in countless propaganda photos and videos aimed for a domestic audience and largely escaping Western attention.

Why this fervor? Gabowitsch and Homanyuk draw on unique sources to trace the logic of Russian monument policies in occupied Ukraine. Mykola Homanyuk spent several months in occupied Kherson and collected sources on the ground, often at considerable risk to himself. This exceptional wartime on-site ethnography was complemented by systematic real-time data collection from online sources, many of which have since disappeared. The book shows how Russian invaders believed their own propaganda about Soviet war memorials being mistreated in Ukraine, and what they did when they discovered well-maintained monuments on the ground. More generally, it also discusses the link between monuments and territorial claims by irredentist empires.