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Flying with the Fifteenth Air Force
A B-24 Pilot's Missions from Italy during World War II
Tom Faulkner
University of North Texas Press, 2018

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Foch versus Clemenceau
France and German Dismemberment, 1918-1919
Jere Clemens King
Harvard University Press

When, at the end of the First World War, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, soldier and popular hero, assumed the role of self-appointed peacemaker, he proved himself a source of embarrassment and irritation. Challenging Georges Clemenceau's right to negotiate the peace settlement, Foch attempted to arrange a peace which, according to him, would provide France with security, but which, according to his civilian superior, would have lost France's urgently needed allies.

French internal conflict in civil-military relations during the Versailles Peace Conference was thus primarily between Clemenceau and Foch, both inspired by the most patriotic of motives.

Foch versus Clemenceau gives a vivid account of the diplomatic maneuvers among France, its allies, and Germany during the period of the Conference. It sketches the Rhineland separatist movement in 1919--with Dorten's abortive, even amusing putsch, the Palatine-Rhineland Rebellion--as incidental background to the momentous struggle between Foch and his field commanders on the one hand and the President of the Council, Clemenceau, on the other over their differing conceptions of a realizable peace which could guarantee France's security.

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Foggy Social Structures
Irregular Migration, European Labour Markets and the Welfare State
Giuseppe Sciortino
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

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The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker
Richard Hooker
Harvard University Press, 1977

Although Richard Hooker (1554–1600) is now known principally as the author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in his lifetime the Tractates and Sermons brought him greater notoriety. Hooker’s views on justification, the perseverance of faith, and the relationship of the Church of Rome to the reformed Church of England were widely reported, and texts of the tracts were extensively circulated in manuscript.

Thanks to the meticulous editing of Laetitia Yeandle, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the contemporary impact of these debates can now be appreciated for the first time. These tracts provide a unique perspective on the turbulent world of late Elizabethan theology. In addition, they lay the doctrinal foundations of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity itself and—with the excellent commentary of Egil Grislis, Professor of Theology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, enable us to trace the intellectual formation of sixteenth-century England’s most innovative and provocative theologian.

The volume includes a newly discovered letter; three newly attributed sermon fragments; and analysis by P. F. Forte of Hooker’s distinctive preaching style.

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The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker
Richard Hooker
Harvard University Press, 1977

The writings of Richard Hooker are of central interest to those studying English Renaissance thought and literature. In this, the third volume of a much-needed critical edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, are the posthumous books of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker planned the Laws in eight books, but he died shortly after publication of Book Five. Books Six, Seven, and Eight, which contain his analysis of jurisdiction, episcopacy, and the royal supremacy, are here transcribed from versions that have the most authority. The volume also includes Hooker’s autograph notes toward those texts (brought to light by P. G. Stanwood in the course of his research) and the contemporary notes by George Cranmer and Edwin Sandys on a lost draft of Book Six. Mr. Stanwood’s introduction lays to rest all doubts about the authenticity of the last three books as we have them, doubts current since publication of Walton’s Life of Hooker in 1662.

This edition, sponsored by the Folger Library, is providing authoritative texts to serve as a basis for the scholarly reappraisal of Richard Hooker’s writings that is presently underway.

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The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker
Richard Hooker
Harvard University Press, 1977

Richard Hooker is the first major voice of Anglican theology, and his defense of the Elizabethan Church against the attacks of the Puritans set the prevailing tone of Anglicanism for centuries to follow. Through his eloquent treatise on ecclesiastical law the medieval political thought of Thomas Aquinas became a part of the English political heritage, to be used by such writers as Locke, Burke, and Coleridge. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is also a primary statement in English of a theory of natural law. Finally, we must turn to Hooker if we are to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance, for he luminously sets forth the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age.

The Folger Library has answered a long-felt need in sponsoring this critical, old-spelling edition of Hooker’s Works, prepared with all the expertise modern scholarship can bring to bear. Six scholars share the editorial responsibility, consulting their eighteen-member Board of Advisers as necessary. The texts for the edition are based on fresh transcriptions of the earliest and most authoritative documents, in many cases manuscripts written or corrected by Hooker himself or contemporary transcripts of these. The critical apparatus for each text records substantive variants among the authoritative documents as well as departures in accidentals from the copy text. The aim of the apparatus is to enable the interested reader to reconstruct the authority underlying the text.

The Preface and Books I–V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Volumes I and II of this edition, represent all of Hooker’s work published in his lifetime. These volumes were prepared by Georges Edelen, Professor of English at Indiana University, and W. Speed Hill, Associate Professor of English, Herbert H. Lehman College, City University of New York.

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The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker
Richard Hooker
Harvard University Press

We turn to Richard Hooker to understand the intellectual background of the Renaissance. He sets forth in his writing the ethical, political, and religious assumptions of his age. This magnificent old-spelling edition of Hooker’s works has long been needed, and is being greeted with universal admiration.

Volume Four presents the text of the first and only major attack on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity—namely, A Christian Letter, 1599—with Hooker’s marginal notes made on his own copy of the Letter; and the more extensive essays which he left in manuscript, written in preparation for a published reply. The importance of these notes and essays lies in their expansion of some of the more controversial points made in the Laws, and in the light they shed on Hooker, his personality, method, and sources.

John Booty’s Introduction and substantial commentary place Hooker’s arguments firmly in their historical and theological contexts.

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A Folk Divided
Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840-1940
H. Arnold Barton
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

In this unique longitudinal study of how a divided people relate to one another, H. Arnold Barton outlines dilemmas created by the great migration of Swedes to the United States from 1840 through 1940 and the complex love-hate relationship that resulted between those who stayed and those who left. During that hundred-year period, one Swede out of five voluntarily immigrated to the United States, and four-fifths of those immigrants remained in their new country. This study seeks to explore the far-reaching implications of this mass migration for both Swedes and Swedish Americans.

The Swedes were a literate, historically aware people, and the 1.2 million Swedes who immigrated to the United States offer a particularly well-documented and illuminating case study. Barton has skillfully woven into the text translations of little known published and unpublished Swedish sources from both sides of the Atlantic, to embody—in haunting human terms—both what was gained and what was lost through emigration.

Past studies have traditionally shown ethnic mobilization to be a defensive reaction against the exclusive nativism of resident Americans. Barton convincingly demonstrates, however, that the creation of a distinctive Swedish-American identity was at least equally an expression of the immigrants’ need to justify leaving their homeland to their former compatriots and to themselves by asserting a rightful and unique place within the Swedish national community. He concludes that the relationship between Swedes and Swedish Americans was essentially similar to that experienced by other peoples divided by migration, and that the long debate over the United States and emigration at its deepest level reveals both hopes and fears most conspicuously symbolized by America and "Americanization" in an increasingly integrated world undergoing the relentless advance of modernization.

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Folklore by the Fireside
Text and Context of the Tuscan Veglia
By Alessandro Falassi
University of Texas Press, 1980

For centuries, social life in rural Tuscany has centered around the veglia, an evening gathering of family and friends at the hearth. Folklore by the Fireside is a thorough and insightful study of this custom—from the tales, riddles, lullabies, and folk prayers performed as the small children are put to bed to the courtship songs and dances later in the evening to the anti-veglia male gossip, card games, and protest songs originating in the tavern.

Alessandro Falassi skillfully correlates the veglia to the rites of passage and family values of an agrarian society. Although the impact of mass media and other factors has tended to weaken the tradition, even today Tuscan children are taught to behave and adolescents are guided along the conventional path to adulthood, courtship, and marriage through veglia folklore.

This is the first work to deal systematically with Tuscan folklore from a semiotic and structural viewpoint and to examine the veglia as a means of handing down traditional values. It is important not only for its careful, detailed description but also for its rigorous methodology and theoretical richness.

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Folklore Fights the Nazis
Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940–1945
Kathleen Stokker
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
    Armed with jokes, puns, and cartoons, Norwegians tried to keep their spirits high and foster the Resistance by poking fun at the occupying Germans during World War II. Despite a 1942 ordinance mandating death for the ridicule of Nazi soldiers, Norwegians attacked the occupying Nazis and their Norwegian collaborators by means of anecdotes, quips, insinuating personal ads, children’s stories, Christmas cards, mock postage stamps, and symbolic clothing.
    In relating this dramatic story, Kathleen Stokker draws upon her many interviews with survivors of the Occupation and upon the archives of the Norwegian Resistance Museum and the University of Oslo. Central to the book are four “joke notebooks” kept by women ranging in age from eleven to thirty, who found sufficient meaning in this humor to risk recording and preserving it. Stokker also cites details from wartime diaries of three other women from East, West, and North Norway. Placing the joking in historical, cultural, and psychological context, Stokker demonstrates how this seemingly frivolous humor in fact contributed to the development of a resistance mentality among an initially confused, paralyzed, and dispirited population, stunned by the German invasion of their neutral country.
    For this paperback edition, Stokker has added a new preface offering a comparative view of resistance through humor in neighboring Denmark.
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Folklore in the Nordic World
Thomas A. DuBois
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
In seven concise chapters that document both the history of Nordic folkloristics and the ongoing vivacity of Nordic folklore today, Thomas A. DuBois demonstrates how the informal, traditional elements of a culture or subculture are an integral and vibrant part of the Nordic world.

From methods of preparing suovabiergu (smoked reindeer meat) in Sápmi, to celebrating graduation by “running the falls” at Uppsala University in Sweden, to massive folk music festivals in Finland and tales of supernatural visitors bestowing baby names in Iceland, folklore offers unique insights into the everyday life of Nordic society. The study of Nordic folklore began in the nineteenth century, when early folklorists imagined that the true character of a nation could be found among the tales of the peasantry. Today, the theories, tools, and institutions developed by influential folklorists in the Nordic region continue to lead the way in documentation, preservation, and analysis of folklore.
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Folktales of England
Edited by Katharine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue
University of Chicago Press, 1968
If wonder tales are not abundant in England, other kinds of folktales thrive: local traditions, historical legends, humorous anecdotes. Many of the favorite tales which English-speaking peoples carry with them from childhood come from a long tradition—stories as familiar to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Spenser, and their many contemporaries as they are to us.

"This is a fine, homely feast, immediately intelligble. . . ."—Times Educational Supplement

". . . should be of special concern to Americans since many of the tales are parallel to or the source of our own folk stories."—Choice

"This is entertainment, to be sure, but is also part of man's attempts to comprehend his world."—Quartet

"Folktales of England is by all odds the most satisfactory general collection of folktales to come out of England since the advent of modern collection and classification techniques."—Ernest W. Baughman, Journal of American Folklore
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Folktales of Ireland
Edited by Sean O'Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Few countries can boast such a plentitude of traditional folktales as Ireland. In 1935, the creation of The Irish Folklore Commission set in motion the first organized efforts of collecting and studying a multitude of folktales, both written as well as those of the Irish oral tradition. The Commission has collected well over a million pages of manuscripts. Folktales of Ireland offers chief archivist Sean O'Sullivan's representation of this awe-inspiring collection. These tales represent the first English language collection of Gaelic folktales.

"Without doubt the finest group of Irish tales that has yet been published in English."—The Guardian

"O'Sullivan writes out of an intimacy with his subject and an instinctive grasp of the language of the originals. He tells us that his archives contain more than a million and a half pages of manuscript. If Mr. O'Sullivan translates them, I'll read them."—Seamus Heaney, New Statesman

"The stories have an authentic folktale flavor and will satisfy both the student of folklore and the general reader."—Booklist

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Folktales of Ireland
Edited by Sean O'Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Few countries can boast such a plentitude of traditional folktales as Ireland. In 1935, the creation of The Irish Folklore Commission set in motion the first organized efforts of collecting and studying a multitude of folktales, both written as well as those of the Irish oral tradition. The Commission has collected well over a million pages of manuscripts. Folktales of Ireland offers chief archivist Sean O'Sullivan's representation of this awe-inspiring collection. These tales represent the first English language collection of Gaelic folktales.

"Without doubt the finest group of Irish tales that has yet been published in English."—The Guardian

"O'Sullivan writes out of an intimacy with his subject and an instinctive grasp of the language of the originals. He tells us that his archives contain more than a million and a half pages of manuscript. If Mr. O'Sullivan translates them, I'll read them."—Seamus Heaney, New Statesman

"The stories have an authentic folktale flavor and will satisfy both the student of folklore and the general reader."—Booklist

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Folktales of Norway
Edited by Reidar Christiansen
University of Chicago Press, 1964
Often lacking the clear episodic structure of folktales about talking animals and magic objects, legends grow from retellings of personal experiences. Christiansen isolated some seventy-seven legend types, and many of these are represented here in absorbing stories of St. Olaf, hidden treasures, witches, and spirits of the air, water, and earth. The ugly, massively strong, but slow-witted trolls are familiar to English-speaking readers. Less well-known, but the subject of an enormous number of legends, are the more manlike yet sinister "huldre-folk" who live in houses and try to woo human girls. These tales reflect the wildness of Norway, its mountains, forests, lakes, and sea, and the stalwart character of its sparse population.

"The translation is excellent, retaining the traditional Norwegian style . . . the tales themselves will also appeal to the interested layman."—Library Journal

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Following Chaucer
Offices of the Active Life
Lynn Staley
University of Michigan Press, 2020

Following Chaucer: Offices of the Active Life explores three representative figures—the royal woman, the poet, and the merchant—in relation to the concept of “office,” which Cicero linked to the health of the republic, but Chaucer to that of the common good. Not usually conjoined to the term “office,” these three figures, situated in the active life, were not firmly mapped onto the body politic, which was used to figure a relational and ordered social body ruled by the king, the head. These figures are points of entry into a set of questions rooted in Chaucer’s understanding of his cultural and historical past and in his keen appraisal of the social dynamics of his own time that also reverberate in the centuries after Chaucer’s death.

Following Chaucer does not trace influence but uses Chaucer’s likely reading, circumstances, and literary and social affiliations as guides to understanding his poetry, within the context of late medieval English culture and the reshaping of the concept of these particular offices that suited the needs of a future whose dynamics he anticipated. His understanding of the importance of the Ciceronian concept of office within the active life, his profound cultural awareness, and his probing of the foundations of social change provide him with a keen sense of the persistent tensions and inconsistencies that are fundamental to his poetry.

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Following in Father’s Footsteps
Social Mobility in Ireland
Michael Hout
Harvard University Press, 1989

This is the first systematic study of patterns of social mobility in Ireland. It covers a recent period—the 1960s—when Ireland was undergoing rapid economic growth and modernization. The author thus was able to test the widely accepted hypothesis that growth weakens class barriers. To his surprise he found that it did not. Social mobility increased somewhat, but among mobile men the better jobs still went to those from advantaged social class origins. Despite economic development and demographic change, the underlying link between social origins and career destinations remained unchanged.

In chapters on education, life cycle, religion, and farming, Michael Hout shows how inequality persists in contemporary Ireland. In the last chapter he reviews evidence from other countries and concludes that governments must take action against class barriers in education and employment practices if inequality is to be reduced. Economic growth creates jobs, he argues, but economic growth alone cannot allocate those jobs fairly.

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Fonthill Recovered
A Cultural History
Edited by Caroline Dakers
University College London, 2018
Fonthill, Wiltshire, is typically associated with the writer and collector William Beckford, who built his Gothic fantasy house, Fonthill Abbey, there at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly. But Fonthill is much more than the story of one man’s excesses, and the Abbey was only one of several important houses to be built there, all eventually consumed by fire or deliberately demolished—and all strangely forgotten by contemporary history

Fonthill Recovered draws on new research to explore the rich cultural history of this place where little remains today—a tower, a stable block, the ruins of what was once a kitchen, and an indentation in a field. The first half of the book traces the occupation of Fonthill from the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century. Some of the owners surpassed Beckford in terms of their wealth and political power—and even, in one case, their sexual proclivities. They include Charles I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and the richest British commoner of the nineteenth century. The second half of the book consists of essays on specific topics, examining such crucial areas as the complex history of the designed landscape, the sources of the Beckfords’ wealth and their extensive art collection, and the recent appearance of the Abbey in a video game.
 
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Food and France
What Food Studies Can Teach Us about History
Erica J. Peters and Bertram M. Gordon, editors
Duke University Press

This special issue offers a broad range of social and cultural insights into the history of French gastronomy. At a moment when French cuisine no longer dominates the world of fine dining, the history of French food has drawn increasing attention in the academic world. The contributors address topics spanning the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, such as coffee’s relationship to slavery and exoticism; the promotion of terroir to an aspiring middle class; the contrast between the romanticized images of Parisian shop girls and their efforts to survive on street food in the early twentieth century; the "standard meal" imagined by nineteenth-century nutritionists and the divergent reality of meager lunches for the working class; and the inequitable experience of wartime deprivation. The articles in this issue both model how the study of the culture of food can ground our understanding of France’s place in the world and illuminate questions of nationalism, global networks, gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

Contributors: Martin Bruegel, Bertram M. Gordon, Julia Landweber, Philippe Meyzie, Kenneth Mouré, Erica J. Peters, Patricia A. Tilburg
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Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy
The Renaissance of Taste
Laura Giannetti
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.
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Food Culture in Medieval Scandinavia
Viktória Gyönki
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The making, eating, and sharing of food throughout society represents an important and exciting area of study with the potential to advance the field of scholarship, particularly in the context of Scandinavian Studies. This book analyses the historical, legal, and literary sources of the region during the medieval period to explore different aspects of Scandinavian culture relating to food and drink: production, consumption (including feasts), trading (distribution), and the associated social rituals. Using new and innovative approaches, this collection of studies offers broad insights into a great variety of social practices and includes fresh information on not only social history but also traditional topics such as trade, commercial exchange, legal regulation, and political organisation. The book unites contributors from a variety of backgrounds, further enriching the content of a collection that promises to make a significant contribution to the state of current research.
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Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy
Allen J. Grieco
Harvard University Press
The act of eating is a basic human need. Yet in all societies, quotidian choices regarding food and its consumption reveal deeply rooted shared cultural conventions. Food goes beyond issues relating to biological needs and nutrition or production and commerce; it also reveals social and cultural criteria that determine what dishes are prepared on what occasions, and it unveils the politics of the table via the rituals associated with different meals. This book approaches the history of food in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy through an interdisciplinary prism of sources ranging from correspondence, literature (both high and low), and medical and dietary treatises to cosmographic theory and iconographic evidence. Using a variety of analytical methods and theoretical approaches, it moves food studies firmly into the arena of Late Medieval and Renaissance history, providing an essential key to deciphering the material and metaphorical complexity of this period in European, and especially Italian, history.
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The Footnote
A Curious History
Anthony Grafton
Harvard University Press, 1997
The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bête noire of the “new” liberated scholar: the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship. In Anthony Grafton’s engrossing account, footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history, recounting in their subtle way the curious story of the progress of knowledge in written form.Grafton treats the development of the footnote—the one form of proof normally supplied by historians in support of their assertions—as writers on science have long treated the development of laboratory equipment, statistical arguments, and reports on experiments: as a complex story, rich in human interest, that sheds light on the status of history as art, as science, and as an institution. The book starts in the Berlin of the brilliant nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke, who is often credited with inventing documented history in its modern form. Casting back to antiquity and forward to the twentieth century, Grafton’s investigation exposes Ranke’s position as a far more ambiguous one and offers us a rich vision of the true origins and gradual triumph of the footnote.Among the protagonists of this story are Athanasius Kircher, who built numerous documents into his spectacularly speculative treatises on ancient Egypt and China; Pierre Bayle, who made the footnote a powerful tool in philosophical and historical polemics; and Edward Gibbon, who transformed it into a high form of literary artistry. Proceeding with the spirit of an intellectual mystery and peppered with intriguing and revealing remarks by those who “made” this history, The Footnote brings what is so often relegated to afterthought and marginalia to its rightful place in the center of the literary life of the mind.
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The Footsteps of Israel
Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England
Andrew P. Scheil
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"This innovative, well-researched study looks at anti-Judaic rhetoric in the Old English and Latin texts of Anglo-Saxon England-a land lacking real Jews. The author isolates a common pool of inherited images for portraying the Jew, and teaches us to hear, especially in the vernacular, their increasingly dark and disturbing inflections."
---Roberta Frank, Yale University

"The Footsteps of Israel is a fascinating study of a pervasive stereotype. Scheil's analysis of how Jews, with no real physical presence in Anglo-Saxon England, captured the imagination of writers of the period, is a superb achievement."
---Louise Mirrer, President and CEO, New-York Historical Society

"The elegance of Scheil's prose weaves a unifying thread through the vast literary and historical tapestry he presents, moving with grace from Latin to Old English, from Bede to later authors, from Wordsworth and Blake to modern writers. He speaks elegantly of these texts' conversations with the past, and the Jews emerge as both enemies and spiritual antecedents of the 'New Israel' of Anglo-Saxon England."
---Stephen Spector, State University of New York, Stonybrook


Jews are the omnipresent border-dwellers of medieval culture, a source of powerful metaphors active in the margins of medieval Christianity. This book outlines an important prehistory to later persecutions in England and beyond, yet it also provides a new understanding of the previously unrecognized roles Jews and Judaism played in the construction of social identity in early England.

Andrew P. Scheil approaches the Anglo-Saxon understanding of Jews from a variety of directions, including a survey of the lengthy history of the ideology of England as the New Israel, its sources in late antique texts and its manifestation in both Old English and Latin texts from Anglo-Saxon England. In tandem with this perhaps more sympathetic understanding of the Jews is a darker vision of anti-Judaism, associating the Jews in an emotional fashion with the materiality of the body.

In exploring the complex ramifications of this history, the author is the first to assemble and study references to Jews in Anglo-Saxon culture. For this reason, The Footsteps of Israel will be an important source for Anglo-Saxonists, scholars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, scholars of medieval antisemitism in general, students of Jewish history, and medievalists interested in cultural studies.
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For the Dying Calves
Beyond Literature: Oxford Lectures
Durs Grünbein
Seagull Books, 2021
Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grünbein.

In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grünbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn’t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?
 
In the form of a collage or “photosynthesis,” in image and text, Grünbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the “Führer’s streets” and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grünbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, “There is something beyond literature that questions all writing.”
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For Their Own Good
The Transformation of English Working-Class Health Culture, 1880–1970
Lucinda McCray Beier
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
In For Their Own Good Lucinda McCray Beier examines the interactions between working-class health culture and official provision of health services and medical care in three English communities between 1880 and 1970. Based on 239 oral history interviews of laypeople and annual public health reports, this book considers gender, class, political, economic, and cultural aspects of the mid-twentieth-century shift in responsibility for illness, birth, and death from the informal domestic and neighborhood sphere to the purview of professional, institutionally based authorities.
 
For Their Own Good is a case study, located in a particular place and time, of a phenomenon that has occurred in all Western nations and is now happening worldwide. As in Barrow, Lancaster, and Preston, in most circumstances, the transition from traditional to modern medicine is stimulated and enforced from the top down. Current global struggles with AIDS, overpopulation, malaria, malnutrition, and other killers offer powerful reminders that elite knowledge and strategies rarely result in success unless laypeople are engaged and invested in solutions. Furthermore, as this book demonstrates, the desired transition to Western medicine carries the twin burdens of the loss of lay ability to prevent and manage ill-health, on one hand, and the demand that political elites and medical professionals meet proliferating health care needs and demands, on the other.
 
 
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Foragers and Farmers
Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe
Susan Alling Gregg
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Susan Alling Gregg presents a sophisticated model for the transition from hunter-gatherer societies tosettled agricultural communities in prehistoric Europe. She proposes that farmers and foragers must have encountered each other and interacted in a variety of ways for over a millennium as farming systems spread throughout the continent. Several variations of subsistence developed, such as foraging and hunting for part of the year and farming for the rest, or cooperative exchange arrangements between hunter-gatherers and farmers throughout the year.

Gregg examines anthropological, ecological, and archaeological dimensions of prehistoric population interaction. She then examines the ecological requirements of both crops and livestock and, in order to identify an optimal farming strategy for Early Neolithic populations, develops a computer simulation to examine various resource mixes. Turning to the foragers, she models the effects that interaction with the farmers would have had on the foragers' subsistence-settlement system.

Supporting her model with archaeological, ecological, and ethnobotanical evidence from southwest Germany, Gregg shows that when foragers and farmers occur contemporaneously, both need to be considered before either can be understood. Theoretically and methodologically, her work builds upon earlier studies of optimal diet and foraging strategy, extending the model to food-producing populations. The applicability of Gregg's generalized model for both wild and domestic resources reaches far beyond her case study of Early Neolithic Germany; it will interest both Old and New World archaeologists.
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Forbidden History
The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe
Edited by John C. Fout
University of Chicago Press, 1992
How have society's values and attitudes toward sexuality and morality changed over the centuries? Why and how has the state sought to criminalize certain forms of sexual behavior and to control reproduction? How have churches tried to influence the state in its regulation of sexuality?

This anthology encompasses a broad range of essays on sexuality spanning European history from the fifteenth century to the present. The topics in this collection of fifteen essays have both historic importance and current relevance. All crucial issues in the regulation of sexuality are addressed, from incest to infanticide, from breast-feeding and women's sexuality to female prostitution, from pornography to reproductive politics, and from the first homosexual rights movement to AIDS.

Contributions from a diverse group of prominent scholars representing a variety of disciplines are included in this anthology. Essays by Randolph Trumbach on "Sex, Gender, and Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London"; Ruth Perry on "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth Century England"; Theo van der Meer on "Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth Century Amsterdam"; Robin Ann Sheets on "Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'"; and James W. Jones on "Discourses on and of AIDS in West Germany, 1986-1990."

Offering the most up-to-date scholarship from a significant and growing field, this collection is essential for both students and faculty in social history, family history, women's and gender studies, gay studies, sociology and literature.
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Forbidden Knowledge
Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy
Hannah Marcus
University of Chicago Press, 2020
An exploration of the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation.

Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities.
 
Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact, began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge.
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Forbidden Relatives
THE AMERICAN MYTH OF COUSIN MARRIAGE
Martin Ottenheimer
University of Illinois Press, 1996
Forbidden Relatives challenges the belief--widely held in the United States--that legislation against marriage between first cousins is based on a biological risk to offspring. In fact, its author maintains, the U.S. prohibition against such unions originated largely because of the belief that it would promote more rapid assimilation of immigrants.
A social anthropologist, Martin Ottenheimer questioned U.S. laws against cousin marriage because his international research into marriage patterns showed no European countries prohibit such unions. He examines the historical development of U.S. laws governing marriage, contrasts them with European laws, and analyzes the genetic implications of first cousin marriage. Modern genetic evidence, Ottenheimer says, doesn't support the concept that children of these unions are at any special risk.
Ottenheimer's book, the only volume available that deals with kinship in this way, will challenge readers and give them much to consider and discuss.
 
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Foreign Cultural Policy in the Interbellum
The Italian Dante Alighieri Society and the British Council Contesting the Mediterranean
Tamara van Kessel
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
This book considers the growing awareness in the wake of World War I that culture could play an effective political role in international relations. Tamara van Kessel shows how the British created the British Council in support of those cultural aims, which took on particular urgency in light of the rise of fascist dictatorships in Europe. Van Kessel focuses in particular on the activities of the British Council and the Italian Dante Alighieri Society in the Mediterranean area, where their respective country's strategic and ideological interests most evidently clashed.
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Foreign Eyes
International Students Reflect on Utrecht
Edited By Emmeline Besamusca
Amsterdam University Press, 2012

Every year hundreds of students from all over the world come to study in Utrecht. On the occasion of the 375th anniversary of the founding of Utrecht University, foreign students and alumni were invited to reflect on Dutch culture as they had experienced it in their university years there. This book collects the best of the essays they wrote; the result is a unique and fascinating contribution to the study of Dutch culture. These essays offer not only an intimate portrait of the students’ experiences, but also a fresh perspective on the remarkable, frustrating, and fascinating features of Dutch culture.

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Foreign Front
Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany
Quinn Slobodian
Duke University Press, 2012
It is often asserted that West German New Leftists "discovered the Third World" in the pivotal decade of the 1960s. Quinn Slobodian upsets that storyline by beginning with individuals from the Third World themselves: students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who arrived on West German campuses in large numbers in the early 1960s. They were the first to mobilize German youth in protest against acts of state violence and injustice perpetrated beyond Europe and North America. The activism of the foreign students served as a model for West German students, catalyzing social movements and influencing modes of opposition to the Vietnam War. In turn, the West Germans offered the international students solidarity and safe spaces for their dissident engagements. This collaboration helped the West German students to develop a more nuanced, empathetic understanding of the Third World, not just as a site of suffering, poverty, and violence, but also as the home of politicized individuals with the capacity and will to speak in their own names.
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Forest Rites
The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France
Peter Sahlins
Harvard University Press, 1994

In May 1829, strange reports surfaced from the Ariège department in the French Pyrenees, describing male peasants, bizarrely dressed in women’s clothes, gathering in the forests at night to chase away state guards and charcoal-makers. This was the raucous War of the Demoiselles, a protest against the national French Forest Code of 1827, which restricted peasants’ rights to use state and private forests.

Peter Sahlins unravels the fascinating story of this celebrated popular uprising, and in his telling captures the cultural, historical, and political currents that swept the countryside during France’s July 1830 Revolution. Sahlins explains how and why the Ariège peasants drew on the practices and rituals of folk culture, as well as on a revolutionary tradition, to defend their inherited rights to the forest. To explore these rights and their expression, he delves into the history of forest management, of peasant conflicts with the state, and of popular culture—particularly the disputed history of Carnival and of local rituals of justice.

Sahlins also sheds new light on the French revolutionary tradition and the “Three Glorious Days” of July 1830. The drama and symbolism of the War of the Demoiselles have inspired nearly a dozen plays, novels, films, and even a comic book. Using the concepts of anthropology and cultural studies as transport, Sahlins moves from this rich event to the wider worlds of peasant society in France. Focusing on the years from 1829 to 1832 but drawing on sources since the sixteenth century, his book should captivate social, cultural, and political historians of both early modern and modern Europe.

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Forgery, Replica, Fiction
Temporalities of German Renaissance Art
Christopher S. Wood
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Today we often identify artifacts with the period when they were made. In more traditional cultures, however, such objects as pictures, effigies, and buildings were valued not as much for their chronological age as for their perceived links to the remote origins of religions, nations, monasteries, and families. As a result, Christopher Wood argues, premodern Germans tended not to distinguish between older buildings and their newer replacements, or between ancient icons and more recent forgeries.
             But Wood shows that over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, emerging replication technologies—such as woodcut, copper engraving, and movable type—altered the relationship between artifacts and time.  Mechanization highlighted the artifice, materials, and individual authorship necessary to create an object, calling into question the replica’s ability to represent a history that was not its own. Meanwhile, print catalyzed the new discipline of archaeological scholarship, which began to draw sharp distinctions between true and false claims about the past. Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.
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Forgetful of Their Sex
Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100
Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this remarkable study of over 2,200 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church by examining factors such as family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, and motherhood. The result is a unique depiction of the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society that led to recognition of sanctity.

"A tremendous piece of scholarship. . . . This journey through more than 2,000 saints is anything but dull. Along the way, Schulenburg informs our ideas regarding the role of saints in the medieval psyche, gender-specific identification, and the heroics of virginity." —Library Journal

"[This book] will be a kind of 'roots' experience for some readers. They will hear the voices, haunted and haunting, of their distant ancestors and understand more about themselves." —Christian Science Monitor

"This fascinating book reaches far beyond the history of Christianity to recreate the 'herstory' of a whole gender." —Kate Saunders, The Independent
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Forging an Integrated Europe
Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
As European integration has deepened and become more invasive, the tension between the authority of the European Union and the autonomy of member states has increased, while dissatisfaction with the political institutions of the European Union has increased dramatically. How fast and how far European integration will proceed are critical issues for scholars and policymakers in Europe and the United States. Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden have assembled a group of prominent economists and political scientists to discuss the most important--and most difficult--political and economic issues involved in European integration. The book focuses on three major issues: economic and monetary union, the reform and development of responsive political institutions for the Union, and the enlargement of the Union to include states to the east.
In examining these issues, the writers consider such prob-lems as the trade-off between the benefits of international economic cooperation and the ability to pursue domestic welfare policies; how to increase the political accountability of the institutions of the EU; and how the EU can both be enlarged in membership and deepened in terms of the powers given community institutions.
The contributors are Steven Arndt, Peter Bofinger, Christian de Boisseu, Michele Fratianni, Geoffrey Garrett, Jurgen von Hagen, Ander Todal Jenssen, Ken Kletzer, Lisa Martin, Jonathan Moses, Jean Pisani-Ferry, and Michael Wallerstein, in addition to the editors.
Barry Eichengreen is Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley. Jeffry Frieden is Professor of Government, Harvard University.
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Forging Communities
Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe
Montserrat Piera
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
Forging Communities explores the importance of the cultivation, provision, trade, and exchange of foods and beverages to mankind’s technological advancement, violent conquest, and maritime exploration. The thirteen essays here show how the sharing of food and drink forged social, religious, and community bonds, and how ceremonial feasts as well as domestic daily meals strengthened ties and solidified ethnoreligious identity through the sharing of food customs. The very act of eating and the pleasure derived from it are metaphorically linked to two other sublime activities of the human experience: sexuality and the search for the divine.

This interdisciplinary study of food in medieval and early modern communities connects threads of history conventionally examined separately or in isolation. The intersection of foodstuffs with politics, religion, economics, and culture enhances our understanding of historical developments and cultural continuities through the centuries, giving insight that today, as much as in the past, we are what we eat and what we eat is never devoid of meaning.
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Forging Deaf Education in Nineteenth-Century France
Biographical Sketches of Bébian, Sicard, Massieu, and Clerc
Ferdinand Berthier
Gallaudet University Press, 2009

In 1811, deaf student Ferdinand Berthier commenced his education at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris under its director Abbé Sicard and his teachers Auguste Bébian, Jean Massieu, and Laurent Clerc. Their tutelage eventually led Berthier to join the faculty at the Institute and become a life-long proponent of sign language and Deaf culture. Berthier earned fame for instituting the famous silent banquets in Paris in 1834. He also learned to advance his agenda by writing biographies of important figures who advocated sign over oralism to educate deaf French students. Forging Deaf Education in Nineteenth-Century France offers the first translation of Berthier’s biographical sketches of the four men above who influenced him most.

Berthier wrote first about Bébian in 1839, timed to advocate sign language for teaching deaf students after the death of the pro-oralism Institute Director Désiré Ordinaire. Berthier extolled Bébian’s linguistic acumen and his educational philosophy. In later sketches, however, he described Sicard and Massieu in positive terms, but also criticized them for supporting “methodical” signing that conformed to spoken language conventions.  In contrast, he lauded  Clerc in his portrayal for using “natural” signing to teach deaf students. The clarity of these translations will introduce a brand new audience to Berthier’s biographies shaped by his unswerving beliefs about Deaf French education.

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Forgotten Armies
The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper
Harvard University Press, 2005

In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world.

More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.

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The Forgotten Frontier
A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier
Andrew C. Hess
University of Chicago Press, 1978

The sixteenth-century Mediterranean witnessed the expansion of both European and Middle Eastern civilizations, under the guises of the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman empire. Here, Andrew C. Hess considers the relations between these two dynasties in light of the social, economic, and political affairs at the frontiers between North Africa and the Iberian peninsula.

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Forgotten Healers
Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy
Sharon T. Strocchia
Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize

A new history uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.

In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life—from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries—drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls’ shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine.

Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular, were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era’s understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe.

Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine.

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Forgotten Saints
History, Power, and Politics in the Making of Modern Morocco
Sahar Bazzaz
Harvard University Press, 2010

In 1894, on the eve of the French conquest of Morocco, a young Muslim mystic named Muḥammad al-Kattānī decided to abandon his life of asceticism to preach Islamic revival and jihad against the French. Ten years later, al-Kattānī mobilized a socially diverse coalition of Moroccans who called for resistance against French colonization.

In 1909, he met a violent death at the hands of the same Moroccan anti-colonialists he had empowered through his activism. Today, the government of Morocco regards al-Kattānī’s story as subversive, and he has virtually disappeared from the narratives of the early Moroccan anti-colonialism and nationalism. Despite this silencing, al-Kattānī’s remarkable personal transformation and sacrifice is at the heart of the events that, although ultimately failing to prevent French rule, gave birth to Moroccan nationalism and to modern concepts of Moroccan political power and authority.

Forgotten Saints draws on a diverse collection of previously unknown primary sources to narrate the vivid story of al-Kattānī and his virtual disappearance from accounts of modern Moroccan history.

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The Formation of a Modern Rabbi
The Life and Times of the Viennese Scholar and Preacher Adolf Jellinek
Samuel Joseph Kessler
SBL Press, 2022

An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities

Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.

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The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830
David Garrioch
Harvard University Press, 1996

Despite their importance during the French Revolution, the Paris middle classes are little known. This book focuses on the family organization and the political role of the Paris commercial middle classes, using as a case study the Faubourg St. Marcel and particularly the parish of St. Médard.

David Garrioch argues that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the commercial middle classes were steadfastly local in their family ties and outlook. He shows, too, that they took independent political action in defense of their local position. This gradually changed during the eighteenth century, and the Revolution greatly accelerated the process of integration, at the same time broadening the composition of what may now be termed the Parisian bourgeoisie.

Central to Garrioch's argument is the idea that family, politics, and power are intimately connected. He shows the centrality of kinship to local politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the way new family structures were related to changes in the nature of politics even before the Revolution. Among the many important issues considered are birth control, the role of women, the importance of lineage, the spatial limits of middle-class lives, and the language and secularization of politics.

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Formations of Violence
The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
Allen Feldman
University of Chicago Press, 1991

"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist

"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review

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Forming Humanity
Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition
Jennifer A. Herdt
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Now in paperback, Forming Humanity reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought.

Kant’s proclamation of humankind’s emergence from “self-incurred immaturity” left his contemporaries with a puzzle: What models should we use to sculpt ourselves if we no longer look to divine grace or received authorities?  Deftly uncovering the roots of this question in Rhineland mysticism, Pietist introspection, and the rise of the bildungsroman, Jennifer A. Herdt reveals bildung, or ethical formation, as the key to post-Kantian thought. This was no simple process of secularization, in which human beings took responsibility for something they had earlier left in the hands of God.  Rather, theorists of bildung, from Herder through Goethe to Hegel, championed human agency in self-determination while working out the social and political implications of our creation in the image of God.  While bildung was invoked to justify racism and colonialism by stigmatizing those deemed resistant to self-cultivation, it also nourished ideals of dialogical encounter and mutual recognition.  Herdt reveals how the project of forming humanity lives on in our ongoing efforts to grapple with this complicated legacy.
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Forms of Association
Making Publics in Early Modern Europe
Paul Yachnin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
In today's connected and interactive world, it is hard to imagine a time when cultural and intellectual interests did not lead people to associate with others who shared similar views and preoccupations. In this volume of essays, fifteen scholars explore how these kinds of relationships began to transform early modern European culture.

Forms of Association grows out of the "Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe" (MaPs) project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This scholarly initiative convened an interdisciplinary research team to consider how "publics"—new forms of association built on the shared interests of individuals—developed in Europe from 1500 to 1700. Drawing on a wide array of texts and histories, including the plays of Shakespeare, the legend of Robin Hood, paintings, and music as well as English gossip about France, the contributors develop a historical account of what publics were in early modern Europe. This collaborative study provides a dynamic way of understanding the political dimensions of artistic and intellectual works and opens the way toward a new history of early modernity.

Until his death in 2008, the great Renaissance scholar Richard Helgerson was a key participant in the MaPs project. The scholars featured in this volume originally met in Montreal to engage in a critical, commemorative conversation about Helgerson's work, the issues and questions coming out of the MaPs project, and how Helgerson's thinking advanced and could in turn be advanced by MaPs. This collection represents the fruits of that conversation.
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Fortress of My Youth
Memoir of a Terezín Survivor
Jana Renée Friesová
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Jana Renée Friesová was fifteen when she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Czech ghetto town of Terezín. Her memoir tells the poignantly familiar story of a young girl who, even under the most abominable circumstances, engages in intense adolescent friendships, worries with her companions over her looks, and falls in love.
Anne Frank’s diary ends with deportation to a concentration camp; Fortress of My Youth, in contrast, takes the reader deep into the horrors of daily life in a camp that were faced by a young girl and her family. But Friesová also tells of love, joy, sacrifice, and the people who shared in the most profound experiences of her life.

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Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall
Ekkehard IV
Harvard University Press, 2021

The eleventh-century monk Ekkehard IV’s Fortune and Misfortune at Saint Gall, part of the chronicles of the famous Swiss abbey, is a treasure trove of medieval monastic life. Saint Gall’s records span its humble beginnings in the early seventh century to the late Middle Ages, with Ekkehard’s contribution covering the 880s to 972, near the end of the monastery’s two-century-long golden age. Its unforgettable tales, sometimes at odds with the historical record, contain sharp flashes of Ekkehard’s signature humor—when, for instance, a spying abbot from a neighboring monastery is caught hiding in the latrine. Ekkehard also shows how the abbey’s role as a spiritual haven could be compromised by worldly ties, including close associations with the powerful Carolingian and Ottonian courts. He bears witness to the struggles of the tenth-century church reform movement, when Emperor Otto I dispatched investigators to uncover Saint Gall’s deviations from the Rule of Saint Benedict.

This volume publishes the Latin text alongside its first complete English translation.

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Fosterage in Medieval Ireland
An Emotional History
Thomas O'Donnell
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Fosterage was a central feature of medieval Irish society, yet the widespread practice of sending children to another family to be cared for until they reached adulthood is a surprisingly neglected topic. Where it has been discussed, fosterage is usually conceptualised and treated as a purely legal institution. This work seeks to outline the emotional impact of growing up within another family. What emerges is a complex picture of deeply felt emotional ties binding the foster family together. These emotions are unique to the social practice of fosterage, and we see the language and feelings originating within the foster family being used to describe other relationships such as those in the monastery or between humans and animals. This book argues that the more we understand how people felt in fosterage, the more we understand medieval Ireland.
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The Foul and the Fragrant
Odor and the French Social Imagination
Alain Corbin
Harvard University Press, 1986
In a book whose insight and originality have already had a dazzling impact in France, Alain Corbin has put the sense of smell on the historical map. He conjures up the dominion that the combined forces of smells - from the seductress's civet to the ubiquitous excremental odors of city cesspools - exercised over the lives (and deaths) of the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Part One: The Perceptual Revolution or the Sense of Smell on Trial

1. Air and the Threat of the Putrid
2. The Extremes of Olfactory Vigilance
3. Social Emanations
4. Redefining the Intolerable
5. The New Calculus of Olfactory Pleasure

Part Two: Purifying Public Space

6. The Tactics of Deodorization
7. Odors and the Physiology of the Social Order
8. Policy and Pollution

Part Three: Smells, Symbols, and Social Representations

9. The Stench of the Poor
10. Domestic Atmospheres
11. The Perfumes of Intimacy
12. The Intoxicating Flask
13. "Laughter in a Bead of Sweat"
14. The Odors of Paris

Conclusion
Notes
Index



Reviews of this book:
[This book] is not only serious, but interesting and important; one of those studies that profoundly alters our understanding of both social life and history.
--Joan W. Scott, New York Times Book Review

Reviews of this book:
At once encyclopedic and impressionistic, The Foul and the Fragrant is...a masterful exposition of odors and the perception of odors from 1750 to the "Pasteurian revolution" of the late nineteenth century...It is an important and, at times, fascinating voyage...Exploring with imagination and audacity the changing role of smell in the anxieties and antagonisms of the modern world, Corbin reminds us that social history, too long sanitized and too often abstract, must make room for the senses.
--Michael Burns, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Reviews of this book:
The story has never been told more brilliantly, nor with such verve and perceptiveness. That alone would make Corbin's book worth reading, but one may read it as well for a deeper understanding of the roots of modern urban anxieties about the unwholesome...Corbin's book is a tour de force.
--Simon Schama, New Republic
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Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580
Bailey W. Diffie and George D. Winius
University of Minnesota Press, 1978

Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1580 was first published in 1977. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This account traces the history of the Portuguese overseas discoveries, following the expansion into the Atlantic island, the Madeiras, and the Azores. It continues the account with the history of Portuguese discoveries along the African coast, at Guinea, the Congo, and Good Hope, then follows the voyages of Vasco da Gama to India and to Cabra, Brazil, and the expansion in the early years of the sixteen century to Malacca, China, and the East Indies. The volume presents not only a useful narrative of the spread of Portuguese empire but also new interpretations and analyses of the Portuguese overseas history.

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Founders of the Future
The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization
Óscar Iván Useche
Bucknell University Press, 2022
In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.


 
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The Founding of Harvard College
With a New Foreword by Hugh Hawkins
Samuel Eliot Morison
Harvard University Press, 1995
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Samuel Eliot Morison traces the roots of American universities back to Europe, providing “a lively contemporary perspective…a realistic picture of the founding of the first American university north of the Rio Grande” [Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune].
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Fountains, Statues, and Flowers
Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Elizabeth Blair MacDougall
Harvard University Press, 1994

The essays in this volume focus on the different aspects of Italian gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This volume is divided into two parts, with the first part concentrating on the decorations in Roman gardens of the sixteenth centuries, especially the fountains and statue collections, their iconographic programs, and their relationship to contemporary and ancient literature.

The second half of the volume considers two particular sites. The first, a Savoy duke’s villa, is considered through the history of its construction and its relationship to contemporary festivity architecture. The second essay considers a secret garden at the Palazzo Barberini in the 1630s. Also included are illustrations and text from three Barberini manuscripts documenting the plants used in this garden.

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Four Germanys
A Chronicle of the Schorcht Family
Donald S. Pitkin
Temple University Press, 2016

In this last book by the late Donald Pitkin, author of The House that Giacomo Built, comes a story of the Schorcht family, through whose fortunes and struggles one can see the transformations of Germany through the long twentieth century.

Each chapter of Four Germanys is reflective of generational rather than historical time. In 1922, Edwin Schorcht inherited his family farm, and in Part One, Pitkin traces the derivation of this farmstead.  Part Two focuses on Schorcht’s children who came of age in Hitler’s Germany. Part Three has the Schorchts growing up in the Ulbricht years (1950–73) of the German Democratic Republic. The book concludes with the great-granddaughter, Maria, looking back to the past in relation to the new Germany that history had bequeathed her.

Ultimately, Four Germanys reflects the impact of critical historical events on ordinary East Germans while it also reveals how one particular family managed its own historical adaptation to these events.

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Four Histories about Early Dutch Football, 1910-1920
Constructing Discourses
Nicholas Piercey
University College London, 2016
What is the purpose of history today, and how can sporting research help us understand the world around us? In this stimulating book, Nicholas Piercey constructs four new histories of early Dutch football, exploring urban change, club members, the media, and the diaries of Cornelis Johannes Karel van Aalst, a stadium director, to propose practical examples of how history can become an important democratic tool for the 21st century. Using early Dutch football as a field for experimental thinking about the past, the four histories offer new insights into the lives, interests and passions of those connected to the sport in the 1910s and the cities they lived in. How did the First World War impact on Dutch football? Were new stadia a form of social control? Is the spread of the beautiful game really a good thing? And why was one of the sport’s most prominent figures more concerned with potatoes? These stories of early Dutch football suggest how vital sport and history can be in shaping our lives, perceptions and actions, and why we need to challenge the influence they have today. This book also includes a downloadable appendix. Download it here(.xlsx).
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Four Last Songs
Aging and Creativity in Verdi, Strauss, Messiaen, and Britten
Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Aging and creativity can seem a particularly fraught relationship for artists, who often face age-related difficulties as their audience’s expectations are at a peak. In Four Last Songs, Linda and Michael Hutcheon explore this issue via the late works of some of the world’s greatest composers.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Benjamin Britten (1913–76) all wrote operas late in life, pieces that reveal unique responses to the challenges of growing older. Verdi’s Falstaff, his only comedic success, combated Richard Wagner’s influence by introducing young Italian composers to a new model of national music. Strauss, on the other hand, struggling with personal and political problems in Nazi Germany, composed the self-reflexive Capriccio, a “life review” of opera and his own legacy. Though it exhausted him physically and emotionally, Messiaen at the age of seventy-five finished his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, which marked the pinnacle of his career. Britten, meanwhile, suffering from heart problems, refused surgery until he had completed his masterpiece, Death in Venice. For all four composers, age, far from sapping their creative power, provided impetus for some of their best accomplishments.

With its deft treatment of these composers’ final years and works, Four Last Songs provides a valuable look at the challenges—and opportunities—that present themselves as artists grow older.
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Four Shakespearean Period Pieces
Margreta de Grazia
University of Chicago Press, 2021
In the study of Shakespeare since the eighteenth century, four key concepts have served to situate Shakespeare in history: chronology, periodization, secularization, and anachronism.

Yet recent theoretical work has called for their reappraisal. Anachronisms, previously condemned as errors in the order of time, are being hailed as alternatives to that order. Conversely chronology and periods, its mainstays, are now charged with having distorted the past they have been entrusted to represent, and secularization, once considered the driving force of the modern era, no longer holds sway over the past or the present.

In light of this reappraisal, can Shakespeare studies continue unshaken? This is the question Four Shakespearean Period Pieces takes up, devoting a chapter to each term: on the rise of anachronism, the chronologizing of the canon, the staging of plays “in period,” and the use of Shakespeare in modernity’s secularizing project.

To read these chapters is to come away newly alert to how these fraught concepts have served to regulate the canon’s afterlife. Margreta de Grazia does not entirely abandon them but deftly works around and against them to offer fresh insights on the reading, editing, and staging of the author at the heart of our literary canon. 
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Fragile Lives
Violence, Power, and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Arlette Farge
Harvard University Press, 1993

The rich and complex texture of working-class neighborhoods in eighteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in this collage of the experiences of ordinary people—men and women, rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbors and colleagues. Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity—the home, the workplace, and the street—Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.

Fragile Lives reconstructs the rhythms of this population's daily existence, the way they met, formed relationships and broke them off, conducted their affairs in the community, and raised their young. Farge follows them into the factory and describes the ways they organized to improve their working conditions, and how they were controlled by the authorities. She shows how these Parisians behaved in the context of collective events, from festive street spectacles to repressive displays of power by the police. As the author examines interwoven lives as revealed in judicial records, we come to know and understand the criminals and the underworld of the time; the situation of women as lovers, wives, or prostitutes; anxieties about food and drink, and the rules of conduct in a “fragile” society. Elegantly written and skillfully translated, Fragile Lives is a book for the curious general reader and for those interested in social and cultural history.

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Fragments and Assemblages
Forming Compilations of Medieval London
Arthur Bahr
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city’s literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London’s literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.
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Fragments of a World
William of Auvergne and His Medieval Life
Lesley Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The first modern biography of medieval French scholar and bishop William of Auvergne.
 
Today, William of Auvergne (1180?–1249) is remembered for his scholarship about the afterlife as well as the so-called Trial of the Talmud. But the medieval bishop of Paris also left behind nearly 600 sermons delivered to all manner of people—from the royal court to the poorest in his care. In Fragments of a World, Lesley Smith uses these sermons to paint a vivid picture of this extraordinary cleric, his parishioners, and their bustling world. The first modern biography of the influential teacher, bishop, and theologian, Fragments of a World casts a new image of William of Auvergne for our times—deeply attuned to both the spiritual and material needs of an ever-changing populace in the medieval city.
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Fragments of Lives
Chronicles of the Gulag
Jacques Rossi
Karolinum Press, 2018
In Fragments of Lives, Gulag survivor Jacques Rossi opens a window onto everyday life inside the notorious Soviet prison camp through a series of portraits of inmates and camp personnel across all walks of life—from workers to peasants, soldiers, civil servants, and party apparatchiks. Featuring Rossi’s original illustrations and written in a tone as sharp and dry as that of Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, Rossi’s vignettes are also filled with surprising humor. A former agent in the Spanish Civil War and a lifelong Communist, Rossi never considered himself a victim. Instead, in the manner of Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, and Margaret Buber-Neumann, he sought to share and transmute his experience within the living hell of the Gulag. In so doing, he gives voice to the inmates whose lives were shattered by one of the most corrupt and repressive regimes of the twentieth century.

An impassioned reminder to always question one’s beliefs, to have the courage to give up one’s illusions at the risk of one’s life, Fragments of Lives lays bare, with acute observations and biting wit, the falsity of the Soviet utopia that transformed Rossi’s home into a “huge Potemkin village, a farcical sham dissimulating oceans of mud and blood.”
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Fragments of the European City
Stephen Barber
Reaktion Books, 1995
This book explores the visual transformation of the contemporary European city, focusing on the most emblematic and visibly wounded of all European cities – Berlin.

Taking as its subject the "intricately assembled, relentlessly disassembling metropolitan screen", it charts the virulent implosions of culture, the distortions and violence that give city-living its fractured and hallucinatory quality.

Provocatively written as a series of inter-locking poetic fragments, the text evokes the formation of metropolitan "identity" as it ricochets between the physical surface of the city and the vulnerable but manipulating consciousness of city dwellers.

Barber has discovered a powerful new vocabulary – a vocabulary charged with the visual and sonic impact of the cinema. Like the city, the text pulsates, creatively chaotic, raw and exhilarating.
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Framing Immigrant Integration
Dutch Research-Policy Dialogues in Comparative Perspective
Peter Scholten
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

Debates on immigrant integration often center on “national models of integration,” a concept that reflects the desire of both researchers and policy makers to find common ground. This book challenges the idea that there has ever been a coherent or consistent Dutch model of integration and asserts that though Dutch society has long been seen as exemplary for its multiculturalism—and argues that the incorporation of migrants remains one of the country’s most pressing social and political concerns. In addition to an analysis of how immigration is framed and reframed through diverse dialogues, the author provides a highly dynamic overview of integration policy and its evolution alongside migration research.

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Framing Power in Visigothic Society
Discourses, Devices, and Artifacts
Eleonora Dell' Elicine
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This volume examines how power was framed in Visigothic society and how a diverse population with a complex and often conflicting cultural inheritance was thereby held together as a single kingdom. Indeed, through this dynamic process a new, early medieval society emerged. Understanding this transformation is no simple matter, as it involved the deployment of an array of political and cultural resources: the production of knowledge, the appropriation of Patristic literature, controlling and administering rural populations, reconceptualizing the sacred, capital punishment and exile, controlling the manufacture of currency, and defining Visigothic society in relation to other polities such as the neighbouring Byzantine state. In order to achieve an analysis of these different phenomena, this volume brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach therefore expands the available sources and reformulates topics of traditional scholarship in order to engage with a renewal of Visigothic Studies and reformulate the paradigm of study itself. As a result, this volume rethinks frameworks of power in the Peninsula along not only historical and archaeological but also anthropological terms, presenting the reader with a new understanding of Iberian society as a whole.
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Framing Premodern Desires
Sexual Ideas, Attitudes, and Practices in Europe
Edited by Satu Lidman, Tom Linkinen, and Marjo Kaartinen
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The way that we have perceived, described, and understood sexual desire has changed dramatically over time and across cultures. This collection brings together a group of experts from a variety of disciplines to explore the history of sexual desires and the transformation of sexual ideas, attitudes, and practices in premodern Europe. Among the topics considered are the visibility of sexual offenses and the construction of passions; the geographical range extends to Great Britain, with extended attention also to France as well as Northern and Eastern Europe. The result is a groundbreaking volume that adds significantly to our understanding of premodern European history, history of sexualities, gender studies, religious history, and many other fields.
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France after Revolution
Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order
Denise Z. Davidson
Harvard University Press, 2007

The decades following the French Revolution saw unprecedented political and social experimentation. As the Napoleonic and Restoration regimes attempted to build a stable order, ordinary city dwellers began to create their own sense of how society operated through everyday activities. Interactions between men and women--in theaters, cafes, and other public settings--helped to fashion new social norms.

In this extensively researched work, Denise Z. Davidson offers a powerful reevaluation of the effects of the French Revolution, especially on women. Arguing against the view that the Revolution forced women from the public realm of informed political discussion, Davidson demonstrates that women remained highly visible in urban public life. Women of all classes moved out of the domestic sphere to participate in the spectacle of city life, inviting frequent commentary on their behavior. This began to change only in the 1820s, when economic and social developments intensified class distinctions and made the bourgeoisie fear the "dangerous classes."

This book provides an important corrective to prevailing views on the ramifications of the French Revolution, while shedding light on how ordinary people understood, shaped, and contested the social transformations taking place around them.

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France and Algeria
A History of Decolonization and Transformation
Phillip Naylor
University of Texas Press, 2024

An examination of the complicated history between France and Algeria since the latter’s independence.

While most related studies concentrate on the colonial era and Algeria's War of Independence, France and Algeria details the nations' postcolonial relationship. Phillip Naylor provides a philosophical approach, contending that France reformulated, rather than repudiated, “essential” strategic values during decolonization. It thus continued to pursue grandeur and independence, especially with regard to the Third World and Algeria, an essentialism that expedited France’s postcolonial transformation. But as a new nation, Algeria needed to pursue the “existential” project of self-definition. It became involved in state-building while also promulgating socialism, and it recognized how French oil concessions in the Sahara impeded its independence, leading to the industry's postcolonial decolonization. Finally, the postcolonial relationship has featured a human dimension involving immigrants, pieds-noirs (colonial settlers), and harkis (Algerian soldiers loyal to France), all of them central to bilateral relations.

In this revised and updated edition of his seminal work, first published over twenty years ago, Naylor expands his coverage of the decolonization era, drawing on new information while continuing to study the ever-evolving relationship between the two countries. These new additions expose the continually shifting relations of power, perception, and identity between the two states.

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France, Fin de Siècle
Eugen Weber
Harvard University Press, 1986

The end of the nineteenth century in France was marked by political scandals, social unrest, dissension, and “decadence.” Yet the fin de siècle was also an era of great social and scientific progress, a time when advantages previously reserved for the privileged began to be shared by the many. Public transportation, electrical illumination, standard time, and an improved water supply radically altered the life of the modest folk, who found time for travel and leisure activities—including sports such as cycling. Change became the nature of things, and people believed that further improvement was not only possible but inevitable.

In this thoroughly engaging history, Eugen Weber describes ways of life, not as recorded by general history, but as contemporaries experienced them. He writes about political atmosphere and public prejudices rather than standard political history. Water and washing, bicycles and public transportation engage him more than great scientific discoveries. He discusses academic painting and poster art, the popular stage and music halls, at greater length than avant-garde and classic theater or opera. In this book the importance of telephones, plumbing, and central heating outranks such traditional subjects as international developments, the rise of organized labor, and the spread of socialism.

Weber does not neglect the darker side of the fin de siècle. The discrepancy between material advance and spiritual dejection, characteristic of our own times, interests him as much as the idea of progress, and he reminds us that for most people the period was far from elegant. In the lurid context of military defeat, political instability, public scandal, and clamorous social criticism, one had also to contend with civic dirt, unsanitary food, mob violence, and the seeds of modern-day scourges: pollution, drugs, sensationalism, debased art, the erosion of moral character. Yet millions of fin de siècle French lived as only thousands had lived fifty years before; while their advance was slow, their right to improvement was conceded.

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France in the Enlightenment
Daniel Roche
Harvard University Press, 1998

A panorama of a whole civilization, a world on the verge of cataclysm, unfolds in this magisterial work by the foremost historian of eighteenth-century France. Since Tocqueville’s account of the Old Regime, historians have struggled to understand the social, cultural, and political intricacies of this efflorescence of French society before the Revolution. France in the Enlightenment is a brilliant addition to this historical interest.

France in the Enlightenment brings the Old Regime to life by showing how its institutions operated and how they were understood by the people who worked within them. Daniel Roche begins with a map of space and time, depicting France as a mosaic of overlapping geographical units, with people and goods traversing it to the rhythms of everyday life. He fills this frame with the patterns of rural life, urban culture, and government institutions. Here as never before we see the eighteenth-century French “culture of appearances”: the organization of social life, the diffusion of ideas, the accoutrements of ordinary people in the folkways of ordinary living—their food and clothing, living quarters, reading material. Roche shows us the eighteenth-century France of the peasant, the merchant, the noble, the King, from Paris to the provinces, from the public space to the private home.

By placing politics and material culture at the heart of historical change, Roche captures the complexity and depth of the Enlightenment. From the finest detail to the widest view, from the isolated event to the sweeping trend, his masterly book offers an unparalleled picture of a society in motion, flush with the transformation that will be its own demise.

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France’s Long Reconstruction
In Search of the Modern Republic
Herrick Chapman
Harvard University Press, 2018

At the end of World War II, France’s greatest challenge was to repair a civil society torn asunder by Nazi occupation and total war. Recovery required the nation’s complete economic and social transformation. But just what form this “new France” should take remained the burning question at the heart of French political combat until the Algerian War ended, over a decade later. Herrick Chapman charts the course of France’s long reconstruction from 1944 to 1962, offering fresh insights into the ways the expansion of state power, intended to spearhead recovery, produced fierce controversies at home and unintended consequences abroad in France’s crumbling empire.

Abetted after Liberation by a new elite of technocratic experts, the burgeoning French state infiltrated areas of economic and social life traditionally free from government intervention. Politicians and intellectuals wrestled with how to reconcile state-directed modernization with the need to renew democratic participation and bolster civil society after years spent under the Nazi and Vichy yokes. But rather than resolving the tension, the conflict between top-down technocrats and grassroots democrats became institutionalized as a way of framing the problems facing Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.

Uniquely among European countries, France pursued domestic recovery while simultaneously fighting full-scale colonial wars. France’s Long Reconstruction shows how the Algerian War led to the further consolidation of state authority and cemented repressive immigration policies that now appear shortsighted and counterproductive.

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Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court
Music and the Circulation of Power
Suzanne G. Cusick
University of Chicago Press, 2009
A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years. Dazzling listeners with the transformative power of her performances and the sparkling wit of the music she composed for more than a dozen court theatricals, Caccini is best remembered today as the first woman to have composed opera. Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court reveals for the first time how this multitalented composer established a fully professional musical career at a time when virtually no other women were able to achieve comparable success.

Suzanne G. Cusick argues that Caccini’s career depended on the usefulness of her talents to the political agenda of Grand Duchess Christine de Lorraine, Tuscany’s de facto regent from 1606 to 1636. Drawing on Classical and feminist theory, Cusick shows how the music Caccini made for the Medici court sustained the culture that enabled Christine’s power, thereby also supporting the sexual and political aims of its women.

In bringing Caccini’s surprising story so vividly to life, Cusick ultimately illuminates how music making functioned in early modern Italy as a significant medium for the circulation of power.
 

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Francis of Assisi
His Life, Vision and Companions
Michael F. Cusato
Reaktion Books, 2023
An accessible introduction to the life of this most-venerated saint.
 
This book is an accessible biography of Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan religious order and one of the most venerated figures in Christianity. In it, Michael F. Cusato explores how Francis and his early brothers embraced a life of poverty in solidarity with the lowest ranks of society, preaching a message of justice and dignity for all. He examines how and why Francis’s vision ultimately expanded to embrace non-Christians and Muslims in particular following Francis’s celebrated encounter with the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil in 1219. Finally, Cusato considers the clash between Francis and newer members of his Order, his reception of the stigmata, and his final years defending his vision among his own brothers, all while living as an exemplar of the gospel life.
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Franciscan Books and their Readers
Friars and Manuscripts in Late Medieval Italy
René Hernández
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The book explores the manuscripts written, read, and studied by Franciscan friars from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries in Northern Italy, and specifically Padua, assessing four key aspects: ideal, space, form and readership. The ideal is studied through the regulations that determined what manuscripts should aim for. Space refers to the development and role of Franciscan libraries. The form is revealed by the assessment of the physical configuration of a set of representative manuscripts read, written, and manufactured by the friars. Finally, the study of the readership shows how Franciscans were skilled readers who employed certain forms of the manuscript as a portable, personal library, and as a tool for learning and pastoral care. By comparing the book collections of Padua’s reformed and unreformed medieval Franciscan libraries for the first time, this study reveals new features of the ground-breaking cultural agency of medieval friars.
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The Franciscan Order in the Medieval English Province and Beyond
Edited by Michael Robson and Patrick Zutshi
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Commemorating John Moorman's immense contribution to Franciscan history across five decades, the essays in this collection reflect upon Moorman's diverse writings on biography, hagiography, history, art, and prosopography. Contributors draw upon Moorman's diaries and his materials for a biographical register of the Franciscans in medieval England. The volume is in tune with recent developments in Franciscan history in general, with a special interest in the English province. This is exemplified by studies on Franciscan iconography; the English province's impact of the wider order; the scholastic enterprise; prosopography; economy; sermons; the application of Canon Law to the debates at the papal court; and the evolution of John Moorman's studies on St Francis and his followers.
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Francisco de los Cobos
Secretary of the Emperor Charles V
Hayward Keniston
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960

A comprehensive biography of the Seceretary of State and Comendador for the kingdom of Castile under Emperor Charles I of Spain.

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Francisco de Osuna’s "Norte de los estados" in Modernized Spanish
A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe
Dana Bultman
Arc Humanities Press, 2019
Best known for his works on the mystical practice of meditative recollection, Franciscan friar Francisco de Osuna published his candid manual for lay life, Norte de los estados (North Star) in 1531 before leaving Spain to reside in Antwerp. True to its title, the book was intended as a North Star that would dependably guide readers through the stages of youth, marriage, and widowhood. Although the historical literature on these themes is dominated by the works of his humanist contemporaries, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Juan Luis Vives, Osuna’s close attention to women’s experiences and his critical awareness of social class are distinctive. This first modern edition in Spanish restores Osuna’s reformist voice and expansive vision to the animated conversations on marriage and family in which he engaged. His detailed attention to practical questions and his intense spiritualization of spousal love make it an invaluable resource for understanding conjugal relationships in the popular imagination of the early modern world.
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Franco
A Personal and Political Biography
Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
General Francisco Franco ruled Spain for nearly forty years, as one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in that nation's long history. He has been the subject of many biographies, several of them more than a thousand pages in length, but all the preceding works have tended toward one extreme of interpretation or the other. This is the first comprehensive scholarly biography of Franco in English that is objective and balanced in its coverage, treating all three major aspects of his life—personal, military, and political. The coauthors, both renowned historians of Spain, present a deeply researched account that has made extensive use of the Franco Archive (long inaccessible to historians). They have also conducted in-depth interviews with his only daughter to explain better his family background, personal life, and marital environment, as well as his military and political career.
            Franco: A Personal and Political Biography depicts his early life, explains his career and rise to prominence as an army officer who became Europe's youngest interwar brigadier general in 1926, and then discusses his role in the affairs of the troubled Second Spanish Republic (1931–36). Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios examine in detail how Franco became dictator and how his leadership led to victory in the Spanish Civil War that consolidated his regime. They also explore Franco's role in the great repression that accompanied the Civil War—resulting in tens of thousands of executions—and examine at length his controversial role in World War II. This masterful biography highlights Franco's metamorphoses and adaptations to retain power as politics, culture, and economics shifted in the four decades of his dictatorship.

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

“An important book, destined to elicit a heated academic debate surrounding the man who ruled Spain for forty years and whose figure still casts a long shadow four decades after his death.”—Journal of Modern History
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The Franco Regime, 1936–1975
Stanley G. Payne
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

The history of modern Spain is dominated by the figure of Francisco Franco, who presided over one of the longest authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Between 1936 and the end of the regime in 1975, Franco’s Spain passed through several distinct phases of political, institutional, and economic development, moving from the original semi-fascist regime of 1936–45 to become the Catholic corporatist “organic democracy” under the monarchy from 1945 to 1957. Distinguished historian Stanley G. Payne offers deep insight into the career of this complex and formidable figure and the enormous changes that shaped Spanish history during his regime.

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Francois Mauriac on Race, War, Politics and Religion
Nathan Bracher
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
Nathan Bracher's François Mauriac on Race, War, Politics, and Religion: The Great War Through the 1960s consists of a selection of some ninety editorials penned by the Catholic novelist and intellectual François Mauriac, who received the Nobel Prize for literature and who was admitted to the Académie Française in 1933. As is often the case for prominent writers and intellectuals in France, Mauriac became active in political punditry early in his career, at the time of the First World War. Intensifying notably in the tumultuous years of the 1930s on, this activity continues to expand over the next five decades. After 1952, Mauriac's editorials came to represent the most important dimension of his intellectual activity. He was, to cite the prominent journalist and intellectual Jean Daniel of Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s most distinguished and formidable editorialist of the twentieth century.
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Francophonie and the Orient
French-Asian Transcultural Crossings (1840-1940)
Mathilde Kang
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Based on transnational France-Asia approaches, this book studies Asian cultures once steeped in French civilisation but free of a colonial mode in order to highlight the transliterary examples of cultural transfer. This book is a pioneering study of the Francophone phenomenon within the context of cultures categorised as non-Francophone. Espousing a transcultural approach, Francophonie and the Orient examines the emergence of French heritage in the Far-East, the various forms of its manifestation, and the modes of its identification.Several thematic signposts guide the diverse pathways of the research. Firstly, the question is posed as to whether colonisation is the ultimate coat of arms for entry into Francophonie? Secondly, the book raises issues relative to Asian Francophone works: the emergence of literatures with French expression from Asian countries historically free of French domination. Finally, the study reconfigures the Asian Francophone heritage with new paradigms (transnational/global studies), which redefine the frontiers of Francophonie in Asia.
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The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France
Julia V. Douthwaite
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. In this book, Julia V. Douthwaite explores how the works within this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and L. Frank Baum.
 
Deploying political history, archival research, and textual analysis with eye-opening results, Douthwaite focuses on five major events between 1789 and 1794—first in newspapers, then in fiction—and shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles, and others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal. She uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frankénsteïn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Père Goriot. Bringing to light the missing links between the ancien régime and modernity, The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France is an ambitious account of a remarkable politico-literary moment and its aftermath.
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François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality
Siep Stuurman
Harvard University Press, 2004

In a tour de force of intellectual history, Siep Stuurman rediscovers the remarkable early Enlightenment figure François Poulain de la Barre. A dropout from theology studies at the Sorbonne, Poulain embraced the philosophy of Descartes, became convinced of the injustice and absurdity of the subjection of women, and assembled an entirely original social philosophy. His writings challenging male supremacy and advocating gender and racial equality are the most radically egalitarian texts to appear in Europe before the French Revolution.

In exploring Poulain's breakthrough, Stuurman sheds new light on the origins of the Enlightenment, the history of feminism, the emergence of rational Christianity, and the social and political implications of Descartes's philosophy. This groundbreaking work, the first comprehensive study of Poulain, brings to life the men and women of the Radical Enlightenment, who pioneered ideas about equality that would shape humankind to this day. Impeccably researched, cogently argued, and lucidly written, this is truly a masterpiece of scholarship.

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Fraternal Bonds in the Early Middle Ages
Aneta Pieniądz
Arc Humanities Press, 2024
The problem of fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages has not been hitherto studied in detail, especially in comparison with the multitude of studies dealing with the models of marriage, gender-based social roles, or the relations between generations. Historians have been often prone to assume that relations between siblings in European culture were naturally constant, based on loyalty, solidarity, and readiness to act in the common interest, stemming from blood ties. However, this conviction equates the category of brotherhood/fraternitas used by medieval authors with concepts associated with sources from later periods. This study does not concern narrowly defined family history, but is an attempt to examine fraternal relations in the early Middle Ages as a multidimensional cultural phenomenon. As the author seeks to demonstrate, it is difficult to speak of kinship in the ninth century and later without being aware of the religious and ideological implications of the transformations taking place at the time, even if direct traces of the impact of moralizing and theological teachings on the conduct of individuals are hard to capture in the sources.
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Frauen
German Women Recall the Third Reich
Owings, Alison
Rutgers University Press, 1995

What were the women of Germany doing during the Third Reich? What were they thinking? And what do they have to say a half century later?

In Frauen we hear their voices––most for the first time. Alison Owings interviewed and here records the words of twenty-nine German women who were there: Working for the Resistance. Joining the Nazi Party. Outsmarting the Gestapo. Disliking a Jewish neighbor. Hiding a Jewish friend. Witnessing "Kristallnacht." Witnessing the firebombing of Dresden. Shooting at Allied planes. Welcoming Allied troops. Being a prisoner. And being a guard. The women recall their own and others' enthusiasm, doubt, fear, fury, cowardice, guilt, and anguish.

Alison Owings, in her pursuit of such memories, was invited into the homes of these women. Because she is neither Jewish nor German, and because she speaks fluent colloquial German, many of the women she interviewed felt comfortable enough with her to unlock the past. What they have to say will surprise Americans, just as they surprised the women themselves.

Not since Marcel Ophuls's controversial film The Sorrow and the Pity have we been on such intimate terms with "the enemy." In this case, the story is that of the women, those who did not make policy but were forced to participate in its effects and to witness its results. What they did and did not do is not just a reflection on them and their country––it also leads us to question what actions we might have taken in their place. The interviews do not allow for easy, smug answers.

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Freaks of History
Two Performance Texts
James MacDonald
Intellect Books, 2017
Disability studies have long been the domain of medical and pedagogical academics. However, in recent years, the subject has outgrown its clinical origins. In Freaks of History, James MacDonald presents two dramatic explorations of disability within the wider themes of sexuality, gender, foreignness, and the other. Originally directed by Martin Harvey and performed by undergraduate students at the University of Exeter, Wellclose Square and Unsex Me Here analyze cultural marginalization against the backdrop of infamous historical events.
            MacDonald, who is cerebral palsied, recognizes that disability narratives are rarely written by and for disabled people. Therefore his plays, accompanied by critical essays and director’s notes, are a welcome addition to the emerging discourse of Crip theory, and essential reading for disability students and academics alike.
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Frederick II
The Wonder of the World
Richard Bressler
Westholme Publishing, 2010
A Medieval King Who Embraced the Arts and Sciences
One of the most remarkable personalities of the Middle Ages, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was born in 1194. His parents—the reigning Holy Roman Emperor and the heiress to the Kingdom of Sicily—belonged to two of the leading ruling families in medieval Europe. The lands controlled by these two families extended from southern Denmark to Sicily, from modern Belgium to Bohemia. Frederick II eventually ruled the joint kingdom, and the story of how he gained and maintained this status is the primary thread running through his life. As a child in Sicily, Frederick was a ward of Pope Innocent III. When he came of age, he sought to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor but only succeeded in 1220 after many years of negotiations with the Vatican, which was reluctant to give up or share power. Resenting the influence and pressure from the papacy, Frederick became its leading opponent. As a result, the new pope, Gregory IX, condemned Frederick as the Antichrist. However, Frederick believed he was a sincere Christian, and led the Sixth Crusade to the Holy Land while under excommunication.
 
As a ruler, Frederick was unusually modern in his sensibilities. Sicily was a cultural melting pot in the thirteenth century and Frederick ended up speaking several languages. He protected Jews and Muslims in his realms and prosecuted Christian heretics throughout his thirty-year reign. Frederick was married three times, and had four legitimate and eleven illegitimate children. He was a polymath with interests ranging from sculpture, architecture, and poetry to mathematics and science in many forms, earning him admiration from his contemporaries who called him Stupor mundi, “Wonder of the World.” His lifelong interest in hunting with birds of prey led to the writing of the classic work De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (The Art of Falconry), which is still in print. Based on the latest scholarship and written for the general reader, Frederick II: The Wonder of the World by Richard Bressler provides the complete story of this complex and fascinating man.
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The Free French
Guillaume Piketty
Harvard University Press

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Free to Hate
How Media Liberalization Enabled Right-Wing Populism in Post-1989 Bulgaria
Martin Marinos
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Linking neoliberalism with the Right’s global rise

Bulgaria’s media-driven pivot to right-wing populism parallels political developments taking place around the world. Martin Marinos applies a critical political economy approach to place Bulgarian right-wing populism within the structural transformation of the country’s media institutions. As Marinos shows, media concentration under Western giants like Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and News Corporation have led to a neoliberal turn of commercialization, concentration, and tabloidization across media. The Right have used the anticommunism and racism bred by this environment to not only undermine traditional media but position their own outlets to boost new political entities like the nationalist party Ataka. Marinos’s ethnographic observations and interviews with local journalists, politicians, and media experts add on-the-ground detail to his account. He also examines several related issues, including the performative appeal of populist media and the money behind it.

A timely and innovative analysis, Free to Hate reveals where structural changes in media intersect with right-wing populism.

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Freedom in White and Black
A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and Its Global Legacy
Emma Christopher
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
By 1808, both Britain and the United States had passed laws outlawing the transatlantic slave trade. Yet the trade covertly carried on. In the summer of 1813, in what is now Liberia, a compound of slave pens was bursting with sick and anguished captives, guarded by other African slaves. As a British patrol swooped down on the illicit barracoon, the slavers burned the premises to the ground, hoping to destroy evidence.

This story can be told because of an exceptional trove of court documents that provides unparalleled insight into one small link in the great, horrific chain of slavery. Emma Christopher follows a trail of evidence across four continents to examine the lives of this barracoon's owners, their workers, and their tragic human merchandise. She reveals how an American, Charles Mason, escaped justice, while British subjects Robert Bostock and John McQueen were arrested. In court five African men—Tamba, Tom Ball, Yarra, Noah, and Sessay—courageously testified against their former owners/captors. They, and 233 other liberated men, women, and children, were relocated to Freetown, Sierra Leone. There they endured harsh lives of "freedom," while the punishment of Bostock and McQueen was fleeting.

From the fragmented facts of these lives, Christopher sheds fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia (where Bostock and McQueen were banished) and the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.
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Freedom Seekers
Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London
Simon P. Newman
University of London Press, 2021
Freedom Seekers reveals the hidden stories of Britain’s enslaved people and their liberation.

This book brings the history of slavery in England to light, revealing the powerful untold stories of resistance by enslaved workers from Africa, South Asia, and First-Nations America forced to work in London as sailors and dockworkers, wet-nurses and washerwomen. Featuring a series of original case studies on those enslaved people who escaped captivity, this volume provides a rich source of information about slavery in eighteenth-century mainland Britain and the “freedom seekers” therein. Using maps, photographs, newspaper advertisements, and more, the book details escape routes, the networks of slaveholders, and the community of people of color across the London region.

Freedom Seekers demonstrates that not only were enslaved people present in Restoration London but that white Londoners were intimately involved in the construction of the system of racial slavery, a process traditionally regarded as happening in the colonies rather than the British Isles. Freedom Seekers is an utterly unmissable and important book that seeks to delve into Britain’s colonial past.
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Freedom's Moment
An Essay on the French Idea of Liberty from Rousseau to Foucault
Paul M. Cohen
University of Chicago Press, 1997
What kind of freedom, and what kind of individual, has the French Revolutionary tradition sought to propagate? Paul Cohen finds a distinctly French articulation of freedom in the texts and lives of eight renowned cultural critics who lived between the eighteenth century and the present day.

Arranged not according to the lives and times of its protagonists but to the narrative themes and structures they held in common, Cohen’s study discerns a single master narrative of liberty in modern France. He captures these radicals, whose tradition bids them to resist the authority of power structures and public opinion. They denounce bourgeois and utilitarian values, the power of Church and State, and the corrupting influence of everyday politics, and they dream of a revolutionary rupture, a fleeting instant of sometimes violent but always meaningful transgression.

An eloquent and insightful work on French political culture, Freedom's Moment also helps explain how France, even as it has oscillated between political stagnation and crisis, has held onto its faith that liberty, equality, and fraternity remain within its grasp.

Examines the ideas of Rousseau, Robespierre, Stendahl, Michelet, Bergson, Peguy, Sartre, and Foucault.
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French and Germans, Germans and French
A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944
Richard Cobb
Brandeis University Press, 2018
The noted historian Richard Cobb presents an engaging synthesis of research, combined with highly original observations and analyses of the war years in France. The reader is given access to a unique private chronicle of the relations between occupants and occupés, which provides the “I was there” understanding that is a hallmark of Cobb’s well-known ability to humanize history. The author characterizes this work as “an essay in interpretation and imagination, an evocation drawing heavily on literary, or semi-literary, sources and even on autobiography, rather than a straight piece of history. The book is about people, individuals, rather than about institutions and administration.” A recognized classic is now back in print.
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The French Apanages and the Capetian Monarchy, 1224-1328
Charles T. Wood
Harvard University Press

An analytical study of the French apanages from their creation to the end of the Capetian period, this pioneering book offers an explanation of why the French kings began the practice of granting fiefs to their younger sons, and why they introduced the curious inheritance restrictions which limited succession in an apanage to direct heirs of the original holder. The author also examines the connection of the apanages with the royal government in terms of sovereignty, jurisdiction, administration, military obligations, and financial affairs, showing how difficult it was to draw distinctions between the two spheres of government.

Since the original apanages were granted from lands only recently conquered from the English, they had the important practical effect of introducing the notion of French royal authority into areas that had not known it for centuries. People living in these lands became used to the fact that "the king" was the king of France, not of England. A clear understanding of the relationship of the apanages to the monarchy, the author maintains, is at the same time a large step toward an understanding of how the monarchy gained control of France and,ultimately, made a nation out of her fragmented provinces.

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The French Atlantic Triangle
Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade
Christopher L. Miller
Duke University Press, 2008
The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.

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French Film History, 1895–1946
Richard Neupert
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
French Film History, 1895–1946 addresses the creative and often unexpected trajectory of French cinema, which continues to be one of the most provocative and engaging cinemas in the world. Tracing French film and its developments from the earliest days, when France dominated world cinema, up through the Occupation and Liberation, Neupert outlines major players and films that made it so influential. Paris held a privileged position as one of the world’s hubs of scientific, social, and cultural experimentation; it is no wonder that the cinema as we know it was born there in the nineteenth century. This book presents French cinema’s most significant creative filmmakers and movies but also details the intricate relations between technology, economics, and government that helped shape the unique conditions for cinematic experimentation in the country.
 
Neupert explains the contexts behind the rise of cinema in France, including groundbreaking work by the Lumière family, Georges Méliès, and Alice Guy; the powerhouse studios of Pathé and Gaumont; directors such as René Clair, Germaine Dulac, Marcel Pagnol, and Jean Renoir; and an array of stars, including Max Linder, Jean Gabin, Josephine Baker, and Michèle Morgan. The first fifty years of French film practice established cinema’s cultural and artistic potential, setting the stage for the global post–World War II explosion in commercial movies and art cinema alike. French film and its rich history remain at the heart of cinematic storytelling and our moviegoing pleasure.
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The French Imperial Nation-State
Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars
Gary Wilder
University of Chicago Press, 2005
France experienced a period of crisis following World War I when the relationship between the nation and its colonies became a subject of public debate. The French Imperial Nation-State focuses on two intersecting movements that redefined imperial politics—colonial humanism led by administrative reformers in West Africa and the Paris-based Negritude project, comprising African and Caribbean elites.

Gary Wilder develops a sophisticated account of the contradictory character of colonial government and examines the cultural nationalism of Negritude as a multifaceted movement rooted in an alternative black public sphere. He argues that interwar France must be understood as an imperial nation-state—an integrated sociopolitical system that linked a parliamentary republic to an administrative empire. An interdisciplinary study of colonial modernity combining French history, colonial studies, and social theory, The French Imperial Nation-State will compel readers to revise conventional assumptions about the distinctions between republicanism and racism, metropolitan and colonial societies, and national and transnational processes.
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The French Joyce
Geert Lernout
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A major contribution to James Joyce studies, as well as a historical review of the French intellectual climate since the 1960s
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