In a work of sweep and ambition, James Fichter explores how American trade proved pivotal to the evolution of capitalism in the United States and helped to shape the course of the British Empire.
Before the American Revolution, colonial merchants were part of a trading network that spanned the globe. After 1783, U.S. merchants began trading in the East Indies independently, creating a new class of investor-capitalists and the first generation of American millionaires. Such wealth was startling in a country where, a generation earlier, the most prosperous Americans had been Southern planters. This mercantile elite brought its experience and affluence to other sectors of the economy, helping to concentrate capital and create wealth, and paving the way for the modern business corporation.
Conducted on free trade principles, American trade in Asia was so extensive that it undermined the monopoly of the British East India Company and forced Britain to open its own free trade to Asia. The United States and the British Empire thus converged around shared, Anglo-American free-trade ideals and financial capitalism in Asia. American traders also provided a vital link to the Atlantic world for Dutch Java and French Mauritius, and were at the vanguard of Western contact with Polynesia and the Pacific Northwest.
Based on an impressive array of sources from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States, this pathbreaking book revolutionizes our understanding of the early American economy in a global context and the relationship between the young nation and its former colonial master.
The image of the naval sailor is that of an enigmatic but compelling figure, a globe-trotting adventurer, swaggering and irresponsible in port but swift to flex the national muscle at sea and beyond. Appealing as this popular image may be, scant effort has been expended to reveal the truth behind the stereotype.
Thanks to Christopher McKee's groundbreaking work, it is now possible to hear from sailors themselves--in this case, those who served in Great Britain's Royal Navy during the first half of the twentieth century. McKee has scoured sailors' unpublished diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral interviews to uncover the lives and secret thoughts of British men of the lower deck. From working-class childhoods teetering on the edge of poverty to the hardships of finding civilian employment after leaving the navy; from sexual initiation in the brothels of Oran and Alexandria to the terror of battle, the former sailors speak with candor about all aspects of naval life: the harsh discipline and deep comradeship, the shipboard homoeroticism, the pleasures and temptations of world travel, and the responsibilities of marriage and family.
McKee has shaped the first authentic model of the naval enlisted experience, an account not crafted by officers or civilian reformers but deftly told in the sailors' own voices. The result is a poignant and complex portrait of lower-deck lives.
In the decades since the end of the Second World War, the unification of Europe has been a subject of enormous importance and tension to politicians, citizens, and scholars. Yet lacking the basic demographic, economic, and social data that would provide a fuller picture of what this integration will involve, the debate has produced more heat than light.
This book, the most comprehensive single-volume source of information available on the social and economic transformations in Europe over the past hundred years, fills that critical gap in our knowledge. In its pages we find examinations of population trends (including growth, mortality, national and international migration, and fertility), social structures (work, income, lifestyle, consumer patterns, welfare programs), and economic structures (agriculture, industry, and services), and an integrative overview of changes in both the organization of the economy and the role of the state in economic management. Paying particular attention to the period since 1950, the authors summarize the developmental paths of the four socioeconomic regions of Europe.The data and analyses provided here make this book an invaluable resource to professionals and scholars in a wide range of fields, from history, politics, and economics to journalism and international business.
In addition to revising our view of the interwar period and the building of European democracies, this book cuts against the grain of most current theorizing in political science by explicitly discussing when and how ideas influence political behavior. Even though German and Swedish Social Democrats belonged to the same transnational political movement and faced similar political and social conditions in their respective countries before and after World War I, they responded very differently to the challenges of democratization and the Great Depression--with crucial consequences for the fates of their countries and the world at large.
Explaining why these two social democratic parties acted so differently is the primary task of this book. Berman's answer is that they had very different ideas about politics and economics--what she calls their programmatic beliefs. The Swedish Social Democrats placed themselves at the forefront of the drive for democratization; a decade later they responded to the Depression with a bold new economic program and used it to build a long period of political hegemony. The German Social Democrats, on the other hand, had democracy thrust upon them and then dithered when faced with economic crisis; their haplessness cleared the way for a bolder and more skillful political actor--Adolf Hitler.
This provocative book will be of interest to anyone concerned with twentieth-century European history, the transition to democracy problem, or the role of ideas in politics.
Georgian social democracy was the most successful social democratic movement in the Russian Empire. Despite its small size, it produced many of the leading revolutionary figures of 1917, including Irakli Tsereteli, Karlo Chkheidze, Noe Zhordania, and Joseph Stalin. In the first of two volumes, Stephen Jones writes the first history in English of this undeservedly neglected national movement, which represented one of the earliest examples of European social democracy at the turn of the twentieth century.
Georgian social democracy was part of the Russian social democracy from which Bolshevism and Menshevism emerged. But innovative theoretical programs and tactics led Georgian social democracy down an independent path. The powerful Georgian organization united all native classes behind it, and it set a remarkable precedent for many of the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the twentieth century. At the same time, Georgian social democracy was committed to a "European" path, a "third way" that attempted to combine grassroots democracy, private manufacturing, and private land ownership with socialist ideology.
One of the few Western historians fluent in Georgian, Jones fills major gaps in the history of revolutionary and national movements of the Russian Empire.
The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship tends to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens.
This volume builds on the latest literature by exploring the development and experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: What did modernity mean for the East German state and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between state-level politics and everyday life to sharply focus on the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around "socialist modernity" shaped the views, memories, and actions of East Germans over four decades.
"An impressive volume drawing together rich, diverse essays by some of the most interesting, well-known, and experienced scholars on the GDR in the field, on both sides of the Atlantic."
---Dr. Jan Palmowski, Senior Lecturer in European Studies at King's College London, and Review Editor for German History
"Delving into many sides of the GDR modern, Pence and Betts present both new empirical evidence and offer insightful theoretical perspectives. The idea of the 'Socialist Modern' provides an excellent conceptual framework; the focus on culture fills a hole in the literature, the introduction is theoretically sophisticated and well-grounded in the historiography, and the span and heterogeneity of the articles are impressive."
---Donna Harsch, Associate Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon University
Katherine Pence is Assistant Professor of History, Baruch College, City University of New York.
Paul Betts is Reader in Modern German History, University of Sussex, Brighton, England.
Contributors
Daphne Berdahl
Paul Betts
Alon Confino
Greg Eghigian
Dagmar Herzog
Young-Sun Hong
Thomas Lindenberger
Alf Lüdtke
Ina Merkel
Katherine Pence
Judd Stitziel
Dorothee Wierling
Winner of a Catholic Media Association Book Award
A revelatory account of the nouvelle théologie, a clerical movement that revitalized the Catholic Church’s role in twentieth-century French political life.
Secularism has been a cornerstone of French political culture since 1905, when the republic formalized the separation of church and state. At times the barrier of secularism has seemed impenetrable, stifling religious actors wishing to take part in political life. Yet in other instances, secularism has actually nurtured movements of the faithful. Soldiers of God in a Secular World explores one such case, that of the nouvelle théologie, or new theology. Developed in the interwar years by Jesuits and Dominicans, the nouvelle théologie reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
Nouveaux théologiens charted a path between the old alliance of throne and altar and secularism’s demand for the privatization of religion. Envisioning a Church in but not of the public sphere, Catholic thinkers drew on theological principles to intervene in political questions while claiming to remain at arm’s length from politics proper. Sarah Shortall argues that this “counter-politics” was central to the mission of the nouveaux théologiens: by recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, colonialism and nuclear war. This approach found its highest expression during the Second World War, when the nouveaux théologiens led the spiritual resistance against Nazism. Claiming a powerful public voice, they collectively forged a new role for the Church amid the momentous political shifts of the twentieth century.
In Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill takes up themes that have emerged from a lifetime’s investigation into the causes of the English Revolution. However, Hill does more than analyze the origins of the Revolution. He examines the ways the seeds of change sown during the revolution, grew into transformative politics in the period following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
Hill argues that the intellectual heritage of the English Revolution was mixed. While he acknowledges its achievements, he also depicts some of its failings. Consequently, he challenges the view that radical notions faded with the Restoration, suggesting instead, that they continued in pervasive and subtle ways throughout the course of English and American history. The apparent similarity between the England of 1640 and that of 1660 is shown to be illusory. Each period’s institutions survived but the social context had changed. In this way, Hill demonstrates how intellectual consequences cannot be separated from the social and economic factors of the nation that produced them. He concludes that historians should turn their attention to the “unofficial” radical heritage that is less easy to comprehend, though no less important.
This is a highly readable and provocative account by one of the world’s foremost historians.
The notion of battles as the irreducible building blocks of war demands a single verdict of each campaign—victory, defeat, stalemate. But this kind of accounting leaves no room to record the nuances and twists of actual conflict. In Somme: Into the Breach, the noted military historian Hugh Sebag-Montefiore shows that by turning our focus to stories of the front line—to acts of heroism and moments of both terror and triumph—we can counter, and even change, familiar narratives.
Planned as a decisive strike but fought as a bloody battle of attrition, the Battle of the Somme claimed over a million dead or wounded in months of fighting that have long epitomized the tragedy and folly of World War I. Yet by focusing on the first-hand experiences and personal stories of both Allied and enemy soldiers, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore defies the customary framing of incompetent generals and senseless slaughter. In its place, eyewitness accounts relive scenes of extraordinary courage and sacrifice, as soldiers ordered “over the top” ventured into No Man’s Land and enemy trenches, where they met a hail of machine-gun fire, thickets of barbed wire, and exploding shells.
Rescuing from history the many forgotten heroes whose bravery has been overlooked, and giving voice to their bereaved relatives at home, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore reveals the Somme campaign in all its glory as well as its misery, helping us to realize that there are many meaningful ways to define a battle when seen through the eyes of those who lived it.
Last of the Spanish Renaissance men, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1504–1575) was a master of the humanist disciplines as well as an active diplomat whose correspondence provides insight into the workings of power politics in the first post-Machiavellian decades.
This account of Mendoza's diplomatic career is a living commentary on the mid-sixteenth century, the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the Reformation, with its upheavals in the European balance of power. Mendoza served as ambassador of Charles V to Venice and Rome and as governor of Siena. His political life complements the reign of the Emperor whose ambition was to become a universal monarch.
An interesting contradiction in Mendoza's thought—his humanist theories versus personal ambition—prevented him from successful implemention of tyrannical imperial policies. His role in the government of the Holy Roman Empire shows how the exertion of imperialist power, humanist ethics notwithstanding, inevitably entails corruption, hypocrisy, greed, and imbalance in the one who tries to wield this power.
Gifted to the point of universal genius, Mendoza was perhaps the foremost representative of the splendid but little-known epoch of Spanish humanism, the era between the death of Queen Isabel (1504) and the abdication of her grandson Charles V (1556). Spain's short-lived Renaissance came to an abrupt end with the accession of Philip II and the almost simultaneous onset of the Counter Reformation. To this changed Spain, under monolithic thought control now exacted and enforced by monarch and Inquisition, Mendoza returned to live the last third of his life, mostly in obscurity, and in the last few years in royal disgrace.
Based on primary sources, this first biography of Mendoza in English also examines the relevance of some of Don Diego's disputed literary works to the legend that grew up around him as a spokesman for latent unorthodox opinion.
Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received—a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies.
The only comparative study of its kind, Songbook treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category “poetry”: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. Marisa Galvez analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks—in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists—contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook’s role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.
A probing reading of leftist Jewish poets who, during the interwar period, drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples.
Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth—Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans—in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.
The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York–based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee’s “God’s Black Lamb,” Moyshe Nadir’s “Closer,” and Esther Shumiatsher’s “At the Border of China.”
These poets dreamed of a moment when “we” could mean “we workers” rather than “we Jews.” Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.
Histories of ancient Rome have long emphasized the ways in which the empire assimilated the societies it conquered, bringing civilization to the supposed barbarians. Yet interpretations of this “Romanization” of Western Europe tend to erase local identities and traditions from the historical picture, leaving us with an incomplete understanding of the diverse cultures that flourished in the provinces far from Rome.
The Sons of Remus recaptures the experiences, memories, and discourses of the societies that made up the variegated patchwork fabric of the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Focusing on Gaul and Spain, Andrew Johnston explores how the inhabitants of these provinces, though they willingly adopted certain Roman customs and recognized imperial authority, never became exclusively Roman. Their self-representations in literature, inscriptions, and visual art reflect identities rooted in a sense of belonging to indigenous communities. Provincials performed shifting roles for different audiences, rehearsing traditions at home while subverting Roman stereotypes of druids and rustics abroad.
Deriving keen insights from ancient sources—travelers’ records, myths and hero cults, timekeeping systems, genealogies, monuments—Johnston shows how the communities of Gaul and Spain balanced their local identities with their status as Roman subjects, as they preserved a cultural memory of their pre-Roman past and wove their own narratives into Roman mythology. The Romans saw themselves as the heirs of Romulus, the legendary founder of the eternal city; from the other brother, the provincials of the west received a complicated inheritance, which shaped the history of the sons of Remus.
Those who think otherwise, though they may fail, deserve our attention, says H. Stuart Hughes. In Sophisticated Rebels, Hughes shows what happened to the revolutionary spirit after the 1968 suppressions in Prague and Paris: dissenters learned their lesson and began to pursue their goals in patient, realistic, limited fashion, eschewing violence and inflammatory ideological rhetoric. Yet theirs were the voices protesting what even conformists recognize as social evils; the manipulative routine of bureaucratic authority, public and private; the soullessness of life in the sprawling conurbations European cities have become; the deadening of sensibility that allows us to screen out from consciousness the possibility of nuclear war.
Hughes takes up in turn the innovations in dissidence during a reactionary age: the foreign workers, especially Moslems, who flooded the more prosperous countries of Europe in the 1970s, creating a large underclass; the advocates of local cultural autonomy, such as the Welsh and Bretons; the independent-minded theologians Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx and Leonardo Boff arrayed against Pope John Paul II, who was himself rebelling against a dilution of Catholic theology; Poland’s Solidarity and with it the longing for reunification of a sundered continent; the frustration of Soviet dissent, from the hope of Khrushchev’s “thaw” to the sufferings of Sakharov; the collapse of Eurocommunism and the falterings of democratic socialism; and the slow advance of the German Greens toward a society on a human scale. Although European dissent, with the exception of the Greens, has failed to shake the hold of conservative rule, Hughes believes the subject matter of dissent—notably the protest against the nuclear menace—has lost none of its timeliness for the century ahead, and the dissenters themselves face the future with both stoicism and hope.
Serving as markers throughout the route are brief analyses of the relevance of novelists and social critics, among them Milan Kundera, Adam Michnik, Yuri Trifonov, Roy Medvedev, and Jürgen Habermas.
In October 1656 James Nayler, a prominent Quaker leader--second only to George Fox in the nascent movement--rode into Bristol surrounded by followers singing hosannas in deliberate imitation of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. In Leo Damrosch's trenchant reading this incident and the extraordinary outrage it ignited shed new light on Cromwell's England and on religious thought and spirituality in a turbulent period.
Damrosch gives a clear picture of the origins and early development of the Quaker movement, elucidating the intellectual foundations of Quaker theology. A number of central issues come into sharp relief, including gender symbolism and the role of women, belief in miraculous cures, and--particularly in relation to the meaning of the entry into Bristol--"signs of the in-dwelling spirit." Damrosch's account of the trial and savage punishment of Nayler for blasphemy exposes the politics of the Puritan response, the limits to Cromwellian religious liberalism.
The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus is at once a study of antinomian religious thought, of an exemplary individualist movement that suddenly found itself obliged to impose order, and of the ways in which religious and political ideas become intertwined in a period of crisis. It is also a vivid portrait of a fascinating man.
Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain.
In Sound Authorities, Edward J. Gillin focuses on hearing and aurality in Victorian Britain, claiming that the development of the natural sciences in this era cannot be understood without attending to the study of sound and music.
During this time, scientific practitioners attempted to fashion themselves as authorities on sonorous phenomena, coming into conflict with traditional musical elites as well as religious bodies. Gillin pays attention to sound in both musical and nonmusical contexts, specifically the cacophony of British industrialization. Sound Authorities begins with the place of acoustics in early nineteenth-century London, examining scientific exhibitions, lectures, spectacles, workshops, laboratories, and showrooms. He goes on to explore how mathematicians mobilized sound in their understanding of natural laws and their vision of a harmonious ordered universe. In closing, Gillin delves into the era’s religious and metaphysical debates over the place of music (and humanity) in nature, the relationship between music and the divine, and the tensions between spiritualist understandings of sound and scientific ones.
The rich conceptual and experiential relays between music and philosophy—echoes of what Theodor W. Adorno once called Klangfiguren, or "sound figures"—resonate with heightened intensity during the period of modernity that extends from early German Idealism to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This volume traces the political, historical, and philosophical trajectories of a specifically German tradition in which thinkers take recourse to music, both as an aesthetic practice and as the object of their speculative work.
The contributors examine the texts of such highly influential writers and thinkers as Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bloch, Mann, Adorno, and Lukács in relation to individual composers including Beethoven, Wagner, Schönberg, and Eisler. Their explorations of the complexities that arise in conceptualizing music as a mode of representation and philosophy as a mode of aesthetic practice thematize the ways in which the fields of music and philosophy are altered when either attempts to express itself in terms defined by the other.
Contributors: Albrecht Betz, Lydia Goehr, Beatrice Hanssen, Jost Hermand, David Farrell Krell, Ludger Lütkehaus, Margaret Moore, Rebekah Pryor Paré, Gerhard Richter, Hans Rudolf Vaget, Samuel Weber
An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture.
What’s in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe.
Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Białoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds.
Kremer’s is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments—from poetic “sound postcards,” to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.
These innovative essays probe the underlying unities that bound the early modern Atlantic world into a regional whole and trace some of the intellectual currents that flowed through the lives of the people of the four continents. Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, the essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and of commerce, legal and illegal, inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, the Protestant international that linked Boston and pietist Germany, and the awareness and meaning of the Atlantic world in the mind of that preeminent intellectual and percipient observer, David Hume.
In his Introduction, Bailyn explains that the Atlantic world was never self-enclosed or isolated from the rest of the globe but suggests that experiences in the early modern Atlantic region were distinctive in ways that shaped the course of world history.
This is a study of the strategic challenges that Soviet ballistic missile defense (BMD) programs may pose for the Western alliance. David Yost suggests that the challenges for Western policy stem partly from Soviet military programs, Soviet arms control policies, and Soviet public diplomacy campaigns, and partly from the West’s own intra-alliance disagreements and lack of consensus about Western security requirements.
By reviewing the history of Western assessments of Soviet BMD, Yost shows that long before the American strategic defense initiative (SDI) was launched, Soviet BMD system modernization and infrastructure expansion were well under way, and that current Soviet programs are not mainly reactive to the SDI. Yost judges that the Soviets are probably better prepared than the Americans to deploy a network of traditional, ground-based BMD systems that would have at least some military value in the next decade, particularly against the limited and selective retaliatory attacks envisaged in NATO strategy. He does not argue that the Soviets are preparing for a clear-cut “breakout” from current arms control limits on BMD, but he notes the risks posed by activities that could eventually amount to a “creepout” from certain treaty constraints. Because of such ambiguities and the seriousness of the strategic and political stakes, the West should be prepared to pursue any necessary countermeasures in a timely fashion. His aim in this book is to advance understanding of the possible strategic challenges to the West and to identify potential points of consensus for Western policies.
The military achievements of the emperors Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, and Basil II brought the Byzantine Empire to the height of its power by the early eleventh century. This volume presents new editions and translations of two military treatises—the Praecepta militaria of Nikephoros Phokas and the revised version included in the Taktika of Nikephoros Ouranos—outlining the tactical system used by Byzantine armies in campaigns against Muslim forces in Cilicia and Syria. Products of experienced soldiers, the texts offer a realistic view of Byzantine warfare and reveal the sophistication of Byzantine military science.
Eric McGeer places the treatises in military historical context; explores the factors that led the Byzantine army to fight as it did; and investigates morale, discipline, and leadership—all of which determined the difference between failure and success.
The common understanding is that honor belongs to a bygone era, whereas civil society belongs to the future and modern society. Heikki Lempa argues that honor was not gone or even in decline between 1700 and 1914, and that civil society was not new but had long roots that stretched into the Middle Ages. In fact, what is peculiar for this era in Germany were the deep connections between practices of honor and civil society. This study focuses on collective actions of honor and finds them, in a series of case studies, at such communal spaces as schools, theaters, lunch and dinner tables, spas, workers’ strikes, and demonstrations. It is in these collective actions that we see civil society in making.
Spaces of Honor sees civil society not primarily as an idea or an intellectual project but as a set of practices shaped in physical spaces. Around 1700, the declining power of religious authorities allowed German intellectuals to redefine civil society, starting with a new language of honor. Then, in the middle of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of voluntary associations and public spaces turned it into reality. Here, honor provided cohesion. In the nineteenth century, urbanization and industrialization ushered in powerful forces of atomization that civil society attempted to remedy. The remedy came from social and physical spaces that generated a culture of honor and emotional belonging. We find them in voluntary associations, spas, revived guilds, and labor unions. By the end of the nineteenth century, honor was deeply embedded in German civil society.
From bloodthirsty conquest to exotic romance, stereotypes of Spain abound. This new volume by distinguished historian Stanley G. Payne draws on his half-century of experience to offer a balanced, broadly chronological survey of Spanish history from the Visigoths to the present. Who were the first “Spaniards”? Is Spain a fully Western country? Was Spanish liberalism a failure? Examining Spain’s unique role in the larger history of Western Europe, Payne reinterprets key aspects of the country’s history.
Topics include Muslim culture in the peninsula, the Spanish monarchy, the empire, and the relationship between Spain and Portugal. Turning to the twentieth century, Payne discusses the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War. The book’s final chapters focus on the Franco regime, the nature of Spanish fascism, and the special role of the military. Analyzing the figure of Franco himself, Payne seeks to explain why some Spaniards still regard him with respect, while many others view the late dictator with profound loathing.
Framed by reflections on the author’s own formation as a Hispanist and his evaluation of the controversy about “historical memory” in contemporary Spain, this volume offers deeply informed insights into both the history and the historiography of a unique country.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book
Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700 was first published in 1984. 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.
Spanish and Portuguese expansion substantially altered the social, political, and economic contours of the modern world. In his book, Lyle McAlister provides a narrative and interpretive history of the exploration and settlement of the Americas by Spain and Portugal.
McAlister divides this period (and the book) into three parts. First, he describes the formation of Old World societies with particular attention to those features that influenced the directions and forms of overseas expansion. Second, he traces the dynamic processes of conquest and colonization that between 1492 and about 1570 firmly established Spanish and Portuguese dominion in the New World. The third part deals with colonial growth and consolidation down to about 1700. McAlister's main themes are: the post-conquest territorial expansion that established the limits of what later came to be called Latin America, the emergence of distinctively Spanish and Portuguese American societies and economies, the formation of systems of imperial control and exploitation, and the ways in which conflicts between imperial and American interests were reconciled.
This comprehensive history, with its extensive bibliographic essay and attention to historiographic issues, will be a standard reference for students and scholars of the period.
This book explores the abolition of African slavery in Spanish Cuba from 1817 to 1886—from the first Anglo-Spanish agreement to abolish the slave trade until the removal from Cuba of the last vestige of black servitude. Making extensive use of heretofore untapped research sources from the Spanish archives, the author has developed new perspectives on nineteenth-century Spanish policy in Cuba. He skillfully interrelates the problem of slavery with international politics, with Cuban conservative and liberal movements, and with political and economic developments in Spain itself.
Arthur Corwin finds that the study of this problem falls naturally into two phases, the first of which, 1817–1860, traces the gradual reduction of the African traffic to the Spanish Antilles and constitutes, in effect, a study in Anglo-Spanish diplomacy. He gives special attention here to the aggressive nature of British abolitionist diplomacy and the mounting but generally ineffective indignation resulting from Spanish failure to apply sanctions against the traffic, as well as the increasing North American interest in the annexation of Cuba. The first phase has for its principal theme the manner in which for decades Spain feigned compliance with agreements to end the slave trade while actually protecting slaveholding interests as the best means of holding Cuba.
The American Civil War, which destroyed the greatest bulwark of black slavery in the New World, marked the opening of a new phase, 1860–1886. The author strongly emphasizes here such influences as the rise of the Creole reform movement in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which, reading the signs of the times, gave the initial impulse to a Spanish abolitionist movement and contributed to closing the Cuban slave trade in 1866; the liberal revolution of 1868 in Spain and its promise of colonial reforms; the outbreak of the great Creole rebellion in Cuba, 1868–1878, and the abolitionist promises of the rebel chieftains; the threat of American intervention and the abolitionist pressure of American diplomacy; and the protests of the Spanish reactionaries in Spain and Cuba, leading to further procrastination in Madrid. The second phase has as its principal theme the shaping, through all these intertwined factors, of Spain’s first measure of gradual emancipation, the Moret Law of 1870, and all subsequent steps toward abolition.
This book explores the trials of Spanish democracy from the death of Franco to the present. But the heart of the story is the generation that came of age in the 1960s, assumed political power, and formed the first Socialist government in 1982 with Felipe González as Prime Minister, which was returned to power in four consecutive elections. Starting in 1993, however, the government came under siege. High officials were accused of authorizing the assassination of as many as twenty-eight Basque nationalists suspected of terrorism over the years, and of covering up these crimes. This scandal, along with other disclosures of corruption and serious law-breaking, shook the country's confidence in its legal and political institutions and in its ability to hold its leaders to the rule of law.
The author probes for the roots of these events in the character of the generation that assumed power and in the immature nature of the civil society it inherited. Facing unusually high unemployment, internal economic and social pressures, the stringent requirements for joining the European Union, and the demands of Catalan and Basque nationalists, the government lost its way and was eventually voted out of office.
Using Spain as the example, the book examines issues of governance, social change, and internal nationalist movements as they relate to the civil society and the wider polity everywhere.
The story of Spain during World War II has largely been viewed as the story of dictator Francisco Franco’s foreign diplomacy in the aftermath of civil war. Wayne H. Bowen now goes behind the scenes of fascism to reveal less-studied dimensions of Spanish history. By examining the conflicts within the Franco regime and the daily lives of Spaniards, he has written the first book-length assessment of the regime’s formative years and the struggle of its citizens to survive.
Bowen argues that the emphasis of previous scholars on Spain’s foreign affairs is misplaced—that even the most pro-Axis elements of Franco’s regime were more concerned with domestic politics, the potential for civil unrest, and poverty than with events in Europe. Synthesizing a wide range of Spanish-language scholarship and recently declassified government documents, Bowen reveals how Franco’s government stumbled in the face of world war, inexperienced leaders, contradictory political ideology, and a divided populace. His book tells the dramatic story of a six-year argument among the general, the politicians, and the clerics on nothing less than what should be the nature of the new Spain, touching on issues as diverse as whether the monarchy should be restored and how women should dress.
Examining the effects of World War II years on key facets of Spanish life—Catholicism, the economy, women, leisure, culture, opposition to Franco, and domestic politics—Bowen explores a wide range of topics: the grinding poverty following the civil war, exacerbated by poor economic decisions; restrictions on employment for women versus the relative autonomy enjoyed by female members of the Falange; the efforts of the Church to recover from near decimation; and methods of repression practiced by the regime against leftists, separatists, and Freemasons. He also shows that the lives of most Spaniards remained apolitical and centered on work, family, and leisure marked by the popularity of American movies and the resurgence of loyalty to regional sports teams.
Unlike other studies that have focused exclusively on Spain’s foreign affairs during the Second World War, Bowen’s work stresses the importance of the home front not only in keeping Spain out of the war but also in keeping Franco in power. He shows that in spite of internal problems and external distractions, Franco’s government managed to achieve its goals of state survival and internal peace. As the only single-volume survey of this era available in English, Spain during World War II is a masterful synthesis that offers a much-needed alternative view of the Franco regime during crucial times as it provides a testament to the Spanish people’s will to survive.
“No man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain.”—Ernest Hemingway
In 1937, Hank Rubin, a twenty-year-old Jewish pre-med student at UCLA, volunteered for service in the International Brigades combating fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In his illustrated memoir, Rubin reflects on those events, making no apologies for his youthful impulsiveness, bravado, and ideology, but recalling the heroics and sufferings he witnessed and experienced in Spain, as well as the disappointing treatment he received upon his return.
Using recently declassified documents from Spain and the United States, personal interviews, and unpublished and published Spanish, German, British, and U.S. records, Spaniards and Nazi Germany makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Hispano-German relations during the 1930s and 1940s. This study shows that Naziphiles within the Spanish Falange, Spain's fascist party, made a concerted effort to bring their nation into World War II, and that only the indecisiveness of dictator Francisco Franco and diplomatic mistakes by the Nazis prevented them from succeeding.
Bowen demonstrates that while Spain was neutral in World War II, its policies clearly favored the Axis, at least in the early stages of the war. Franco, who had emerged victorious from the Spanish Civil War in 1939 largely because of support from Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, even carefully considered entering World War II on the side of Nazi Germany.
By the late 1930s, members of the Falange saw World War II as a revolutionary opportunity, a chance to lead Spain into a new age as a partner with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the head of a New Europe of social justice and authoritarian regimes. By the end of 1939, a significant minority of pro- Nazi Spaniards were unhappy that Spain had not entered the war and remade itself to fit better into Hitler's New Order. Bowen argues that support for Nazi Germany in Spain and among Spanish communities throughout Europe was both wide and deep, and that this enthusiasm for the Third Reich and the New Order it promised to bring lasted until the end of the war. Despite statements of neutrality by the Spanish government, the Franco regime was well aware of this collaboration by Spanish citizens as late as 1944-1945 and did little to stop it. Had Hitler been more interested in bringing Spain into his empire, or exploiting the pro-Nazi sentiments of these thousands of Spaniards, he might have replaced Franco with someone more willing to support his interests even as late as 1943.
Spaniards and Nazi Germany presents many possibilities for what might have been a far different outcome of World War II in Europe. It shows that even without the full support of the Spanish or German governments, pro-Nazi Spaniards, even if they did not quite bring Spain into the war, added to the strength of the Third Reich by serving in its armies, working in its factories, and promoting its ideas to other nations.
“This is the first complete history of Spanish Catholicism in English. The history of the Spanish church is rich, complex, and controversial, and this enormous undertaking by Stanley Payne is all the more praiseworthy in view of his determination not to limit his study to the church alone, but to investigate the relationship between the Catholic Church and Spanish culture and nationhood in general.”—Isaac Aviv, Mediterranean Historical Review
How does a totalitarian government influence the arts, and how do the arts respond? Spanish Film Under Franco raises these important questions, giving English speakers a starting point in their study of Spanish cinema.
After a brief overview of Spanish film before Franco, the author proceeds to a discussion of censorship as practiced by the Franco regime. The response of directors to censorship—the “franquista aesthetic,” or “aesthetic of repression,” with its highly metaphorical, oblique style—is explored in the works of Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, and other important directors.
Virginia Higginbotham combines historical perspective with detailed critical analysis and interpretation of many famous Franco-era films. She shows how directors managed to evade the censors and raise public awareness of issues relating to the Spanish Civil War and the repressions of the Franco regime.
Film has always performed an educational function in Spain, reaching masses of poor and uneducated citizens. And sometimes, as this study also reveals, Spanish film has been ignored when the questions it raised became too painful or demanding.
The author concludes with a look at post-Franco cinema and the directions it has taken. For anyone interested in modern Spanish film, this book will be essential reading.
Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and political forces that transformed Spain’s diverse peoples and polities into a unified nation.
Antonio Feros traces evolving ideas of Spanish nationhood and Spanishness in the discourses of educated elites, who debated whether the union of Spain’s kingdoms created a single fatherland (patria) or whether Spain remained a dynastic monarchy comprised of separate nations. If a unified Spain was emerging, was it a pluralistic nation, or did “Spain” represent the imposition of the dominant Castilian culture over the rest? The presence of large communities of individuals with Muslim and Jewish ancestors and the colonization of the New World brought issues of race to the fore as well. A nascent civic concept of Spanish identity clashed with a racialist understanding that Spaniards were necessarily of pure blood and “white,” unlike converted Jews and Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans.
Gradually Spaniards settled the most intractable of these disputes. By the time the liberal Constitution of Cádiz (1812) was ratified, consensus held that almost all people born in Spain’s territories, whatever their ethnicity, were Spanish.
“Masterful…An indispensable warning for our own time.”
—Samuel Moyn
“Magisterial…Covers this dark history with insight and skill…A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history.”
—The Nation
For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism.
“It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is…A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little.”
—Mark Mazower, Financial Times
“From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element—the Jews—aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies…The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers.”
—Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs
As a study of the greatest middle class party of Imperial Germany, The Splintered Party is inevitably, in its broadest aspect, an inquiry into the weaknesses of liberalism in the Empire of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. How did the National Liberals, the dominant force in the Reichstag of the 1870s, become by 1914 a spent and divided power? Dan White explores this question from a new perspective, emphasizing regional circumstances as primary agents of the party’s decline. The resulting portrait underscores the paradox of the National Liberals: a party with strength in all areas of the Empire, a rarity before 1914, yet a party whose impact was undermined by divisions among its regional branches.
In The Splintered Party the former Grand Duchy of Hessen serves as a testing ground where the regional foundations of National Liberalism can be exposed. As Professor White points out, the party’s reversals on the Imperial plane after 1878—rejection by Bismarck, electoral defeats, internal splits—not only ended its early primacy in German affairs but also shifted political initiative from Berlin and the Reichstag delegation to the National Liberal branches in the states and provinces, which had maintained unity, power, and alliances with local government in spite of the upheaval above them. The consequences of this change become visible through close examination of the political and social structure in Hessen. On the regional level a liberalism based on the claim to majority representation by the notables (Honoratioren) of bourgeois society, a creed no longer plausible in national politics, remained defensible. Through the Heidelberg Declaration of 1884 the National Liberals of the German Southwest attempted to buttress this approach with an economic and social platform and, simultaneously, to make it the impulse of the national party’s revival. But they succeeded only in deferring National Liberalism’s adjustment to democratic politics and in subordinating their movement to the clash of regional and constituency interests. The result was a chronically splintered party.
Against the backdrop of this main theme, White delineates several additional features of the changing political and social scene in Imperial Germany—the local power of the notables, Bismarck’s skills as a political manager, the character of agrarian discontent and rural anti-Semitism, the steady advance of socialism. The uniquely German element in National Liberalism’s failure is assessed in a concluding comparison with the development of liberal politics in Britain and Italy.
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