Vanguard of Nazism is the first full history of the German Free Corps and of its contributions to the rise of Nazism. This dramatic and horrifying story sheds new light on a dark corner of the recent past, and it has an unhappy relevance to neo-Nazist tendencies in Germany today.
The newly established Weimar Republic, defenseless against the Communists, hired groups of volunteer soldiers (the Free Corps) to fight for it. These volunteers—born of the pre–World War I youth movement, nourished on the battlefields of the War, unreconciled to defeat and determined to avenge it—fought for the Republic (which they despised) from Munich to Berlin, from Düsseldorf to the Baltic. When the Republic, in fear, tried to disband them, they went underground until they reappeared in the brown shirts of the Nazis.
The savage spirit, brutal acts, and perverted ideology of the men whom Hermann Goering called “the first soldiers of the Third Reich” stand out in glaring relief in this record. The book is based on contemporary newspaper accounts and government documents, but the story it tells would hardly be credible were it not for the memoirs of the Free Corps fighters themselves, from which Robert G. L. Waite quotes liberally. With this material, Waite is able to show that the Free Corps contributed to Hitler’s Germany powerful political shock troops, labor camps, a youth movement, a well-developed Führer concept, and the basic tenets of National Socialist ideology.
The movement, half a million strong, swept Germany at a time when Hitler was an unknown political agitator. But when Hitler came to power, leaders of the Free Corps emerged as leaders of the Third Reich. Waite lists the names of these men in a valuable appendix to the book, which shows the activities of each man in both movements.
Waite emphasizes and substantiates the thesis that National Socialism really began in the months and years immediately following World War I. Aside from its importance as history, the story of these self-styled Freebooters has all the ingredients of a fantastic adventure tale: intrigues, conspiracies, quick reversals, and sudden death follow each other in dramatic succession.
In 1869, some seven hundred Catholic bishops traveled to Rome to participate in the first church-wide council in three hundred years. The French Revolution had shaken the foundations of the church. Pope Pius IX was determined to set things right through a declaration by the council that the pope was infallible.
John W. O’Malley brings to life the bitter, schism-threatening conflicts that erupted at Vatican I. The pope’s zeal in pressing for infallibility raised questions about the legitimacy of the council, at the same time as Italian forces under Garibaldi seized the Papal States and were threatening to take control of Rome itself. Gladstone and Bismarck entered the fray. As its temporal dominion shrank, the Catholic Church became more pope-centered than ever before, with lasting consequences.
“O’Malley’s account of the debate over infallibility is masterful.”
—Commonweal
“[O’Malley] excels in describing the ways in which the council initiated deep changes that still affect the everyday lives of Catholics.”
—First Things
“An eminent scholar of modern Catholicism…O’Malley…invit[es] us to see Catholicism’s recent history as profoundly shaped by and against the imposing legacy of Pius IX.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Gripping…O’Malley continues to engage us with a past that remains vitally present.”
—The Tablet
“The worldwide dean of church historians has completed his trinity of works on church councils…[A] masterclass in church history…telling us as much about the church now as then.”
—America
An illuminating study of early modern efforts to regulate sound in women’s residential institutions, and how the noises of city life—both within and beyond their walls—defied such regulation.
Amid the Catholic reforms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the number of women and girls housed in nunneries, reformatories, and charity homes grew rapidly throughout the city of Florence. Julia Rombough follows the efforts of legal, medical, and ecclesiastical authorities to govern enclosed women, and uncovers the experiences of the women themselves as they negotiated strict sensory regulations. At a moment when quiet was deeply entangled with ideals of feminine purity, bodily health, and spiritual discipline, those in power worked constantly to silence their charges and protect them from the urban din beyond institutional walls.
Yet the sounds of a raucous metropolis found their way inside. The noise of merchants hawking their wares, sex workers laboring and socializing with clients, youth playing games, and coaches rumbling through the streets could not be contained. Moreover, enclosed women themselves contributed to the urban soundscape. While some embraced the pursuit of silence and lodged regular complaints about noise, others broke the rules by laughing, shouting, singing, and conversing. Rombough argues that ongoing tensions between legal regimes of silence and the inevitable racket of everyday interactions made women’s institutions a flashpoint in larger debates about gender, class, health, and the regulation of urban life in late Renaissance Italy.
Attuned to the vibrant sounds of life behind walls of stone and sanction, A Veil of Silence illuminates a revealing history of early modern debates over the power of the senses.
When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and national pride, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that “Victorian values” also included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.”
The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is an in-depth look at the ways that the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor. It considers how the Victorian inheritance has been represented in literature, politics, film, and visual culture; the ways in which modernists and progressives have sought to differentiate themselves from an image of the Victorian; and how conservatives (and some liberals) have sought to revive elements of nineteenth-century life. Nostalgic and critical impulses combine to fix an understanding of the Victorians in the popular imagination.
Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.
Although more than one hundred years have passed since the death of Queen Victoria, the impact of her time is still fresh. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror speaks to diverse audiences in literary and cultural studies, in addition to those interested in visual culture and contemporary politics, and situates detailed close readings of literary and cinematic texts in the context of a larger argument about the legacies of an era not as distant as we might like to think.
As Teresa Longo’s groundbreaking examination reveals, North America’s dissident literature has its roots in the Latin American literary tradition. From Pablo Neruda’s Canto General to Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—among others—contemporary writers throughout the Americas have forced us to reconsider the United States’s relationship with Latin America, and more broadly with the Global South. Highlighting the importance of reading and re-reading the Latin American canon in the United States, Longo finds that literature can be an instrument of progressive social change, and argues that small literary presses—City Lights, Curbstone, and Seven Stories—have made that dissent visible in the United States. In the book’s final two chapters on the Robert F. Kennedy Center’s Speak Truth to Power initiative and the publication of Marc Falkoff’s Poems from Guantánamo, the author turns our attention further outward, probing the role poetry, theater, and photography play in global human rights work.
Locating the work of artists and writers alongside that of scholars and legal advocates, Visible Dissent not only unveils the staying-power of committed writing, it honors the cross-currents and the on-the-ground implications of humane political engagement.
This book explores the parallel and yet profoundly different ways of seeing the outside world and engaging with the foreign at two important moments of dislocation in Chinese history, namely, the early medieval period commonly known as the Northern and Southern Dynasties (317–589 CE), and the nineteenth century. Xiaofei Tian juxtaposes literary, historical, and religious materials from these two periods in comparative study, bringing them together in their unprecedentedly large-scale interactions, and their intense fascination, with foreign cultures.
By examining various cultural forms of representation from the two periods, Tian attempts to sort out modes of seeing the world that inform these writings. These modes, Tian argues, were established in early medieval times and resurfaced, in permutations and metamorphoses, in nineteenth-century writings on encountering the Other. This book is for readers who are interested not only in early medieval or nineteenth-century China but also in issues of representation, travel, visualization, and modernity.
In an age when few people ventured beyond their place of birth, André Palmeiro left Portugal on a journey to the far side of the world. Bearing the title “Father Visitor,” he was entrusted with the daunting task of inspecting Jesuit missions spanning from Mozambique to Japan. A global history in the guise of a biography, The Visitor tells the story of a theologian whose extraordinary travels bore witness to the fruitful contact—and violent collision—of East and West in the early modern era.
In India, Palmeiro was thrust into a controversy over the missionary tactics of Roberto Nobili, who insisted on dressing the part of an indigenous ascetic. Palmeiro walked across Southern India to inspect Nobili’s mission, recording fascinating observations along the way. As the highest-ranking Jesuit in India, he also coordinated missions to the Mughal Emperors and the Ethiopian Christians, as well as the first European explorations of the East African interior and the highlands of Tibet.
Orders from Rome sent Palmeiro farther afield in 1626, to Macau, where he oversaw Jesuit affairs in East Asia. He played a crucial role in creating missions in Vietnam and seized the opportunity to visit the Chinese mission, trekking thousands of miles to Beijing as one of China’s first Western tourists. When the Tokugawa Shogunate brutally cracked down on Christians in Japan—where neither he nor any Westerner had power to intervene—Palmeiro died from anxiety over the possibility that the last Jesuits still alive would apostatize under torture.
On June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan delivered a historic address to the British Parliament, promising that the United States would give people around the world “a voice in their own destiny” in the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism. While British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher celebrated Reagan’s visit and thanked him for putting “freedom on the offensive,” over 100,000 Britons marched from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square to protest his arrival and call for nuclear disarmament. Reagan’s homecoming was equally eventful, with 1,000,000 protesters marking his return with a rally for nuclear disarmament in Central Park—the largest protest in American history up to that point.
Employing a wide range of previously unexamined primary sources, Anthony M. Eames demonstrates how the Reagan and Thatcher administrations used innovations in public diplomacy to build back support for their foreign policy agendas at a moment of widespread popular dissent. A Voice in Their Own Destiny traces how competition between the governments of Reagan and Thatcher, the Anglo-American antinuclear movement, and the Soviet peace offensive sparked a revolution in public diplomacy.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press