Results by title

3745 books match the query 'Europe' and 117 start with d

Sort by

Democratization in the Nordic World

David Delfs Erbo Andersen

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden enjoy some of the happiest populations and highest standards of living in the world, thanks in part to stable, democratic systems of government. Here, David Delfs Erbo Andersen presents a syncretic history of political and socioeconomic developments in the three Scandinavian countries since the early modern period, and contrasts their peaceful transitions with the more dramatic histories of otherwise similar European countries, like France and Germany. Unlike these and many other countries—the United States among them—Scandinavia’s transition to democracy from monarchy was not marked by major violent upheavals or extreme political antagonism.

Rather, Scandinavia’s peaceful process of democratization owed itself to the development of a penetrative bureaucracy in the early modern period and the activism of cooperative associations, first of farmers in the early nineteenth century and then of industrialized workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thanks to the gradual, relatively consensual adoption of political reforms and social norms, the history of “Nordic democratic exceptionalism” today helps account for the ongoing stability of the Scandinavian countries.

[more]

Demographic Avant-Garde

Jews in Bohemia between the Enlightenment and the Shoah

Jana Vobecká

Central European University Press, 2013

This book studies the unique demographic behavior of Jews in Bohemia (the historic part of the Czech Republic), starting from a moment in history when industrialization in Central Europe was still far away in the future, and when Jews were still living legally restricted lives in ghettos. Very early on, however, from the 18th century onwards, Jews developed patterns of decreasing mortality and fertility that was not observed among the gentile majority in Bohemia; patterns which established them as a demographic avant-garde population in all of Europe.

[more]

Demon Lovers

Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief

Walter Stephens

University of Chicago Press, 2002

On September 20, 1587, Walpurga Hausmännin of Dillingen in southern Germany was burned at the stake as a witch. Although she had confessed to committing a long list of maleficia (deeds of harmful magic), including killing forty—one infants and two mothers in labor, her evil career allegedly began with just one heinous act—sex with a demon. Fornication with demons was a major theme of her trial record, which detailed an almost continuous orgy of sexual excess with her diabolical paramour Federlin "in many divers places, . . . even in the street by night."

As Walter Stephens demonstrates in Demon Lovers, it was not Hausmännin or other so-called witches who were obsessive about sex with demons—instead, a number of devout Christians, including trained theologians, displayed an uncanny preoccupation with the topic during the centuries of the "witch craze." Why? To find out, Stephens conducts a detailed investigation of the first and most influential treatises on witchcraft (written between 1430 and 1530), including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches).

Far from being credulous fools or mindless misogynists, early writers on witchcraft emerge in Stephens's account as rational but reluctant skeptics, trying desperately to resolve contradictions in Christian thought on God, spirits, and sacraments that had bedeviled theologians for centuries. Proof of the physical existence of demons—for instance, through evidence of their intercourse with mortal witches—would provide strong evidence for the reality of the supernatural, the truth of the Bible, and the existence of God. Early modern witchcraft theory reflected a crisis of belief—a crisis that continues to be expressed today in popular debates over angels, Satanic ritual child abuse, and alien abduction.

[more]

Demos Assembled

Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880

Stephen W. Sawyer

University of Chicago Press, 2018

An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century.

Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being.

Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.

[more]

Demos Rising

Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800–1850

Stephen W. Sawyer

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A political history exploring the concept of demos in the French government during the period of 1800 to 1850.

In his previous book, Demos Assembled, historian Stephen W. Sawyer offered a transatlantic account of the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. In Demos Rising, he presents readers of political history with a prequel whose ambitious claim is that a genuine demos became possible in France only with the development of government regulation and administration. Focusing on democracy as a form of administration rather than as a form of sovereignty allows Sawyer to explore urban planning, work and private enterprise, health administration, and much more as cornerstones of a self-governing society of equals.

Examining the period between 1800 and 1850, Sawyer studies a set of thinkers who debated at length over the material problems of everyday life, sparking calls for political action and social reform in the face of conflict wreaked by deforestation, urbanization, health crises, labor relations, industrial capitalism, religious tensions, and imperial expansion. The solutions to these problems, Sawyer argues, were sought—and sometimes found—not through elections, as one might assume, but rather through the “care for all” promised by modern administrative power, regulatory intervention, and social welfare programs. By studying this profound transformation in governance, the book wagers, we can better understand the origin and meaning of democracy—even when events in our own time have thrown the concept into doubt.

[more]

Deprived of Sense and Intellect

Insanity, Possession, and Diagnosis in Medieval Europe

Leigh Ann Craig

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Medieval saints were thought to be able to provide miraculous cures for a wide variety of illnesses, and about one tenth of their miracles involved the restoration of sanity to those who had lost their minds. Deprived of Sense and Intellect explores 460 of these stories written across Latin Christendom between 1240 and 1500. The study uses the lens of critical disability studies to bridge the gap between discussions of demonic possession and naturally arising somatic conditions, treating all these narratives about disability and miraculous healing not as documentation of changes to the function of an individual person, but instead as evidence of substantial and intrusive interpersonal tensions in medieval communities.

While medieval communities assigned these tensions to a malfunction of consciousness in a single person, medieval miracle texts also reveal how the function and malfunction of consciousness was named and classified. In studying these texts, Leigh Ann Craig explores the terminology and rhetoric used to diagnose a loss of mind as either from natural causes or as an effect of demonic predation, tracing the use of Latin vocabulary in medical compendia, law, and theology. Deprived of Sense and Intellect finds that since diagnoses were difficult and frequently subject to doubt, they varied based on regional cultures of disability in northern and southern Europe, the influences on the development of community consensus in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages, and assumptions based on gender, material evidence, and self-diagnosis.

[more]

Designing English

Early Literature on the Page

Daniel Wakelin

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2017

Early manuscripts in the English language included religious works, plays, romances, poetry, and songs, as well as charms, notebooks, and scientific documents. Given this vast array, how did scribes choose to arrange the words and images on the page, and what visual guides did they give early readers to help them use and understand each manuscript?

Working beyond the traditions established for Latin, scribes of English needed to be more inventive, using each book as an opportunity to redesign. Surveying eight centuries of graphic design in manuscripts and inscriptions, Designing English focuses on the craft, agency, and intentions of scribes, painters, and engravers from the Anglo-Saxon to the early Tudor periods. The book examines format, layout, and decoration, as well as bilingual manuscripts and oral recitations, weighing the balance of ingenuity and copying, imagination and practicality, behind early English book design. With over ninety illustrations, drawn especially from the holdings of the Bodleian Library, Designing English gives a comprehensive overview of English books and other material texts across the Middle Ages.

[more]

Designs of Destruction

The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century

Lucia Allais

University of Chicago Press, 2018

How architectural monuments survived and historical preservation was reinvented during the destructions of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century was highly destructive, but from its landscapes of ruins was born a new architectural type: the cultural monument. In the wake of World War I, an international movement arose which aimed to protect architectural monuments in large numbers, and regardless of style, hoping not only to keep them safe from future conflicts but also to make them worthy of protection from more quotidian forms of destruction. An evolving group—including architects, intellectuals, art historians, archaeologists, curators, and lawyers—grew out of the new diplomacy of the League of Nations. During and after World War II, it became affiliated with the Allied Military Government and was eventually absorbed by the UN as UNESCO. By the 1970s, this organization had begun granting World Heritage status to a global register of significant sites—from buildings to bridges, shrines to city centers, ruins to colossi.

Examining key episodes in the history of this preservation effort—including projects for the Parthenon, the Cathedral of St-Lô, the temples of Abu Simbel, and the Bamyian Buddahs —Lucia Allais demonstrates how the group deployed the notion of culture to shape architectural sites, and how architecture in turn shaped the very idea of global culture. Designs of Destruction emphasizes how the technical project of ensuring various buildings’ longevity jolted preservation into establishing a transnational set of codes, values, and practices. At the same time, this paradoxically helped integrate technologies of destruction—from bombs to bulldozers—into cultural governance. Designs of Destruction not only offers a fascinating narrative of cultural diplomacy, based on extensive archival findings; it also contributes an important new chapter in the intellectual history of modernity by showing the manifold ways architectural form is charged with concretizing abstract ideas and ideals, even in its destruction.

[more]

Detente in Europe

The Soviet Union & The West Since 1953

John Van Oudenaren

Duke University Press, 1991

The monumental events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union must be understood, Jan Van Oudenaren argues, in the context of a process of East-West détente begun in 1953 in the aftermath of Stalin’s death. Van Oudenaren’s comprehensive and timely study examines the development of Soviet-Western détente from the death of Stalin to the unification of Germany.
In redefining détente as a process, rather than a code of conduct, Van Oudenaren looks to its origins in Soviet policy earlier than previously identified and analyzes both its history and character. His study explores the restoration of four-power negotiations in Germany and Austria in the mid-1950s, their subsequent breakdown in the Berlin crisis, their unexpected revival in 1990 in the form of “two plus four” talks on German unity, and the future of the Soviet Union as a European power.
Among the key elements of détente discussed are diplomacy, particularly the role of summit conferences; cooperation among parliaments, political parties, and trade unions; arms control; economic relations; and links among cultural institutions, churches, and peace movements.

[more]

Development of Southern French and Catalan Society, 718-1050

By Archibald R. Lewis

University of Texas Press, 1965

Early in the eighth century, the current of the Muslim movement that inundated northern Spain crept over the Pyrenees to spread across a portion of the French Midi. From the north the tide of Carolingian conquest forced the Muslims back and took in these same southern French and northern Spanish provinces. During the same era the Vikings raided intermittently and with varying degrees of intensity along the seacoasts and up the inland waterways, sometimes controlling considerable areas for extended periods.

These raids and conquests inevitably affected the way of life of the people of southern France and Catalonia. Contemporary travelers and later scholars have noted that the feudal traditions and obligations that were so strong in the north seemed very weak or nonexistent in the south. They found that the land seemed to be held largely as allods, not as feudal fiefs; they saw that women held positions of surprising power, that throughout the area there was great emphasis on money, and that the traditions of Roman and Visigothic law still survived.

Although scholars have noted these differences, no one has made a comprehensive study of southern French and Catalan society as a whole. It is to fill this void that Archibald Lewis provides this volume. In a detailed and scholarly study, based largely upon original records and chronicles, he examines the familial, social, economic, governmental, military, and religious life of the area from 718 to 1050 A.D.

Lewis gives as comprehensive a picture as the records will permit of the society that existed in the early eighth century, describes and discusses the major changes which took place during the next three centuries, and analyzes their causes and effects. This study, which includes careful and detailed notes and an extensive bibliography, provides a reliable and long-needed reference tool.

[more]

Developments in German Politics 3

Stephen Padgett, William E. Paterson, and Gordon Smith, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

Once the miracle economy of the continent, Germany now staggers under the massive cost burden of unification while it struggles to come to terms with global economic change. Failure to confront the underlying economic weakness has discredited political institutions and patterns of political behavior that were once regarded as the ‘efficient secret’ of economic success. The country stands at the crossroads between economic reform and a spiral of economic decline with unpredictable fallout. Bringing together entirely new chapters by leading authorities in the field, Developments in German Politics 3 examines the unfolding crisis of German political economy; its repercussions for polity, politics, and policy; and the consequences for Germany’s role in Europe and the wider world. Like its predecessors, this book will be of interest to all concerned with European politics and will be necessary reading for students of German politics and society.

Contributors. David P. Conradt, Russell J. Dalton, Kenneth Dyson, Klaus H. Goetz, Simon Green, Adrian Hyde-Price, Charlie Jeffery, Stephen Padgett, William E. Paterson, Wolfgang Rüdig, Martin Seeleib-Kaiser, Gordon Smith, Roland Sturm

[more]

Developments in German Politics 3

Stephen Padgett, William E. Paterson, and Gordon Smith, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

[more]

Diagramming Devotion

Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s Poems in Praise of the Cross

Jeffrey F. Hamburger

University of Chicago Press, 2020

During the European Middle Ages, diagrams provided a critical tool of analysis in cosmological and theological debates. In addition to drawing relationships among diverse areas of human knowledge and experience, diagrams themselves generated such knowledge in the first place. In Diagramming Devotion, Jeffrey F. Hamburger examines two monumental works that are diagrammatic to their core: a famous set of picture poems of unrivaled complexity by the Carolingian monk Hrabanus Maurus, devoted to the praise of the cross, and a virtually unknown commentary on Hrabanus’s work composed almost five hundred years later by the Dominican friar Berthold of Nuremberg. Berthold’s profusely illustrated elaboration of Hrabnus translated his predecessor’s poems into a series of almost one hundred diagrams. By examining Berthold of Nuremberg’s transformation of a Carolingian classic, Hamburger brings modern and medieval visual culture into dialogue, traces important changes in medieval visual culture, and introduces new ways of thinking about diagrams as an enduring visual and conceptual model.

[more]

Dialogue on the Infinity of Love

Tullia d'Aragona

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona (1510–56) entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love.

Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature.

By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality.

[more]

Dialogue with Death

The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War

Arthur Koestler

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler, a German exile writing for a British newspaper, was arrested by Nationalist forces in Málaga. He was then sentenced to execution and spent every day awaiting death—only to be released three months later under pressure from the British government. Out of this experience, Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, his most acclaimed work in the United States, about a man arrested and executed in a Communist prison.

Dialogue with Death is Koestler’s riveting account of the fall of Málaga to rebel forces, his surreal arrest, and his three months facing death from a prison cell. Despite the harrowing circumstances, Koestler manages to convey the stress of uncertainty, fear, and deprivation of human contact with the keen eye of a reporter.

[more]

Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past

Colonial Nahua and Quechua Elites in Their Own Words

Justyna Olko

University Press of Colorado, 2018

Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past is a critical, annotated anthology of indigenous-authored texts, including the Nahua, Quechua, and Spanish originals, through which native peoples and Spaniards were able to convey their own perspectives on Spanish colonial order. It is the first volume to bring together native testimonies from two different areas of Spanish expansion in the Americas to examine comparatively these geographically and culturally distant realities of indigenous elites in the colonial period.

In each chapter a particular document is transcribed exactly as it appears in the original manuscript or colonial printed document, with the editor placing it in historical context and considering the degree of European influence. These texts show the nobility through documents they themselves produced or caused to be produced—such as wills, land deeds, and petitions—and prioritize indigenous ways of expression, perspectives, and concepts. Together, the chapters demonstrate that native elites were independent actors as well as agents of social change and indigenous sustainability in colonial society. Additionally, the volume diversifies the commonly homogenous term “cacique” and recognizes the differences in elites throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes.

Showcasing important and varied colonial genres of indigenous writing, Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past reveals some of the realities, needs, strategies, behaviors, and attitudes associated with the lives of the elites. Each document and its accompanying commentary provide additional insight into how the nobility negotiated everyday life. The book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Mesoamerican and Andean history, as well as those interested in indigenous colonial societies in the Spanish Empire.

Contributors: Agnieszka Brylak, Maria Castañeda de la Paz, Katarzyna Granicka, Gregory Haimovich, Anastasia Kalyuta, Julia Madajczak, Patrycja Prządka-Giersz

[more]

Dialogues and Addresses

Madame de Maintenon

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Born Françoise d'Aubigné, a criminal's daughter reduced to street begging as a child, Madame de Maintenon (1653-1719) made an improbable rise from impoverished beginnings to the summit of power as the second, secret wife of Louis XIV. An educational reformer, Maintenon founded and directed the celebrated academy for aristocratic women at Saint-Cyr. This volume presents the dialogues and addresses in which Maintenon explains her controversial philosophy of education for women.

Denounced by her contemporaries as a political schemer and religious fanatic, Maintenon has long been criticized as an opponent of gender equality. The writings in this volume faithfully reflect Maintenon's respect for social hierarchy and her stoic call for women to accept the duties of their state in life. But the writings also echo Maintenon's more feminist concerns: the need to redefine the virtues in the light of women's experience, the importance of naming the constraints on women's freedom, and the urgent need to remedy the scandalous neglect of the education of women.

In her writings as well as in her own model school at Saint-Cyr, Maintenon embodies the demand for educational reform as the key to the empowerment of women at the dawn of modernity.

[more]

Diaries by Jewish and Christian Adolescents

Reconstructing the Social Reality of Pre- and Post-Holocaust Hungary

Gergely Kunt

Central European University Press, 2027

Based on twenty published and manuscript diaries written by Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents during wartime Hungary, this book provides an unprecedented microhistorical perspective on how young people observed, interpreted, and internalized the profound social and political upheavals of the late 1930s through the 1950s. These diaries—often discovered by chance and preserved against all odds—reveal not only personal struggles with identity, belief and belonging, but also troubling reflections of prevailing social attitudes, including complicity, silence and, at times, approval toward the persecution of their peers. Through intimate narrative details and marginalia—from doodles to worn pages—the text reconstructs the emotional and intellectual worlds of teenagers who witnessed history unfolding around them. An unsettling yet essential contribution to Holocaust studies, social history and memory research, it challenges contemporary readers to confront the disquieting mirror held up by youth living through one of Hungary’s darkest eras.

[more]

Diaries by Jewish and Christian Adolescents

Reconstructing the Social Reality of Pre- and Post-Holocaust Hungary

Gergely Kunt

Central European University Press, 2027

[more]

Dickens's Kent

Peter Clark

Haus Publishing, 2024

A geographical narrative of Charles Dickens’s life in Kent.

Few novelists have written so intimately about a city as Charles Dickens wrote about London, but he was intimately connected to Kent more than any other part of Britain. Perhaps Kent meant more to him than the capital. He had an idyllic childhood in Chatham and Kent features in his first works of fiction, Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, and in his favorite novel, David Copperfield. In his last ten years, he wrote two novels with strong Kentish themes, Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He had his honeymoon outside Gravesend and often spent the summer months in Broadstairs. In 1856, he bought Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester, and died there in 1870.

Dickens’s Kent begins with the description of a walk from London to Dickens's main residence, Gad’s Hill Place, before taking the reader to areas in Kent most closely associated with his life and work: the Medway Towns and their surroundings, Thanet and East Kent, and finally Staplehurst, the scene of the railway accident that nearly killed him.

[more]

Dickens's London

Peter Clark

Haus Publishing, 2012

Marking the 150th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s death, Dickens’s London leads us in the footsteps of the author through this beloved city. Few novelists have written so intimately about a place as Dickens wrote about London, and, from a young age, his near-photographic memory rendered his experiences there both significant and in constant focus. Virginia Woolf maintained that “we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens,” as he produces “characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.” The most enduring “character” Dickens was drawn back to throughout his novels was London itself, in all its aspects, from the coaching inns of his early years to the taverns and watermen of the Thames. These were the constant cityscapes of his life and work.

In five walks through central London, Peter Clark explores “The First Suburbs”—Camden Town, Chelsea, Greenwich, Hampstead, Highgate and Limehouse—as they feature in Dickens’s writing and illuminates the settings of Dickens’s life and his greatest works of journalism and fiction. Describing these storied spaces of today’s central London in intimate detail, Clark invites us to experience the city as it was known to Dickens and his characters. These walks take us through the locations and buildings that he interacted with and wrote about, creating an imaginative reconstruction of the Dickensian world that has been lost to time.

[more]

Diet for a Large Planet

Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology

Chris Otter

University of Chicago Press, 2020

A history of the unsustainable modern diet—heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar—that requires more land and resources than the planet is able to support.

We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point?

In Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, where the diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar was developing. As Britain underwent steady growth, urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion, the nation altered its food choices, shifting away from locally produced plant-based nutrition. This new diet, rich in animal proteins and refined carbohydrates, made people taller and stronger, but it led to new types of health problems. Its production also relied on far greater acreage than Britain itself, forcing the nation to become more dependent on global resources. Otter shows how this issue expands beyond Britain, looking at the global effects of large agro-food systems that require more resources than our planet can sustain. This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.

[more]

Digestible Governance

Gastrocracy and Spanish Foodways

Edited by Eugenia Afinoguénova, Lara Anderson, and Rebecca Ingram

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

The term “gastrocracy” refers to the appropriation of discourses and practices related to the sourcing, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food for political purposes. The intersections of gastronomy and governance, dating in Spain to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, have become highly visible over the past decade, when political debates around nationalism in its different forms have taken the guise of discussions about regional and local cuisines. Concomitant with the rise of the “slow food” movement and following UNESCO’s addition in 2011 of “Gastronomic Meal of the French” to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, public and private associations all around Spain have been established with the goal of achieving recognition by UNESCO for Spanish, Catalan, and other national cuisines. In 2016, Gastro Marca España—an association and a web portal—was launched to raise the profile of food in Spain’s national brand.

Eliciting wide public participation, co-opted for political purposes, regarded as a factor of economic development on any scale, and integrated into every so-called banal nationalism, the production, distribution, and consumption of food are highly relevant for historical analysis. Seeking to encourage a broader discussion about Peninsular gastrocracies, this book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from different sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific who have spearheaded research on gastronomy and governance in Spain.

[more]

Diplomatic Material

Affect, Assemblage, and Foreign Policy

Jason Dittmer

Duke University Press, 2017

In Diplomatic Material Jason Dittmer offers a counterintuitive reading of foreign policy by tracing the ways that complex interactions between people and things shape the decisions and actions of diplomats and policymakers. Bringing new materialism to bear on international relations, Dittmer focuses not on what the state does in the world but on how the world operates within the state through the circulation of humans and nonhuman objects. From examining how paper storage needs impacted the design of the British Foreign Office Building to discussing the 1953 NATO decision to adopt the .30 caliber bullet as the standard rifle ammunition, Dittmer highlights the contingency of human agency within international relations. In Dittmer's model, which eschews stasis, structural forces, and historical trends in favor of dynamism and becoming, the international community is less a coming-together of states than it is a convergence of media, things, people, and practices. In this way, Dittmer locates power in the unfolding of processes on the micro level, thereby reconceptualizing our understandings of diplomacy and international relations.

[more]

Disability Disruptions

Gender, Family, and Care in Post-1989 Poland

Natalia Pamula

University of Illinois Press, 2026

In postsocialist Poland, the state offers no support for its disabled citizens and often abandons families to care for them. Natalia Pamula draws on memoirs, novels, journalistic accounts, protest statements, and interviews to excavate the voices of disabled people and caregivers caught within a system that both privatizes care and denies aid to families.

Polish politicians regularly idealize the family. But, as Pamula illustrates such rhetoric coerces people into a state of violent intimacy that forces the burden of care onto family members bound by love, dependence, and responsibility. As the narratives show, disability destabilizes national myths, challenges heteronormative and patriarchal family ideals, and exposes continuities between socialist and capitalist regimes in their treatment of disabled citizens.

A rich blend of activism and analysis, Disability Disruptions ventures outside Anglophone notions of disability to highlight how Poland’s disabled people and caregivers overcome lack of recognition, resist social death, and rewrite public memory.

[more]

Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture

Carol Poore

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Comprehensively researched, abundantly illustrated and written in accessible and engaging prose . . . With great skill, Poore weaves diverse types of evidence, including historical sources, art, literature, journalism, film, philosophy, and personal narratives into a tapestry which illuminates the cultural, political, and economic processes responsible for the marginalization, stigmatization, even elimination, of disabled people---as well as their recent emancipation."
---Disability Studies Quarterly

"A major, long-awaited book. The chapter on Nazi images is brilliant---certainly the best that has been written in this arena by any scholar."
---Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

"An important and pathbreaking book . . . immensely interesting, it will appeal not only to students of twentieth-century Germany but to all those interested in the growing field of disability studies."
---Robert C. Holub, University of Tennessee

Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture covers the entire scope of Germany's most tragic and tumultuous century---from the Weimar Republic to the current administration---revealing how central the notion of disability is to modern German cultural history. By examining a wide range of literary and visual depictions of disability, Carol Poore explores the contradictions of a nation renowned for its social services programs yet notorious for its history of compulsory sterilization and eugenic dogma. This comprehensive volume focuses particular attention on the horrors of the Nazi era, when those with disabilities were considered "unworthy of life," but also investigates other previously overlooked topics including the exile community's response to disability, socialism and disability in East Germany, current bioethical debates, and the rise and gains of Germany's disability rights movement.

Richly illustrated, wide-ranging, and accessible, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture gives all those interested in disability studies, German studies, visual culture, Nazi history, and bioethics the opportunity to explore controversial questions of individuality, normalcy, citizenship, and morality. The book concludes with a memoir of the author's experiences in Germany as a person with a disability.

Carol Poore is Professor of German Studies at Brown University.

A volume in the series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability

"Insightful and meticulously researched . . . Using disability as a concept, symbol, and lived experience, the author offers valuable new insights into Germany's political, economic, social, and cultural character . . . Demonstrating the significant ‘cultural phenomena' of disability prior to and long after Hitler's reign achieves several important theoretical and practical aims . . . Highly recommended."
---Choice

[more]

Disalienation

Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

Camille Robcis

University of Chicago Press, 2021

From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.

In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

[more]

Discipline and Experience

The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution

Peter Dear

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Although the Scientific Revolution has long been regarded as the beginning of modern science, there has been little consensus about its true character. While the application of mathematics to the study of the natural world has always been recognized as an important factor, the role of experiment has been less clearly understood.

Peter Dear investigates the nature of the change that occurred during this period, focusing particular attention on evolving notions of experience and how these developed into the experimental work that is at the center of modern science. He examines seventeenth-century mathematical sciences—astronomy, optics, and mechanics—not as abstract ideas, but as vital enterprises that involved practices related to both experience and experiment. Dear illuminates how mathematicians and natural philosophers of the period—Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, Barrow, Newton, Boyle, and the Jesuits—used experience in their argumentation, and how and why these approaches changed over the course of a century. Drawing on mathematical texts and works of natural philosophy from all over Europe, he describes a process of change that was gradual, halting, sometimes contradictory—far from the sharp break with intellectual tradition implied by the term "revolution."

[more]

Discord and Consensus in the Low Countries, 1700-2000

Edited by Jane Fenoulhet, Gerdi Quist, and Ulrich Tiedau

University College London, 2016

All countries, regions and institutions are ultimately built on a degree of consensus, on a collective commitment to a concept, belief or value system. This consensus is continuously rephrased and reinvented through a narrative of cohesion and challenged by expressions of discontent and discord. The history of the Low Countries is characterised by both a striving for consensus and eruptions of discord, both internally and from external challenges. This interdisciplinary volume explores consensus and discord in a Low Countries context along broad cultural, linguistic and historical lines. Disciplines represented include early-modern and contemporary history; art history; film; literature; and translation scholars from both the Low Countries and beyond.

[more]

Discourse and Defiance under Nazi Occupation

Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940–1945

Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp

Michigan State University Press, 2013

Captured by German forces shortly after Dunkirk, and not relinquished until May of 1945, nearly a year after the Normandy invasion, the British Channel Islands (Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark, and Herm) were characterized during their occupation by severe deprivation and powerlessness. The Islanders, with few resources to stage an armed resistance, constructed a rhetorical resistance based upon the manipulation of discourse, construction of new symbols, and defiance of German restrictions on information. Though much of modern history has focused on the possibility that Islanders may have collaborated with the Germans, this eye-opening history turns to secret war diaries kept in Guernsey. A close reading of these private accounts, written at great risk to the diarists, allows those who actually experienced the Occupation to reclaim their voice and reveals new understandings of Island resistance. What emerges is a stirring account of the unquenchable spirit and deft improvisation of otherwise ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Under the most dangerous of conditions, Guernsey civilians used imaginative methods in reacting to their position as a subjugated population, devising a covert resistance of nuance and sustainability. Violence, this book and the people of Guernsey demonstrate, is not at all the only means with which to confront evil.

[more]

Discover Romanian

An Introduction to the Language and Culture

Rodica Bo?oman

The Ohio State University Press, 1995

Discover Romanian's thorough treatment of both language and culture makes it an effective learning tool in classroom and individualized settings.

This comprehensive introduction to Romanian for English-speaking students emphasizes communication with a complete treatment of grammar, an extensive vocabulary, and a focus on the four major language skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Cultural information, an integral part of the textbook, is presented both formally, in sections on culture and civilization, and informally, as the setting for dialogues and exercises. Tables of verb conjugations and a glossary round out the book's primary materials.

Straightforward and accessible, Discover Romanian is an essential textbook for all those teaching and learning the language and provides important information for those seeking to understand Romanian culture.

[more]

Discussing Hitler

Advisers of U.S. Diplomacy in Central Europe, 1934-41

Tibor Frank

Central European University Press, 2003

This book promises to illuminate the foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration during the rise of Hitler's Germany. It is based on the heretofore unpublished notes of J. F. Montgomery (1878-1954), U.S. ambassador ("Minister") to Hungary before World War II. In Budapest, Montgomery quickly made friends with nearly everyone who mattered in the critical years of Hitler's takeover and preparation for World War II. His circle included Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, subsequent prime ministers, foreign ministers, members of both houses of parliament, as well as fellow diplomats from all over Europe. In addition, as an avid player of golf and bridge, he had an active social life that was interconnected with a large circle of influential friends in the United States.

[more]

Disease, War, and the Imperial State

The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years' War

Erica Charters

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The Seven Years’ War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India. In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of European states.

In Disease, War, and the Imperial State, Erica Charters demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years’ War. Military medicine was a crucial component of the British war effort; it was central to both eighteenth-century scientific innovation and the moral authority of the British state. Looking beyond the traditional focus of the British state as a fiscal war-making machine, Charters uncovers an imperial state conspicuously attending to the welfare of its armed forces, investing in medical research, and responding to local public opinion. Charters shows military medicine to be a credible scientific endeavor that was similarly responsive to local conditions and demands.

Disease, War, and the Imperial State is an engaging study of early modern warfare and statecraft, one focused on the endless and laborious task of managing manpower in the face of virulent disease in the field, political opposition at home, and the clamor of public opinion in both Britain and its colonies.

[more]

Dislocating the Orient

British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921

Daniel Foliard

University of Chicago Press, 2017

While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era.

Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.

[more]

Dismembering the Male

Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War

Joanna Bourke

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Some historians contend that femininity was "disrupted, constructed and reconstructed" during World War I, but what happened to masculinity? Using the evidence of letters, diaries, and oral histories of members of the military and of civilians, as well as contemporary photographs and government propoganda, Dismembering the Male explores the impact of the First World War on the male body.

Each chapter explores a different facet of the war and masculinity in depth. Joanna Bourke discovers that those who were dismembered and disabled by the war were not viewed as passive or weak, like their civilian counterparts, but were the focus of much government and public sentiment. Those suffering from disease were viewed differently, often finding themselves accused of malingering.

Joanna Bourke argues convincingly that military experiences led to a greater sharing of gender identities between men of different classes and ages. Dismembering the Male concludes that ultimately, attempts to reconstruct a new type of masculinity failed as the threat of another war, and with it the sacrifice of a new generation of men, intensified.

[more]

Disorderly Families

Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives

Arlette Farge

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

The first English translation of letters of arrest from eighteenth century France held in the archives of the Bastille

Drunken and debauched husbands; libertine wives; vagabonding children. These and many more are the subjects of requests for confinement written to the king of France in the eighteenth century. These letters of arrest (lettres de cachet) from France’s Ancien Régime were often associated with excessive royal power and seen as a way for the king to imprison political opponents. In Disorderly Families, first published in French in 1982, Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault collect ninety-four letters from ordinary families who, with the help of hired scribes, submitted complaints to the king to intervene and resolve their family disputes.

Gathered together, these letters show something other than the exercise of arbitrary royal power, and offer unusual insight into the infamies of daily life. From these letters come stories of divorce and marital conflict, sexual waywardness, reckless extravagance, and abandonment. The letters evoke a fluid social space in which life in the home and on the street was regulated by the rhythms of relations between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Most impressively, these letters outline how ordinary people seized the mechanisms of power to address the king and make demands in the name of an emerging civil order.

Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault were fascinated by the letters’ explosive qualities and by how they both illustrated and intervened in the workings of power and governmentality. Disorderly Families sheds light on Foucault’s conception of political agency and his commitment to theorizing how ordinary lives come to be touched by power. This first English translation is complete with an introduction from the book’s editor, Nancy Luxon, as well as notes that contextualize the original 1982 publication and eighteenth-century policing practices.

[more]

Dispossession

Plundering German Jewry, 1933-1953

Christoph Kreutzmüller and Jonathan R. Zatlin, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2020

This collection of essays by a range of international, multidisciplinary scholars explores the financial history, social significance, and cultural meanings of the theft, starting in 1933, of assets owned by German Jews. Despite the fraught topic and the ongoing legal discussions, the subject has not received much scholarly attention until now. This volume offers a much needed contribution to our understanding of the history of the period and the acts. The essays examine the confiscatory taxation of Jewish property, the looting of art and confiscation of gold, the role of German freight forwarders in property theft, salesmen and dispossession in the retail world, theft from the elderly, and the complicity of the banking industry, as well as the reach of the practice beyond German borders.

[more]

Disruptive Acts

The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France

Mary Louise Roberts

University of Chicago Press, 2002

In fin-de-siècle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.

Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper La Fronde; the journalists Séverine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of La Fronde itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men—even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for La Fronde put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny.

Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, Disruptive Acts will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.

[more]

Dissing Elizabeth

Negative Representations of Gloriana

Julia M. Walker, ed.

Duke University Press, 1998

Dissing Elizabeth focuses on the criticism that cast a shadow on the otherwise celebrated reign of Elizabeth I. The essays in this politically and historically revealing book demonstrate the sheer pervasiveness and range of rhetoric against the queen, illuminating the provocative discourse of disrespect and dissent that existed over an eighty-year period, from her troubled days as a princess to the decades after her death in 1603.
As editor Julia M. Walker suggests, the breadth of dissent considered in this collection points to a dark side of the Cult of Elizabeth. Reevaluating neglected texts that had not previously been perceived as critical of the queen or worthy of critical appraisal, contributors consider dissent in a variety of forms, including artwork representing (and mocking) the queen, erotic and pornographic metaphors for Elizabeth in the popular press, sermons subtly critiquing her actions, and even the hostility encoded in her epitaph and in the placement of her tomb. Other chapters discuss gossip about Elizabeth, effigies of the queen, polemics against her marriage to the Duke of Alençon, common verbal slander, violence against emblems of her authority, and the criticism embedded in the riddles, satires, and literature of the period.

[more]

Dissonant Heritage in Tourism

Confronting Difficult Pasts in Italy and Beyond

Maria Paola Pasini

Central European University Press, 2026

Interest in dissonant heritage has grown significantly in recent years. Difficult legacies, such as monuments and urban and artistic works, as well as intangible personal and communal experiences are linked to dictatorships, regimes, wars, slavery, and exploitation. In some places, a dissonant heritage creates tension. In other places, difficult histories are cancelled or ignored. But forgetting is not the solution. Critical analysis can help us ‘face the past’ and process it in order to move forward. This applies to tourism as well: ‘Difficult’ places, monuments and experiences become opportunities for gaining and creating knowledge for a public interested in historical issues. At the same time, tourist presence is an incentive for communities to better comprehend their contested past(s). This volume contains contributions by scholars from various countries and different backgrounds, such as historians, architects, and anthropologists, who deal with this topic from different angles. The volume is divided into two parts: the first part concentrates on Italy, while the second part covers other countries in the world.

[more]

Distaff Diplomacy

The Empress Eugénie and the Foreign Policy of the Second Empire

By Nancy Nichols Barker

University of Texas Press, 1967

The Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and one of the most beautiful women ever to grace a throne, was the victim of her own inconstant mind. A daughter of an aristocratic Spanish family, she had a natural reverence for legitimate monarchy; yet her high-spirited temperament and chivalric outlook made her admire instinctively the boldness and aura of glory that she associated with the Napoleonic empire. The incongruous principles of Legitimism and Bonapartism battling within the Empress produced in her a double-mindedness that had tragic consequences.

The Empress has always been a controversial figure. Her enemies have blamed her the fall of the Second Empire and the defeat of France; her admirers have disclaimed for her any part in the mistakes that led to the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870. To determine the actual role that Eugénie played, Barker, using material from public and private European archives and a wide range of published works, examines in Distaff Diplomacy the development of the Empress' views on foreign affairs and ascertains their effect on the formation of the policies of the Second Empire.

Eugénie's influence fluctuated widely over the years. As a bride she was neither interested in nor knowledgable about foreign matters; as a middle-aged woman, in the late years of the Empire, she was discredited by her past errors, but she continued to pull strings outside of normal diplomatic channels. Her most sustained and effective work, from 1861 to 1863, was largely the inspiration for a grand design to remake the map to assure French hegemony in Europe and to establish an empire in Mexico. The success of this design rested on an Austro-French alliance; but the design itself, reflecting the Empress' incoherent thinking, contained the fatal inconsistencies that made Austrian rejection of it inevitable. Since the Mexican expedition and the diplomatic muddle of 1863 were the watershed from which the subsequent troubles of the Empire flowed, the Empress must be held responsible for seriously undermining the foreign policy of the Empire. Despite Eugénie's many fine qualities—her generosity of spirit, her splendid courage, and her moral integrity—her diplomatic efforts, affected as they were by her background, temperament, state of health, and changing moods, did not amount to statesmanship. This first systematic examination of the Empress' influence on foreign policy delves deeply and carefully into the subject.

[more]

Disturbing Practices

History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War

Laura Doan

University of Chicago Press, 2013

For decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project serving competing agendas. Lesbian, gay, and queer scholars have produced powerful narratives by tracing the homosexual or queer subject as continuous or discontinuous. Yet organizing historical work around categories of identity as normal or abnormal often obscures how sexual matters were known or talked about in the past. Set against the backdrop of women’s work experiences, friendships, and communities during World War I, Disturbing Practices draws on a substantial body of new archival material to expose the roadblocks still present in current practices and imagine new alternatives.

In this landmark book, Laura Doan clarifies the ethical value and political purpose of identity history—and indeed its very capacity to give rise to innovative practices borne of sustained exchange between queer studies and critical history. Disturbing Practices insists on taking seriously the imperative to step outside the logic of identity to address questions as yet unasked about the modern sexual past.

[more]

Divas in the Convent

Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy

Craig A. Monson

University of Chicago Press, 2012

When eight-year-old Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (1590–1662) entered one of the preeminent convents in Bologna in 1598, she had no idea what cloistered life had in store for her. Thanks to clandestine instruction from a local maestro di cappella—and despite the church hierarchy’s vehement opposition to all convent music—Vizzana became the star of the convent, composing works so thoroughly modern and expressive that a recent critic described them as “historical treasures.” But at the very moment when Vizzana’s works appeared in 1623—she would be the only Bolognese nun ever to publish her music—extraordinary troubles beset her and her fellow nuns, as episcopal authorities arrived to investigate anonymous allegations of sisterly improprieties with male members of their order.

Craig A. Monson retells the story of Vizzana and the nuns of Santa Cristina to elucidate the role that music played in the lives of these cloistered women. Gifted singers, instrumentalists, and composers, these nuns used music not only to forge links with the community beyond convent walls, but also to challenge and circumvent ecclesiastical authority. Monson explains how the sisters of Santa Cristina—refusing to accept what the church hierarchy called God’s will and what the nuns perceived as a besmirching of their honor—fought back with words and music, and when these proved futile, with bricks, roof tiles, and stones. These women defied one Bolognese archbishop after another, cardinals in Rome, and even the pope himself, until threats of excommunication and abandonment by their families brought them to their knees twenty-five years later. By then, Santa Cristina’s imaginative but frail composer literally had been driven mad by the conflict.

Monson’s fascinating narrative relies heavily on the words of its various protagonists, on both sides of the cloister wall, who emerge vividly as imaginative, independent-minded, and not always sympathetic figures. In restoring the musically gifted Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana to history, Monson introduces readers to the full range of captivating characters who played their parts in seventeenth-century convent life.

[more]

Divide, Provide and Rule

An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Reform, and Social Policy in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy

Susan Zimmermann

Central European University Press, 2011

A concise and comprehensive account of the transformation of social policy from traditional poor relief towards social insurance systems in a European state before World War One. Brings together the analysis of older, mostly local welfare policies with the history of social policy developed by the state and operated at a national level. Explores also the interaction of various layers of and actors in welfare policy, i.e. of poor relief, social reform policies and the unfolding welfare state over time, including often neglected elements of these policies such as e.g. protective policies at the work place, housing policy, child protection, and prostitution policies.

[more]

Divided in Unity

Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police

Andreas Glaeser

University of Chicago Press, 1999

More than a decade after unification, Germany remains deeply divided. Following East and West German police officers on their patrols through the newly-united city of Berlin and observing how they make sense of one another in a fast-changing environment, Andreas Glaeser explains how East-West boundaries have been maintained by the interactions of institutions, practices, and cultural forms-including diverging patterns of understanding rooted in vastly different social systems, readily revived Cold War images, the continuing search for an adequate response to Germany's Nazi past, and the politics and organization of unification, which impose highly asymmetrical burdens on east and west. Glaeser also leverages his ethnography to develop an innovative approach to studying identity formation processes. Central to his theory is an emphasis on the exchange of identifications and the particular ways in which they are deployed and recognized in interpretations, narratives, and performances as parts of face-to-face encounters, political discourses, and organizational practices.

[more]

Dividing Time

The Invention of Historical Periods in Early Modern Europe

Frederic Clark

University of Chicago Press, 2027

A bold reconstruction of the origins of the “ancient, medieval, modern” trope used to define historical eras and the transitions between them.

We are used to dividing time, indicating the beginning or end of an era based on a year, a month, or even a specific day, after which (supposedly) “nothing was the same.” In this book, historian and classicist Frederic Clark looks at a particularly enduring form of dividing time—the tripartite distinction between antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity—in order to analyze the history of this division, how it has been constructed and deployed, and what its past and present implications are.

Clark argues that the study of the past has always depended on subdividing it into multiple parts, which tend to underpin any attempt to articulate a system of culture or value. After all, certain eras, ages, and epochs are celebrated as having ushered in a new, better time, whereas others are depicted as extended periods of decay and darkness. Clark provides an ingenious critique of the foundational assumptions underlying our narratives of periodization and the complex and messy process by which historical schemas develop, from the Renaissance through the early modern period to the Enlightenment and beyond. The result is an engaging and erudite tour through time and its many contested divisions, imagined and reimagined across history.

[more]