Bronka Schneider Edited with forewords by Erika Bourguignon and Barbara Hill Rigney
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
Bronka Schneider and her husband, Joseph, were two of the thirty thousand Austrian Jews admitted as refugees to Great Britain between March 1938 and 2 September 1939. It was not until 1960, however, that Schneider wrote her memoir about the year she spent as a housekeeper, with Joseph as a butler, in a Scottish castle.
Schneider tells of daily encounters—with her employers, the English lady and her husband, a retired British civil servant who had spent many years in India; the village locals; other refugees; and a family of evacuees from the slums of Glasgow.
The editors have divided this memoir into chapters, adding headlines from the London Times as epigraphs. These headlines, reporting the escalating events of World War II, are in stark contrast to daily activities of the residents of this isolated region of Scotland. A commentary by Erika Bourguignon provides historical, political, and cultural background of this period.
Michelle Treeve
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014
Tyler Whitney
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Bernth Lindfors
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Edited by Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis
University of Arizona Press, 1993
Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis and Philippa Kelly, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Igor Chabrowski
Central European University Press, 2026
Michelle M. Dowd
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012
Martin J. S. Rudwick
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Isabelle Tillerot
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024
Florin Curta, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Edited by Margot Finn and Kate Smith
University College London, 2018
E. C. Spary
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Daniela Spenser
University of Alabama Press, 2025
A sweeping exploration of survival, resilience, and the fate of one family amid Europe’s most turbulent century.
Echoes of Exile reveals the seismic disruptions of twentieth-century European history through the intimate lens of one family’s struggle to survive. Setting out to record the life of her mother, Ruth, Daniela Spenser unearthed personal facts and stories that additionally illuminate the shared traumas and experiences of millions of Czech, Polish, and German Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the stories of those who survived and lived under Communism and the Cold War. Her resulting work is a fascinating hybrid that combines family letters and interviews with deeply researched political history spanning from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Spenser’s fascinating work reveals the difficult choices her mother and family faced, the tests to their loves and loyalties, and the lingering scars of exile. More than a family history, it weaves personal and historical narratives with mundane and momentous threads to create a fresh, distinctive fabric. Spenser recovers fragments of the past that contribute to a map of the present and possibilities for the future. An engrossing account of survival, resilience, and the enduring human spirit amid the maelstrom of Europe’s savage twentieth century, Echoes of Exile will interest readers who value firsthand accounts of significant events and who seek to understand the complexities of survival, identity, and political change through intimate, lived experiences.
Kelley Harness
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Hobsbawm, Eric
Rutgers University Press, 1990
Hobsbawm, Eric
Rutgers University Press, 2019

Till Düppe and Ivan Boldyrev, issue editors
Duke University Press, 0
Torben M. Andersen
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Michael S. Lewis-Beck
University of Michigan Press, 1990
Helmut Norpoth, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, and Jean-Dominique Lafay, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Jennifer Suchland
Duke University Press, 2015

Carl A. Hanson
University of Minnesota Press, 1981
Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal, 1668–1703 was first published in 1981. 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.
The late seventeenth century in Portugal was a period of apparent calm, and few historians have given it much attention. Portugal's Golden Age of worldwide expansion had made sixteenth-century Lisbon a great commercial center, but other European nations with more advanced economies surpassed Portugal's achievement, and during the seventeenth century agricultural, economic, and political problems all contributed to Portugal's decline. In 1668, at the conclusion of a long war with Spain to restore Portuguese sovereignty, Pedro II began a reign of 38 years, first as regent for a feckless brother ad after 1683 as king. The history of Portugal during his reign is the subject of this book.
Carl A. Hanson looks at this relatively unexamined era and finds, behind the facade of baroque calm, subtle but dramatic shifts in the socio-economic foundations of the age. In an effort to cope with economic depression Pedro's government hearkened to enthusiastic reports of Colbert's mercantile policies in France, and tried to encourage the expansion of domestic manufacturing. Linked to these efforts were attempts to curb the inquisitorial persecution of New Christian merchants. Hanson explores the motives of anti-Semitism, greed and class warfare that underlay the persecution and describes the efforts of an eloquent Jesuit, Father Antonio Vieira, to protect the New Christians from the worst excesses of the Inquisition.
The triumph of the Inquisition, and thus of the established social order, and the failure of Portugal's experiment in mercantilism coincided with a new wave of commodity-borne prosperity. After 1690, increased exports of Brazilian gold, tobacco, hides, and sugar, and of Port wine changed Portugal's economic status. With the signing of the Anglo- Portuguese treaty of Methuen in 1703, Portugal entered a gilded—if not golden—age. Yet, as Hanson makes clear, the new prosperity was deceptive, for Portugal was to slip into increasingly dependent relationships with the more advanced economies — especially England's—which absorbed great quantities of Luso-Atlantic commodities in exchange for its own manufactures. And, at home, the victorious social order, no longer threatened by a mercantile class, was to find security under an increasingly absolutist government. The reign of Pedro II is significant, then, as a period of transition when, for the first time, the foundations of the old order were threatened. The baroque facade survived but the edifice itself had begun to crumble.
Carlo Ginzburg
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Marjorie Perloff
University of Chicago Press, 2016
By Susan Goodman
University of Texas Press, 1994
When Edith Wharton became friends with Henry James, she joined a group of men who became her "inner circle." This group included both well-known figures, such as James, Percy Lubbock, and Bernard Berenson, and several now forgotten, including John Hugh Smith, Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Robert Norton, and Howard Sturgis.
Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, Susan Goodman here presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored. She explores how the group, which began forming around 1904 and lasted until Wharton's death in 1937, defined itself against the society its founders had left in the United States, while simultaneously criticizing and accommodating the one it found in Europe. Tracing Wharton's individual relationships with these men and their relationships with one another, she examines literary kinships and movements in the biographical and feminist context of gender, exile, and aesthetics. She also relates the group to other literary circles, such as the Bloomsbury group and Gertrude Stein's salon.
Daniel Stolzenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Hollis Clayson
University of Chicago Press, 2027
A revelatory behind-the-scenes look at a universally recognized landmark: the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower is widely photographed, visited, and written about, but it holds a wealth of stories that are rarely told. When it was built, the three-hundred-meter structure was the tallest on earth, but it bore little resemblance to the stripped-down, modernized monument that is known and loved today. With Eiffel Tower Confidential, art historian Hollis Clayson makes this familiar landmark strange again, offering expert insight into the life of the Tower.
Here she traces the creative financing of the Tower before its construction began, shares images made in its early years, and illuminates the role the Tower played in celebrating French Imperialism. She tells the fascinating story of iron ornamentation that helped the Tower win approval as the centerpiece of the 1889 Universal Exposition but was ripped off and discarded in 1937, and she investigates the sinister backstory behind how the dazzling illumination of the Tower—which combined 10,000 gas lights in glass globes, two kinds of electric spotlights placed at the summit, and Bengal flames on the platforms—was designed to function as an instrument of surveillance.
This extraordinary account takes us into the long shadow of the Eiffel Tower, inviting readers to get to know this acclaimed landmark on an unprecedented level.
Jane Duran
University of Illinois Press, 2005

Marshall Brown, ed.
Duke University Press, 1999
Contributors. Nancy Armstrong, Marshall Brown, Sanford Budick, Catherine Gallagher, Thomas M. Kavanagh, Jon Klancher, Jill Kowalik, Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Christie McDonald, Jerome McGann, Ruth Perry, Michael B. Prince, Leonard Tennenhouse
Richard Maddox
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Karen Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Edited by William W. Kibler
University of Texas Press, 1976
Eleanor of Aquitaine was the wife of two kings, Louis VII of France and Henry II Plantagenet of England, and the mother of two others, Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland. In her eventful, often stormy life, she not only influenced the course of events in the twelfth century but also encouraged remarkable advances in the literary and fine arts. In this book, experts in five disciplines—history, art history, music, French and English literature—evaluate the influence of Eleanor and her court on history and the arts.
Elizabeth A. R. Brown views Eleanor as having played a significant role as parent and politician, but not as patron. Rebecca A. Baltzer takes a new look at the music of the period that was written by and for Eleanor, her court, and her family. Moshé Lazar reexamines her relationship to the courtly-love literature of the period. Eleanor S. Greenhill and Larry M. Ayres reassess her influence in the realm of art history. Rossell Hope Robbins traces the lines extending from the French courtly literature of Eleanor's period down into fourteenth-century Chaucerian England. The essays reflect divergent but generally complementary assessments of this remarkable woman's influence on her own era and on future times as well.
This volume is the result of a symposium held at the University of Texas in 1973.
Andrew Dalby
Haus Publishing, 2010
Andrew McCann
Northwestern University Press, 2027
Examining the conflicted legacy of Ernst Jünger’s thought and its relationship to critical theory
In the 1920s, Ernst Jünger’s journalistic advocacy of a militaristic, antidemocratic nationalism played a central role in the rise of German fascism. At the same time, Jünger developed an increasingly acute account of how the mobilizing force of industrial technology embodied a will to power that, on the one hand, anticipated an authoritarian state but, on the other, assumed a planetary perspective that made national identifications redundant. What he called the Gestalt of the worker expresses the “elemental powers” that, he believed, mark the limits of Enlightenment conceptions of historical progress.
Today, Jünger appears in intellectual history primarily as a representative of protofascist decisionism, reactionary modernism, or the so-called conservative revolution. Andrew McCann puts these aspects of Jünger’s early work into dialogue with the posthistorical orientation that he developed after the Second World War, in order to offer a fresh reading that demonstrates how Jünger’s obsession with the transience of cultural and historical forms displays deep structural affinities with the idea of natural history developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. By tracing this thread in intellectual history, McCann charts the currents of influence and confluence between what are usually understood as sharply polarized political positions and the conceptual postures that accompany them: immanence and transcendence, reason and myth, class and nation, relations of production and the forces of nature.
Ulf Hedberg
Gallaudet University Press, 2019
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Edited by Jessica Edmondes
Iter Press, 2022
Leonard R. N. Ashley
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988
Stefan Kieniewicz
University of Chicago Press, 1969
Captured in this study are the complexity and fascination of one hundred and fifty years of Polish political, cultural, and socioeconmic history. The author traces the course of peasant emancipation in Poland from its beginnings during the Enlightenment to its aftermath in the cultural awakening of the peasantry during the half century prior to World War I and shows how the peasant question played a vital role in the struggle for independence in partitioned Poland.
The book synthesizes, for the first time in any language, the work of leading Polish historians during the present century. It presents a clear analysis of the disintegration of the economic system based on serfdom and compulsory labor prevalent in feudal Poland and traces the emergence of modern capitalist conditions, including wage labor and independent property rights.
Also analyzed is the role of foreign goverments in the emacipation process. The freeing of the serfs took place during a period when all or most of the country was under the rule of Russia, Prussia, or Austria. Although emancipation was due primarily to economic forces withing Poland, it was hastened by peasant resistance and the national struggle for political independence led by Polish patriots who demanded far-reaching social reforms.
This comprehensive study provides valuable information not only to those with a particular interest in Poland but also to scholars concerned with the parallel problems in Russia andother Eastern Eurpean countries, to specialists in agrarian history, and to students of Eastern European history who lack adequate reading materials in English.
Jan-Georg Deutsch
Ohio University Press, 2006
This study examines the complex history of slavery in East Africa, focusing on the area that came under German colonial rule. In contrast to the policy pursued at the time by other colonial powers in Africa, the German authorities did not legally abolish slavery in their colonial territories. However, despite government efforts to keep the institution of slavery alive, it significantly declined in Tanganyika in the period concerned. The book highlights the crucial role played by the slaves in the process of emancipation.
Author Jan-Georg Deutsch explores the rise of slavery in Tanganyika in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the region became more fully integrated into the world economy.
An analysis of German colonial policy reveals that the authorities believed that abolition should be avoided at all costs since it would undermine the power and prosperity of the local slave-owning elites whose effective collaboration was thought to be indispensable to the functioning of colonial rule.
The author demonstrates how slaves by their own initiative brought the ”evil institution“ to an end, making the best of limited choices and opportunities available to them.
The study, of interest to historians of East Africa, makes a contribution to the more general debate about the demise of slavery on the continent.
Pedro F. Campa
Duke University Press, 1990
Katya Motyl
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Yana Hashamova
Central European University Press, 2012
Miri Rubin
Central European University Press, 2009
Edited by Dolores Martín Moruno and Beatriz Pichel
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Contributors: Jon Arrizabalaga, Rob Boddice, Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, Emma Hutchison, Dolores Martín-Moruno, Piroska Nagy, Beatriz Pichel, María Rosón, Pilar León-Sanz, Bertrand Taithe, and Gian Marco Vidor.