3745 books match the query 'Europe' and 151 start with e

cover of Emperor Charles IV and the Origins of the Great Schism, c. 1375–1378

Emperor Charles IV and the Origins of the Great Schism, c. 1375–1378

Dušan Coufal

Karolinum Press, 2025

Reveals how Emperor Charles IV’s efforts to secure the imperial coronation of his son intersect with the early stages of the Great Western Schism.

Emperor Otto I the Great made history in the Holy Roman Empire with a significant dynastic achievement: in 967, he persuaded the pope to crown his son co-emperor in Rome. Two centuries later, another renowned emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, attempted a similar feat, negotiating with four different popes for the coronation of his descendant, but ultimately failed. A lesser-known parallel can be found in the life of Emperor Charles IV of the Luxembourg dynasty in the fourteenth century. After the Papal Curia returned to Rome from Avignon in early 1377, Charles made concerted efforts in Italy, France, and Germany to secure the imperial coronation of his son, Wenceslas. However, this bold ambition coincided with an unprecedented crisis in relations between the "French” cardinals and the newly elected Italian pope, Urban VI. Recognizing that the final chapter of Charles IV’s biography is deeply intertwined with the early history of the Great Western Schism offers a fresh perspective on a subject that has long captivated international scholarship.

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cover of Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism

Empire in Question

Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism

Antoinette Burton

Duke University Press, 2011

Featuring essays written by the influential historian Antoinette Burton since the mid-1990s, Empire in Question traces the development of a particular, contentious strand of modern British history, the “new imperial history,” through the eyes of a scholar who helped to shape the field. In her teaching and writing, Burton has insisted that the vectors of imperial power run in multiple directions, argued that race must be incorporated into history writing, and emphasized that gender and sexuality are critical dimensions of imperial history. Empire in Question includes Burton’s groundbreaking critiques of British historiography, as well as essays in which she brings theory to bear on topics from Jane Eyre to nostalgia for colonial India. Burton’s autobiographical introduction describes how her early encounters with feminist and postcolonial critique led to her convictions that we must ask who counts as a subject of imperial history, and that we should maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the claims to objectivity that shape much modern history writing. In the coda, she candidly reflects on shortcomings in her own thinking and in the new imperial history, and she argues that British history must be repositioned in relation to world history. Much of Burton’s writing emerged from her teaching; Empire in Question is meant to engage students and teachers in debates about how to think about British imperialism in light of contemporary events.
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cover of Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World

Empire of Tea

The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World

Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger

Reaktion Books, 2015

Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles alike. One of the first truly global commodities and now the world’s most popular drink, tea has also, today, come to epitomize British culture and identity.

This impressively detailed book offers a rich cultural history of tea, from its ancient origins in China to its spread around the world. The authors recount tea’s arrival in London and follow its increasing salability and import via the East India Company throughout the eighteenth century, inaugurating the first regular exchange—both commercial and cultural—between China and Britain. They look at European scientists’ struggles to understand tea’s history and medicinal properties, and they recount the ways its delicate flavor and exotic preparation have enchanted poets and artists. Exploring everything from its everyday use in social settings to the political and economic controversies it has stirred—such as the Boston Tea Party and the First Opium War—they offer a multilayered look at what was ultimately an imperial industry, a collusion—and often clash—between the world’s greatest powers over control of a simple beverage that has become an enduring pastime.
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cover of Empire's Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies

Empire's Children

Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies

Emmanuelle Saada

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Europe’s imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers.When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina—the métis—she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decree was the culmination of a decades-long effort to resolve the “métis question”: the educational, social, and civil issues surrounding the mixed population. Operating at the intersection of history, anthropology, and law, Empire’s Children reveals the unacknowledged but central role of race in the definition of French nationality.

Through extensive archival work in both France and Vietnam, and a close reading of primary and secondary material from the Pacific islands and sub-Saharan and North Africa, Saada has created in Empire’s Children an original and compelling perspective on colonialism, law, race, and culture from the end of the nineteenth century until decolonization.

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cover of Empire-Building and Nation-Building in Central Europe: Zoltán László (1881–1961) in the Turmoil of the 20th Century

Empire-Building and Nation-Building in Central Europe

Zoltán László (1881–1961) in the Turmoil of the 20th Century

Krisztián Csaplár-Degovics

Central European University Press, 2026

This book reconstructs the intellectual and political trajectory of Zoltán László (1881–1961), a representative figure of the East-Central European middle-class intelligentsia. His shifting positions—on nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, antisemitism, racism, and anticommunism—mirror the broader ideological and political transformations of the region from the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Second World War.
Before 1914, László established himself as a journalist, writer, academic, and willing agent of Austro-Hungarian imperial policy. In the interwar period and during the Second World War, his expertise as a propagandist found expression in racist circles.
By examining László’s life as a case study, the book offers a microhistorical perspective on how members of the educated middle classes became implicated in, and often willing participants of, imperial, racist, and totalitarian projects. It demonstrates how the lived experience of one individual illuminates the complex entanglement of ideology, identity, and power in East-Central Europe’s modern history.
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cover of Enchanted Islands: Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France

Enchanted Islands

Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France

Mary D. Sheriff

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day—islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and Fénelon’s, Telemachus. Other islands—real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue—the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée. Writers such as Fénelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art’s purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.
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cover of Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, Vol. 1 and 2

Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, Vol. 1 and 2

Edited by Joep Leerssen

Amsterdam University Press, 2016

This monumental encyclopedia documents the presence and effects of cultural consciousness-raising in the early decades of European nationalism. The volume tracks how intellectuals, historians, novelists, poets, painters, folklorists, and composers, in an intensely collaborative transnational network, articulated the national identities and aspirations that would go on to determine European history and politics with effects that are still felt today.
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cover of Endless Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's Decline

Endless Empire

Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's Decline

Edited by Alfred W. McCoy, Josep M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of power that closely resembled that of its European predecessors.
 
As Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a decline in U.S. global power, including:
  • erosion of economic and fiscal strength needed for military power on a global scale
  • misuse of military power through micro-military misadventures
  • breakdown of alliances among major powers
  • weakened controls over the subordinate elites critical for any empire’s exercise of global power
  • insufficient technological innovation to sustain global force projection.
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cover of Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars

Enemies for a Day

Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars

Darius Staliunas

Central European University Press, 2015

It begins by illustrating how widespread anti-Jewish feelings were among the Christian population in 19 th century, focusing on blood libel accusations as well as describing the role of modern antisemitism. Secondly, it tries to identify the structural preconditions as well as specific triggers that turned anti-Jewish feelings into collective violence and analyzes the nature of this violence. Lastly, pogroms in Lithuania are compared to anti-Jewish violence in other regions of the Russian Empire and East Galicia.

This research is inspired by the cultural turn in social sciences, an approach that assumes that violence is filled with meaning, which is “culturally constructed, discursively mediated, symbolically saturated, and ritually regulated.” The author argues that pogroms in Lithuania instead followed a communal pattern of ethnic violence and was very different from deadly pogroms in other parts of the Russian Empire.

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cover of Engaging the Atom: The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present

Engaging the Atom

The History of Nuclear Energy and Society in Europe from the 1950s to the Present

Arne Kaijser

West Virginia University Press, 2021

Transnational perspectives on the relationship between nuclear energy and society.

With the aim of overcoming the disciplinary and national fragmentation that characterizes much research on nuclear energy, Engaging the Atom brings together specialists from a variety of fields to analyze comparative case studies across Europe and the United States. It explores evolving relationships between society and the nuclear sector from the origins of civilian nuclear power until the present, asking why nuclear energy has been more contentious in some countries than in others and why some countries have never gone nuclear, or have decided to phase out nuclear, while their neighbors have committed to the so-called nuclear renaissance. Contributors examine the challenges facing the nuclear sector in the context of aging reactor fleets, pressing climate urgency, and increasing competition from renewable energy sources.

Written by leading academics in their respective disciplines, the nine chapters of Engaging the Atom place the evolution of nuclear energy within a broader set of national and international configurations, including its role within policies and markets.
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cover of Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History

Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History

Luisa Elena Delgado

Vanderbilt University Press, 2016

Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major component of social life—including in the nineteenth century, which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere.

The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms—political rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema, graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media—with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic implications.
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cover of Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism

Engineered to Sell

European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism

Jan L. Logemann

University of Chicago Press, 2019

The mid-twentieth-century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture—music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan L. Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research, and commercial design who transformed capitalism from the 1930s through the 1960s. He argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the “Americanization” paradigm. Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods and examines how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the emigrés at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. By focusing on the transnational lives of emigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the midcentury transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to “American” consumer capitalism.
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cover of Engineering European Unity: The Quest for the Right Solution Across Centuries

Engineering European Unity

The Quest for the Right Solution Across Centuries

Éva Bóka

Central European University Press, 2023

Which European and non-European ideas and practices facilitated the shaping of European unity? Or rather, which pursuits led to deadlocks in the cooperation between states?

The book seeks answers to these questions by surveying the historical attempts at realizing supranational patterns of governance in Europe since the Middle Ages. The main focus is on the nineteenth and twentieth century organizational models of European unification.

The analysis draws on an abundance of historical and legal source material. While the author encourages critical thinking about European integration, the exploration is admittedly based on specific values. Éva Bóka claims that the struggle for the humanization of power with its democratic creative force has been the major driver in the development of the system of liberties and the idea of European unity. The analysis of the historical process up to the Lisbon Treaty (2007) with the recognition of common, shared, and supported competences meets the author’s set of values to a great extent. The last part of the book examines whether the European Union can serve as a political and economic organizational model for other parts of the world.

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cover of Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome

Engineering the Eternal City

Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome

Pamela O. Long

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the “engineering pope” Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects—sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight streets, and even the relocation of immensely heavy ancient Egyptian obelisks that Roman emperors had carried to the city centuries before.
 
This portrait of an early modern Rome examines the many conflicts, failures, and successes that shaped the city, as decision-makers tried to control not only Rome’s structures and infrastructures but also the people who lived there. Taking up visual images of the city created during the same period—most importantly in maps and urban representations, this book shows how in a time before the development of modern professionalism and modern bureaucracies, there was far more wide-ranging conversation among people of various backgrounds on issues of engineering and infrastructure than there is in our own times. Physicians, civic leaders, jurists, cardinals, popes, and clerics engaged with painters, sculptors, architects, printers, and other practitioners as they discussed, argued, and completed the projects that remade Rome.
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cover of Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and Territoriality in an Imperial Borderland, Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Engineering the Lower Danube

Technology and Territoriality in an Imperial Borderland, Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Luminita Gatejel

Central European University Press, 2023

The Lower Danube—the stretch of Europe’s second longest river between the Romanian-Serbian border and the confluence to the Black Sea—was effectively transformed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In describing this lengthy undertaking, Luminita Gatejel proposes that remaking two key stretches—the Iron Gates and the delta—not only physically altered the river but also redefined it in a legal and political sense. 

Since the late eighteenth century, military conflicts and peace treaties changed the nature of sovereignty over the area, as the expansionist tendencies of the Habsburg and British Empires encountered rival Ottoman and Russian imperial plans. The inconvenience that the river’s physical shape obstructed free navigation and the growth of commercial traffic, was an increasing concern to all parties. This book shows that alongside imperial aspirations, transnational actors like engineers, commissioners and entrepreneurs were the driving force behind the river regulation. In this highly original, deeply researched, and carefully crafted study, Gatejel explores the formation of international cooperation, the emergence of technical expertise and the emergence of engineering as a profession. This constellation turned the Lower Danube into a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of international cooperation, economic integration, and nature transformation.

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cover of Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815

Engineering the Revolution

Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815

Ken Alder

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.”  Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

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cover of England and the Crusades, 1095-1588

England and the Crusades, 1095-1588

Christopher Tyerman

University of Chicago Press, 1988

A potent mixt of salvation and adventure, the Crusades were one of the most prominent features of medieval Europe, reflecting and directing religious and secular movements in Western society for half a millennium. Christopher Tyerman offers the first book-length study of the role of England in the Crusades. Focusing on the courtroom and council chamber rather than the battlefield, he demonstrates the impact of the Crusades on the political and economic functions of English society.

Drawing on a wide range of archival, chronicle, and literary evidence, Tyerman brings to life the royal personalities, foreign policy, political intrigue, taxation and fundraising, and the crusading ethos that gripped England for hundreds of years.

"An ambitious task to undertake. . . . Tyerman has done the job not only thoroughly but brilliantly. . . . A highly impressive study, deserving rich praise and wide readership."—Norman Housley, Times Literary Supplement

"Christopher Tyerman has written a wonderful book. . . . [He] manages to confront thorny issues in scholarship and to contribute new perspectives on them."—William Chester Jordan, American Historical Review

"Tyerman provides valuable insights into preaching, recruitment, and the funding and organisation of crusading expeditions. . . . Fascinating new perspectives on English history."—Edward Powell, Sunday Times

"Impressive. . . . Tyerman's research has yielded valuable evidence, and his admirably lucid argument sheds new light on a complex and bloody period in English history."—Virginia Quarterly Review
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cover of England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism

England in 1819

The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism

James Chandler

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Many of the writers from 1819, argues James Chandler, were acutely aware not only of their writing's place in history, but also of its place as history—a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism and offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.

"1819? At first sight, it might not seem a 'hot date'; but as James Chandler argues in his powerful book, it would be a mistake to overlook a year of such exceptional political conflagration and literary pyrotechnics in British history. Chandler's study is a wide-ranging, enormously ambitious, densely packed, closely argued work."—John Brewer, New Republic

"The book's largest argument, and the source of its considerable revelations, is that late twentieth-century practices of cultural history-writing have their roots in the peculiar Romantic historicism born in post-Waterloo Britain."—Jon Klancher, Times Literary Supplement

"A monumental work of scholarship."—Terry Eagleton, The Independent

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cover of England's Asian Renaissance

England's Asian Renaissance

Su Fang Ng

University of Delaware Press, 2022

England's Asian Renaissance explores how Asian knowledges, narratives, and customs inflected early modern English literature. Just as Asian imports changed England's tastes and enriched the English language, Eastern themes, characters, and motifs helped shape the country's culture and contributed to its national identity. Questioning long-standing dichotomies between East and West and embracing a capacious understanding of translatio as geographic movement, linquistic transformation, and cultural grafting, the collection gives pride of place to convergence, approximation, and hybridity, thus underscoring the radical mobility of early modern culture. In so doing, England's Asian Renaissance also moves away from entrenched narratives of Western cultural sovereignty to think anew England's debts to Asia.

Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of England's Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution

England's Great Transformation

Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution

Marc W. Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2016

With England’s Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi’s landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.

Building his argument on three case studies—the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers—Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England’s Industrial Revolution.
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cover of English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900-1955

English Pastoral Music

From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900-1955

Eric Saylor

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Covering works by popular figures like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst as well as less familiar English composers, Eric Saylor's pioneering book examines pastoral music's critical, theoretical, and stylistic foundations alongside its creative manifestations in the contexts of Arcadia, war, landscape, and the Utopian imagination. As Saylor shows, pastoral music adapted and transformed established musical and aesthetic conventions that reflected the experiences of British composers and audiences during the early twentieth century. By approaching pastoral music as a cultural phenomenon dependent on time and place, Saylor forcefully challenges the body of critical opinion that has long dismissed it as antiquated, insular, and reactionary.
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cover of English Society: 1580-1680

English Society

1580-1680

Wrightson, Keith

Rutgers University Press, 2003

English Society brings together the results of recent historiography, together with much original research by the author, to provide a fascinating picture of society and social change in the period. The first section of the book discusses some of the enduring characteristics of society: social stratification and social mobility, kinship, neighborliness, patronage and deference, courtship and family formation, relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children. The second half of the book charts the course of social change: problems of public order, crime and social control, educational and religious developments, and profound changes in popular culture brought about by the growth of popular literacy and the consolidation of the Protestant Reformation. At every point, Keith Wrightson brings his material to life with his arresting use of contemporary diaries and texts.
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cover of English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton

English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton

Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson

University of Illinois Press, 2007

English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton examines the history of early English books, exploring the concept of putting the English language into print with close study of the texts, the formats, the audiences, and the functions of English books. Lavishly illustrated with more than 130 full-color images of stunning rare books, this volume investigates a full range of issues regarding the dissemination of English language and culture through printed works, including the standardization of typography, grammar, and spelling; the appearance of popular literature; and the development of school grammars and dictionaries. Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson provide engaging descriptions of more than a hundred early English books drawn from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Elizabethan Club of Yale University. The study nearly mirrors the chronological coverage of Pollard and Redgrave's famous Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), beginning with William Caxton, England's first printer, and ending with John Milton, the English language's most eloquent defender of the freedom of the press in his Areopagitica of 1644. William Shakespeare, neither a printer nor a writer much concerned with publishing his own plays, nonetheless deserves his central place in this study because Shakespeare imprints, and Renaissance drama in general, provide a fascinating window on the world of English printing in the period between Caxton and Milton.
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cover of Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916

Enigmas of Sacrifice

A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916

W. J. Mc Cormack

Michigan State University Press, 2016

Enigmas of Sacrifice: A Critique of Joseph M. Plunkett and the Dublin Insurrection of 1916 is the first critical study of the religious poet and militarist Joseph M. Plunkett, who was executed with the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection of 1916. Through Plunkett the author gains access to areas of nationalist thought that were more often assumed or repressed than publicly formulated. In this eye-opening book, W. J. Mc Cormack explores and analyzes Plunkett’s brief life, work, and influence, beginning with his wealthy but dysfunctional family, irregular Jesuit education, and self-canceling sexuality. Mc Cormack continues through Plunkett’s active phase when amateur theatricals and a magazine editorship brought him into the emergent neonationalist discourse of early twentieth-century Ireland. Finally, the author arrives at Holy Week 1916, when Plunkett masterminded the forgery of official documentation in order to provoke and justify the insurrection he planned. Mc Cormack analyzes Plunkett’s significant texts and provides context through critical perspectives on his milieu. Enigmas of Sacrifice is unique in its effort to understand a major figure of Irish nationalism in terms that reach beyond political identity.
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cover of Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens

Enlightenment Biopolitics

A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens

William Max Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath.

In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.
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cover of Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel

Enlightenment Orientalism

Resisting the Rise of the Novel

Srinivas Aravamudan

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.

More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.
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cover of Enlightenment Portraits

Enlightenment Portraits

Edited by Michel Vovelle

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Enlightenment Portraits permits us to see direct actors in history, people who took an active part in the collective adventures that put the human being at the center of Western civilizations vision of the world: nobles, priests, functionaries, men of letters, artists, and explorers, also soldiers and women.

The Enlightenment's leading figures cast their light in an irregular and unequal way: areas and environments in which new ideas penetrated and took effect alternated with shadowy patches. The fundamental structures of society may have remained stable, but new ways of producing, of being, and of appearing made sometimes abrupt headway. Attitudes toward life, birth, love, marriage and sexuality, and death had begun to change.

The twilight of the Enlightenment came at the end of the eighteenth century, part of a sequence of events of which the French Revolutions was simply the paroxysm.

A subtle and complex study of the Enlightenment, this book allows contemporary readers to reflect on how nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have constructed their views on eighteenth-century man.
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cover of Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered: A Heroic Poem

Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered

A Heroic Poem

Lucrezia Marinella

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is, by all accounts, a phenomenon in early modernity: a woman who wrote and published in many genres, whose fame shone brightly within and outside her native Venice, and whose voice is simultaneously original and reflective of her time and culture. In Enrico; or, Byzantium Conquered, one of the most ambitious and rewarding of her numerous narrative works, Marinella demonstrates her skill as an epic poet.
 

Now available for the first time in English translation, Enrico retells the story of the conquest of Byzantium in the Fourth Crusade (1202–04). Marinella intersperses historical events in her account of the invasion with numerous invented episodes, drawing on the rich imaginative legacy of the chivalric romance. Fast-moving, colorful, and narrated with the zest that characterizes Marinella’s other works, this poem is a great example of a woman engaging critically with a quintessentially masculine form and subject matter, writing in a genre in which the work of women poets was typically shunned.

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cover of Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy

Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy

Richard Hellie

University of Chicago Press, 1971

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cover of Entangled Landscapes: Early Modern China and Europe

Entangled Landscapes

Early Modern China and Europe

Edited by Yue Zhuang and Andrea M. Riemenschnitter

National University of Singapore Press, 2017

China and Europe have had a storied, and at times stormy, relationship. Yet their relationship is hardly one of a simple, binary exchange. Instead, their roles are best described as entangled. This exchange has a physical manifestation in the world of garden design, as artists on both continents engaged in complex processes of appropriation, crossover, and transformation.

Entangled Landscapes focuses on the exchange of ideas of landscape practice between Europe and China in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Yue Zhuang and Andrea M. Riemenschnitter explore this through three themes—empire-building, mediators’ constraints, and aesthetic negotiations. They challenge our assumptions about how China and Europe influenced one another and go beyond well-documented outcomes like the jardin anglo-chinois and Européenerie styles. Interdisciplinary and revisionist, this brings the critical spirit of postcolonial studies to art history and will appeal to scholars in fields such as comparative literature and visual culture, history, and human geography.
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cover of Entangled Paths Toward Modernity: Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans

Entangled Paths Toward Modernity

Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans

Augusta Dimou

Central European University Press, 2009

The book is a study in comparative intellectual history and discusses how socialist ideology emerged as an option of political modernity in the Balkans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Focusing on how technologies of ideological transfer and adaptation work, the book examines the introduction and contextualization of international socialist paradigms in the Southeast European periphery. At its core is the presentation of three case studies (Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece), intertwined at times through similar, but also divergent paths. Each case aspires to tell a different and yet complementary story with respect to the issue of modernity and socialism. The book analyses the introduction of socialism against the background and in conjunction to other prominent options of political modernity such as nationalism, liberalism and agrarianism.
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cover of Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body

Entanglements of Empire

Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body

Tony Ballantyne

Duke University Press, 2015

The first Protestant mission was established in New Zealand in 1814, initiating complex political, cultural, and economic entanglements with Māori. Tony Ballantyne shows how interest in missionary Christianity among influential Māori chiefs had far-reaching consequences for both groups. Deftly reconstructing cross-cultural translations and struggles over such concepts and practices as civilization, work, time and space, and gender, he identifies the physical body as the most contentious site of cultural engagement, with Māori and missionaries struggling over hygiene, tattooing, clothing, and sexual morality. Entanglements of Empire is particularly concerned with how, as a result of their encounters in the classroom, chapel, kitchen, and farmyard, Māori and the English mutually influenced each other’s worldviews. Concluding in 1840 with New Zealand’s formal colonization, this book offers an important contribution to debates over religion and empire.
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cover of Environmental Assessment in Countries in Transintion

Environmental Assessment in Countries in Transintion

Norman Lee

Central European University Press, 2000

The countries included in this study on the regulations and practices relating environmental assessment are Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine. Each country study has been prepared by specialists from within the country concerned. This study will be of interest to EA practitioners in public administration; development and consultant organizations; training and educational and research institutes; and international and bilateral aid agencies. Project level EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) and, to a lesser extent, SEA (Strategic Environmental Assessment) for planning and other strategic-level actions have been, or are being, introduced in the great majority of countries in transition (CIT). As yet, however, most of the countries have only limited experience in formulating "state of the art" EIA regulations and applying them satisfactorily. Furthermore, such experiences in CITs that do exist are not yet sufficiently well documented and widely disseminated. This report should be of considerable value in helping strengthen EA regulation and practice in the region.
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cover of Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic

Envisioning Socialism

Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic

Heather L. Gumbert

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating.

Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period.

A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.

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cover of Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin

Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin

Marie Dentière

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Born to a noble family in Tournai, Marie Dentière (1495-1561) left her convent in the 1520s to work for religious reform. She married a former priest and with her husband went to Switzerland, where she was active in the Reformation's takeover of Geneva.

Dentière's Very Useful Epistle (1539) is the first explicit statement of reformed theology by a woman to appear in French. Addressed to Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister of the French king Francis I, the Epistle asks the queen to help those persecuted for their religious beliefs. Dentière offers a stirring defense of women and asserts their right to teach the word of God in public. She defends John Calvin against his enemies and attacks the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Her Preface (1561) to one of Calvin's sermons criticizes immodesty and extravagance in clothing and warns the faithful to be vigilant. Undaunted in the face of suppression and ridicule, this outspoken woman persisted as an active voice in the Reformation.
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cover of Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France

Equal in Monastic Profession

Religious Women in Medieval France

Penelope D. Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 1991

In this study of the manner in which medieval nuns lived, Penelope Johnson challenges facile stereotypes of nuns living passively under monastic rule, finding instead that collectively they were empowered by their communal privileges and status to think and act without many of the subordinate attitudes of secular women. In the words of one abbess comparing nuns with monks, they were "different as to their sex but equal in their monastic profession."

Johnson researched more than two dozen nunneries in northern France from the eleventh century through the thirteenth century, balancing a qualitative reading of medieval monastic documents with a quantitative analysis of a lengthy thirteenth-century visitation record which allows an important comparison of nuns and monks. A fascinating look at the world of medieval spirituality, this work enriches our understanding of women's role in premodern Europe and in church history.



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cover of Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean: Ways of Being Non/Sovereign

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean

Ways of Being Non/Sovereign

Yvon van der Pijl

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty alongside the work of independistas and traditional social movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.
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cover of Equality for Same-Sex Couples: The Legal Recognition of Gay Partnerships in Europe and the United States

Equality for Same-Sex Couples

The Legal Recognition of Gay Partnerships in Europe and the United States

Yuval Merin

University of Chicago Press, 2002

During the past three decades, nations all over the world have been debating whether to allow same-sex couples to marry, or at least grant these couples various rights associated with marriage. In Equality for Same-Sex Couples, Yuval Merin presents the first comparative study of the legal regulation of same-sex partnerships worldwide, as well as a unique survey of the status of same-sex couples in Europe.

Merin begins by providing a historical overview of the transformation of marriage from antiquity to the present. He then identifies and critically compares four principal models for the legal regulation and recognition of same-sex partnerships: civil marriage, registered partnership, domestic partnership, and cohabitation. Merin concludes that all of the models except civil marriage discriminate against gays and lesbians just as the "separate but equal" doctrine discriminated against African Americans; thus, so-called alternatives to marriage, even if they provide the same rights and benefits as marriage, are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.
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cover of Eric Warburg: A Transatlantic Life

Eric Warburg

A Transatlantic Life

Jeanette Erazo Heufelder

Haus Publishing, 2025

A comprehensive telling of the life of Eric Warburg, nephew of the art historian Aby Warburg.

In Eric Warburg, Jeanette Erazo Heufelder tells the story of the nephew of the art historian Aby Warburg, whose world-famous library Eric saved from the Nazis. He was a Jew, a banker, a helper of escapees, an intelligence officer in the US Army, a transatlantic bridge builder, and a Cold Warrior. With the help of the cooperation channels he set up, West German and US social groups were aligned with the West amidst the turmoil of postwar Europe. 

The history of the transatlantic partnership has become highly topical; since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it has been invoked in Europe as a key reassurance. Eric Warburg’s life, and that of Aby Warburg’s library, tells the story of Europe's twentieth century, the legacy of which continues to inform and inspire the transatlantic partnership today.
 
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cover of Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945

Ernst Jünger and Germany

Into the Abyss, 1914-1945

Thomas R. Nevin

Duke University Press, 1996

For most of his life, Ernst Jünger, one of Europe's leading twentieth-century writers, has been controversial. Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War, he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jünger in English, Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writer’s first fifty years, from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jünger, a man who has been extolled, despised, denounced, and admired throughout his lifetime, Ernst Jünger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is, if uncomfortably, represented by him.
Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany’s conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler’s assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger’s untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger’s profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism.
Winner of Germany’s highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.
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cover of Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer

Eros and Inwardness in Vienna

Weininger, Musil, Doderer

David S. Luft

University of Chicago Press, 2003

Although we usually think of the intellectual legacy of twentieth-century Vienna as synonymous with Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories, other prominent writers from Vienna were also radically reconceiving sexuality and gender. In this probing new study, David Luft recovers the work of three such writers: Otto Weininger, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer. His account emphasizes the distinctive intellectual world of liberal Vienna, especially the impact of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in this highly scientific intellectual world.

According to Luft, Otto Weininger viewed human beings as bisexual and applied this theme to issues of creativity and morality. Robert Musil developed a creative ethics that was closely related to his open, flexible view of sexuality and gender. And Heimito von Doderer portrayed his own sexual obsessions as a way of understanding the power of total ideologies, including his own attraction to National Socialism. For Luft, the significance of these three writers lies in their understandings of eros and inwardness and in the roles that both play in ethical experience and the formation of meaningful relations to the world-a process that continues to engage artists, writers, and thinkers today.

Eros and Inwardness in Vienna will profoundly reshape our understanding of Vienna's intellectual history. It will be important for anyone interested in Austrian or German history, literature, or philosophy.
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cover of Eros and Magic in the Renaissance

Eros and Magic in the Renaissance

Ioan P. Couliano

University of Chicago Press, 1987

It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.

Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.

In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing.

Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.
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cover of Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany

Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany

Translated by Albrecht Classen

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007

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cover of Escaping Hitler: A Jewish Haven in Chile

Escaping Hitler

A Jewish Haven in Chile

Eva Goldschmidt Wyman

University of Alabama Press, 2013

A family’s flight from Nazi terror to an unexpected refuge in Chile.

Escaping Hitler is the personal story of Eva Wyman and her family’s escape from Nazi Germany to Chile in the sociohistorical context of 1930s and 1940s, a time when the Chilean Nazi party had an active presence in the country’s major institutions.

Based primarily on interviews with German Jewish refugees and family correspondence, Eva Goldschmidt Wyman provides an intimate account of Jews in Germany in the 1930s as Nazi controls tightened and family members were taken to Riga concentration camp. Wyman recounts Kristallnacht in Stuttgart, where her father was principal of the Jewish school, his imprisonment in Dachau, and his release and immigration to Great Britain. Escaping Hitler details the family’s escape from Germany and subsequent life in Chile, providing an intimate look at daily life on the steam ship Conte Grande during the voyage from Italy to Chile in 1939, Nazi espionage and anti-Semitic activity in Chile, and the Nazi influence in South America in general.

Recounted in an intimate and personal style, Escaping Hitler immerses the reader in an extraordinary chapter of contemporary Jewish history both inside Germany and South America.

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cover of Escaping Kakania: Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia

Escaping Kakania

Eastern European Travels in Colonial Southeast Asia

Jan Mrázek

Central European University Press, 2024

Escaping Kakania is about fascinating characters—soldiers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters—who traveled from their eastern European homelands to colonial Southeast Asia. Their stories are told by experts on different countries in the two regions, who bring diverse approaches into a conversation that crosses disciplinary and national borders.

The 14 chapters deal with the diverse encounters of eastern Europeans with the many faces of colonial southeast Asia. Some essays directly engage with post-colonial studies, contributing to an ongoing critical re-evaluation of eastern European “semi-peripheral” (non-)involvement in colonialism. Other chapters disclose a range of perspectives and narratives that illuminate the plurality of the travelers’ positions while reflecting on the specificity of the eastern European experience.

The travellers moved—as do the chapter authors—between two regions that are off-centre, in-between, shiftingly “Eastern,” and disorientingly heterogeneous, thus complicating colonial and postcolonial notions of “Europe,” “East,” and East-West distinctions. Both at home and overseas, they navigated among a multiplicity of peoples, “races,” and empires, Occidents and Orients, fantasies of the Self and the Other, adopting/adapting/mimicking/rejecting colonialist identities and ideologies. They saw both eastern Europe and southeast Asia in a distinctive light, as if through each other—and so will the readers of Escaping Kakania.

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cover of Espana Pontifica: Papal Letters to Spain 1198-1303

Espana Pontifica

Papal Letters to Spain 1198-1303

Peter Linehan

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

Peter Linehan (+2020) followed his survey of original papal letters in Portugal, Portugalia pontifica 1198-1417 (2013) with the present volume, España Pontifica, that covers papal letters to Spanish recipients from Pope Innocent II (1198-1216) to Pope Boniface VIII (+1303). This volume will provide students of the medieval papacy and the Spanish church with an invaluable research tool to explore the relationship between Rome and Spain during the crucial period of the Spanish Reconquistà after the battles of Navas de Tolosa (1212) to the capture of Seville (1248). Linehan spent his career cataloguing papal letters from more than sixty Spanish repositories. For the past sixty years the Vatican has also been engaged in publishing surveys of original papal letters preserved from various European archives. However, this volume includes material that has not been included in these surveys.
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cover of Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography

Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography

Arnaldo Momigliano

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the foremost classical historiographers of the twentieth century. This collection of twenty-one carefully selected essays is remarkable both in the depth of its scholarship and the breadth of its subjects. Moving with ease across the centuries, Momigliano supplements powerful readings of writers in the Greek, Jewish, and Roman traditions, such as Tacitus and Polybius, with writings that focus on later historians, such as Vico and Croce. Charmingly written and concise, these pieces range from review essays reprinted from the New York Review of Books to treatises on the nature of historical scholarship. Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography is a brilliant reminder of Momigliano’s profound knowledge of classical civilization and his gift for deftly handling prose.
            With a new Foreword by Anthony Grafton, this volume is essential reading for any student of classics or historiography.
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cover of Essays on Scandinavian History

Essays on Scandinavian History

H. Arnold Barton

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Essays on Scandinavian History examines important aspects of the history of Sweden and its Nordic neighbors between the later eighteenth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Historian H. Arnold Barton has selected thirteen of the numerous essays he has published over the past forty years on the history of Scandinavia.

This is a companion volume to Barton's The Old Country and the New, an essay collection on Swedish emigration and the Swedes in America. Included here are studies of the special significance of the eighteenth century in Sweden's history and culture, the relationship of King Gustaf III to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the impact of the American Revolution in Sweden, and Gustaf III's ambitions in the East Baltic region. Also detailed are the king's early reaction to the French Revolution and his efforts to organize a European coalition to crush it, a reassessment of the reign and internal reforms of Gustaf IV Adolf, and the Swedish succession crises of 1809 and 1810.

In addition, Barton examines the increasing tension between the Pan-Scandinavian movement and the rising Finnish national movement. He deals with the historians of the Danish Agrarian Reforms of 1784-1814, parallel developments in Finland and Norway between 1808 and 1917, the discovery of Norway abroad, Swedish national romanticism, and Sweden's transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, now exemplifying the rational and humane ideals of the twentieth century.

Essays on Scandinavian History highlights important topics in the history of the Scandinavian region, which has remained all too little known outside the Nordic lands themselves, while also offering broader perspectives on Europe since the mid-eighteenth century. Twelve keyed-to-text illustrations, a bibliography of Barton's publications on Scandinavian history, essay endnotes, and an index augment this work.

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cover of Essays on Some Maladies of Angola (1799)

Essays on Some Maladies of Angola (1799)

José Pinto De Azeredo

Tagus Press, 2016

Western science and pharmacology first learned about many African diseases, remedies, and medicinal practices through José Pinto de Azeredo's highly original and influential text. A unique Enlightenment-era medical text written specifically about health issues in Angola, this is the first work by a Portuguese physician to describe accurately, through first-hand observation, medical practices and substances used in Angola during the peak period of the transatlantic slave trade.

This first English-language edition of Essays on Some Maladies of Angola was translated by Stewart Lloyd-Jones (University of Stirling) and includes scholarly essays by Timothy Walker (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth), Adelino Cardoso (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), António Braz de Oliveira (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal) and Manuel Silvério Marques (Universidade de Lisboa).
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cover of Estonian Life Stories

Estonian Life Stories

Tiina Kirss

Central European University Press, 2009

After a short period of independence, Estonia was occupied in World War II by the Red Army, then Nazi Germany, and again, for a lasting occupation, by the Soviets. No wonder that a greater part of the roughly one million Estonians had harshly eventful lives.

This anthology contains 25 selected life stories collected from Estonians who lived through the tribulations of the 20th century, and describe the travails of ordinary people under numerous regimes. The autobiographical accounts provide authentic perspectives on events of this period, where time is placed in the context of life-spans, and subjects grounded in personal experience. Most of the life stories reveal sufferings under foreign (Russian) oppression.

The volume is the product of a large-scale national project to record history by collecting autobiographical accounts, and a process of engaged selection for publication which followed. The variety of life-experiences recorded offers comparison across cultures, as well as an overview of the powerful neighbors as they relinquish and strengthen their hold on Estonia.

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