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This book offers lively description and convincing interpretation of the most significant events, cruxes and ongoing themes in German history from the end of the Second World War up to the present. The main features of the last fifty years are not only succinctly and vividly presented and interpreted, they are also placed in the context of international political developments.

The chronologies that accompany each chapter record the most important dates, facts and names occurring in the narrative. Jürgen Weber’s text supplies the reader with a combination of vivid descriptive history, easily absorbed chronology, and a reliable reference work for the parallel lives of the two Germanies, a product of the Cold War.

Tracing how the Civil War continues to shape the landscapes, politics, and culture of today

Every year, thousands of Americans don Civil War uniforms and restage the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil. In Gettysburg, Time and Again, Mads Daugbjerg explores how the Civil War continues to inhabit the present. Bringing together reenactors, National Park Service rangers, ghost hunters, tourists, and local residents, this study examines how Americans across social and political divides engage the past through the landscapes, institutions, and everyday practices of public history.

At once historically grounded and urgently contemporary, this book speaks directly to current struggles over the meaning of America and its values. Rather than treating time and history as abstract concepts, Daugbjerg approaches them as lived, material forces produced through commemorative landscapes, interpretive labor, and the relentless restaging of 1863 for contemporary audiences. Studying reenactment illuminates not only a distinctive cultural practice but also the broader processes through which the past is continuously reshaped, repeated, and felt in the present. He argues that present-day American unrest can be understood, in part, as a conflict over how the past is curated. He further suggests that Americans today often occupy profoundly different temporal worlds.

Daugbjerg traces these tensions through landscapes, material culture, tourism infrastructures, and social life at Gettysburg. Challenging the commonsense notion of history as linear progression, Gettysburg, Time and Again reveals repetition as a defining feature of American historical experience. By offering a finely grained anthropology of the “present past,” Daugbjerg shows how history’s afterlives remain powerfully out of sync and why those temporal disjunctions matter now.

While public intellectuals are typically thought of as inherently nonconformist and critical of established power, in practice many adapt themselves to the views of the majority—particularly in the context of repressive governments and dictatorships. When the political winds change, such figures often refashion themselves to fit the new paradigm. Ghosts of Fascism follows the trajectories of four major Italian intellectuals who, despite their passivity and at times collaboration with Fascist institutions, became some of postwar Italy’s iconic anti-Fascists: Federico Chabod, a prominent historian who would join the Resistance; the jurist Piero Calamandrei, who later participated in drafting the Italian democratic constitution; the influential literary critic Luigi Russo, who presided over the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa; and Alberto Moravia, the internationally renowned novelist. Simon Levis Sullam weaves together their histories to show how postwar Italian intellectuals quietly revised their previous political positions, redefining themselves—and their recent pasts, together with that of the entire nation—as consistently anti-Fascist.

This book argues for an original, unorthodox conception about the relationship between globalization and contemporary nationalism. While the prevailing view holds that nationalism and globalization are forces of clashing opposition, Sabanadze establishes that these tend to become allied forces. It acknowledges that nationalism does react against the rising globalization and represents a form of resistance against globalizing influences, but the Basque and Georgian cases prove that globalization and nationalism can be complementary rather than contradictory tendencies.

Nationalists have often served as promoters of globalization, seeking out globalizing influences and engaging with global actors out of their very nationalist interests. In the case of both Georgia and the Basque Country, there is little evidence suggesting the existence of strong, politically organized nationalist opposition to globalization.

Globalization and Nationalism discusses why, on a broader scale, different forms of nationalism develop differing attitudes towards globalization and engage in different relationships.

The authors of this book retell the political and economic history of East-Central Europe, the post-communist Balkans, and the Baltic states and speculate about their future from the vantage point of three competing forces operating in the region: territorial imperialism, globalization, and nationalism.

Exposed to imperial aspirations, the geographic area from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea has in the past 150 years been subject to alternating waves of globalization and nationalism. The nineteenth century Eastern European empires were open to forces of economic globalization, but all collapsed at the end of World War One. Emerging nation-states embraced the logic of Western-led globalization but were subjugated by Nazi and Soviet empires, which pursued policies of economic autarchy. The demise of the Soviet empire marked the revival of pre-1939 nation-states and the re-entry of forces of liberalism and globalization into the region, with multiple crises of economic transition, ethnic militancy, new forms of authoritarianism, and external security threats. By 2010 negative, nationalist-populist reactions against crises that globalization brought to Eastern Europe became the dominant political trend. The analysis involves the consideration about the very contemporary factors of Brexit and COVID, as well as Russia’s and China’s influences, and their effects on Eastern Europe.

A key period in the history of food cooperatives that continues to influence how we purchase organic food today

Our notions of food co-ops generally don’t include images of baseball bat–wielding activists in the aisles. But in May 1975, this was the scene as a Marxist group known as the Co-op Organization took over the People’s Warehouse, a distribution center for more than a dozen small cooperative grocery stores in the Minneapolis area. The activist group’s goal: to curtail the sale of organic food. The People’s Warehouse quickly became one of the principal fronts in the political and social battle that Craig Upright explores in Grocery Activism. The story of the fraught relationship of new-wave cooperative grocery stores to the organic food industry, this book is an instructive case study in the history of activists intervening in capitalist markets to promote social change.

Focusing on Minnesota, a state with both a long history of cooperative enterprise and the largest number of surviving independent cooperative stores, Grocery Activism looks back to the 1970s, when the mission of these organizations shifted from political activism to the promotion of natural and organic foods. Why, Upright asks, did two movements—promoting cooperative enterprise and sustainable agriculture—come together at this juncture? He analyzes the nexus of social movements and economic sociology, examining how new-wave cooperatives have pursued social change by imbuing products they sell with social values. Rather than trying to explain the success or failure of any individual cooperative, his work shows how members of this fraternity of organizations supported one another in their mutual quest to maintain fiscal solvency, promote better food-purchasing habits, support sustainable agricultural practices, and extol the virtues of cooperative organizing. A foundational chapter in the history of organic food, Grocery Activism clarifies the critical importance of this period in transforming the politics and economics of the grocery store in America.