3745 books match the query 'Europe' and 973 start with t

cover of The Village and the Class War: Anti-Kulak Campaign in Estonia 1944-49

The Village and the Class War

Anti-Kulak Campaign in Estonia 1944-49

Anu Mai Kõll

Central European University Press, 2013

Before collectivization of agriculture in Estonia, “kulaks” (better-off farmers) were persecuted and many of them were finally deported in March 1949. This book is situated on the local level; the aim is to understand what these processes meant from the perspective of the Estonian rural population, a kind of study that has been missing so far. Analyzes the mechanisms of repression, applying new aspects. Repression was mainly conducted through a bureaucratic process where individual denunciations were not even necessary. The main tool of persecution was a screening of the rural population with the help of records, censuses and local knowledge, in order to identify, or invent, “kulak families”. Moreover, in the Estonian sources, the World War II history of each individual was a crucial part of screenings. The prisoners of war of the Red Army, held in camps in Estonia, played an unexpected part in this campaign. Another result is a so far neglected wave of peaceful resistance as the kulak identifications were challenged in 1947-48. This has not been addressed in the existing literature. The results mainly answer the question “how” this process worked, whereas the question ”why” finds hypothetical responses in the life trajectories of actors.
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cover of The Village of Vanished Souls: The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 1

The Village of Vanished Souls

The Vanished Souls Duology, Book 1

Richard Zimler

Tagus Press, 2027

Winner of Book of the Year in Portugal, The Village of Vanished Souls is a sweeping historical tale inspired by authentic records of the Portuguese Inquisition and the real lives of villagers whose stories have long been forgotten.

Portugal, 1671—Nine-year-old Isaaque Zarco lives a peaceful life in the remote mountain village of Castelo Rodrigo, where he helps his mother prepare meals, roams the surrounding forests with his spirited best friend Lena, and learns about nature from the village apothecary, Samuel. But his idyllic childhood is shattered when Lena and her family suddenly vanish, followed by a series of brutal murders that plunge the isolated community into fear.

When Isaaque’s formidable Castilian grandmother visits, she says what no one else dares: the Inquisition is hunting descendants of Jews who continue to secretly practice. Then she entrusts Isaaque with an even more dangerous secret—that he, too, belongs to a secret Jewish family. As she introduces him to the forbidden traditions and sacred writings of their ancestors, Isaaque’s understanding of his parents, his village, and himself is transformed forever.

As Isaaque comes of age, he is drawn into a clandestine network that helps persecuted Jews escape Portugal. Every mission carries the risk of imprisonment, torture, and death, yet this dangerous work gives Isaaque a profound sense of purpose while deepening his commitment to his heritage. When he learns that his beloved grandmother is ill, he embarks on a journey that will expose long-buried family secrets and reveal that learning to embrace his heritage is only the beginning of what will soon be asked of him.

Inspired by the names, arrest records, and testimonies preserved in Inquisitional archives, The Village of Vanished Souls recreates a little-known chapter of history with vivid historical detail and emotional depth. At once an unforgettable coming-of-age story and a moving portrait of resilience, identity, faith, and love, it gives voice to people whose courage endured despite centuries of persecution and forced silence.

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cover of The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos: Uncovering Hidden Influences from Spain to Mexico

The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos

Uncovering Hidden Influences from Spain to Mexico

Hernández, Marie-Theresa

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Hidden lives, hidden history, and hidden manuscripts. In The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos, Marie-Theresa Hernández unmasks the secret lives of conversos and judaizantes and their likely influence onthe Catholic Churchin the New World.

The terms converso and judaizante are often used for descendants of Spanish Jews (the Sephardi, or Sefarditas as they are sometimes called), who converted under duress to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are few, if any, archival documents that prove the existence of judaizantes after the Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the Portuguese expulsion in 1497, as it is unlikely that a secret Jew in sixteenth-century Spain would have documented his allegiance to the Law of Moses, thereby providing evidence for the Inquisition.

On a Da Vinci Code – style quest, Hernández persisted in hunting for a trove of forgotten manuscripts at the New York Public Library. These documents, once unearthed, describe the Jewish/Christian religious beliefs of an early nineteenth-century Catholic priest in Mexico City, focusing on the relationship between the Virgin of Guadalupe and Judaism. With this discovery in hand, the author traces the cult of Guadalupe backwards to its fourteenth-century Spanish origins. The trail from that point forward can then be followed to its interface with early modern conversos and their descendants at the highest levels of the Church and the monarchy in Spain and Colonial Mexico. She describes key players who were somehow immune to the dangers of the Inquisition and who were allowed the freedom to display, albeit in a camouflaged manner, vestiges of their family's Jewish identity.

By exploring the narratives produced by these individuals, Hernández reveals the existence of those conversos and judaizantes who did not return to the “covenantal bond of rabbinic law,” who did not publicly identify themselves as Jews, and who continued to exhibit in their influential writings a covert allegiance and longing for a Jewish past. This is a spellbinding and controversial story that offers a fresh perspective on the origins and history of conversos.
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cover of The Visions of Sor María de Agreda: Writing Knowledge and Power

The Visions of Sor María de Agreda

Writing Knowledge and Power

Clark Colahan

University of Arizona Press, 1994

Sor María de Agreda (1602-65) was a Spanish nun and visionary who is best known as the author of the widely read biography of the Virgin Mary, The Mystical City of God, and as the missionary who "bilocated" to the American Southwest, reportedly appearing to Indians there without ever leaving Spain. Her role as advisor to King Philip IV contributed further to her legend. Clark Colahan now offers the first major study of Sor María's writings, including translations of two previously unpublished works: Face of the Earth and Map of the Spheres and the first half of her Report to Father Manero, in which she reflects on her bilocation.
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cover of The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar

The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar

Robert Desjarlais

Duke University Press, 2025

On the night of October 17, 1961, thousands of Algerians peacefully demonstrated in the streets of Paris, protesting an illegal curfew imposed upon them by the French colonial government. The Paris police responded with deadly violence, by some accounts killing over two hundred people and wounding countless others. One of the victims was Abdelkader Bennahar, who was seriously beaten in Nanterre, a commune just west of Paris. Jewish-French photographer Élie Kagan took a number of photographs of Bennahar as he lay bleeding in the street. Bennahar was brought to a Nanterre hospital and reportedly died the next night. In The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar, Robert Desjarlais analyzes Kagan’s photographs and their affective force and political significance from the moment they first circulated through the decades that followed. By drawing on Kagan’s photographs and archival records to consider the trace remnants of Bennahar’s life and the fate of his body in death, Desjarlais offers a compelling account of one person’s “life death” through complicated strands of time and memory.
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cover of The Visual World of the Hungarian Angevin Legendary

The Visual World of the Hungarian Angevin Legendary

Béla Zsolt Szakács

Central European University Press, 2016

Dispersed in two continents, four countries and six collections; many of its pages were cropped, cut into four, or lost forever; its history, origin, commissioner and audience are obscure; still, in its fragmented state it presents fifty-eight legends in abundant series of images, on folios fully covered by miniatures, richly gilded, using only one side of the fine parchment; a luxurious codex worthy of a ruler; a unique iconographic treasury of medieval legends; one of the most significant manuscripts of the medieval Hungarian Kingdom – these are all what we call the Hungarian Angevin Legendary.
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cover of The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852

The Wake of Wellington

Englishness in 1852

Peter W. Sinnema

Ohio University Press, 2006

Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death.

The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented.

Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times’s celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington “was the very type and model of an Englishman.” The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation.

The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

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cover of The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story

The Wall Jumper

A Berlin Story

Peter Schneider

University of Chicago Press, 1998

A classic novel that Werner Herzog called “the ultimate depiction” of the Berlin Wall and that Salman Rushdie said was “marvelous”

When the Berlin Wall was still the most tangible representation of the Cold War, Peter Schneider made this political and ideological symbol into something personal, that could be perceived on a human level, from more than one side. In Schneider's Berlin, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country. This unforgettable novel, originally published in 1982, takes us back to a time when the Cold War seemed to have no end in sight and the Wall loomed over everyday life on both sides of Berlin.
 
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cover of The Wandering Scholars

The Wandering Scholars

Helen Waddell

University of Michigan Press, 1990

“There is no beginning,” writes Helen Waddell in her introduction to this classic, “to a history of medieval Latin. Its roots take hold too firmly on the kingdoms of the dead. The scholar’s lyric of the twelfth century seems as new a miracle as the first crocus; but its earth is the leafdrift of centuries of forgotten scholarship.” This book is the record of the Wandering Scholars, makers, and singers of medieval Latin, and their vanished Order.
 
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cover of The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The War against Catholicism

Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Michael B. Gross

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"A lucid, innovative work of top-flight scholarship. Gross shows us the depths of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany; he explains why the German Kulturkampf had such force and why prominent liberals imagined it as a turning point not only in Germany but in world history."
---Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University

"A marvelously original account of how the Kulturkampf emerged from the cultural, social, and gendered worlds of German liberalism. While not neglecting the 1870s, Gross's analysis directs historians' attention to the under-researched 1850s and 1860s-decades in which liberals' anti-Catholic arguments were formulated against a backdrop of religious revival, democratic innovation, national ambition, and the articulation of new roles for women in society, politics, and the church. The drama of these decades resonates in every chapter of Gross's fine study."
---James Retallack, University of Toronto

"Michael Gross has put the culture back into the Kulturkampf! Integrating social and political analysis with illuminating interpretations of visual and linguistic evidence, Gross explores the work of religious cleavage in defining German national identity. An emerging women's movement, liberal virtues, and Catholic difference come together to explain why, in a century of secularization, Germany's Catholics experienced a religious revival, and why its liberals responded with enmity and frustration. Vividly written and a pleasure to read, this groundbreaking study offers real surprises."
---Margaret Lavinia Anderson, University of California, Berkeley


An innovative study of the relationship between the two most significant, equally powerful, and irreconcilable movements in Germany, Catholicism and liberalism, in the decades following the 1848 Revolution.

After the defeat of liberalism in the Revolution of 1848, and in the face of the dramatic revival of popular Catholicism, German middle-class liberals used anti-Catholicism to orient themselves culturally in a new age. Michael B. Gross's study shows how anti-Catholicism and specifically the Kulturkampf, the campaign to break the power of the Catholic Church, were not simply attacks against the church nor were they merely an attempt to secure state autonomy. Gross shows that the liberal attack on Catholicism was actually a complex attempt to preserve moral, social, political, and sexual order during a period of dramatic pressures for change.

Gross argues that a culture of anti-Catholicism shaped the modern development of Germany including capitalist economics, industrial expansion, national unification, and gender roles. He demonstrates that images of priests, monks, nuns, and Catholics as medieval, backward, and sexually deviant asserted the liberal middle-class claim to social authority after the Revolution of 1848. He pays particular attention to the ways anti-Catholicism, Jesuitphobia, and antimonastic hysteria were laced with misogyny and expressed deeper fears of mass culture and democracy in the liberal imagination. In doing so, he identifies the moral, social, and cultural imperatives behind the Kulturkampf in the 1870s.

By offering a provocative reinterpretation of liberalism and its relationship to the German anti-Catholic movement, this work ultimately demonstrates that in Germany, liberalism itself contributed to a culture of intolerance that would prove to be a serious liability in the twentieth century. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of culture, ideology, religion, and politics.
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cover of The War in Their Minds: German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany

The War in Their Minds

German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany

Svenja Goltermann

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Historians are increasingly looking at the sacrifices Germans had to make during World War II. In this context, Svenja Goltermann has taken up a particularly delicate topic, German soldiers’ experience of violence during the war, and repercussions of this experience after their return home. Part I of her book explores the ways in which veterans’ experiences of wartime violence reshaped everyday family life, involving family members in complex ways. Part II offers an extensive analysis of the psychiatric response to this new category of patient, and in particular the reluctance of psychiatrists to recognize the psychic afflictions of former POWs as constituting the grounds for long-term disability. Part III analyzes the cultural representations of veterans’ psychic suffering, encompassing the daily press, popular films, novels, and theater.

Originally published in German as Die Gesellschaft der Uberlebenden, The War in Their Minds examines hitherto unused source material—psychiatric medical files of soldiers—to make clear how difficult it was for the soldiers and their families to readjust to normal, everyday life. Goltermann allows these testimonies of violence, guilt, justification, and helplessness speak for themselves and sensitively explores how the pension claims of returning soldiers were to compete with the claims of the Holocaust victims to compensation.
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cover of The War in Ukraine’s Donbas: Origins, Contexts, and the Future

The War in Ukraine’s Donbas

Origins, Contexts, and the Future

David R. Marples

Central European University Press, 2022

This collective work analyzes the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, providing a coherent picture of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in the period 2013–2020. Giving voice to different social groups, scholarly communities and agencies relevant to Ukraine’s recent history, The War in Ukraine's Donbas goes beyond simplistic media interpretations that limit the analysis to Vladimir Putin and Russian aims to annex Ukraine. Instead, the authors identify the deeper roots linked to the autonomy and history of Donbas as a region. The contributions explore local society and traditions and the alienation from Ukraine caused by the events of Euromaidan, which saw the removal of the Donetsk-based president Viktor Yanukovych. Other chapters address the refugee crisis, the Minsk Accords in 2014 and the impact of the new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his efforts to bring the war to an end by negotiations among Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.

The book concludes with four proposals for a durable peace in Donbas: territorial power-sharing; the conversion of rebels into legitimate political parties; amnesty for all participants of the armed conflict; and a transitional period of several years until political institutions are fully re-established.

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cover of The War of 1812, A Short History

The War of 1812, A Short History

Donald R. Hickey

University of Illinois Press, 2012

This abridged edition of Donald R. Hickey's comprehensive and authoritative The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict has been thoroughly revised for the 200th anniversary of the historic conflict. A myth-shattering study that will inform and entertain students and general readers alike, The War of 1812: A Short History explores the military, diplomatic, and domestic history of our second war with Great Britain, bringing the study up to date with recent scholarship on all aspects of the war, from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.

 
With new information on military operations, logistics, and the use and capabilities of weaponry, The War of 1812: A Short History explains how the war promoted American nationalism, reinforced the notion of manifest destiny, stimulated peacetime defense spending, and enhanced America's reputation abroad. Hickey also concludes that the war sparked bloody conflicts between pro-war Republican and anti-war Federalist neighbors, dealt a crippling blow to the independence and treaty rights of American Indians, and solidified the United States' antipathy toward the British. Ideal for students and history buffs, this special edition includes selected illustrations, maps, a chronology of major events during the war, and a list of suggested further reading.
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cover of The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World

The Wardian Case

How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World

Luke Keogh

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The story of a nineteenth-century invention (essentially a tiny greenhouse) that allowed for the first time the movement of plants around the world, feeding new agricultural industries, the commercial nursery trade, botanic and private gardens, invasive species, imperialism, and more.

Roses, jasmine, fuchsia, chrysanthemums, and rhododendrons bloom in gardens across the world, and yet many of the most common varieties have roots in Asia. How is this global flowering possible? In 1829, surgeon and amateur naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward placed soil, dried leaves, and the pupa of a sphinx moth into a sealed glass bottle, intending to observe the moth hatch. But when a fern and meadow grass sprouted from the soil, he accidentally discovered that plants enclosed in glass containers could survive for long periods without watering. After four years of experimentation in his London home, Ward created traveling glazed cases that would be able to transport plants around the world. Following a test run from London to Sydney, Ward was proven correct: the Wardian case was born, and the botanical makeup of the world’s flora was forever changed.
 
In our technologically advanced and globalized contemporary world, it is easy to forget that not long ago it was extremely difficult to transfer plants from place to place, as they often died from mishandling, cold weather, and ocean salt spray. In this first book on the Wardian case, Luke Keogh leads us across centuries and seas to show that Ward’s invention spurred a revolution in the movement of plants—and that many of the repercussions of that revolution are still with us, from new industries to invasive plant species. From the early days of rubber, banana, tea, and cinchona cultivation—the last used in the production of the malaria drug quinine—to the collecting of beautiful and exotic flora like orchids in the first great greenhouses of the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, DC, and England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Wardian case transformed the world’s plant communities, fueled the commercial nursery trade and late nineteenth-century imperialism, and forever altered the global environment.
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cover of The Wars of Archibald Forbes

The Wars of Archibald Forbes

W. Hamish Fraser

Aberdeen University Press, 2015

With heroic journeys on horseback and on foot to get to the nearest telegraph station, Archibald Forbes transformed the profession of war correspondent into something recognisably modern. He was widely regarded as the greatest war correspondent of the nineteenth century and the model with whom all others had to compete. It was he, more than any other, who appreciated the public demand for immediacy and therefore the need to get reports from the front into the press as fast as possible. He transformed the fortunes of the Daily News by making extensive use of the telegraph: his brilliant descriptive writing shaped images of wars for a public greedy for information and excitement.Despite persistent health difficulties he covered in the 1870s the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, the Carlist Wars in Spain, the Serbian-Turkish War, the Russo-Turkish War, the occupation of Cyprus, the Afghan War, the Zulu War, the Indian Famine and the Prince of Wales’s visit to India.At the same time, he kept up a prolific output of articles in many of which he did not hesitate to challenge the assumptions of the military authorities, to criticise the generals and to press for modernisation of the army. He defended the freedom of war correspondents to report wars as they saw them against the growing pressures to have their work censored and controlled. When ill-health forced him to abandon war work he became a tireless lecturer in Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand and his predictions on the shape of future wars came all too true in 1914.
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cover of The Warsaw Uprising of 1944

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944

Wlodzimierz Borodziej

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 dramatically tells the largely unknown story of the Warsaw resistance movement during World War II. Desperate to free themselves from German military oppression but also hoping to show the advancing Soviets that they could not impose easy rule upon the citizens of Warsaw, the Poles launched an almost hopeless attack against the Germans on August 1, 1944.

    Wlodzimierz Borodziej presents an evenhanded account of what is commonly considered the darkest chapter in Polish history during World War II. In only sixty-three days, the Germans razed Warsaw to the ground and 200,000 people, mostly civilians, lost their lives. The result—a heroic and historically pivotal turning point—meant that the Poles would lose both their capital and an entire generation. This concise account of the trauma—little known to English-speaking readers—will appeal to anyone interested in the history of World War II in general and is a must-read for students of Polish history in particular.
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cover of The Warwolf: A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War

The Warwolf

A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War

Hermann Lons

Westholme Publishing, 2006

The conflict that ravaged seventeeth-century Europe, as seen in a classic German novel—freshly translated
The Thirty Years War, fought between 1618 and 1648, was a ruthless struggle for political and religious control of central Europe. Engulfing most of present-day Germany, the war claimed at least ten million lives. The lengthy conflict was particularly hard on the general population, as thousands of undisciplined mercenaries serving Sweden, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and various German principalities, robbed, murdered, and pillaged communities; disease spread out of control and starvation became commonplace. In The Warwolf, Hermann Löns's acclaimed historical novel, the tragedy and horrors of war in general, and these times in particular are revealed. The Warwolf, based on the author's careful research, traces the life of Harm Wulf, a land-owning peasant farmer of the northern German heath who realizes after witnessing the murder of neighbours and family at the hands of marauding troops that he has a choice between compromising his morals or succumbing to inevitable torture and death. Despite his desire for peace, Wulf decides to band with his fellow farmers and live like "wolves," fiercely protecting their isolated communities from all intruders. Löns's brilliant portrayal of the two sides faced by any person in a moral crisis—in Harm Wulf's case, whether to kill or be killed—continues to resonate. Originally published in 1910 and still in print in Germany, The Warwolf is available for first time in English.
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cover of The Waxing of the Middle Ages: Revisiting Late Medieval France

The Waxing of the Middle Ages

Revisiting Late Medieval France

Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier

University of Delaware Press, 2023

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period.

The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some “cultural form,” to borrow Huizinga’s expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship. 
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cover of The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry

The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry

David L. Marshall

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The Weimar origins of political theory is a widespread and powerful narrative, but this singular focus leaves out another intellectual history that historian David L. Marshall works to reveal: the Weimar origins of rhetorical inquiry. Marshall focuses his attention on Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Aby Warburg, revealing how these influential thinkers inflected and transformed problems originally set out by Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno, Hans Baron, and Leo Strauss. He contends that we miss major opportunities if we do not attend to the rhetorical aspects of their thought, and his aim, in the end, is to lay out an intellectual history that can become a zone of theoretical experimentation in para-democratic times. Redescribing the Weimar origins of political theory in terms of rhetorical inquiry, Marshall provides fresh readings of pivotal thinkers and argues that the vision of rhetorical inquiry that they open up allows for new ways of imagining political communities today.
 
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cover of The Welfare State and Beyond: Success and Problems in Scandinavia

The Welfare State and Beyond

Success and Problems in Scandinavia

Gunnar Heckscher

University of Minnesota Press, 1984

The Welfare State and Beyond was first published in 1984. 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 welfare state emerged in a number of industrialized countries after the First World War as a middle ground between capitalism and socialism. The aim of architects of the welfare state was to abolish the injustices and hardships that accompanied capitalism and to do so without wholesale social or economic revolution. Establishment of the welfare state created something close to euphoria among many observers; it was, it seemed, the answer to many, if not all, troubling social questions. But it eventually became obvious that this type of society was not immune to problems.

In The Welfare State and Beyond Gunnar Heckscher examines four Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—not to either criticize or defend the welfare state but to shed some light on a number of questions: Has the welfare state achieved what it attempted? Are the results generally held to be satisfactory? What important problems remain unsolved and what types of solutions have been proposed? Although Heckscher has been associated with the Conservative party in Sweden, his objective, clear-eyed analysis cites both the accomplishments of the welfare state and the troubling problems that still await resolution.

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cover of The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany

The Whole Book

Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany

Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1996

In the last few decades it has become abundantly clear how important is the "archaeology of the manuscript-book" in literary and textual scholarship. This method offers essential contexts for an editor's understanding of a manuscript, and helps to set the manuscript in the historical matrix in which the work was first brought out and understood.
This group of papers, edited by two well-known scholars of the medieval world, offers both general and particular approaches to the issues surrounding manuscripts produced in the medieval habit of "miscellany," works of seemingly diverse natures bound together into one volume. Julia Boffey investigates how certain poetical miscellanies came to be assembled, for example, while Sylvia Huot suggests that the miscellany had many different sorts of function and significance. Siegfried Wenzel considers a taxonomy of such collections, and A. S. G. Edwards' paper considers Bodleian Selden B.24 as an example of how the notions of canon, authorship, and attribution might come into play. Ann Matter's final chapter offers the notion that what we call "miscellanies" are likely to have an internal logic that we have been trained to miss, but can come to understand. Other contributors are Ralph Hanna III, Georg Knauer, Stephen Nichols, James J. O'Donnell, and Barbara A. Shailor.
Because The Whole Book deals not only with the content of miscellanies but also with contemporary literary principles, this volume will be of interest to a wide circle of literary critics and historians, as well as to students of the survival of literature and of cultural values.
Stephen G. Nichols is James M. Beall Professor of French and Chair of the Department of French, The Johns Hopkins University. Siegfried Wenzel is Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.
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cover of The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment

The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster

Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment

Julia V. Douthwaite

University of Chicago Press, 2002

This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized.

A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.
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cover of The Work of Music: Labor and Creativity in Germany's Long Nineteenth Century

The Work of Music

Labor and Creativity in Germany's Long Nineteenth Century

Celia Applegate

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

In The Work of Music, Celia Applegate examines the cultural history of Austro-German music through the lens of labor from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to the Third Reich. She explores the working world of music and musicians, the various jobs they performed, the work music did in society, the observations and commentaries of contemporaries on the shape and function of musical life, and the work of organizing music making, both amateur and professional. At a time when ideas of absolute music and music-as-leisure were both on the rise, writing about music tended to obscure these practical matters. Here, Applegate reflects on how an intensely musical society organized and understood the ubiquitous activity that underpinned it.
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cover of The World beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe

The World beyond the Windshield

Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe

Christof Mauch

Ohio University Press, 2008

For better or worse, the view through a car’s windshield has redefined how we see the world around us. In some cases, such as the American parkway, the view from the road was the be-all and end-all of the highway; in others, such as the Italian autostrada, the view of a fast, efficient transportation machine celebrating either Fascism or its absence was the goal. These varied environments are neither necessary nor accidental but the outcomes of historical negotiations, and whether we abhor them or take delight in them, they have become part of the fabric of human existence.

The World beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe is the first systematic, comparative look at these landscapes. By looking at examples from the United States and Europe, the chapters in this volume explore the relationship between the road and the landscape thatit traverses, cuts through, defines, despoils, and enhances. The authors analyze the Washington Beltway and the Blue Ridge Parkway, as well as iconic roads in Italy, Nazi Germany, East Germany, and Great Britain. This is a story of the transatlantic exchange of ideas about environment and technology and of the national and nationalistic appropriations of such landscaping.

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cover of The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia

The World in a Box

The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia

Anke te Heesen

University of Chicago Press, 2002

This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images.

As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to collect, store, and order knowledge. te Heesen compares the Academy with other aspects of Enlightenment material culture, such as commercial warehouses and natural history cabinets, to show how the kinds of collecting and ordering practices taught by the Academy shaped both the developing middle class in Germany and Enlightenment thought. The World in a Box, illustrated with a multitude of images of and from Stoy's Academy, offers a glimpse into a time when it was believed that knowledge could be contained and controlled.
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cover of The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe

The Worldmakers

Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe

Ayesha Ramachandran

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In this beautifully conceived book, Ayesha Ramachandran reconstructs the imaginative struggles of early modern artists, philosophers, and writers to make sense of something that we take for granted: the world, imagined as a whole. Once a new, exciting, and frightening concept, “the world” was transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But how could one envision something that no one had ever seen in its totality?
 
The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how “the world” itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of firsts: the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture “the world” on the page.
[more]
cover of The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941

The Worlds of Victor Sassoon

Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941

Rosemary Wakeman

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An interpretative history of global urbanity in the 1920s and 1930s, from the vantage point of Bombay, London, and Shanghai, that follows the life of business tycoon Victor Sassoon.
 
In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. In the early twentieth century, these cities were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family’s trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family’s fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, The Worlds of Victor Sassoon paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wreaked by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital.
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cover of The Worm in the Apple: A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron

The Worm in the Apple

A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron

Christopher Tugendhat

Haus Publishing, 2022

The first extensive history of the relationship between the UK Conservative Party and the European Union.
 
The Conservative Party has been in power for 47 of the 65 years since the end of World War II. During that time the division within the party over Europe has been the enduring drama of British politics—from Churchill’s decision not to join the original European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 to Cameron’s decision to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. Other leaders came and went, but the issue was always there—sometimes center-stage, at others behind the scenes—destabilizing foreign policy, corroding the body politic, and destroying several of the party’s leaders. These questions, and how they panned out, created a deep, grumbling discontent—the worm in the apple—that, over time, turned the Conservative Party and, by extension, a significant section of the electorate, against British membership of the EU. By telling the story of the arguments and divisions within the Conservative Party, The Worm in the Apple helps to explain why Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016.
 
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cover of The X Club: Power and Authority in Victorian Science

The X Club

Power and Authority in Victorian Science

Ruth Barton

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In 1864, amid headline-grabbing heresy trials, members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were asked to sign a declaration affirming that science and scripture were in agreement. Many criticized the new test of orthodoxy; nine decided that collaborative action was required. The X Club tells their story.

These six ambitious professionals and three wealthy amateurs—J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, John Lubbock, William Spottiswoode, Edward Frankland, George Busk, T. A. Hirst, and Herbert Spencer—wanted to guide the development of science and public opinion on issues where science impinged on daily life, religious belief, and politics. They formed a private dining club, which they named the X Club, to discuss and further their plans. As Ruth Barton shows, they had a clear objective: they wanted to promote “scientific habits of mind,” which they sought to do through lectures, journalism, and science education. They devoted enormous effort to the expansion of science education, with real, but mixed, success. 

​For twenty years, the X Club was the most powerful network in Victorian science—the men succeeded each other in the presidency of the Royal Society for a dozen years. Barton’s group biography traces the roots of their success and the lasting effects of their championing of science against those who attempted to limit or control it, along the way shedding light on the social organization of science, the interactions of science and the state, and the places of science and scientific men in elite culture in the Victorian era.
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cover of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War

The Young Descartes

Nobility, Rumor, and War

Harold J. Cook

University of Chicago Press, 2018

René Descartes is best known as the man who coined the phrase “I think, therefore I am.”  But though he is remembered most as a thinker, Descartes, the man, was no disembodied mind, theorizing at great remove from the worldly affairs and concerns of his time. Far from it. As a young nobleman, Descartes was a soldier and courtier who took part in some of the greatest events of his generation—a man who would not seem out of place in the pages of The Three Musketeers.

In The Young Descartes, Harold J. Cook tells the story of a man who did not set out to become an author or philosopher—Descartes began publishing only after the age of forty. Rather, for years he traveled throughout Europe in diplomacy and at war. He was present at the opening events of the Thirty Years' War in Central Europe and Northern Italy, and was also later involved in struggles within France. Enduring exile, scandals, and courtly intrigue, on his journeys Descartes associated with many of the most innovative free thinkers and poets of his day, as well as great noblemen, noblewomen, and charismatic religious reformers. In his personal life, he expressed love for men as well as women and was accused of libertinism by his adversaries.

These early years on the move, in touch with powerful people and great events, and his experiences with military engineering and philosophical materialism all shaped the thinker and philosopher Descartes became in exile, where he would begin to write and publish, with purpose. But though it is these writings that made ultimately made him famous, The Young Descartes shows that this story of his early life and the tumultuous times that molded him is sure to spark a reappraisal of his philosophy and legacy.
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cover of Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath

Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis

Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath

John Ireland

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis explores how French and Algerian dramatists have engaged with two traumatic events that continue to haunt France: the German occupation and Vichy government from 1940 to 1944 and the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. John Ireland’s investigation is guided by one central question: can theater take on issues of violence, war trauma, and conflicted memory in a fundamentally different way from archival forms of culture such as memoirs, narrative fiction, and film? Throughout the twentieth century, French cultural anthropologists, classicists, and social scientists repeatedly revisited links between archaic religious ritual, the practice of sacrifice, and Greek tragedy as attempts to understand, regulate, and mitigate the violence of human conflict and war. Ireland argues that contemporary French playwrights dealing with war trauma and contested memory were influenced by aspects of this research that foregrounded the core virtues of oral culture: presence and the present, the “here and now” that also regulate theatrical performance. That connection to the present encouraged dramatists and performance artists to make “live” historiographical contributions to reverberating, unresolved history but also revived perennial therapeutic values of oral culture that evolved in ancient Greece. Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis brings original readings of canonical authors like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Bernard-Marie Koltès, and Kateb Yacine into dialogue with non-canonical dramatists such as Armand Gatti, Liliane Atlan, and Noureddine Aba. 
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cover of Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany

Theaters of Occupation

Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany

Jennifer Fay

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

In the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, Germans found themselves receiving instruction from their American occupiers. It was not a conventional education. In their effort to transform German national identity and convert a Nazi past into a democratic future, the Americans deployed what they perceived as the most powerful and convincing weapon-movies.

In a rigorous analysis of the American occupation of postwar Germany and the military’s use of “soft power,” Jennifer Fay considers how Hollywood films, including Ninotchka, Gaslight, and Stagecoach, influenced German culture and cinema. In this cinematic pedagogy, dark fantasies of American democracy and its history were unwittingly played out on-screen. Theaters of Occupation reveals how Germans responded to these education efforts and offers new insights about American exceptionalism and virtual democracy at the dawn of the cold war.

Fay’s innovative approach examines the culture of occupation not only as a phase in U.S.–German relations but as a distinct space with its own discrete cultural practices. As the American occupation of Germany has become a paradigm for more recent military operations, Fay argues that we must question its efficacy as a mechanism of cultural and political change.

Jennifer Fay is associate professor and codirector of film studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

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cover of Theaters of Translation: Cosmopolitan Vernaculars in Shakespeare's England

Theaters of Translation

Cosmopolitan Vernaculars in Shakespeare's England

Andrew S. Keener

University of Alabama Press, 2025

Explores the profound influence of multilingual dictionaries, dialogues, and grammars on English Renaissance playwrights

In Theaters of Translation, Andrew S. Keener offers a fascinating account of the ways that plays by Thomas Kyd, Mary Sidney Herbert, Ben Jonson, and their fellow English contemporaries were shaped by and part of a multilingual Europe where dictionaries, grammars, and language-learning materials circulated widely. He proposes a fresh, multilingual approach to English Renaissance drama that challenges the histories of early modern European languages as sites of national and linguistic cohesion.

Covering the period between 1570 and 1640, when England’s drama and the English language itself were evolving, Keener uses the term “cosmopolitan vernaculars” to examine how nonclassical European languages modeled transnational forms of belonging for playgoers, readers, and authors in Renaissance England. Combining recent contributions to cosmopolitan theory and transnational studies of early modern literature and culture, Keener highlights both the ways in which cosmopolitanism manifests through Europe’s vernacular languages—in print and performance—and the ways languages themselves can exhibit cosmopolitanism for those who encounter them on the page or on the stage.

Theaters of Translation opens up new transnational interpretations of English Renaissance plays and casts fresh light on historical anecdotes, such as Jonson inscribing a copy of Pietro Aretino’s scandalous Italian dialogues or Shakespeare’s First Folio being advertised for sale in Germany before its London publication. It offers much of interest to readers and scholars of Renaissance Europe, early modern drama, and the development of national European languages.

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cover of Themistius and the Imperial Court: Oratory, Civic Duty, and Paideia from Constantius to Theodosius

Themistius and the Imperial Court

Oratory, Civic Duty, and Paideia from Constantius to Theodosius

John Vanderspoel

University of Michigan Press, 1995

For generations the debate has continued: can politicians, or mid-level administrators, speak freely and say what they think, or must they describe their superiors in purely flattering ways and abandon any philosophy of independent thought? The politician and philosopher Themistius faced these same issues in the later fourth century, in composing and delivering his panegyrics for several Roman emperors.
John Vanderspoel examines the relationship between Themistius and the emperors whom he served, and assesses realistically how philosopher and emperor interacted. Themistius' speeches cover a range of periods and topics, and offer an important body of evidence for governmental affairs in the later fourth century.
Themistius and the Imperial Court includes chapters on Themistius himself, as well as on his relations with the emperors Constantius, Julian, Jovian, Valens, and Theodosius. Appendices discuss Themistius' philosophical works and extant speeches, present translations of selected sections of his Orations, and offer a chronology of Themistius' speeches, among other topics.
Themistius and the Imperial Court will be of interest to ancient historians, classicists, students and scholars of the ancient Near East, and all those interested in power politics within governing classes.
John Vanderspoel is Associate Professor of Ancient History, University of Calgary. He has written numerous articles and reviews on late antiquity.
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cover of Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection

Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance

The German-French Connection

Tilden Russell

University of Delaware Press, 2017

This book is about the intersection of two evolving dance-historical realms—theory and practice—during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. France was the source of works on notation, choreography, and repertoire that dominated European dance practice until the 1780s. While these French inventions were welcomed and used in Germany, German dance writers responded by producing an important body of work on dance theory. This book examines consequences in Germany of this asymmetrical confrontation of dance perspectives.

Between 1703 and 1717 in Germany, a coherent theory of dance was postulated that called itself dance theory, comprehended why it was a theory, and clearly, rationally distinguished itself from practice. This flowering of dance-theoretical writing was contemporaneous with the appearance of Beauchamps-Feuillet notation in the Chorégraphie of Raoul Auger Feuillet (Paris, 1700, 1701). Beauchamps-Feuillet notation was the ideal written representation of the dance style known as la belle danse and practiced in both the ballroom and the theater. Its publication enabled the spread of belle danse to the French provinces and internationally. This spread encouraged the publication of new practical works (manuals, choreographies, recueils) on how to make steps and how to dance current dances, as well as of new dance treatises, in different languages.

The Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister, by Gottfried Taubert (Leipzig, 1717), includes a translated edition of Feuillet’s Chorégraphie. Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance addresses how Taubert and his contemporary German authors of dance treatises (Samuel Rudolph Behr, Johann Pasch, Louis Bonin) became familiar with Beauchamps-Feuillet notation and acknowledged the Chorégraphie in their own work, and how Taubert’s translation of the Chorégraphie spread its influence northward and eastward in Europe. This book also examines the personal and literary interrelationships between the German writers on dance between 1703 and 1717 and their invention of a theoria of dance as a counterbalance to dance praxis, comparing their dance-theoretical ideas with those of John Weaver in England, and assimilating them all in a cohesive and inclusive description of dance theory in Europe by 1721.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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cover of Theory as Event: Humanistic Knowledge Production in Germany Since 1968

Theory as Event

Humanistic Knowledge Production in Germany Since 1968

Matt Erlin, André Fischer

Northwestern University Press, 2027

Shedding new light on the actors, infrastructures, and events that shaped the development of literary and cultural theory

While theory aspires by its very nature to timeless validity, the ascendency of particular intellectual paradigms at specific historical moments depends on a complex assemblage of institutional, historical, political, material, and medial factors. Theory as Event: Humanistic Knowledge Production in Germany Since 1968 reconsiders the so-called age of theory as it took shape in the German-speaking world after 1968. In invoking the term “event,” this volume draws attention to the myriad incidents and accidents that enable the creation, diffusion, and canonization of humanistic knowledge, from public controversies and debates to the circulation of various forms of print media.

By conceptualizing theory as an event, the volume also sheds new light on the quotidian, praxeological forms of knowledge production—inconspicuous but no less important acts of research, teaching, and even administration that have shaped the intellectual landscape of the humanities, from visiting professorships and habilitation defenses to the founding of new working groups. In shifting attention from the explication of individual works to these seemingly paratextual phenomena, the contributors to this collection not only offer a fresh perspective on key moments in German intellectual history; they also model a new approach to the history of ideas. 

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cover of They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640

They Came to Japan

An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640

Michael Cooper, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1995

The Japan accidentally discovered by the Europeans in 1543 was a country torn by internecene wars waged by independent barons who recognised no effective central government and were free to appropriate as many neighbouring fiefs as force of arms and treachery would permit. The Japan which deported the Europeans a century later was a stable, highly centralised bureaucracy under the firm control of a usurping family which was to continue to rule the country until well into the Victorian age. Europeans living in Japan at the time have not only recorded the events of this fascinating period but also provided a picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese life. Apart from a few lacunae, a remarkably full description of the country in this century—its history, people, traditions, culture, and religion—can be pieced together.
They Came to Japan collects and translates excerpts from more than thirty early European accounts of Japan, many previously unpublished and extremely rare. Arranged into thematic chapters on aspects of Japanese society, these commentaries are most interesting not for what they say about the Japan but about the European writers themselves. Their attitude towards the newly discovered country and its inhabitants is clearly reflected in their letters and reports, especially when implicit comparisons are made between Japan and Europe. During the course of their discovery of the East, the Europeans had generally adopted the role of representatives of a superior race. They had taken for granted that Europe was synonymous with the civilised world, and thus the discovery of the highly developed Japanese culture and civilisation, which had grown up quite independently of Europe, came as a salutary shock. Because they could not aggressively assert themselves by force of arms in such a remote place, as was their norm, this was to be the first confrontation between East and West on equal terms.
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cover of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

Milton Mayer

University of Chicago Press, 1966

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”--from Chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late”
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cover of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933–45

Milton Mayer

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The classic, chilling account of how fascism took over Germany—and of the constant danger of complacency

“When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.”
 
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest.
 
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
 
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.
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cover of Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations

Thinking in the Past Tense

Eight Conversations

Alexander Bevilacqua and Frederic Clark

University of Chicago Press, 2019

If the vibrancy on display in Thinking in the Past Tense is any indication, the study of intellectual history is enjoying an unusually fertile period in both Europe and North America. This collection of conversations with leading scholars brims with insights from such diverse fields as the history of science, the reception of classical antiquity, book history, global philology, and the study of material culture. The eight practitioners interviewed here specialize in the study of the early modern period (c. 1400–1800), for the last forty years a crucial laboratory for testing new methods in intellectual history. The lively conversations don’t simply reveal these scholars’ depth and breadth of thought; they also disclose the kind of trade secrets that historians rarely elucidate in print. Thinking in the Past Tense offers students and professionals alike a rare tactile understanding of the practice of intellectual history. Here is a collectively drawn portrait of the historian’s craft today.
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cover of Thinking through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe After 1989

Thinking through Transition

Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe After 1989

Michal Kopecek

Central European University Press, 2015

Thinking through Transition is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-communism can be understood as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy (as well as the older political traditions), and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance.  This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.
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cover of Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900

Thinking with Sound

A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900

Viktoria Tkaczyk

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Thinking with Sound traces the formation of auditory knowledge in the sciences and humanities in the decades around 1900.
 
When the outside world is silent, all sorts of sounds often come to mind: inner voices, snippets of past conversations, imaginary debates, beloved and unloved melodies. What should we make of such sonic companions? Thinking with Sound investigates a period when these and other newly perceived aural phenomena prompted a far-reaching debate. Through case studies from Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, Viktoria Tkaczyk shows that the identification of the auditory cortex in late nineteenth-century neuroanatomy affected numerous academic disciplines across the sciences and humanities. “Thinking with sound” allowed scholars and scientists to bridge the gaps between theoretical and practical knowledge, and between academia and the social, aesthetic, and industrial domains. As new recording technologies prompted new scientific questions, new auditory knowledge found application in industry and the broad aesthetic realm. Through these conjunctions, Thinking with Sound offers a deeper understanding of today’s second “acoustic turn” in science and scholarship.
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cover of This Is Enlightenment

This Is Enlightenment

Edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed the question, “What is Enlightenment?” The contributors to this ambitious book offer a paradigm-shifting answer to that now-famous query: Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. Enlightenment, they argue, needs to be engaged within the newly broad sense of mediation introduced here—not only oral, visual, written, and printed media, but everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between. 

With essays addressing infrastructure and genres, associational practices and protocols, this volume establishes mediation as the condition of possibility for enlightenment. In so doing, it not only answers Kant’s query; it also poses its own broader question: how would foregrounding mediation change the kinds and areas of inquiry in our own epoch? This Is Enlightenment is a landmark volumewith the polemical force and archival depth to start a conversation that extends across the disciplines that the Enlightenment itself first configured.

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cover of This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages

This Is My Body

Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages

Michal Kobialka

University of Michigan Press, 2003

The recipient of the annual Award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, This Is My Body realigns representational practices in the early Middle Ages with current debates on the nature of representation. Michal Kobialkai's study views the medieval concept of representation as having been in flux and crossed by different modes of seeing, until it was stabilized by the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Kobialka argues that the concept of representation in the early Middle Ages had little to do with the tradition that considers representation in terms of Aristotle or Plato; rather, it was enshrined in the interpretation of Hoc est corpus meum [This is my body] -- the words spoken by Christ to the apostles at the Last Supper -- and in establishing the visibility of the body of Christ that had disappeared from view.
Michal Kobialka is Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota.
[more]
cover of This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb

This Is Not My World

Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb

Adair Rounthwaite

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

A close-up history of the Yugoslav artists who broke down the boundaries between public and private

 

In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb took to using the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. This Is Not My World presents a detailed account of the Group of Six Authors and their circle in the prolific and experimental period from 1975 to 1985, highlighting the friction between public and private that underlied their innovative practices. 

 

Looking to circumvent the rigid bureaucracy of official art institutions, this freewheeling group of conceptual artists and their peers brought artistic activities directly to an unwitting public by staging provocative performances, exhibiting artworks, and interacting with passersby on the streets. Exploring artworks such as Vlasta Delimar’s act of tying herself to a tree in a busy pedestrian area, Željko Jerman’s production of a giant banner declaring “Intimate Inscription” in the city’s central square, and Vlado Martek’s creation of an artwork on a seaside beach using women’s underwear, Adair Rounthwaite examines the work of these artists as a site of tension between the intimacy of artistic expression and the political structure of the public sphere under state socialism. 

 

Whereas many histories of modern and contemporary art in formerly socialist countries tend to be dominated by discussions of ideology and resistance, This Is Not My World focuses its attention on the affective aspects of the group’s activities, using artist interviews and extensive documentation to bring the reader closer to the felt experience of their public interventions. Situating the group’s work within the context of broader developments in conceptualism and theories of the avant-garde, Rounthwaite provides a fresh consideration and newly detailed account of this marginalized episode in global art history.

[more]
cover of This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace

This Was Not Our War

Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace

Swanee Hunt

Duke University Press, 2004

"Replacing tyranny with justice, healing deep scars, exchanging hatred for hope . . . the women in This Was Not Our War teach us how."—William Jefferson Clinton

This Was Not Our War shares amazing first-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women who are reconstructing their society following years of devastating warfare. A university student working to resettle refugees, a paramedic who founded a veterans’ aid group, a fashion designer running two nonprofit organizations, a government minister and professor who survived Auschwitz—these women are advocates, politicians, farmers, journalists, students, doctors, businesswomen, engineers, wives, and mothers. They are from all parts of Bosnia and represent the full range of ethnic traditions and mixed heritages. Their ages spread across sixty years, and their wealth ranges from expensive jewels to a few chickens. For all their differences, they have this much in common: all survived the war with enough emotional strength to work toward rebuilding their country. Swanee Hunt met these women through her diplomatic and humanitarian work in the 1990s. Over the course of seven years, she conducted multiple interviews with each one. In presenting those interviews here, Hunt provides a narrative framework that connects the women’s stories, allowing them to speak to one another.

The women describe what it was like living in a vibrant multicultural community that suddenly imploded in an onslaught of violence. They relate the chaos; the atrocities, including the rapes of many neighbors and friends; the hurried decisions whether to stay or flee; the extraordinary efforts to care for children and elderly parents and to find food and clean drinking water. Reflecting on the causes of the war, they vehemently reject the idea that age-old ethnic hatreds made the war inevitable. The women share their reactions to the Dayton Accords, the end of hostilities, and international relief efforts. While they are candid about the difficulties they face, they are committed to rebuilding Bosnia based on ideals of truth, justice, and a common humanity encompassing those of all faiths and ethnicities. Their wisdom is instructive, their courage and fortitude inspirational.

[more]
cover of Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929): refashioning history for the twentieth century

Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929)

refashioning history for the twentieth century

Edited by Joel T. Rosenthal and Caroline M. Barron

University of London Press, 2019

Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929) was arguably the most prolific English medieval historian of the early twentieth century. The son of an unsuccessful publican, he was described at his Oxford scholarship exam as ‘uncouth and untidy’; however he went on to publish hundreds of books throughout his distinguished career with a legacy that extended well beyond the academy. Tout pioneered the use of archival research, welcomed women into academia and augmented the University of Manchester’s growing reputation for pioneering research. This book presents the first full assessment of Tout’s life and work, from his early career at Lampeter, to his work in Manchester and his wide-ranging service to the study of history. Selected essays take a fresh and critical look at Tout’s own historical writing and discuss how his research shaped, and continues to shape, our understanding of the middle ages, particularly the fourteenth century. The book concludes with a personal reflection on Tout by his grandson, Tom Sharp.
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cover of Thomas Heywood's Art of Love: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid's Ars Amatoria

Thomas Heywood's Art of Love

The First Complete English Translation of Ovid's Ars Amatoria

Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary by M. L. Stapleton

University of Michigan Press, 2000

Thomas Heywood (ca 1573-1641) was a major Renaissance playwright who wrote or collaborated on over two hundred plays. Loues Schoole was one of his many nondramatic works that shows his fascination with antiquity. It was the standard English translation of the Ars in the seventeenth century, so popular that it was pirated almost as soon as he had written it--then printed, sold, reprinted, and resold in England and the Netherlands. It was not attributed to him during his lifetime, and he was not allowed to share in the profits that its (considerable) sales generated, two things that rankled him for the rest of his life. This is understandable because it is an excellent translation into English heroic verse, accurate without stuffiness, colloquial without indecorousness. Twenty years after Heywood's death, Loues Schoole was pirated yet again and went to six different editions during the Restoration (1662-84).
The present edition represents the first instance in which the translation has been edited in a scholarly manner. Besides a full Introduction that accounts for the history of Loues Schoole, Ovid in the English Renaissance, and the editorial method, each of the three books of the poem includes a Commentary that provides cross-references within the text; glosses for unusual, archaic, or regional forms peculiar to Heywood's English; annotations from sourcebooks that Heywood used to identify or understand characters from classical history, literature, and mythology; and explanations for any emendations the editor deemed necessary. In his efforts to make the Ars a seventeenth-century poem, Heywood contemporizes Ovid's references to dress, behavior, courtship, marriage, games, theater, agriculture, horsemanship, war, literature --all of which the Commentary explains at great length.
Loues Schoole will find readership in these areas: early modern history, literature, and culture; classical studies; Renaissance drama; the history of sexuality; and translation theory.
M. L. Stapleton is Associate Professor of English and Philosophy, Stephen F. Austin State University.
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cover of Thomas More's Vocation

Thomas More's Vocation

Frank Mitjans

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

The book considers Thomas More’s early life-choices. An early letter is cited by biographers but most miss More’s reference to the market place. More’s great-grandson, Cresacre, a Londoner, understood it correctly, and that gives reason to trust him on other aspects of More’s youth. This study is based on early testimonies, those of Erasmus, Roper, Harpsfield, Stapleton and Cresacre More, as well as More’s early writings, the Pageant Verses, and his additions / omissions to the Life of Pico; evidence drawn from authors he recommended, like Hilton and Gerson; and finally, his epitaph. Attention is given to his lectures on St Augustine’s City of God, and to St John Chrysostom. It is argued More studied Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Gospel of St Matthew,/i> from a Greek manuscript. Chrysostom, in the introductory homily, spoke of the city and the market place, as the setting in which Christians practice the teaching of Christ. More practiced law and taught it. He was attracted to becoming a Christian humanist alongside Grocyn, Colet, Linacre, and Lily. With them he studied Greek, the classics and Fathers of the Church. Helped by them he became a man of prayer, aware of the need to seek holiness in the midst of the world as a layman. Faced with the dilemma of the humanist in choosing between the contemplative life of the philosopher and an active life of engagement with the world, he deliberately chose the active life in service to society, and the contemplative life of the Christian as a married man. This awareness and choice is what is called vocation, implying determination to persevere throughout life: More saw his life as a pilgrimage towards heaven as described in the last chapter focusing on More’s last work, De tristitia, tedio, pavore, et oratione christi ante captionem eius.
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cover of Those Who Count: Expert Practicies of Roma Classification

Those Who Count

Expert Practicies of Roma Classification

Mihai Surdu

Central European University Press, 2016

Those Who Count scrutinizes the scientific and expert practices of Roma classification and counting, and the politics of Roma-related knowledge production. The book takes a historical perspective on Roma group construction, both as an epistemic object and a policy target, with a focus on the expert discourse of the last two decades. The book argues that knowledge production on Roma is neither objective nor disinterested but rather is co-produced by political and academic actors driven by organizational interests with rather narrow disciplinary research traditions, as well as by political manifestos. The result of such co-production is a negative Roma public image circulating well beyond the expert discourse which reinforces stereotypes held by society at large. The case studies and examples presented in the book show that the state-led population census, policy related surveys, as well as academic and scientific research, together craft an essentialized Roma identity. The recently reemerged Roma-related genetic research imports assumptions, classifications, and narrations from the social sciences and contributes through sampling strategies, interpretation of data, and generalization to reify and pathologize Roma ethnicity. Roma are relegated by experts to several types of determinism: to a social category, to a frozen culture, and to a homogenous biologized entity.
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