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

cover of Three Stars of Redemption: The Influential Women in the Life of Franz Rosenzweig

Three Stars of Redemption

The Influential Women in the Life of Franz Rosenzweig

Amy Hill Shevitz

University of Alabama Press, 2026

A revelatory study of the overlooked ways that Franz Rosenzweig’s closest relationships with women shaped his philosophical legacy and reframed Jewish thought

Three Stars of Redemption: The Influential Women in the Life of Franz Rosenzweig by Amy Hill Shevitz offers a groundbreaking reexamination of Franz Rosenzweig, one of the most influential Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, through the lens of three pivotal women in his life. The book is a compelling study of the ways that Rosenzweig’s intellectual and emotional world were shaped by his mother, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, his wife, Edith Hahn Rosenzweig, and his lover Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, charting the influence those women had, by extension, on modern Jewish thought.

Rosenzweig is best known for his work of essential religious philosophy The Star of Redemption and his role in the Weimar Jewish Renaissance. Yet Shevitz reveals how the maternal, romantic, and marital relationships he maintained were not peripheral but central to his philosophical development and lived Judaism. Drawing on archival research and close readings of correspondence and historical context, Shevitz restores agency to these women, whose lives have been marginalized or misrepresented in scholarship. Adele’s bourgeois upbringing and intimate intellectual bond with her son, Edith’s independent journey into Judaism, and Margrit’s complex role as both muse and thinker are explored with nuance and depth. Shevitz challenges reductive portrayals and brings their full humanity to light. This richly contextualized study expands the understanding of Jewish cultural history, gender, and the personal dimensions of philosophical inquiry. Three Stars of Redemption is a vital contribution to Jewish studies, women’s history, and the legacy of Rosenzweig’s thought.

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cover of Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational

Three-Way Street

Jews, Germans, and the Transnational

Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2016

As German Jews emigrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and as exiles from Nazi Germany, they carried the traditions, culture, and particular prejudices of their home with them. At the same time, Germany—and Berlin in particular—attracted both secular and religious Jewish scholars from eastern Europe. They engaged in vital intellectual exchange with German Jewry, although their cultural and religious practices differed greatly, and they absorbed many cultural practices that they brought back to Warsaw or took with them to New York and Tel Aviv. After the Holocaust, German Jews and non-German Jews educated in Germany were forced to reevaluate their essential relationship with Germany and Germanness as well as their notions of Jewish life outside of Germany.
 
Among the first volumes to focus on German-Jewish transnationalism, this interdisciplinary collection spans the fields of history, literature, film, theater, architecture, philosophy, and theology as it examines the lives of significant emigrants. The individuals whose stories are reevaluated include German Jews Ernst Lubitsch, David Einhorn, and Gershom Scholem, the architect Fritz Nathan and filmmaker Helmar Lerski; and eastern European Jews David Bergelson, Der Nister, Jacob Katz, Joseph Soloveitchik, and Abraham Joshua Heschel—figures not normally associated with Germany. Three-Way Street addresses the gap in the scholarly literature as it opens up critical ways of approaching Jewish culture not only in Germany, but also in other locations, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

 

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cover of Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment

Thrifty Science

Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment

Simon Werrett

University of Chicago Press, 2018

If the twentieth century saw the rise of “Big Science,” then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were surely an age of thrift. As Simon Werrett’s new history shows, frugal early modern experimenters transformed their homes into laboratories as they recycled, repurposed, repaired, and reused their material possessions to learn about the natural world.
 
Thrifty Science explores this distinctive culture of experiment and demonstrates how the values of the household helped to shape an array of experimental inquiries, ranging from esoteric investigations of glowworms and sour beer to famous experiments such as Benjamin Franklin’s use of a kite to show lightning was electrical and Isaac Newton’s investigations of color using prisms. Tracing the diverse ways that men and women put their material possessions into the service of experiment, Werrett offers a history of practices of recycling and repurposing that are often assumed to be more recent in origin. This thriving domestic culture of inquiry was eclipsed by new forms of experimental culture in the nineteenth century, however, culminating in the resource-hungry science of the twentieth. Could thrifty science be making a comeback today, as scientists grapple with the need to make their research more environmentally sustainable?
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cover of Through French Windows: An Introduction to France in the Nineties

Through French Windows

An Introduction to France in the Nineties

James Corbett

University of Michigan Press, 1994

Through French Windows is a journey into contemporary French culture and society. By describing the country's education, religion, politics, finances, technology and telecommunications, and social and ethical issues, Corbett draws a portrait of present-day France.The author provides background information necessary for understanding the changes that continue to evolve. Corbett conscientiously avoids the traditional and simplistic means of portraying France that emphasizes the cultural heritage of the country. Instead he provides an insider's view of France, separating that mythic image from the current reality. Further, he presents an accurate portrayal of the diversity of France by moving beyond the typical dichotomy between Paris and the rest of the country or the oversimplification of dividing the country into north and south.
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cover of Through Words and Deeds: Polish and Polish American Women in History

Through Words and Deeds

Polish and Polish American Women in History

Edited by John Bukowczyk

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Though often overlooked in conventional accounts, women with myriad backgrounds and countless talents have made an impact on Polish and Polish American history. John J. Bukowczyk gathers articles from the journals Polish Review and Polish American Studies to offer a fascinating cross-section of readings about the lives and experiences of these women. The first section examines queens and aristocrats during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also looks at the life of the first Polish female doctor. In the second section, women of the diaspora take center stage in articles illuminating stories that range from immigrant workers in Europe and the United States to women's part in Poland’s nationalist struggle. The final section concentrates on image, identity, and consciousness as contributors examine the stereotyping and othering of Polish women and their portrayal in ethnic and émigré fiction.

A valuable and enlightening resource, Through Words and Deeds offers an introduction to the many facets of Polish and Polish American womanhood.

Contributors: Laura Anker, Robert Blobaum, Anna Brzezińska, John J. Bukowczyk, Halina Filipowicz, William J. Galush, Rita Gladsky, Thaddeus V. Gromada, Bożena Karwowska, Grażyna Kozaczka, Lynn Lubamersky, Karen Majewski, Nameeta Mathur, Lori A. Matten, Jan Molenda, James S. Pula, Władysław Roczniak, and Robert Szymczak

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cover of Through the Window: Kinship and Elopement in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Through the Window

Kinship and Elopement in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Keith Doubt

Central European University Press, 2014

This book is not about war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, evil, or the killing of a society. It is about a cultural heritage, something vital to a society as a society, something that was not killed in the previous war, something that is resilient. 

Through the Window brings an original perspective to folklore of Bosnians at a certain period of time and the differences and similarities of the three main ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It examines the transethnic character of cultural heritage, against divisions that dominate their tragic recent past. 

The monograph focuses in particular on customs shared by different ethnic groups, specifically elopement, and affinal visitation. The elopement is a transformative rite of passage where an unmarried girl becomes a married woman. The affinal visitation, which follows, is a confirmatory ceremony where ritualized customs between families establish in-lawships These customs reflect a transethnic heritage shared by people in Bosnia as a national group, including Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

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cover of Thunder Cross: Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia

Thunder Cross

Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia

Paula A. Oppermann

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Founded in 1932, Thunder Cross (Pērkonkrusts) was the largest and most prominent right-wing political party in Latvia in the early twentieth century. Its motto—“Latvia for Latvians!”—echoed the ultranationalist rhetoric of similar movements throughout Europe at the time. Unlike the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy, however, Thunder Cross never succeeded in seizing power. Nevertheless, Holocaust historian Paula A. Oppermann argues, its movement left an indelible mark on the country. The antisemitism at the core of Thunder Cross’s ideology remained a driving force for Latvian fascists throughout the twentieth century, persisting despite shifting historical and political contexts. 

Thunder Cross is the most comprehensive study of Latvia’s fascist movement in English to date, and the only work that investigates the often neglected continuities of fascist antisemitism after World War II. Formulated as an empirical case study, this book draws on international and interdisciplinary secondary literature and sources in seven languages to broaden our understanding of fascism, antisemitism, and mass violence from Germany and Italy to the larger European context.
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cover of Tiber: Eternal River of Rome

Tiber

Eternal River of Rome

Bruce Ware Allen

University Press of New England, 2018

In this rich history of Italy’s Tiber River, Bruce Ware Allen charts the main currents, mythic headwaters, and hidden tributaries of one of the world’s most renowned waterways. He considers life along the river, from its twin springs high in the Apennines all the way to its mouth at Ostia, and describes the people who lived along its banks and how they made the Tiber work for them. The Tiber has served as the realm of protomythic creatures and gods, a battleground for armies and navies, a livelihood for boatmen and fishermen, the subject matter of poets and painters, and the final resting place for criminals and martyrs. Tiber: Eternal River of Rome is a highly readable history and a go-to resource for information about Italy’s most storied river.
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cover of Tides and Floods: New Research on London and the Tidal Thames from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

Tides and Floods

New Research on London and the Tidal Thames from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century

James Galloway

University of London Press, 2010

The lands bordering the tidal river Thames and the Thames Estuary have historically been highly vulnerable to marine flooding. The most severe of these floods derive from North Sea storm surges, when wind and tide combine to drive huge quantities of water against the coast, as happened to devastating effect in 1953. This project seeks to understand the occurrence of storm flooding in the past, and to explore the ways in which people have responded to the threat. The project draws upon rich surviving documentary sources to study the impact of storm flooding upon the reclaimed marshlands bordering the tidal Thames and its estuary during the period c.1250-1550. Year-by-year accounts of the management of riverside properties have been examined and the degree to which reclaimed land was lost to the sea during the later Middle Ages assessed. The impact of population decline and agrarian recession upon the economics of coastal and river-side defence has been considered. The flood threat to medieval London’s low-lying suburbs has been investigated and the possibility that the long-term flooding of lands down-river spared the city the worst effects of North Sea storm surges explored. Parallels have also been sought in the modern policy of managed retreat or realignment. The volume concludes with an overview of the multi-faceted work of the Thames Discovery Programme, which is increasing our knowledge of many aspects of the Thames’s past, from medieval fish traps, through nineteenth-century shipbuilding, to the Blitz, which posed a new and very real flood threat to the mid-twentieth century metropolis.
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cover of Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty's Navy

Tides of History

Ocean Science and Her Majesty's Navy

Michael S. Reidy

University of Chicago Press, 2008

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British sought to master the physical properties of the oceans; in the second half, they lorded over large portions of the oceans’ outer rim. The dominance of Her Majesty’s navy was due in no small part to collaboration between the British Admiralty, the maritime community, and the scientific elite. Together, they transformed the vast emptiness of the ocean into an ordered and bounded grid.  In the process, the modern scientist emerged. Science itself expanded from a limited and local undertaking receiving parsimonious state support to worldwide and relatively well financed research involving a hierarchy of practitioners.
Analyzing the economic, political, social, and scientific changes on which the British sailed to power, Tides of History shows how the British Admiralty collaborated closely not only with scholars, such as William Whewell, but also with the maritime community  —sailors, local tide table makers, dockyard officials, and harbormasters—in order to systematize knowledge of the world’s oceans, coasts, ports, and estuaries.  As Michael S. Reidy points out, Britain’s security and prosperity as a maritime nation depended on its ability to maneuver through the oceans and dominate coasts and channels. The practice of science and the rise of the scientist became inextricably linked to the process of European expansion.
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cover of Tiger Duff: India, Madeira and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Tiger Duff

India, Madeira and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Alistair Mutch

Aberdeen University Press, 2017

Wounded in battle, ringleader of an officers’ mutiny, survivor of a mauling by a tiger, candidate in a Parliamentary by-election – Patrick ‘Tiger’ Duff (1742–1803) had an eventful life. The son of a Speyside tenant farmer, he rose to the rank of General in the East India Company army and retired to a country estate near Turriff. He made a fortune in India, in part because of his family connections with the Gordons of Letterfourie. James and Alexander Gordon were successful wine merchants in Madeira. They not only provided for Patrick’s education, but also employed his brothers James and Robert in the wine trade. In turn, Patrick was able to win business for the partnership amongst the hard-drinking British in India.Scottish merchants, such as the Gordons, were an important part of the British merchant community in Madeira. Wealth from both sources, the empire of conquest in India and the empire of commerce exemplified by Madeira, flowed back into Scotland and fuelled the process of agricultural improvement.
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cover of Time Travelers: Victorian Encounters with Time and History

Time Travelers

Victorian Encounters with Time and History

Edited by Adelene Buckland and Sadiah Qureshi

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past.
 
Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.
 
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cover of Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages

Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages

Jacques Le Goff

University of Chicago Press, 1980

Jacques Le Goff is a prominent figure in the tradition of French medieval scholarship, profoundly influenced by the Annales school, notably, Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel, and by the ethnographers and anthropologists Mauss, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss. In building his argument for "another Middle Ages" (un autre moyen âge), Le Goff documents the emergence of the collective mentalité from many sources with scholarship both imaginative and exact.


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cover of Times of Upheaval: Four Medievalists in Twentieth-Century Central Europe. Conversations with Jerzy Kloczowski, János M. Bak, František Šmahel, and Herwig Wolfram

Times of Upheaval

Four Medievalists in Twentieth-Century Central Europe. Conversations with Jerzy Kloczowski, János M. Bak, František Šmahel, and Herwig Wolfram

Pavlína Rychterová

Central European University Press, 2019

The volume unites conversations with four masters of Medieval Studies from east-central Europe: János Bak from Hungary, Jerzy Kloczowski from Poland, František Šmahel from the Czech Republic, and Herwig Wolfram from Austria. The interviews, made by younger colleagues, reveal engaging life stories, with numerous observations, anecdotes and experiences. The four scholars grew up before and during the war, under Nazi occupation, emerged as young scholars in the difficult post-war period, and, for most of their careers worked in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, two of them spending most of their lifetimes under communist regimes. The conversations focus on ways in which open-minded young intellectuals became medieval historians under difficult circumstances, how they experienced the long shadows of totalitarian regimes with their acute sensitivity for historical change, and how their perceptions of the world around them reflected back on their approach to medieval history. The histories of their nations were broken, most of them ceased to exist and then were re-established during their lifetimes, came under foreign domination, were split up, or had their territories shifted. These changes affected these scholars' identities and patriotic feelings, and their present was reflected in the distant mirror of the medieval past.
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cover of Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe

Tirana Modern

Biblio-Ethnography on the Margins of Europe

Matthew Rosen

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Guided by the thesis that literature can transform social reality, Tirana Modern draws on ethnographic and historical material to examine the public culture of reading in modern Albania. As its starting point, this book asks: How has Albanian literature and literary translation shaped social action during the longue durée of Albanian modernity?

Drawing on material collected through fieldwork with a community of readers, writers, and translators attached to the independent Albanian publisher Pika pa sipërfaqe (Point without Surface), Tirana Modern provides a tightly focused ethnography of literary culture in Albania that brings into relief the more general dialectic between social imagination and social reality as mediated by reading and literature.
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cover of Tito and His Comrades

Tito and His Comrades

Jože Pirjevec, Foreword by Emily Greble

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

This landmark biography reveals the life of one of the most powerful figures of the Cold War era. Josip Broz (1892–1980), nicknamed Tito, led Yugoslavia for nearly four decades with charisma, cunning, and an iron fist.

With his Partisans he fought Hitler during World War II, and after the war he shrewdly resisted the Soviet Union's grasp. A leader of the non-aligned nations, he long enjoyed a reputation in the West as "the only good Communist" despite a dubious human rights record at home. Jože Pirjevec employs impressive research from archives in eight languages to offer this illuminating, definitive portrait of a complex man in turbulent times.

Pirjevec recounts how Tito, with little schooling but an astute intellect and driving ambition, rose through Communist Party ranks to shape and rule the Yugoslav federation. Surviving multiple assassination attempts by Nazis, Soviet spies, and others, Tito boldly threatened Stalin in return and may have, Pirjevec reveals, contrived Stalin's death. The narrative follows Tito's personal and political life into old age, as the specter of a Soviet invasion haunted him until his death at age eighty-seven. Available in English for the first time, this edition includes new material from Pirjevec and a foreword by Emily Greble.
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cover of To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain

To Embody the Marvelous

The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain

Esther Fernández

Vanderbilt University Press, 2021

Winner of the Vern Williamsen Comedia Book Prize, Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, 2023
Winner of the Nancy Staub Award, UNIMA-USA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette), 2023


In its exploration of puppetry and animation as the performative media of choice for mastering the art of illusion, To Embody the Marvelous engages with early modern notions of wonder in religious, artistic, and social contexts.

From jointed, wood-carved figures of Christ, saintly marionettes that performed hagiographical dramas, experimental puppets and automata in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the mechanical sets around which playwright Calderón de la Barca devised secular magic shows to deconstruct superstitions, these historical and fictional artifacts reenvisioned religious, artistic, and social notions that led early modern society to critically wrestle with enchantment and disenchantment.

The use of animated performance objects in Spanish theatrical contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became one of the most effective pedagogical means to engage with civil society. Regardless of social strata, readers and spectators alike were caught up in a paradigm shift wherein belief systems were increasingly governed by reason—even though the discursive primacy of supernatural doxa and Christian wonder remained firmly entrenched. Thanks to their potential for motion, religious and profane puppets, automata, and mechanical stage props deployed a rationalized sense of wonder that illustrates the relationship between faith and reason, reevaluates the boundaries of fiction in art and entertainment cultures, acknowledges the rise of science and technology, and questions normative authority.
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cover of To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain

To Embody the Marvelous

The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain

Esther Fernández

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Winner of the Vern Williamsen Comedia Book Prize, Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, 2023
Winner of the Nancy Staub Award, UNIMA-USA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette), 2023


In its exploration of puppetry and animation as the performative media of choice for mastering the art of illusion, To Embody the Marvelous engages with early modern notions of wonder in religious, artistic, and social contexts.

From jointed, wood-carved figures of Christ, saintly marionettes that performed hagiographical dramas, experimental puppets and automata in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and the mechanical sets around which playwright Calderón de la Barca devised secular magic shows to deconstruct superstitions, these historical and fictional artifacts reenvisioned religious, artistic, and social notions that led early modern society to critically wrestle with enchantment and disenchantment.

The use of animated performance objects in Spanish theatrical contexts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became one of the most effective pedagogical means to engage with civil society. Regardless of social strata, readers and spectators alike were caught up in a paradigm shift wherein belief systems were increasingly governed by reason—even though the discursive primacy of supernatural doxa and Christian wonder remained firmly entrenched. Thanks to their potential for motion, religious and profane puppets, automata, and mechanical stage props deployed a rationalized sense of wonder that illustrates the relationship between faith and reason, reevaluates the boundaries of fiction in art and entertainment cultures, acknowledges the rise of science and technology, and questions normative authority.
[more]
cover of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe

To Exist is to Resist

Black Feminism in Europe

Edited by Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande

Pluto Press, 2019

This book brings together activists, artists and scholars of colour to show how Black feminism and Afrofeminism are being practiced in Europe today, exploring their differing social positions in various countries, and how they organise and mobilise to imagine a Black feminist Europe.

Deeply aware that they are constructed as 'Others' living in a racialised and hierarchical continent, the contibutors explore gender, class, sexuality and legal status to show that they are both invisible - presumed to be absent from and irrelevant to European societies - and hyper-visible - assumed to be passive and sexualised, angry and irrational.

Through imagining a future outside the neocolonial frames and practices of contemporary Europe, this book explores a variety of critical spaces including motherhood and the home, friendships and intimate relationships, activism and community, and literature, dance and film.
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cover of To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

To Kill a Spy

Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

Zachary Mazur

Central European University Press, 2026

On an August afternoon in 1910, a Polish nationalist gunned down an alleged Russian spy on the streets of Kraków. Afterward the murderer claimed that he had done a great deed for “Poland,” though no such country existed at the time. The press lionized the assassin, justifying his act as necessary for the defense of the nation. When the defendant stood trial, a jury composed of local citizens acquitted him, and he walked free.
How does an ordinary, working-class man transform into a political executioner? And how does a society reach the tipping point where premeditated murder is celebrated as a civic duty?
This gripping historical investigation unravels the environment and conditions of radicalization in fin-de-siècle Europe. Societal shifts, mass political movements, the popular press and espionage paranoia all contributed to a fearful community, wary of outsiders and ready to do anything to defend itself.
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cover of To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci

To Live Is to Resist

The Life of Antonio Gramsci

Jean-Yves Frétigné

University of Chicago Press, 2021

This in-depth biography of Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci casts new light on his life and writing, emphasizing his unflagging spirit, even in the many years he spent in prison.
 
One of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has left an indelible mark on philosophy and critical theory. His innovative work on history, society, power, and the state has influenced several generations of readers and political activists, and even shaped important developments in postcolonial thought. But Gramsci’s thinking is scattered across the thousands of notebook pages he wrote while he was imprisoned by Italy’s fascist government from 1926 until shortly before his death.

To guide readers through Gramsci’s life and works, historian Jean-Yves Frétigné offers To Live Is to Resist, an accessible, compelling, and deeply researched portrait of an extraordinary figure. Throughout the book, Frétigné emphasizes Gramsci’s quiet heroism and his unwavering commitment to political practice and resistance. Most powerfully, he shows how Gramsci never surrendered, even in conditions that stripped him of all power—except, of course, the power to think.
 
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cover of To the Lexicon and Beyond: Sociolinguistics in European Deaf Communities

To the Lexicon and Beyond

Sociolinguistics in European Deaf Communities

Mieke Van Herreweghe

Gallaudet University Press, 2004

Volume 10 of the series explores sociolinguistics in various European Deaf communities. Editors Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen present a wide array of research inspired by the Sociolinguistics Symposium 14 held at Ghent University, Belgium, in April 2002. Noted contributors from Finland, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom offer insights gleaned from the languages of their countries.

Part One of this five-part volume investigates multilingualism and language contact among Finland-Swedish Deaf People. Part Two looks at regional variation and the evolution of signs in Flemish Sign Language, as well as gender-influenced variation in Irish Sign Language. Language policy and planning receives consideration in the third part, with a study of sign language lexical variation in the Netherlands and an analysis of the risks of codification in Flemish Sign Language. Part Four examines the implementation of bilingual programs for deaf students throughout Europe, and updates research on language use visually oriented in Swedish Deaf education classrooms.

The final part of To the Lexicon and Beyond: Sociolinguistics in European Deaf Communities presents data on language attitudes, including a census of sign language users in Spain that reveal a changing language community. The last chapter of this fascinating assembly assays British Deaf communities and language identity in relation to issues of transnationality in the 21st century.

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cover of Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His Sources for The Old Regime and the Revolution

Tocqueville Unveiled

The Historian and His Sources for The Old Regime and the Revolution

Robert T. Gannett Jr.

University of Chicago Press, 2003

With The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote what remains the essential history of the French Revolution. Yet historians have found it nearly impossible to trace the evolution of Tocqueville's ideas because he chose not to disclose his sources.

Drawing on his unprecedented access to Tocqueville's papers—access made possible by the late French historian Francois Furet—Robert T. Gannett Jr. reveals the ingenuity of Tocqueville's analyses of issues such as landownership, administrative centralization, and public opinion in prerevolutionary France. He also sheds light on the benefits Tocqueville reaped from unexpected intellectual encounters with such authors as Burke, Constant, and Dareste de la Chavanne. A literary detective at work, Gannett tracks Tocqueville as the author himself tracked the French Revolution—and brings him to life as a meticulous historian and an ardent defender of liberty.

An ideal companion to The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volumes 1 and 2, both published by the University of Chicago Press, Tocqueville Unveiled will be a valuable resource for revolutionary historians and Tocqueville enthusiasts alike.
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cover of Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin

Topographies of Class

Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin

Sabine Hake

University of Michigan Press, 2010

In Topographies of Class, Sabine Hake explores why Weimar Berlin has had such a powerful hold on the urban imagination. Approaching Weimar architectural culture from the perspective of mass discourse and class analysis, Hake examines the way in which architectural projects; debates; and representations in literature, photography, and film played a key role in establishing the terms under which contemporaries made sense of the rise of white-collar society.

Focusing on the so-called stabilization period, Topographies of Class maps out complex relationships between modern architecture and mass society, from Martin Wagner's planning initiatives and Erich Mendelsohn's functionalist buildings, to the most famous Berlin texts of the period, Alfred Döblin's city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and Walter Ruttmann's city film Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (1927). Hake draws on critical, philosophical, literary, photographic, and filmic texts to reconstruct the urban imagination at a key point in the history of German modernity, making this the first study---in English or German---to take an interdisciplinary approach to the rich architectural culture of Weimar Berlin.

Sabine Hake is Professor and Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of numerous books, including German National Cinema and Popular Cinema of the Third Reich.

Cover art: Construction of the Karstadt Department Store at Hermannplatz, Berlin-Neukölln. Courtesy Bildarchiv Preeussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY

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cover of Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime

Torture and the Law of Proof

Europe and England in the Ancien Régime

John H. Langbein

University of Chicago Press, 2006

In Torture and the Law of Proof John H. Langbein explores the world of the thumbscrew and the rack, engines of torture authorized for investigating crime in European legal systems from medieval times until well into the eighteenth century. Drawing on juristic literature and legal records, Langbein's book, first published in 1977, remains the definitive account of how European legal systems became dependent on the use of torture in their routine criminal procedures, and how they eventually worked themselves free of it.

The book has recently taken on an eerie relevance as a consequence of controversial American and British interrogation practices in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a new introduction, Langbein contrasts the "new" law of torture with the older European law and offers some pointed lessons about the difficulty of reconciling coercion with accurate investigation. Embellished with fascinating illustrations of torture devices taken from an eighteenth-century criminal code, this crisply written account will engage all those interested in torture's remarkable grip on European legal history.
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cover of Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System

Torture, Humiliate, Kill

Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System

Hikmet Karcic

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

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cover of Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France

Tortured Subjects

Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France

Lisa Silverman

University of Chicago Press, 2001

At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period.

Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.
[more]
cover of Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective

Tosca's Rome

The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective

Susan Vandiver Nicassio

University of Chicago Press, 1999

A timeless tale of love, lust, and politics, Tosca is one of the most popular operas ever written. In Tosca's Rome, Susan Vandiver Nicassio explores the surprising historical realities that lie behind Giacomo Puccini's opera and the play by Victorien Sardou on which it is based.

By far the most "historical" opera in the active repertoire, Tosca is set in a very specific time and place: Rome, from June 17 to 18, 1800. But as Nicassio demonstrates, history in Tosca is distorted by nationalism and by the vehement anticlerical perceptions of papal Rome shared by Sardou, Puccini, and the librettists. To provide the historical background necessary for understanding Tosca, Nicassio takes a detailed look at Rome in 1800 as each of Tosca's main characters would have seen it—the painter Cavaradossi, the singer Tosca, and the policeman Scarpia. Finally, she provides a scene-by-scene musical and dramatic analysis of the opera.

"[Nicassio] must be the only living historian who can boast that she once sang the role of Tosca. Her deep knowledge of Puccini's score is only to be expected, but her understanding of daily and political life in Rome at the close of the 18th century is an unanticipated pleasure. She has steeped herself in the period and its prevailing culture-literary, artistic, and musical-and has come up with an unusual, and unusually entertaining, history."—Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph

"In Tosca's Rome, Susan Vandiver Nicassio . . . orchestrates a wealth of detail without losing view of the opera and its pleasures. . . . Nicassio aims for opera fans and for historians: she may well enthrall both."—Publishers Weekly

"This is the book that ranks highest in my estimation as the most in-depth, and yet highly entertaining, journey into the story of the making of Tosca."—Catherine Malfitano

"Nicassio's prose . . . is lively and approachable. There is plenty here to intrigue everyone-seasoned opera lovers, musical novices, history buffs, and Italophiles."—Library Journal

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cover of Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland

Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character

British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland

William H. A. Williams

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland perceived by British visitors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not fit their ideas of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. The rituals of Irish Catholicism, the lamentations of funeral wakes, the Irish language they could not comprehend, even the landscapes were all strange to tourists from England, Wales, and Scotland. Overlooking the acute despair in England’s own industrial cities, these travelers opined in their writings that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated moral failures of the Irish character.

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cover of Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism

Toward the Final Solution

A History of European Racism

George L. Mosse, With a critical introduction by Christopher R. Browning

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

Originally published in 1978, Toward the Final Solution was one of the first in-depth studies of the evolution of racism in Europe, from the Age of Enlightenment through the Holocaust and Hitler’s Final Solution. George L. Mosse details how antisemitism and dangerous prejudices have long existed in the European cultural tradition, revealing an appalling and complex history. With the global renewal of extreme, right-wing nationalism, this instrumental work remains as important as ever for understanding how bigotry impacts political, cultural, and intellectual life. This edition of Mosse’s classic book includes a new critical introduction by Christopher R. Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
[more]
cover of Towards Better Reproductive Health in Eastern Europe: Concern, Commitment, and Change

Towards Better Reproductive Health in Eastern Europe

Concern, Commitment, and Change

WHO Scientific Working Group WHO Scientific Working Group

Central European University Press, 1998

Documenting the latest statistical data on current problems related to reproductive health issues in Central and Eastern Europe, this text explores the reasons for these problems and recommends action based on the scientific evidence for improving reproductive health.

The main issues covered are: declining standards of reproductive health care; rising trends in the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases; low rates of use of modern contraceptives; high rates of induced abortion; high prevalence of infertility; and the needs of adolescents with regard to reproductive health.

[more]
cover of Town: Prints & Drawings of Britain before 1800

Town

Prints & Drawings of Britain before 1800

Bernard Nurse

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020

Many provincial towns in Britain grew dramatically in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centers such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as commercial centers or as specialty destinations: visitors could find spa treatments in Bath, horse racing in Newmarket, and naval services in Portsmouth. Containing more than one hundred images of country towns in England, Wales, and Scotland, this book draws on the extensive Gough collection in the Bodleian Library. Contemporary prints and drawings provide a powerful visual record of the development of the town in this period, and finely drawn prospects and maps—made with greater accuracy than ever before—reveal their early development. This book also includes perceptive observations from the journals and letters of collector Richard Gough (1735–1809), who traveled throughout the country on the cusp of the industrial age.
[more]
cover of Towns between Empires: Good Governance and “Police” in Case Studies from Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, 1500s–1800s

Towns between Empires

Good Governance and “Police” in Case Studies from Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, 1500s–1800s

Mária Pakucs

Central European University Press, 2025

Towns between Empires contains contributions regarding urban administration and governance in the historical regions that are now in Romania, and that fall under the early modern concept of good governance. Chapters give insight into the concepts and solutions applied by urban governments to political, social and economic issues that were under their care and control. The authors approach various aspects of this topic: town councils as political and economic elites of early modern towns, urban political systems as models of early modern ideas of administration, relations between towns and central authorities (the Prince), healthcare as good governance.

The chapters in the volume capture the widest possible variety of political and administrative systems in the region. Transylvanian towns were structured and governed similarly to other small Central European urban centers, however significant diversity can be discerned following the Reformation. Moldavian and Wallachian towns in the 18th and 19th century are little known to international scholarship, and the chapters in this volume will fill this gap.
[more]
cover of Traces of My Father

Traces of My Father

William Radice

Northwestern University Press, 2002

I recall the long solo journeys when I would think about my father: the Oberfeldarzt (Retired), the Reichsamtsleiter in the SS, the adjutant to Heinrich Himmler, the author of New Foundations for Racial Research, the man described by the chief prosecutor in the Eichmann trial as a 'desk murderer,' the man I knew: my father.

In 1979 Sigfrid Gauch published the groundbreaking Vaterspuren, (Traces of My Father), the first of the so-called father books about the relationships of postwar Germans with their parents. It inspired a new genre in German literature. Ever since, such writings have contributed greatly to Germany's ongoing struggle to overcome its own past.

This autobiographical novel is Gauch's attempt to come to terms with his father, Hermann Gauch, a physician who had joined the National Socialists in the 1920s, wrote six books of "race research" as a member of the SS, and to his dying day remained an unrepentant Nazi. The story alternates between the images of the elder Gauch's death and burial and the author's memories of childhood and adolescence.

Unlike many of the father books, however, Traces of My Father is less a political attack than a personal journey. Gauch, though honest about his father's monstrous actions and ideas, does not shirk their shared emotional bond. The result is a poignant attempt by a son to relive his father's notorious life and in doing so free himself from the man's influence.
[more]
cover of Tracking Europe: Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location

Tracking Europe

Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of Location

Ginette Verstraete

Duke University Press, 2009

Tracking Europe is a bold interdisciplinary critique of claims regarding the free movement of goods, people, services, and capital throughout Europe. Ginette Verstraete interrogates European discourses on unlimited movement for everyone and a utopian unity-in-diversity in light of contemporary social practices, cultural theories, historical texts, media representations, and critical art projects. Arguing against the persistent myth of borderless travel, Verstraete shows the discourses on Europe to be caught in an irresolvable contradiction on a conceptual level and in deeply unsettling asymmetries on a performative level. She asks why the age-old notion of Europe as a borderless space of mobility goes hand-in-hand with the at times violent containment and displacement of people.

In demystifying the old and new Europe across a multiplicity of texts, images, media, and cultural practices in various times and locations, Verstraete lays bare a territorial persistence in the European imaginary, one which has been differently tied up with the politics of inclusion and exclusion. Tracking Europe moves from policy papers, cultural tourism, and migration to philosophies of cosmopolitanism, nineteenth-century travel guides, electronic surveillance at the border, virtual pilgrimages to Spain, and artistic interventions in the Balkan region. It is a sustained attempt to situate current developments in Europe within a complex matrix of tourism, migration, and border control, as well as history, poststructuralist theory, and critical media and art projects.

[more]
cover of Trade and Romance

Trade and Romance

Michael Murrin

University of Chicago Press, 2013

In Trade and Romance, Michael Murrin examines the complex relations between the expansion of trade in Asia and the production of heroic romance in Europe from the second half of the thirteenth century through the late seventeenth century. He shows how these tales of romance, ostensibly meant for the aristocracy, were important to the growing mercantile class as a way to gauge their own experiences in traveling to and trading in these exotic locales. Murrin also looks at the role that growing knowledge of geography played in the writing of the creative literature of the period, tracking how accurate, or inaccurate, these writers were in depicting far-flung destinations, from Iran and the Caspian Sea all the way to the Pacific.
           
With reference to an impressive range of major works in several languages—including the works of Marco Polo, Geoffrey Chaucer, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Luís de Camões, Fernão Mendes Pinto, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and more—Murrin tracks numerous accounts by traders and merchants through the literature, first on the Silk Road, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century; then on the water route to India, Japan, and China via the Cape of Good Hope; and, finally, the overland route through Siberia to Beijing. All of these routes, originally used to exchange commodities, quickly became paths to knowledge as well, enabling information to pass, if sometimes vaguely and intermittently, between Europe and the Far East. These new tales of distant shores fired the imagination of Europe and made their way, with surprising accuracy, as Murrin shows, into the poetry of the period.

[more]
cover of Trading in Lives?: Operations of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, 1944-1945

Trading in Lives?

Operations of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee in Budapest, 1944-1945

Szabolcs Szita

Central European University Press, 2005

Set in the tumultuous moments of 1944–45 Budapest, this work discusses the operations of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee. Drawing out the contradictions and complexities of the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews during the final phase of World War II, Szita suggests that in the Hungarian context, a commerce in lives ensued, where prominent Zionists like Dr. Rezso Kasztner negotiated with the higher echelons of the SS, trying to garner the freedom of Hungarian Jews. Szita's portrait of the controversial Kasztner is a more sympathetic rendition of a powerful Zionist leader who was later assassinated in Israel for his dealings with Nazi leaders. Szita reveals a story of interweaving personalities and conflicts during arguably the most tragic moment in European history. The author's extensive research is a tremendous contribution to a field of study that has been much ignored by scholarship-the Hungarian holocaust and the trade in human lives.
[more]
cover of Trams or Tailfins?: Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States

Trams or Tailfins?

Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States

Jan L. Logemann

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In the years that followed World War II, both the United States and the newly formed West German republic had an opportunity to remake their economies. Since then, much has been made of a supposed “Americanization” of European consumer societies—in Germany and elsewhere. Arguing against these foggy notions, Jan L. Logemann takes a comparative look at the development of postwar mass consumption in West Germany and the United States and the emergence of discrete consumer modernities.
 
In Trams or Tailfins?, Logemann explains how the decisions made at this crucial time helped to define both of these economic superpowers in the second half of the twentieth century. While Americans splurged on private cars and bought goods on credit in suburban shopping malls, Germans rebuilt public transit and developed pedestrian shopping streets in their city centers—choices that continue to shape the quality and character of life decades later. Outlining the abundant differences in the structures of consumer society, consumer habits, and the role of public consumption in these countries, Logemann reveals the many subtle ways that the spheres of government, society, and physical space define how we live.
[more]
cover of Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redifining Culture beyond the Nation

Transatlantic Central Europe

Contesting Geography and Redifining Culture beyond the Nation

Jessie Labov

Central European University Press, 2019

While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it has receded from the horizon. Proponents of a distinct cultural profile of these countries—all involved now in the process of Transatlantic integration—used "Central European", as a contestation with the geo-political label of Eastern Europe. This book discusses the transnational set of practices connecting journals with other media in the mid-1980s, disseminating the idea of Central Europe simultaneously in East and West. A range of new methodologies, including GIS-mapping visualization, is used, repositing the political-cultural journal as one central node of a much larger cultural system. What has happened to the liberal humanist philosophy that "Central Europe" once evoked? In the early years of the transition era, the liberal humanist perspective shared by Havel, Konrád, Kundera, and Michnik was quickly replaced by an economic liberalism that evolved into neoliberal policies and practices. The author follows the trajectories of the concept into the present day, reading its material and intellectual traces in the postcommunist landscape. She explores how the current use of transnational, web-based media follows the logic and practice of an earlier, 'dissident' generation of writers.
[more]
cover of Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K.

Transatlantic Connections

Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K.

Thomas, M. Wynn

University of Iowa Press, 2005

In this series of textual readings and cultural comparisons, M. Wynn Thomas explores Whitman’s amazing ability to appeal across distances and centuries.

The book’s contrasting sections reflect the two locations studied: the first shows Whitman in his time and place, while the second repositions him within the cultures of England and Wales from the late 19th to the late 20th century. In the opening chapter he is placed against the vivid, outrageous background of the New York of his time; the second finds evidence in his poetry of a critique of the new urban politics of the emerging city boss; the third radically redefines Whitman's relationship to his famous contemporary Longfellow. Other chapters deal with the Civil War poet, exploring the ways in which his poetic responses were in part shaped by his relationship to his soldier brother George, and his use of the meteorological discoveries of his day to fashion metaphors for imaging the different phases of the conflict.

The second section ponders the paradox that this Whitman, who was so much the product of his specific time and limited “local” culture, should come to be accepted as an international visionary. The United Kingdom is taken as offering striking instances of this phenomenon, and his transatlantic admirers are shown to have been engaged in an unconscious process of “translating” Whitman into the terms of their own culturally specific social, political, and sexual preoccupations. Some of the connections explored are those between Whitman and Edward Carpenter, the so-called English Whitman; between Whitman and perhaps his greatest English critic, D. H. Lawrence; and between Whitman and the Welsh poets Ernest Rhys, Amanwy (David Rees Griffiths), Niclas y Glais (T. E. Nicholas), Waldo Williams, Glyn Jones, Dylan Thomas, and R. S. Thomas.

This bold and original study, offering new points of entry into understanding Whitman as the product of his time and place as well as understanding the reception of Whitman in the U.K. as a process of cultural translation, should fascinate scholars of Whitman and students of comparative literature.
[more]
cover of Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World

Transatlantic Conversations

Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World

Beth L. Lueck

University of New Hampshire Press, 2017

This unique interdisciplinary essay collection offers a fresh perspective on the active involvement of American women authors in the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Internationally diverse contributors explore topics ranging from women's social and political mobility to their authorship and activism. While a number of essays focus on such well-known writers as Margaret Fuller, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, other, perhaps lesser-known authors are also included, such as E. D. E. N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Peabody, Jeannette Hart, and Laura Richards.

These essays show the spectrum of interests and activities in which nineteenth-century women were involved as they moved, geographically and metaphorically, toward gaining their independence and the right to control their lives. Traveling far and wide—to Italy, France, Great Britain, and the Bahamas—these writers came into contact with realities far different from their own. On topics ranging from homeopathy and literary endeavors to politics and revolution, they conversed with others, reaching and inspiring transnational audiences with their words and deeds, and creating a space for self-expression in the rapidly changing transatlantic world.

[more]
cover of Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945

Transatlantic Fascism

Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945

Federico Finchelstein

Duke University Press, 2010

In Transatlantic Fascism, Federico Finchelstein traces the intellectual and cultural connections between Argentine and Italian fascisms, showing how fascism circulates transnationally. From the early 1920s well into the Second World War, Mussolini tried to export Italian fascism to Argentina, the “most Italian” country outside of Italy. (Nearly half the country’s population was of Italian descent.) Drawing on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Finchelstein examines Italy’s efforts to promote fascism in Argentina by distributing bribes, sending emissaries, and disseminating propaganda through film, radio, and print. He investigates how Argentina’s political culture was in turn transformed as Italian fascism was appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted by the state and the mainstream press, as well as by the Left, the Right, and the radical Right.

As Finchelstein explains, nacionalismo, the right-wing ideology that developed in Argentina, was not the wholesale imitation of Italian fascism that Mussolini wished it to be. Argentine nacionalistas conflated Catholicism and fascism, making the bold claim that their movement had a central place in God’s designs for their country. Finchelstein explores the fraught efforts of nationalistas to develop a “sacred” ideological doctrine and political program, and he scrutinizes their debates about Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, imperialism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism. Transatlantic Fascism shows how right-wing groups constructed a distinctive Argentine fascism by appropriating some elements of the Italian model and rejecting others. It reveals the specifically local ways that a global ideology such as fascism crossed national borders.

[more]
cover of Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture

Transatlantic Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture

Denise Kohn

University of Iowa Press, 2006

Uncle Tom’s Cabin broke publishing records and made Harriet Beecher Stowe in her time one of the world’s most famous authors. The book was a bestseller in Britain and was translated into some forty languages. Yet today Stowe tends to be seen wholly in the context of American literary history. Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture is the first book to consider multiple aspects of Stowe’s career in an international context. The groundbreaking essays of Transatlantic Stowe examine the author’s literary and literal forays in Europe and the ways in which intellectual and cultural exchanges between the Old and New Worlds shaped her work. It was a crucial moment in the transatlantic discourse, a turning of the tide, and Stowe was among the first American novelists to be lionized in Europe---and pirated by publishers---in the same way that European writers had been treated in America.Blending historical and cultural criticism and drawing on fresh primary material from London and Paris, Transatlantic Stowe includes essays exploring Stowe’s relationship with European writers and the influence of her European travels on her work, especially the controversial travel narrative Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her “Italian novel” Agnes of Sorrento.Interdisciplinary and itself transatlantic, the collection discusses visual art and material culture as well as literature and politics and includes contributions from Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Together these essays offer new interpretations of Stowe’s most popular novel as well as new readings of her many other works, illuminate the myriad connections between Stowe and European writers, and thus rewrite literary history by returning Stowe to the larger political, historical, and literary contexts of nineteenth-century Europe.
[more]
cover of Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Transatlantic Women

Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Beth L. Lueck

University of New Hampshire Press, 2012

In this volume, fifteen scholars from diverse backgrounds analyze American women writers’ transatlantic exchanges in the nineteenth century. They show how women writers (and often their publications) traveled to create or reinforce professional networks and identities, to escape strictures on women and African Americans, to promote reform, to improve their health, to understand the workings of other nations, and to pursue cultural and aesthetic education. Presenting new material about women writers’ literary friendships, travels, reception and readership, and influences, the volume offers new frameworks for thinking about transatlantic literary studies.
[more]
cover of Transforming Markets: A Development Bank for the 21st Century. A History of the EBRD, Volume 2

Transforming Markets

A Development Bank for the 21st Century. A History of the EBRD, Volume 2

Andrew Kilpatrick

Central European University Press, 2021

The second volume of the history of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) takes up the story of how the Bank has become an indispensable part of the international financial architecture. It tracks the rollercoaster ride during this period, including the Bank’s crucial coordinating role in response to global and regional crises, the calls for its presence as an investor in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa and later Greece and Cyprus, as well as the consequences of conflicts within its original region. It shows how in face of the growing threat of global warming the EBRD, working mainly with the private sector, developed a sustainable energy business model to tackle climate change.
Transforming Markets also examines how the EBRD broadened its investment criteria, arguing that transition towards sustainable economies requires market qualities that are not only competitive and integrated but which are also resilient, well-governed, green and more inclusive. This approach aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement and the international community’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with its core set of 17 sustainable development goals. The story of the EBRD’s own transition and rich history provides a route map for building the sustainable markets necessary for future growth and prosperity.
[more]
cover of Transforming Masculine Rule: Agriculture and Rural Development in the European Union

Transforming Masculine Rule

Agriculture and Rural Development in the European Union

Elisabeth Prügl

University of Michigan Press, 2011

"The premise of mainstreaming gender is to bring equality concerns into every aspect of policy-making, and this brave book offers a close look at how feminists have taken up the challenge to transform the hidden dynamics of male domination in agricultural policy in Europe. In contrast to the automatic assumption that (neo)liberal policy always works against women’s interests, Prügl demonstrates the potential for feminist ju-jitsu to take advantage of multiple levels of governance to empower women in some circumstances. Although feminists were not always successful, the story of their efforts to remake agricultural policy should encourage activists to look for points of leverage in this and other contested and changing multilevel power systems."
---Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin

"Information on policy development, conflicts about improving the status of farm women, and using rural development policies to foster gender equality is hard to access in English and extremely useful for researchers concerned with the specifics of gender equality policy in the EU."
---Alison Woodward, Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

"This book is a must-read for scholars interested in the gendered process of global restructuring. Elisabeth Prügl succeeds superbly in teasing out the power politics involved in European agricultural policy. Through the lens of a feminist-constructivist approach, she makes visible the multiple mechanisms of gendered power within the state. This very lucid narrative is a milestone in a new generation of feminist theoretical scholarship."
---Brigitte Young, University of Muenster, Germany

Taking West and East Germany as case studies, Elisabeth Prügl shows how European agricultural policy has cemented long-standing gender-based inequalities and how feminists have used liberalization as an opportunity to challenge such inequalities. Through a comparison of the EU’s rural development program known as LEADER as it played out in the Altmark region in the German East and in the Danube/Bavarian Forest region in the West, Prügl provides a close-up view of the power politics involved in government policies and programs.

In identifying mechanisms of power (refusal, co-optation, compromise, normalization, and silencing of difference), Prügl illustrates how these mechanisms operate in arguments over gender relations within the state. Her feminist-constructivist approach to global restructuring as a gendered process brings into view multiple levels of governance and the variety of gender constructions operating in different societies. Ultimately, Prügl offers a new understanding of patriarchy as diverse, contested, and in flux.

Jacket photograph: © iStockphoto.com/Wojtek Kryczka

[more]
cover of Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962

Transforming Peasants, Property and Power

The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962

Dorin Dobrincu

Central European University Press, 2009

The subject matter of the volume is part of larger research agenda on the process of land collectivization in the former communist camp, focusing on state, identity and property. The main innovation of the volume is to apply recent interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the collectivization process, asking what types of new peasant-state relations it formed and how it transformed notions of self, persons, and things (such as land). The project conceived of changes in the system of ownership as causing changes in the identity and attitude of people; similarly, it regarded the study of personal identities as essential for understanding changes in the system of ownership. This perspective is rare in the area-studies approaches to the topic.
[more]
cover of Transforming the Public Sphere: The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898

Transforming the Public Sphere

The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898

Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk

Duke University Press, 2004

In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, five hundred women organized an enormous public exhibition showcasing women’s contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, held in The Hague, was attended by more than ninety thousand visitors. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk consider the exhibition in the international contexts of women’s history, visual culture, and imperialism.

A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women’s Labor and the event itself—the sights, the sounds, and the smells—as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 exhibition displayed the range and variety of women’s economic, intellectual, and artistic roles in Dutch culture, including their participation in such traditionally male professions as engineering, diamond-cutting, and printing and publishing. They examine how people and goods from the Dutch colonies were represented, most notably in an extensive open-air replica of a “Javanese village.” Grever and Waaldijk reveal the tensions the exhibition highlighted: between women of different economic classes; between the goal of equal rights for women and the display of imperial subjects and spoils; and between socialists and feminists, who competed fiercely with one another for working women’s support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in women’s public participation during the twentieth century.

[more]
cover of Transnational Capitalism in East Central Europe's Heavy Industry: From Flagship Enterprises to Subsidiaries

Transnational Capitalism in East Central Europe's Heavy Industry

From Flagship Enterprises to Subsidiaries

Aleksandra Sznajder Lee

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Focusing on the steel industry during the post-communist transition from 1989 through 2009, Aleksandra Sznajder Lee traces the transformation of flagship state enterprises in the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia into the subsidiaries of large, international corporations. By analyzing this transformation at the three levels of enterprise, sector, and national-international nexus, she identifies the players—from international investors and European Union members to national labor unions and local industry managers—in the political economy of reform. Even in the midst of the transition to a capitalist, democratic system, Sznajder Lee finds, the state plays a key role in mediating between domestic vested interests and external pressures from international financial markets and institutions, on the one hand, and regional institutions on the other. Whereas state power may be employed to require domestic firms to operate as capitalists in the international market, it may also be used to shield enterprises from market pressures in order to promote the political and personal preferences of the elite.

This book has broad implications for the political economy of reform because it illuminates the political determinants of privatization and the resources used to resist it. In addition, Sznajder Lee sheds new light on why some countries are more likely than others to be subject to external constraints, such as IMF conditionality, and how some allegedly pro-market reformers manage to maintain public ownership over certain industry sectors.
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cover of Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish

Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish

Howard Lune

Temple University Press, 2020

In Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish, Howard Lune considers the development and mobilization of different nationalisms over 125 years of Irish diasporic history (1791–1920) and how these campaigns defined the Irish nation and Irish citizenship. 

Lune takes a collective approach to exploring identity, concentrating on social identities in which organizations are the primary creative agent to understand who we are and how we come to define ourselves. As exiled Irishmen moved to the United States, they sought to create a new Irish republic following the American model. Lune traces the construction of Irish American identity through the establishment and development of Irish nationalist organizations in the United States. He looks at how networks—such as societies, clubs, and private organizations—can influence and foster diaspora, nationalism, and nationalist movements. 

By separating nationalism from the physical nation, Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity among the American Irish uniquely captures the processes and mechanisms by which collective identities are constructed, negotiated, and disseminated. Inevitably, this work tackles the question of what it means to be Irish—to have a nationality, a community, or a shared history.

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