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2335 books match the query 'Modern' and 569 start with t

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The Intellectual Legacy of Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977)

Maarten Verkerk

Amsterdam University Press, 2025

Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), a renowned philosopher and legal scholar, has been regarded as one of the most original philosophers the Netherlands has ever produced. In 1935, he published his seminal work, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, which offers an in-depth analysis of the foundations of culture and science. Dooyeweerd develops a sophisticated and impressive conceptual framework to analyse reality. He demonstrates that every philosophy, all science, and every political ideology is driven by underlying religious or worldview perspectives.

The work of Herman Dooyeweerd is currently attracting global interest. From the United States to Korea, from New Zealand to Brazil, and from the United Kingdom to South Africa, professionals across various disciplines—philosophers, engineers, politicians, economists, and others—are expanding upon his ideas within their respective fields. At the same time, his work is becoming increasingly relevant as contemporary society displays characteristics reminiscent of those observed in European culture a century ago. The Intellectual Legacy of Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977): A Hopeful Philosophy for our Time introduces his most significant concepts and numerous examples of their contemporary applications.

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The Internal Colony

Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization

Sam Klug

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An explication of how global decolonization provoked profound changes in American political theory and practice.

In The Internal Colony, Sam Klug reveals the central but underappreciated importance of global decolonization to the divergence between mainstream liberalism and the Black freedom movement in postwar America. Klug reconsiders what has long been seen as a matter of primarily domestic policy in light of a series of debates concerning self-determination, postcolonial economic development, and the meanings of colonialism and decolonization. These debates deeply influenced the discord between Black activists and state policymakers and formed a crucial dividing line in national politics in the 1960s and 1970s.

The result is a history that broadens our understanding of ideological formation—particularly how Americans conceptualized racial power and political economy—by revealing a much wider and more dynamic network of influences. Linking intellectual, political, and social movement history, The Internal Colony illuminates how global decolonization transformed the terms of debate over race and social class in the twentieth-century United States.

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The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945

Toward a Global History

Slucki, David

Rutgers University Press, 2012

The Jewish Labor Bund was one of the major political forces in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe. But the decades after the Second World War were years of enormous difficulty for Bundists. Like millions of other European Jews, they faced the challenge of resurrecting their lives, so gravely disrupted by the Holocaust. Not only had the organization lost many members, but its adherents were also scattered across many continents. In this book, David Slucki charts the efforts of the surviving remnants of the movement to salvage something from the wreckage.

Covering both the Bundists who remained in communist Eastern Europe and those who emigrated to the United States, France, Australia, and Israel, the book explores the common challenges they faced—building transnational networks of friends, family, and fellow Holocaust survivors, while rebuilding a once-local movement under a global umbrella. This is a story of resilience and passion—passion for an idea that only barely survived Auschwitz.

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The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Jonathan Senchyne

University of Massachusetts Press, 2020

The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures.

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.

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The Invention of Madness

State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China

Emily Baum

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.”

Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.

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The Invisible Shining

The Cult of Mátyás Rákosi in Stalinist Hungary, 19451956

Balazs Apor

Central European University Press, 2018

This book offers a detailed analysis of the construction, reception, and eventual decline of the cult of the Hungarian Communist Party Secretary, Mátyás Rákosi, one of the most striking examples of orchestrated adulation in the Soviet bloc. While his cult never approached the magnitude of that of Stalin, Rákosi’s ambition to outshine the other “best disciples” and become the best of the best was manifest in his diligence in promoting a Soviet-type ritual system in Hungary. The main argument of The Invisible Shining is that the cult of personality is not just a curious aspect of communist dictatorship, it is an essential element of it. The monograph is primarily concerned with techniques and methods of cult construction, as well as the role various institutions played in the creation of mythical representations of political figures. While engaging with a wider international literature on Stalinist cults, the author uses the case of Rákosi to explore how personality cults are created, how such cults are perceived, and how they are eventually unmade. The book addresses the success—generally questionable—of such projects, as well as their uncomfortable legacies.

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The Involuntary American

A Scottish Prisoner's Journey to the New World

Carol R. Gardner

Westholme Publishing, 2024

A Common Man’s Survival After Being Captured at the Battle of Dunbar and Sold into Servitude in America
In the winter of 1650–51, one hundred fifty ragged and hungry Scottish prisoners of war arrived at Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they were sold as indentured laborers for 20 to 30 pounds each. Among them was Thomas Doughty, a common foot soldier who had survived the Battle of Dunbar, a forced marched of 100 miles without food or water, imprisonment in Durham Cathedral, and a difficult Atlantic crossing. An ordinary individual who experienced extraordinary events, Doughty was among some 420 Scottish soldiers who were captured during the War of the Three Kingdoms, transported to America, and sold between 1650 and 1651. Their experiences offer a fresh perspective on seventeenth-century life.
The Involuntary American: A Scottish Prisoner’s Journey to the New World by Carol Gardner describes Doughty’s life as a soldier, prisoner of war, exile, servant, lumberman, miller, and ultimately free landowner. It follows him and his peers through critical events: the apex of the Little Ice Age, the War of the Three Kingdoms, the colonization of New England, the burgeoning transatlantic trade in servants and slaves, King Philip’s and King William’s wars, and the Salem witch crisis. Firstperson accounts of individuals who lived through those events—Scottish, English, Puritan, Native American, wealthy, poor, working class, educated or not— provide rich period detail and a variety of perspectives.
The Involuntary American demonstrates how even individuals of humble circumstances were swept into the maelstrom of the First Global Age. It expands our understanding of immigration to the colonies, colonial servitude, the linkages and tensions between Europe, Massachusetts Bay, and America’s northeastern frontier, and of New England society in the early colonial period.

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The Italian Fascist Party in Power

A Study in Totalitarian Rule

Dante L. Germino

University of Minnesota Press, 1959

The Italian Fascist Party in Power was first published in 1959. 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.

Although much significant material on the Italian Fascist party became available when the regime collapsed, scholars have not made extensive use of it until now. In this study, which is based on all the available sources, Professor Germino describes the functions of the party, ,explains how it was organized to perform tasks, and discusses conflicts between the party and other power elements in the dictatorship. He reaches a conclusion contrary to that of most other scholars -- that Fascist Italy was a full-fledged totalitarian state resembling Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in political structure and ideological content.

Professor Carl J. Riedrich of Harvard University writes: "I consider this a major contribution to our knowledge of totalitarian dictatorship. There is nothing in the existing literature that can be compared to it either in terms of depth or analysis, range of documentation or breadth of treatment."

Professor Taylor Cole of Duke University comments: "Professor Germino has presented an excellent case study of the Italian Fascist Party. He has made use of more materials on the Party than any previous writer in English, and has marshalled them effectively to support his contention that the Fascist Party did not differ 'in kind' from [the Nazi and Soviet Communist parties] on the eve of World War II. His conclusion that on most (though not all) basic counts the Italian Fascist system was to be classified as 'totalitarian' is controversial, but it merits the careful attention of all students who are interested in the Italian Fascist period and in totalitarianism."

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The Italian Resistance

Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies

Tom Behan

Pluto Press, 2009

One of the enduring myths about World War Two is that only the Allies liberated occupied Europe. Many countries had anti-fascist Resistance movements, and Italy's was one of the biggest and most politically radical yet it remains relatively unknown outside of its own homeland.

Within Italy many plaques and streets commemorate the actions of the partisans - a movement from below that grew as Mussolini's dictatorship unravelled. Led by radical left forces, the Resistance trod a thin line between fighting their enemies at home and maintaining an uneasy working relationship with the Allies.

Essential for courses on World War Two and European history, Tom Behan uses unpublished archival material and interviews with surviving partisans to tell an inspiring story of liberation.

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The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney

The Politics and Jurisprudence of a Northern Democrat from the Age of Jackson to the Gilded Age

David M. Gold

Ohio University Press, 2016

Ohio’s Rufus P. Ranney embodied many of the most intriguing social and political tensions of his time. He was an anticorporate campaigner who became John D. Rockefeller’s favorite lawyer. A student and law partner of abolitionist Benjamin F. Wade, Ranney acquired an antislavery reputation and recruited troops for the Union army; but as a Democratic candidate for governor he denied the power of Congress to restrict slavery in the territories, and during the Civil War and Reconstruction he condemned Republican policies.

Ranney was a key delegate at Ohio’s second constitutional convention and a two-time justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. He advocated equality and limited government as understood by radical Jacksonian Democrats. Scholarly discussions of Jacksonian jurisprudence have primarily focused on a handful of United States Supreme Court cases, but Ranney’s opinions, taken as a whole, outline a broader approach to judicial decision making.

A founder of the Ohio State Bar Association, Ranney was immensely influential but has been understudied until now. He left no private papers, even destroying his own correspondence. In The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney, David M. Gold works with the public record to reveal the contours of Ranney’s life and work. The result is a new look at how Jacksonian principles crossed the divide of the Civil War and became part of the fabric of American law and at how radical antebellum Democrats transformed themselves into Gilded Age conservatives.

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The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast

Gender and Animality in Modernist Hebrew Fiction

Naama Harel

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Jews, women, and animals have been notoriously considered in Western thought as antithetical to the “civilized,” and therefore parallel. The trope of the womanized Jewish man has been widely recognized as a staple in otherizing portrayals of European Jews, as well as their self-perception. Similarly, ecofeminist critique has addressed the ubiquitous depiction of the animalized woman throughout history. Yet, the interconnection between the effeminization of Jews and the animalization of women has been overlooked.

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast critically explores the tangled interplay between Jewishness, gender, and animality and its manifestation in modernist Hebrew fiction. Through interdiscursive analysis and close readings, the effeminate Jew is examined vis-à-vis the animalized woman. Intertwining cutting-edge theoretical frameworks of posthumanism and animal studies with established scholarship of Hebrew literature, Jewish studies, and gender studies, Naama Harel offers new Hebrew literary historiography and innovative perspectives on canonical works by Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Devorah Baron, Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Yosef Haim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, and David Vogel.

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The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

Rochelle G. Saidel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp for women. Located about fifty miles north of Berlin, the camp was the site of murder by slave labor, torture, starvation, shooting, lethal injection, "medical" experimentation, and gassing.
    While this camp was designed to hold 5,000 women, the actual figure was six times this number. Between 1939 and 1945, 132,000 women from twenty-three countries were imprisoned in Ravensbrück, including political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, "asocials" (including Gypsies, prostitutes, and lesbians), criminals, and Jewish women (who made up about 20 percent of the population). Only 15,000 survived.
    Drawing upon more than sixty narratives and interviews of survivors in the United States, Israel, and Europe as well as unpublished testimonies, documents, and photographs from private archives, Rochelle Saidel provides a vivid collective and individual portrait of Ravensbrück’s Jewish women prisoners. She worked for over twenty years to track down these women whose poignant testimonies deserve to be shared with a wider audience and future generations. Their memoirs provide new perspectives and information about satellite camps (there were about 70 slave labor sub-camps). Here is the story of real daily camp life with the women’s thoughts about food, friendships, fear of rape and sexual abuse, hygiene issues, punishment, work, and resistance. Saidel includes accounts of the women's treatment, their daily struggles to survive, their hopes and fears, their friendships, their survival strategies, and the aftermath.
    On April 30, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Ravensbrück. They found only 3,000 extremely ill women in the camp, because the Nazis had sent other remaining women on a death march. The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp reclaims the lost voices of the victims and restores the personal accounts of the survivors.

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The Jews of Europe in the Modern Era

A Socio-Historical Outline

Victor Karady

Central European University Press, 2003

Discusses the socio-historical problem areas related to the presence of Jews in major European societies from the 18th century to our days; differently from most other studies, covers the post-Shoah situation also. The approach is multi-disciplinary, mobilizing resources gained from sociology, demography and political science, based on substantial statistical information. Presents and compares the different patterns of Jewish policies of the emerging nation states and established empires. Discusses education and socio-professional stratification of Jews. Deals with the challenges of emancipation and assimilation, the emergence of Jewish nationalism in various forms, Zionism above all, as well as antisemitic ideologies. The book ends with a scrutiny of post-Shoah situation opposing in this regard Western Europe to the Sovietised East, discussing finally strategies of dissimulation or reconstruction of Jewish identity.

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