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Drawing on quantitative data drawn from a range of trials Kateryna Dysa first describes the ideological background of the tribunals based on works written by priests and theologians that reflect attitudes toward the devil and witches. The main focus of her work, however, is the process leading to witchcraft accusations. From the stories of participants of the trials she shows what led people to enunciate first suspicions then accusations of witchcraft. Finally, she presents a microhistory from one Volhynian village, comparing attitudes toward two “female crimes” in the Ukrainian courts. 

The study is based on archival research including witch trials transcripts. Dysa approaches the trials as indications of belief and practice, attempting to understand the actors involved rather than dismiss or condemn them. She takes care to situate early modern Ukrainian witchcraft and its accompanying trials in a broader European context, with comparisons to some African cases as well.

Western democracy is currently under attack by a resurgent Russia, weaponizing new technologies and social media. How to respond? During the Cold War, the West fought off similar Soviet propaganda assaults with shortwave radio broadcasts. Founded in 1949, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast uncensored information to the Soviet republics in their own languages. About one-third of Soviet urban adults listened to Western radio. The broadcasts played a key role in ending the Cold War and eroding the communist empire.

R. Eugene Parta was for many years the director of Soviet Area Audience Research at RFE/RL, charged among others with gathering listener feedback. In this book he relates a remarkable Cold War operation to assess the impact of Western radio broadcasts on Soviet listeners by using a novel survey research approach. Given the impossibility of interviewing Soviet citizens in their own country, it pioneered audacious interview methods in order to fly under the radar and talk to Soviets traveling abroad, ultimately creating a database of 51,000 interviews which offered unparalleled insights into the media habits and mindset of the Soviet public. By recounting how the “impossible” mission was carried out, Under the Radar also shows how the lessons of the past can help counter the threat from a once and current adversary.

False hair can reveal honest truths—about the past, gender, identity, and the stories men tell about themselves.

History has seen its share of famous toupees. John Wayne’s. Frank Sinatra’s. Humphrey Bogart’s. Hairpieces can reveal a wearer’s inner motivations, reinforce gender norms, cause embarrassment, and even provoke disgust. Although false, they can create real meaning.

In Wendy A. Woloson’s hands, the toupee helps us see how men have understood themselves and fashioned their identities over time. Starting in the late eighteenth century, when men stopped wearing white powdered wigs, and moving to the 1920s, when toupees could be easily mass-produced, Woloson tells the story of the “Toupee Age.” She investigates why balding was considered such a problem in the first place, how hair became entangled with anxieties about aging, and the ways that looking old posed a threat to manhood. She details the bear’s grease pomades, brush-on dyes, elixirs, false whiskers, and hairpieces that were created to meet shifting notions of masculinity and style. Under the Rug also introduces readers to the people who styled and traded hair, made wigs, and hawked baldness cures. Drawing on business records, advertisements, graphic images, and a host of other primary sources, Woloson incisively explains how such trades seeded fears about thinning hair and sold men solutions. This vanity project continues today, as hair transplants, medications to stimulate hair growth, and Toupee TikTok encourage people to reinvent the way they’re seen—by others and themselves.

The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin.

The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘Underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture.

The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht).

Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity. 

The authors of this edited volume address the hidden attraction that existed between the extremes of left and right, and of internationalism and nationalism under the decades of communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe. One might suppose that under the suppressive regimes based on leftist ideology and internationalism their right-wing opponents would have been defeated and ultimately removed. These essays, on the other hand, recount the itinerary of survival and revival of "right-wing" thought and activities under communist dictatorship. Resistance and accommodation are explored in the various phases from the Stalinist era to the demise of the Soviet Bloc, with the continuity provided by tacit or concealed right-wing discourses receiving particular consideration. The Eastern European right, both in its conservative and fascist version, centered on nationalism, a legitimizing factor that increased with the downfall of the regimes, and the authors thus accord nationalism special attention.

Two documentary sources for these essays that stand out are files of the security services and the exceptionally rich Oral History Archive compiled by the 1956 Institute in Budapest, Hungary.

First-hand insight into the Czechoslovak underground music scene and the numerous obstacles placed in its way by communist-era security services.

Underground Symphony: The Plastic People traces the history of the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe against the backdrop of political developments in communist Czechoslovakia. It begins with the band’s formation in the 1960s, when psychedelic rock was first introduced to Czechoslovakia, through the emergence of the first concepts of cultural opposition and politically oriented dissent, particularly Charter 77, ending with a detailed account of the band’s breakup in the second half of the 1980s.

The authors rely on primary sources, many of which have not been published; for example, the Plastic People’s chronicles, extensive interviews with band members and friends, and contemporary writings by individual participants (in samizdat publications, private correspondence, diaries, etc.). They also “mine” archival sources from the State Security (Archive of Security Services, National Archives, etc.). The result is an insightful study of the legendary underground band and its era.

This extraordinary book provides a snapshot of socialism throughout the Kádár regime in Hungary (1956-1989) and captures the essence of the world behind the ‘iron curtain’ in a stunning, and often stark, collection of photographs.

Unfinished Socialism is a visually stunning anthropological study containing 450 photographs, many previously unpublished, which portray life in Hungary from every angle: from the May Day March to pop music and from the homeless to sport.

With an introduction that will help the reader understand and appreciate the true meaning of the photographs, this political, social and cultural study of the Kádár years transports the reader back to a time of great significance in Hungary’s long and turbulent history.

Literary naturalism at play in one of America’s most visionary novelists: Cormac McCarthy

It took six novels and nearly thirty years for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success with the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, followed by major prizes, more best sellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work. Those successes, though, have obscured McCarthy’s commitment to an older form of literary expression: naturalism.

It is hardly a secret that McCarthy’s work tends to darker themes: violence, brutality, the cruel indifference of nature, themes which would not be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But literary naturalism is more than the oversimplified Darwinism that many think of. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and humans are part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature is capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality, as well.

In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye illuminates all these dimensions of McCarthy’s work. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both explicitly and obliquely with the project of manifest destiny, in the western drama Blood Meridian, the Tennessee Valley Authority-era Tennessee novels, and the atomic frontier of Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. McCarthy’s concerns are deeply religious and philosophical, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and Nietzsche, among other sources. Frye argues for McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in the most expansive sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars but anyone studying the literature of the South or the West.

A comprehensive overview of the controversy surrounding Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

Few if any books of the past fifty years have moved a broad section of the German public to think about their country’s Nazi past as has Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The main argument of his book is that Germans committed the unthinkable acts of the Holocaust not because they were forced to but out of a deeply held conviction that killing Jews was morally just. Unwilling Germans? traces the intense and varied reception of a book that has created more heated debate than any other treatment of Germany’s genocidal past.

This volume is the second in the series Cold War Documentary Readers, a project of the US National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project.

The volume is the first documented account of this early Cold War crisis from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Based on the recent unprecedented access to the once-closed archives of several member states of the Warsaw Pact, this collection of primary-source documents presents one of the most notorious events of post-war European history in a highly readable format.

Previously unreleased Kremlin records, once highly classified American documents, materials from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and transcripts of internal East German Communist Party Politburo meetings in the days leading to the uprising in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are among the highlights of this sensational documentary.

In this volume, as in the previous one in the series, each part is preceded by a detailed introductory essay to provide the necessary historical and political context. The individual documents are introduced by short headnotes summarizing the contents and orienting the reader. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information.

Traditional interpretations of the 1950s have emphasized how American anti-communists deployed censorship and the blacklist to silence dissent, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Yet those efforts at repression did not always succeed. Throughout the early years of the Cold War, a significant number of writers and performers continued to express controversial views about international relations in Hollywood films, through the new medium of television, on the Broadway stage, and from behind the scenes.

By promoting superpower cooperation, decolonization, nuclear disarmament, and other taboo causes, dissident artists such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rod Serling, Dalton Trumbo, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky managed both to stretch the boundaries of Cold War ideology and to undermine some of its basic assumptions. Working at times under assumed names and in some cases outside the United States, they took on the role of informal diplomats who competed with Washington in representing America to the world. 

Ironically, the dissidents' international appeal eventually persuaded the U.S. foreign policy establishment that their unconventional views could be an asset in the Cold War contest for “hearts and minds,” and their artistic work an effective means to sell American values and culture abroad. By the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration not only appropriated the work of these talented artists but enlisted some of them to serve as official voices of Cold War cultural diplomacy.