New Books in Western European Studies: Recent Episodes
Marshall Poe
Interviews with Scholars of Western Europe about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Filmer to Alexander Dugin and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the universe where each part of reality has its place maps onto the conservative admiration for orderly political and social stratification. It stamps even the more moderate forms of liberal conservatism which emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary 18th century, as the political right struggled to accept and later master first the politics of liberal capitalism and later universal suffrage. In its most radical forms this nostalgia for an orderly and hierarchical existence can harden into a resentment at the perceived shallowness of liberal modernity. McManus argues for those who support the project of modernity to commit themselves to better understanding the depth of the political right’s critiques, many of which expose uncomfortable but solvable problems with the quest for equality and freedom. While there are a lot of competing explanations for the contemporary rise of right-wing forces, Matt McManus’ new book suggests that it is hostility to equality that actually unites the right. Zeroing in on key intellectuals and writers, McManus, in a sharply written text, offers a compelling explanation for the disproportionate intensity of right-wing grievance politics Matthew McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is a contributor to Jacobin and Quillette online magazines.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history of science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Is the raw material of literature the paper, ink, vellum, paphyrus, and increasingly electronic data that it is inscribed on? Or is the stuff of literature the storehouse of tropes, techniques, and plots that authors draw from? And what kind of labor is the process of transforming that matter into literature? Earlier this year, Taylor Cowdery published an academic study on just this subject. The title of Taylor’s book is Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Through case studies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, and Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, Taylor captures a wide discourse around creativity and originality. Taylor is Associate Professor of English and Robert M. Lumiansky Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Taylor also serves as the Director of the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Taylor’s writing has been published in ELH, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s guest is Aaron Kunin, Professor of English at Pomona College. We will discuss two books Aaron published in 2019: the first is Character as Form (Bloomsbury), a re-examination of the early modern understanding of “character” as stereotype, generalization, and convention. In Character as Form, Aaron braids together close readings of furniture in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a reflection on the concept of negative anthropology from Raul Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death, and insight into formalism and anti-formalist views of fictive personhood. The second we discuss is Love Three: A Study of a Poem by George Herbert (Wave Books), a “reading diary” that takes a seventeenth-century poem as a springboard for a meditation on love, sexual experience, and power. Herbert’s poem is a fraught dialogue between a speaker and Love, which is unfolded to touch on the politics of eating, the allure of rhetorical power, and the nature of crowds. Aaron’s research focuses on English Renaissance literature. In addition to his scholarship, he is the author of five books, including Cold Genius: A Book of Poems (2014), The Mandarin (2008), and Folding Ruler Star: Poems (2005), all from Fence Books. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While there is little doubt that women were active participants in medieval musical culture, their role has nevertheless been variously obfuscated, undermined, and overlooked, in large part because of the relative absence of named women composers. Work from recent decades has sought to re-insert women into our music-historical narratives, often by broadening their scopes and shifting away from strictly author-focused surveys. Female-Voice Song and Women's Musical Agency in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2022) brings together seventeen essays, each of which newly identifies contributions to musical culture made by women before 1500 across Europe. Encompassing not only medieval French, English, and Italian culture, but also stretching to Iceland and the Islamicite courts, this volume speaks to the various ways in which we can hear women’s voices through history. Prof. Lisa Colton and Dr. Anna Kathryn Grau jointly edited this collection, in addition to contributing chapters to it. In this episode, they speak with Áine Palmer about the study of women’s participation in medieval musical culture, the process of putting together an edited volume such as this, and share insights on their own analyses of 13th-century French motets. Further Reading and Listening: For those interested, you can here performer’s renditions of some of the songs and motets mentioned in Anna’s chapter here, here, and here, and a rendition of the motet Lisa’s chapter focuses on can be found here. Those interested in Bahktinian approaches to early music should also read Helen Dell, Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song (Woodbridge: Suffolk, 2008), particularly chapters 5 and 6, and Anna Kathryn Grau ‘Hearing Voices: Heteroglossia, Homoglossia, and the Old French Motet’ in Musica Disciplina 58 (2013), pp. 73-100. Prof. Lisa Colton can be found on Twitter at @elsie33, and you can find Dr. Anna Kathryn Grau at @AnnaKathrynGrau. Aine Palmer is a PhD candidate in the Music Department at Yale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood. Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds (U Chicago Press, 2023) attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions—including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope—participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon’s revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell. Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University. Email: nathan.smith@yale.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (Oxford UP, 2022) looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehicle for broadcasting news about crime and executions, exploring how this performative medium could frame and mediate the message of punishment and repentance. Examining ballads in English, French, Dutch, German, and Italian across four centuries, author Una McIlvenna offers the first multilingual and longue durée study of the complex and fascinating phenomenon of popular songs about brutal public death. Ballads were frequently written in the first-person voice, and often purported to be the last words, confession or 'dying speech' of the condemned criminal, yet were ironically on sale the day of the execution itself. Musical notation was generally not required as ballads were set to well-known tunes. Execution ballads were therefore a medium accessible to all, regardless of literacy, social class, age, gender or location. A genre that retained extraordinary continuities in form and content across time, space, and language, the execution ballad grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, and only began to fade as executions themselves were removed from the public eye. With an accompanying database of recordings, Singing the News of Death brings these centuries-old songs of death back to life. Una McIlvenna is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. A literary and cultural historian of early modern Europe, she is also the author of Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici (2016). She has held positions at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Kent and Queen Mary University of London Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans in positions of influence who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by idealistic university professors and social scientists, these surveys came to define much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen Questionnaire and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticized vetting program impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from dictatorship and war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by recounting a more comprehensive history of denazification, one of mid-level planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history. Mikkel Dack is Assistant Professor of History at Rowan University and Director of Research at the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Wolf Gruner about his new book Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany (Yale UP, 2023). Drawing on twelve years of research in dozens of archives in Austria, Germany, Israel, and the United States, this book tells the story of five Jewish people--a merchant, a homemaker, a real estate broker, and two teenagers--who bravely resisted persecution and defended themselves in Nazi Germany. These stories have not been told until now, and each case is one of many, as Gruner shows by resurfacing similar accounts of Jewish refusal to accept persecution and violence in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1943, upending the notion of passive Jews and expanding the concept of resistance. Each individual described here represents a category of resistance: written opposition, oral protest, contesting Nazi propaganda, defiance of anti-Jewish laws and measures, and self-defense against physical attacks. Many of these courageous acts resulted in the resisters being prosecuted and put on trial, and often receiving harsh punishments, while some led to acquittal by courts and others to changes in Nazi policies. Taken together, these accounts reframe our understanding of German Jewish attitudes during the Holocaust, while also providing an astonishing examination of the complex Nazi reactions to the many individual acts of Jewish resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There was a time when French people put up picture of Marshal Philippe Petain on their walls. He is a figure of immeasurable stature to the country of France. Victor of Verdun, a one-time minister of war, and finally, a traitor to his country. Or was he? Did Petain allow the stain of collaboration to tarnish his reputation, or did he use his figure to guard the French people from worse Nazi atrocities during the Vichy era? The answer to those questions would divide France in the years following World War II. The trial of Petain, which took place during a humid July in 1945, would leave some venerating the figure of Petain while others looked upon him as betrayer of the French people. Professor Julian Jackson, is professor emeritus of history with Queen Mary University of London. His latest work is France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain published by Harvard University Press in 2023, covers the political trial of Marshal Petain for treason. Dr. Jackson has authored an award-winning biography of Charles de Gaulle and other works on the history of modern France including his next work an exploration of the life of Andre Gide. Rick Northrop is an ex-journalist and undergraduate student in Calgary, Alberta Canada. He can be reached at rnorthrop2001@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Jeremy Black about his new book Why the Industrial Revolution Happened in Britain (Amberley Publishing, 2023). Britain's key importance in world history was a product of its constitution and its empire, but both, in turn, were sustained and supported by Britain's role in achieving the first Industrial Revolution. In part this was a matter of coal and steam but far more was involved. Alongside the 'push' factors of entrepreneurs and resources came the 'pull' factors of consumerism, fashion and an ability to purchase goods. There was also the context of parliamentary government, the rule of law, a society open to talent, and no internal tariff boundaries. The combination of these factors produced vital synergies. They also ensure that the history of the Industrial Revolution is the history of a country, a people, and of the factors that made them exceptional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age. Lawrence Goldman was born in London and educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught British and American History for three decades in Oxford, where he was a fellow of St. Peter's College, and Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-2014. Latterly he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His publications include books on Victorian social science and the history of workers' education, and a biography of the historian and political thinker R. H. Tawney. He is now Emeritus Fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Barczewski is an exploration of the evolution of the quintessentially English country house. Country houses have come to be regarded as quintessentially English, not only in terms of their architectural style but because they appear to embody national values of continuity and insularity. The histories of country houses and England, however, have featured episodes of violence and disruption, so how did country houses come to represent one version of English history, when in reality they reflect its full range of contradictions and complexities? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the violent impact of the Reformation and Civil War and showing how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England’s political stability. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn State University Press, 2023), art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait. Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies. Highly original and persuasive, Praying to Portraits profoundly revises our understanding of early modern portraiture. It will intrigue art historians across geographical boundaries, and it will also find an audience among scholars of architecture, history, and religion in the early modern Hispanic world. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (U Wales Press, 2022) demonstrates a little-studied crossover between the Gothic imagination and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. Unafraid to explore the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, Laura R. Kremmel argues, Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and chapbooks expanded the possibilities of medical theories by showing what they might look like in a speculative space without limits. In comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavory tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, Kremmel shows that the Gothic’s prioritization of fear and gore gives it access to non-normative bodies, shifting medical and narrative agency to bodies considered powerless. Each chapter pairs a familiar gothic trope with a critical medical debate; the result is to give silenced bodies power over their own narratives. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The fastest-rising force in Italian politics is Giorgia Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia - a party with a direct genealogy from Mussolini's regime. Surging to prominence in recent years, it has waged a fierce culture war against the Left, polarised political debate around World War II, and even secured the largest vote share in Italy's 2022 general election. Eighty years after the fall of Mussolini, his heirs, and admirers are again on the brink of taking power. So how exactly has this situation come about? Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy (Pluto Press, 2023) delves into Italy's self-styled 'post-fascist' movements - rooted in historical fascism yet claiming to have 'transcended' it. David Broder highlights the reinventions of far-right politics since the Second World War and examines the interplay between a parliamentary face aimed at integrating fascists into the mainstream and militant fringe groups which, despite their extremism, play an important role in nurturing the broader far right. Fratelli d'Italia has retained its hegemony over fascist subcultures whilst embracing a raft of more pragmatic policy positions, fusing harsh Islamophobia and anti-communism with support for the European Union and NATO. As countervailing anti-fascist forces in Italian society wane, the far-right party's mission to redeem historical fascism, legitimize its political heirs, and shift the terrain of mainstream politics is proving alarmingly successful. David Broder is a historian of the Italian far-right. He is a regular contributor to the New Statesman and Internazionale, writing about Italian politics, as well as Europe editor for Jacobin. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Left Review and Tribune. He is the author of The Rebirth of Italian Communism: Dissident Communists in Rome, 1943-44 and First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Conor Lucey's book House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life (Four Courts Press, 2022) explores the everyday character and functions of domestic spaces in Georgian Ireland. While the design and decoration of the country pile and the aristocratic town house enjoys a long and distinguished literature, to date there has been no sustained examination of how rooms were habitually occupied and experienced, or how different social demographics--not least the burgeoning 'middling sorts'--might have informed approaches to spatial design and functionality. Drawing on recent pioneering research, the topics and themes addressed here range widely from comfort, privacy, and multiple occupancy to sociability, maternity, and piety. Focusing on how different species of domestic spaces were used and inhabited, from mansions and merchant houses to lodgings and farm house cabins, this book expands our understanding of house and home in Ireland in the long eighteenth century. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works. This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre’s output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A rich and indulgent history, English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables (William Collins, 2022) by Dr. Diane Purkiss will change the way you view your food and understand your past. Dr. Purkiss uses the story of food as a revelatory device to chart changing views on class, gender, and tradition through the ages. Sprinkled throughout with glorious details of historical quirks – trial by ordeal of bread, a fondness for ‘small beer’ and a war-time ice-cream substitute called ‘hokey pokey’ made from parsnips – this book is both an education and an entertainment. English Food explores the development of the coffee trade and the birth of London’s coffee houses, where views were exchanged on politics, art, and literature. Dr. Purkiss introduces the first breeders of British beef and reveals how cattle triggered the terrible Glencoe Massacre. We are taken for tea, to the icehouse, the pantry, and the beehive. We learn that toast is as English as the chalk cliffs. We bite into chicken, plainly poached or exotically spiced. We join bacon curers and fishermen at work. We follow the scent of apples into ancient orchards. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The experiences of the Irish in France during the war were overshadowed by the threat of internment or destitution. Up to 2,000 Irish people were stuck in occupied France after the defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. This population consisted largely of governesses and members of religious orders, but also the likes of Samuel Beckett, as well as a few individuals who managed to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in internment camps (or worse). Isadore Ryan's book No Way Out: The Irish in Wartime France, 1939–1945 (Mercier Press, 2018) examines the engagement of the Irish in various forms of resistance. It also reveals that the attitude of some of the Irish towards the German occupiers was not always as clear-cut as politically correct discourse would like to suggest. There are fascinating revelations, most notably that Ireland’s diplomatic representative in Paris sold quantities of wine to Hermann Göring; that Irish passports were given out very liberally (including to a convicted British rapist); that, in the early part of the war, some Irish ended up in internment camps in France and, through the slowness of the Irish authorities to intervene, were subsequently sent to concentration camps in Germany; and that a couple of Irish people faced criminal proceedings in France after the Liberation because of their wartime dealings with the Germans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023). Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of colonialism to the pan-European movement that grew out of the first world war and peace project (or was it?) that emerged from the second. Not only is pro-Europeanism “analogous to nationalism - something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale," Kundani argues, but the EU itself has “become a vehicle for imperial amnesia" thereby promoting and privileging “whiteness”. Hans Kundnani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations Workshop, an associate scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and a visiting scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research. From 2018-22, he was a full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. Before that, he was a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, the Transatlantic Academy, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014, he published The Paradox of German Power. *The author's own book recommendations are Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006 - first published in 1956) Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2016) explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance. Al Coppola is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
After his dramatic rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most turbulent period of British history in living memory. Beginning with the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August and the historic landslide election victory later that year, Johnson was barely through the door of No. 10 when Britain was engulfed by a series of crises that will define its place in the world for decades to come. From the agonising upheaval of Brexit and the devastating Covid-19 pandemic to the nerve-shredding crisis in Afghanistan, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the Partygate scandal, Johnson’s government ultimately unravelled after just three years. Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell's book Johnson at 10: The Inside Story (Atlantic Books, 2023) maps Johnson’s time in power from start to finish and sheds new light on the most divisive Prime Minister to have led the United Kingdom since Thatcher. Based on more than 200 interviews with key aides, allies and insiders, Johnson at 10 gives the first full account of Johnson’s premiership, the shockwaves of which are still felt today. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Focusing on gender relations, family formation, and marriage patterns in areas peripheral to the England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, Christian Raffensperger and Joanna Drell argue for a more inclusive understanding of medieval Europe. Their conversation dwells on Kyivan Rus and Norman Salerno in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but also the present state of medieval history and the importance of thinking beyond Western Europe and talking across language and geographical divides. Raffensperger is author of Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus in the Medieval World, 988-1146 (Harvard UP, 2012). Joanna Drell is the author of Kinship and Conquest: Family Strategies in the Principality of Salerno during the Norman Period, 1077-1194 (Cornell UP, 2002). Her recent article “The Luxuriant Southern Scene: Textiles as Reflections of Power in the Kingdom of Southern Italy and Sicily” is also a focus of conversation. It is published in Mapping Pre-Modern Sicily: Maritime Violence, Cultural Exchange, and Imagination in the Mediterranean, 800-1700. Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1686 in Geneva, a single mother named Jeanne Catherine Thomasset is charged with poisoning two young children: her own illegitimate daughter and the son of a rural wet nurse. So begins a harrowing criminal trial during which authorities interrogate Jeanne Catherine several times, sometimes with torture, to determine the truth. Sara Beam's The Trial of Jeanne Catherine: Infanticide in Early Modern Geneva (University of Toronto Press, 2021) is a suspenseful historical mystery that offers students the opportunity to learn about motherhood, child rearing, gender, religion, local politics, and the practice of criminal justice in early modern Europe. This edition provides the complete trial transcript as well as the deliberations of the Genevan authorities and relevant correspondence. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1811, Napoleon stood at his zenith. He had defeated all his continental rivals, come to an entente with Russia, and his blockade of Britain seemed, at long last, to be a success. The emperor had an heir on the way with his new wife, Marie-Louise, the young daughter of the Emperor of Austria. His personal life, too, was calm and secure for the first time in many years. It was a moment of unprecedented peace and hope, built on the foundations of emphatic military victories. But in less than two years, all of this was in peril. In four years, it was gone, swept away by the tides of war against the most powerful alliance in European history. The rest of his life was passed on a barren island. This is not a story any novelist could create; it is reality as epic. Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821 (Pegasus Books, 2023) traces this story through the dramatic narrative of the years 1811-1821 and explores the ever-bloodier conflicts, the disintegration and reforging of the bonds among the Bonaparte family, and the serpentine diplomacy that shaped the fate of Europe. At the heart of the story is Napoleon's own sense of history, the tensions in his own character, and the shared vision of a family dynasty to rule Europe. Drawing on the remarkable resource of the new edition of Napoleon's personal correspondence produced by the Fondation Napoleon in Paris, Michael Broers dynamic new history follows Napoleon's thoughts and feelings, his hopes and ambitions, as he fought to preserve the world he had created. Much of this turns on his relationship with Tsar Alexander of Russia, in so many respects his alter ego, and eventual nemesis. His inability to understand this complex man, the only person with the power to destroy him, is key to tracing the roots of his disastrous decision to invade Russia--and his inability to face diplomatic and military reality thereafter. Even his defeat in Russia was not the end. The last years of the Napoleonic Empire reveal its innate strength, but it now faced hopeless odds. The last phase of the Napoleonic Wars saw the convergence of the most powerful of forces in European history to date: Russian manpower and British money. The sheer determination of Tsar Alexander and the British to bring Napoleon down is a story of compromise and sacrifice. The horrors and heroism of war are omnipresent in these years, from Lisbon to Moscow, in the life of the common solider. The core of this new book reveals how these men pushed Napoleon back from Moscow to St. Helena. Among this generation, there was no more remarkable persona than Napoleon. His defeat forged his myth--as well as his living tomb on St. Helena. The audacious enterprise of the 100 Days, reaching its crescendo at the Battle of Waterloo, marked the spectacular end of an unprecedented public life. From the ruins of a life--and an empire--came a new continent and a legend that haunts Europe still. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The concept of madness as a challenge to communities lies at the core of legal sources. Aleksandra Nicole Pfau's book Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France (Amsterdam UP, 2020) considers how communal networks, ranging from the locale to the realm, responded to people who were considered mad. The madness of individuals played a role in engaging communities with legal mechanisms and proto-national identity constructs, as petitioners sought the king's mercy as an alternative to local justice. The resulting narratives about the mentally ill in late medieval France constructed madness as an inability to live according to communal rules. Although such texts defined madness through acts that threatened social bonds, those ties were reaffirmed through the medium of the remission letter. The composers of the letters presented madness as a communal concern, situating the mad within the household, where care could be provided. Those considered mad were usually not expelled but integrated, often through pilgrimage, surveillance, or chains, into their kin and communal relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values. Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany (Stanford UP, 2023) explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" the guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity. Esra Özyürek is the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nihilism - the belief that life is meaningless - is frequently associated with twentieth-century movements such as existentialism, postmodernism and Dadaism, and thought to result from the shocking experiences of the two World Wars and the Holocaust. In A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century: Confrontations with Nothingness (Cambridge UP, 2023), Jon Stewart shows that nihilism's beginnings in fact go back much further to the first half of the nineteenth century. He argues that the true origin of modern nihilism was the rapid development of Enlightenment science, which established a secular worldview. This radically diminished the importance of human beings so that, in the vastness of space and time, individuals now seemed completely insignificant within the universe. The author's panoramic exploration of how nihilism developed - not only in philosophy, but also in religion, poetry and literature - shows what an urgent topic it was for thinkers of all kinds, and how it has continued powerfully to shape intellectual debates ever since. Jon Bartley Stewart is an American philosopher and historian of philosophy. He specializes in 19th century Continental philosophy with an emphasis on the thought of Kierkegaard and Hegel. Stewart currently works as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world. Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and government archives, The Violence of Colonial Photography (Manchester UP, 2022) offers a new account of how conflict photography developed in the decades before the First World War. It explores the ways the camera was used to impose order on subject populations in Africa and Asia and to generate propaganda for the public in Europe, where a visual economy of violence was rapidly taking shape. At the same time, the book reveals how photographs could escape the intentions of their creators, offering a means for colonial subjects to push back against oppression. Daniel Foliard is a Professor of Modern History at Université Paris Cité Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Since the late 1990s, activists have campaigned to remove "conflict diamonds" from jewelry shops and department stores. But if the problem of conflict diamonds--gems extracted from war zones--has only recently generated attention, it is not a new one. Nor are conflict diamonds an exception in an otherwise honest industry. The modern diamond business, Steven Press shows, owes its origins to imperial wars and has never escaped its legacy of exploitation. In Blood and Diamonds: Germany's Imperial Ambitions in Africa (Harvard UP, 2021), Press traces the interaction of the mass-market diamond and German colonial domination in Africa. Starting in the 1880s, Germans hunted for diamonds in Southwest Africa. In the decades that followed, Germans waged brutal wars to control the territory, culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples and the unearthing of vast mineral riches. Press follows the trail of the diamonds from the sands of the Namib Desert to government ministries and corporate boardrooms in Berlin and London and on to the retail counters of New York and Chicago. As Africans working in terrifying conditions extracted unprecedented supplies of diamonds, European cartels maintained the illusion that the stones were scarce, propelling the nascent US market for diamond engagement rings. Convinced by advertisers that diamonds were both valuable and romantically significant, American purchasers unwittingly funded German imperial ambitions into the era of the world wars. Amid today's global frenzy of mass consumption, Press's history offers an unsettling reminder that cheap luxury often depends on an alliance between corporate power and state violence. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Catch: An Environmental History of Medieval European Fisheries (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides a comprehensive examination of European engagement with aquatic systems between c. 500 and 1500 CE. Using textual, zooarchaeological, and natural records, Richard C. Hoffmann's unique study spans marine and freshwater fisheries across western Christendom, discusses effects of human-nature relations and presents a deeper understanding of evolving European aquatic ecosystems. Changing climates, landscapes, and fishing pressures affected local stocks enough to shift values of fish, fishing rights, and dietary expectations. Readers learn what the abbess Waldetrudis in seventh-century Hainault, King Ramiro II (d.1157) of Aragon, and thirteenth-century physician Aldebrandin of Siena shared with English antiquarian William Worcester (d. 1482), and the young Martin Luther growing up in Germany soon thereafter. Sturgeon and herring, carp, cod, and tuna played distinctive roles. Hoffmann highlights how encounters between medieval Europeans and fish had consequences for society and the environment - then and now. Richard Hoffmann is Professor Emeritus in History at York University, Toronto, and author of the acclaimed An Environmental History of Medieval Europe. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This book tells the untold story of the Married Women's Association. Unlike more conventional histories of family law, which focus on legal actors, it highlights the little-known yet indispensable work of a dedicated group of life-long activists. Formed in 1938, the Married Women's Association took reform of family property law as its chief focus. The name is deceptively innocuous, suggesting tea parties and charity fundraisers, but in fact the MWA was often involved in dramatic confrontations with politicians, civil servants, and Law Commissioners. The Association boasted powerful public figures, including MP Edith Summerskill, authors Vera Brittain and Dora Russell, and barrister Helena Normanton. They campaigned on matters that are still being debated in family law today. Sharon Thompson's Quiet Revolutionaries: The Married Women's Association and Family Law (Hart Publishing, 2022) sheds new light upon legal reform then and now by challenging longstanding assumptions, showing that piecemeal legislation can be an effective stepping stone to comprehensive reform and highlighting how unsuccessful bills, though often now forgotten, can still be important triggers for change. Drawing upon interviews with members' friends and family, and thousands of archival documents, the book is compulsory reading for lawyers, legal historians, and anyone who wishes to explore histories of law reform from the ground up. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories (Melville House, 2023), Mike Rothschild delves into the history of the conspiracy industry around the Rothschild family—from the "pamphlet wars" of Paris in the 1840s to the dankest pits of the internet today. Journalist and conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild, who isn't related to the family, sorts out myth from reality to find the truth about these conspiracy theories and their spreaders. Who were the Rothschilds? Who are they today? Do they really own $500 trillion and every central bank, in addition to “controlling the British money supply?” Is any of this actually true? And why, even as their wealth and influence have waned, do they continue to drive conspiracies and hoaxes? Mike Rothschild is a journalist and conspiracy theory expert. He has written two previous books, including The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything. Rothschild has been interviewed by CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times among many others to discuss conspiracy theories and has testified to Congress on the threat of election disinformation. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The nineteenth century witnessed a flurry of evangelical and missionary activity in Europe and North America. This was an era of renewed piety and intense zeal spanning denominations and countries. One area of Protestant flourishing in this period has received scant attention in Anglophone sources, however: the French Réveil. Born of a rich Huguenot heritage but aimed at recovering the religion of the heart, this awakening gave birth to a dynamic missionary movement—and some of its chief agents were women. In Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-Century France (Baylor UP, 2022), Michèle Sigg sheds light on the seminal role French Protestant women played in launching and sustaining this movement of revival and mission. Out of the concerted efforts of these women arose a holistic mission strategy encompassing the home front and the foreign field. Parisian women, led by Émilie Mallet, established schools to provide infants with food, safety, and religious education. Mallet and her friend Albertine de Broglie led the women’s auxiliary of the Paris Bible Society to design and carry out a strategy for large-scale Bible distribution and fundraising. In 1825 de Broglie pioneered the women’s committee of the Paris Evangelical Mission Society, which used the Bible Society model to promote international missions across their many networks. In meetings, publications, and reports to the annual General Assembly, the women reflected on their calling in the work of mission and fully embraced their identity as "true missionaries." The success of women teachers and their presence as wives and mothers in the Lesotho Mission—exemplified by pioneering missionary wife Elizabeth Lyndall Rolland—proved that married couples serving together as models of Christian living were essential in opening the doors to missionary work in Africa. The story, and these women’s legacies, does not end in the field, however. Sigg demonstrates how the educational work of the missionary wives and their publications that shared good news of growing faith in Lesotho sparked local revivals in France. When the enthusiasm of the Réveil waned in the metropole and divisions mounted among Protestants, a movement of deaconesses emerged to renew the faith of French Protestants. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Sun Yong Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, studying World Christianity and the history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her research interests center on the history of Christianity in East Asia and Protestant missions. She is especially interested in women’s experiences in their mission encounters and their participation in the formation of Christianity and social changes. Her research expands to social theory of religion, church-state relations, and politics of religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What defines the complicated relationship between brothers and sisters—is it lineage? Love? Obligation? Friendship? Need? And why did so many parents expect their offspring to share and share alike? Historian Amy Harris joins us to talk about:
What led to her interest in researching sibling relationships.
Why her book project seemed to find her in an archive in England.
How the early stresses on sibling relationships plagued them in later life.
Why parents’ behavior affects how sibling relationships function.
A discussion of the book Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike.
Today’s book is: Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike (Manchester University Press, 2016), Dr. Amy Harris, which examines the impact sisters and brothers had on eighteenth-century English families and society. Using evidence from letters, diaries, probate disputes, court transcripts, prescriptive literature and portraiture, Dr. Harris argues that although parents’ wills often recommended their children 'share and share alike', siblings had to constantly negotiate between prescribed equality and practiced inequalities. This is the first monograph-length analysis of early modern siblings in England, and is at the forefront of sibling studies. The book is intended for a broad audience of scholars – particularly those interested in families, women, children and eighteenth-century social and cultural history. Our guest is: Dr. Amy Harris, who is an associate professor of history and family/history genealogy at BYU, where she also serves as the director for the Family History Program. She is the author of Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England, and the co-editor of Family Life in England and America, 1690-1820. She is currently working on her new book: A Single View: Family Life and the Unmarried in Georgian England, which analyzes family relations across the lifespan of never-married men and women. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:
This episode on the detective work of research
This episode on reclaiming lost voices and recovering history
This episode on writing feminist biography
This episode about the House on Henry Street and public-facing humanities
This episode on how our pets are family members
This episode on archival etiquette and what to know before you go
This episode on launching an online history conference
This episode on where research really begins
Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re busy in the studio preparing new episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As she taught university-level courses on modern French history, Darcie Fontaine felt like she could not find a textbook that provided an up-to-date narrative about the ways in which France has been involved in and influenced by the rest of the world—certainly not one that incorporated contributions from scholars of social and cultural history, gender studies, and the history of imperialism. So when the opportunity to develop a textbook for college professors that did just that presented itself, she decided to take the leap. Modern France and the World (Routledge, 2023) is the result of years of research, reading, and collaborative engagement with scholars in a diverse array of fields that provides readers with an engaging narrative of French history from the 18th century to the present that incorporates a consistent awareness of how France’s empire and global politics has shaped it as a nation. A useful resource for teachers, students, and scholars of modern France, the book incorporates brief discussions of cultural objects and major themes in French history that can serve as a foundation for a one- or two- semester survey, a specialized course, or even general undergraduate classes. In this conversation, we talk not only about how she decided to take on this gargantuan task, but how she went about writing the book – gathering ideas and advice from scholars with different methodological expertise, reading widely in fields with which she was less familiar, and, eventually, whittling down all of this information into a concise text. Along the way, we discuss how collaboration, teaching, and an awareness of the influence of academic history shaped the decisions she made about what to include and what to leave out of the narrative. Fontaine demonstrates an astute awareness of the political importance and stakes of creating national narratives. As she explains: “everything about [the book] is a historiographic intervention… every choice I make about what to include, what not to include, is embedded in the historiography.” Darcie Fontaine is a scholar of modern French imperialism, particularly in North Africa, though she has studied transnational women’s movements and refugee politics in nineteenth and twentieth century French history. Her first book, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria was published in 2016—and was featured on an episode of New Books in French Studies! She is currently working as a developmental editor and translator at Les plumes rouges, the new company she has launched with Dr. Sandrine Sanos. Sarah K. Miles is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who specializes in global francophone history and the history of the French Left. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (skmiles@live.unc.edu). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Taylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers. We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell's last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is what Orwell: The New Life (Pegasus Books, 2023) achieves. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did the rise of consumerism impact Britain? In In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style (Manchester UP, 2023), Ben Highmore, a Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, explores this question by telling the story of key British institutions and cultural habits. The book uses a wealth of different sources, including newspapers, lifestyle magazines, shopping catalogues, plays, books, and television programmes, as well as architecture and design, in order to think through key forms of social identity and the structures of feeling underpinning social change. The book is a rich, deep, and fascinating examination of how taste patterns and practices made modern Britain, and how modern Britain made tastes. It will be essential reading across the arts humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding the recent history of culture in the UK. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Anchored in the principles of free-market economics, neoliberalism emerged in the 1990s as the world's most dominant economic paradigm. It has been associated with political leaders from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Bill Clinton, to Tony Blair, Barack Obama, and Manmohan Singh. Neoliberalism even penetrated deeply into communist China's powerful economic system. However, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the related European Sovereign Debt Crisis triggered a decade of economic volatility and insecurity that boosted the fortunes of the 1 per cent while saddling the 99 per cent with stagnant wages and precarious work. As a result of this Great Recession, neoliberalism fortunes have waned considerably. This downward trend further accelerated with the recent surge of national populism around the world that brought to power outspoken critics of neoliberalism like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi. Is neoliberalism doomed or will it regain its former glory? And what are the major types of neoliberalism, and how did they evolve over the decades? Responding to these crucial questions, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the considerable variations of neoliberalism around the world, and discusses the origins, evolution, and core ideas of neoliberalism. This new edition brings the story of neoliberalism up to date, and asks whether new versions of neoliberalism might succeed in drowning out the rising tide of national populism and its nostalgic longing for a return to territorial sovereignty and national greatness. Manfred B. Steger is a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When Charles Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books of the day were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight works was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater and written by leading men of science appointed by the president of the Royal Society to explore “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series offered Darwin’s generation a range of approaches to one of the great questions of the age: how to incorporate the newly emerging disciplinary sciences into Britain’s overwhelmingly Christian culture. In Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age (U Chicago Press, 2022), Jonathan R. Topham examines how and to what extent the series contributed to a sense of congruence between Christianity and the sciences in the generation before the fabled Victorian conflict between science and religion. Building on the distinctive insights of book history and paying close attention to the production, circulation, and use of the books, Topham offers new perspectives on early Victorian science and the subject of science and religion as a whole. Jonathan R. Topham is professor of history of science at the University of Leeds, UK. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lucy Moffat Kaufman presents the lived experience of the Reformation in Tudor England. The Elizabethan settlement, and the Church of England that emerged from it, made way for a theological reformation, an institutional reformation, and a high political reformation. It was a reformation that changed history, birthed an Anglican communion, and would eventually launch new wars, new language, and even a new national identity. A People’s Reformation offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the English Reformation and the roots of the Church of England. Drawing on archival material from across the United States and Britain, Lucy Kaufman examines the growing influence of state authority and the slow building of a robust state church from the bottom up in post-Reformation England. Situating the people of England at the heart of this story, the book argues that while the Reformation shaped everyday lives, it was also profoundly shaped by them in turn. England became a Protestant nation not in spite of its people but through their active social, political, and religious participation in creating a new church in England. A People’s Reformation explores this world from the pews, reimagining the lived experience and fierce negotiation of church and state in the parishes of Elizabethan England. It places ordinary people at the centre of the local, cultural, and political history of the Reformation and its remarkable, transformative effect on the world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging (Berghahn Books, 2022) provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning. Rahil Roodsaz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops Into the Roman Church, 1200-1350 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surprising and distinctive vantage point. Tracing the web of textual ties that connected the northern fringes of Europe to the Roman see, Joel D. Anderson explores the ways in which Norse writers recruited, refashioned, and repurposed the legal principles and official documents of the Roman church for their own ends. Drawing on little-known vernacular sagas, Reimagining Christendom is populated with tales of married bishops, fictitious and forged papal bulls, and imagined canon law proceedings. These narratives, Anderson argues, demonstrate how Norse writers adapted and reconfigured the institutional power of the church in order to legitimize some of the thoroughly abnormal practices of their native bishops. In the process, Icelandic clerics constructed their own visions of ecclesiastical order―visions that underscore the thoroughly malleable character of the Roman church’s text-based government and that articulate diverse ways of belonging to the far-flung imagined community of high medieval Christendom. Dr. Joel Anderson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine. He is a historian of medieval Europe, and his research revolves around issues of communication, imagination, and authority, particularly in the high and late medieval church. Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play’s dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose dedicated research provides the foundation for an analysis of the play’s broader contexts, also brings perspectives from the first fully staged modern production that tested the theatricality of the translation and provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play’s rich interpretive and performative possibilities. In this discussion, Symes and Thomas discuss the significance of the play, surprising and fascinating things they learned while working on the book, and what the Play about the Antichrist tells us about what it means to be human. Carol Symes is associate professor of history and theatre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of an award-winning monograph on theater and public life in medieval Arras. Kyle A. Thomas is assistant professor of theatre at Missouri State University, specializing in medieval performance texts and strategies for their modern enactment. Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kathleen Lubey,'s book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them. Kathleen Lubey is Professor of English at St. John's University. She is the author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 (2012).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ronan Bolton's book Making Energy Markets: The Origins of Electricity Liberalisation in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) charts the emergence and early evolution of electricity markets in western Europe, covering the decade from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Liberalising electricity marked a radical deviation from the established paradigm of state-controlled electricity systems which had become established across Europe after the Second World War. By studying early liberalisation processes in Britain and the Nordic region, and analysing the role of the EEC, the book shows that the creation of electricity markets involved political decisions about the feasibility and desirability of introducing competition into electricity supply industries. Competition introduced risks, so in designing the process politicians needed to evaluate who the likely winners and losers might be and the degree to which competition would impact key national industries reliant on cross-subsidies from the electricity sector, in particular coal mining, nuclear power and energy intensive production. The book discusses how an understanding of the origins of electricity markets and their political character can inform contemporary debates about renewables and low carbon energy transitions. Ronan Bolton is a Reader in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and the Co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre. His work examines the interconnected policy, market and regulatory challenges of transforming carbon based energy systems. His particular research interests are focused in the areas of energy network regulation and system integration, along with the the history and development of liberalisation processes in the energy sector.
Filippo De Chirico studies History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Opulent jewelled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in mediaeval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture (Penn State University Press, 2022), art historian Dr. Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular mediaeval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Dr. Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jewelled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths’ workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe’s literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India. Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in mediaeval art history, material culture, and mediaeval history. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Yamin Levy's The Mysticism of Andalusia: Exploring HaRambam's Mystical Tradition (MHC Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking book that delves into the mystical tradition of Andalusia and specifically of Maimonides. Unlike Kabalah and the European mystical traditions, Andalusian mysticism is rooted in clear Halakhic and philosophical principles devoid of superstition and magic. This book examines Maimonides works which serve as a guide for those interested in pursuing mystical union with G-d. Topics such as prophecy, love and awe of G-d, silent meditation, the role of prophets, and the spiritual aspects of Jewish rituals are all explored in this book. The Mysticism of Andalusia offers a refreshing perspective and path forward for all who desire deep spiritual fulfillment without the rejection of the mind and self. Ohad Fedida lives in Miami and is a psychology research and clinical assistant. He is pursuing a graduate degree in psychology, and is involved in a wide array of initiatives and studies from legal philosophy, Jewish programming, and psychology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Robert Payne's Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature (Peter Lang, 2021) is the first book-length study of representations of lesbian mothering in French literature. Focusing on female-authored texts published between 1970 and 2013, the book explores how literature reflects, engages with and even anticipates the recent, highly charged debates on the rights of same-sex couples and parents in France. Centered around the notion of «reimagining», the book examines how literature interrogates the normative definition of the family as a heterosexual, biological unit. It discusses a range of themes, including the difficulty of reconciling lesbianism with mothering, the role of the father, the identity of the co-mother and issues of difference and equality. The corpus includes both well-known and previously unstudied authors, and covers a range of genres, from autobiography to popular fiction. Collectively, the texts offer privileged insights into the increasingly relevant experiences of lesbian mothers and illustrate the changing face of the family in twenty-first-century France. Salvador Lopez Rivera is a PhD candidate in French language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Owen Stanwood's newest book, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in an Age of Empire (Oxford UP, 2019), places the history of Huguenot refugees in a global context, the first truly international history of the diaspora. In the early modern world these French Protestant exiles scattered around the world, fleeing persecution following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The story begins with dreams of Eden, as religious migrants sought to build perfect societies far from the political storms of Europe. In order to build these communities, however, the Huguenots needed patrons, forcing them to navigate the world of empires. The refugees promoted themselves as a chosen people, religious heroes who also possessed key skills that could strengthen the British and Dutch states. This embrace of empire led to a gradual assimilation. For over a century, they learned that only by blending in and by mastering foreign institutions could they prosper. While the Huguenots never managed to find a utopia or to realize their imperial sponsors' visions of profits, The Global Refuge demonstrates how this diasporic community helped shape the first age of globalization and influenced the reception of future refugee populations. Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Volume 37 of Spenser Studies is a special issue on the theme of “Companionable Thinking: Spenser With.” As guest editors of this collection of essays, Namratha Rao (University of York), Joe Moshenska (University of Oxford), and David Hillman (King’s College, University of Cambridge) collect over two dozen essays which each “make a match” between Spenser’s work and a philosopher or theorist. For instance, Melissa Sanchez stages a conversation between Spenser and the trans theorist Julia Serrano; Patrick Aaron Harris reads Spenser’s Amoretti with Sianne Ngai’s theorization of cute poetics; and Joe Moshenska and Ayesha Ramachandran look at Spenser through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “cannibal metaphysics.” Each essay, from Megan Bowman’s examination of “spectacular staring” in Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to Supriya Chaudhuri’s consideration of Donna Harraway, gestures toward new critical horizons for early modern studies to take up. Additionally, as the theorist’s work participates in “companionable thinking with” Spenser, the poetry of the Faerie Queene, Amoretti, and The Shepheardes Calender is shown to enrich contemporary discussions of literary theory. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Heide Hausse's book The Malleable Body: Surgeons, Artisans, and Amputees in Early Modern Germany (Manchester University Press, 2023) uses amputation and prostheses to tell a new story about medicine and embodied knowledge-making in early modern Europe. It draws on the writings of craft surgeons and learned physicians to follow the heated debates that arose from changing practices of removing limbs, uncovering tense moments in which decisions to operate were made. Importantly, it teases out surgeons' ideas about the body embedded in their technical instructions. This unique study also explores the material culture of mechanical hands that amputees commissioned locksmiths, clockmakers, and other artisans to create, revealing their roles in developing a new prosthetic technology. Over two centuries of surgical and artisanal interventions emerged a growing perception, fundamental to biomedicine today, that humans could alter the body - that it was malleable. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence, Mani Sharpe peploys the term “late-colonial” to describe (mostly) French films made during, and in response to, the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Sharpe argues that late-colonial cinema represents a formally and thematically important, yet unappreciated tendency in French cinema; one that has largely been overshadowed by a scholarly focus on the French New Wave. Sharpe contends that whilst late-colonial French cinema cannot be seen as a coherent cinematic movement, school of filmmaking, or genre, it can be seen as a coherent ethical trend, with many of the fifteen central case studies explored in Late-colonial French Cinema filtering the Algerian War of Independence through a discourse of “redemptive pacifism”. Dr. Mani Sharpe about Late-Colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence out in 2023 with Edinburgh University Press. Dr. Sharpe is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Leeds. He previously taught Film Studies at Newcastle University and La Sorbonne – Paris 3. Dr. Sharpe’s areas of expertise include: cinema and war; film studies; violence and visuality; de-colonisation; contemporary film theory; French cinema; the French New Wave; cultural studies; defacement; and the politics of the close-up. Dr. Sharpe earned his B.A. and M.A. at Leeds and his Ph.D. at Newcastle University. He is the author of several articles on late-colonial French cinema, having published in French Studies, Journal of European Studies, Journal of War and Culture Studies, and Studies in French Cinema, amongst others.Late-colonial French Cinema: Filming the Algerian War of Independence is his first book. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The province of Grosseto in southern Tuscany shows two extremes in the treatment of Italian and foreign Jews during the Holocaust. To the east of the province, the Jews of Pitigliano, a four hundred-year-old community, were hidden for almost a year by sympathetic farmers in barns and caves. None of those in hiding were arrested and all survived the Fascist hunt for Jews. In the west, near the provincial capital of Grosseto, almost a hundred Italian and foreign Jews were imprisoned in 1943–1944 in the bishop's seminary, which he had rented to the Fascists for that purpose. About half of them, though they had thought that the bishop would protect them, were deported with his knowledge by Fascists and Nazis to Auschwitz. Thus, the Holocaust reached into this provincial corner as it did into all parts of Italy still under Italian Fascist control. Judith Roumani's Jews in Southern Tuscany During the Holocaust (Lexington Books, 2020) is based on new interviews and research in local and national archives. Judith Roumani is founder and director of the Jewish Institute of Pitigliano. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Written by a lawyer who works at the intersection between legal education and practice in access to justice and human rights, this book locates, describes and defines a collective identity for social justice lawyering in the UK. Underpinned by theories of cause lawyering and legal mobilisation, the book argues that it is vital to understand the positions that progressive lawyers collectively take in order to frame the connections they make between their personal and professional lives, the tools they use to achieve social change, as well as ethical tensions presented by their work. The book takes a reflexive ethnographic approach to capture the stories of 35 lawyers working to positively transform law and policy in the UK over the last 50 years. It also draws on a wealth of primary sources including case reports, historic campaign materials and media analysis alongside wider ethnographic interviews with academics, students and lawyers and participant observation at social justice conferences, workshops and events. The book explains the way in which lawyers' networks facilitate their collective positioning and influence their strategic decision making, which in turn shapes their interactions with social activists, with other lawyers and with the state itself. Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. Twitter: @batesmith. His latest publication, a chapter in the collection Leading Works on the Legal Profession (edited by Dan Newman, published by Routledge in July 2023) is entitled “Lawyers Who Want to Make the World a Better Place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Katherine Giuffre examines in depth six of the cultural "battles" that were key parts of this revolution: the novels of the Brontë sisters, the paintings of the Impressionists, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the Ballets Russes production of Le Sacre du printemps, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using contemporaneous reviews in the press as well as other historical material, we can see that these now-canonical works provoked outrage at the time of their release because they addressed critical points of social upheaval and transformation in ways that engaged broad audiences with subversive messages. This framework allows us to understand and navigate the cultural debates that play such an important role in 21st century politics. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When it comes to the development of Western Europe there was religion and then there was science. That is how the story is generally told but Anna Gryzmala Busse believes that modern Europe owes more to the religious part of that than is generally appreciated. She has written Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State (Princeton UP, 2023) and talks to Owen Bennett Jones about religion and the European state. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of sodomitical themes in medieval literary and visual art, built around an impressive range of texts and artworks from high and late medieval England, France, and Italy. As Mills shows, sodomy does enter the field of vision in certain contexts, despite being associated with a rhetoric of unmentionability. He shows why sodomy appears when it does and in which media and genres (e.g., commentaries on the Bible and Ovid s Metamorphoses, in manuscript illuminations and sculpture); how it shifts categories as a means of becoming visible (e.g., appearing in narratives involving age difference or gender transformation); and how, as readers/viewers, the process of translating the medieval category of sodomy into the languages of the present is at once a necessity and an impossibility. In a single stroke, Mills revises the way we think about well known medieval literary and visual materials in the light of twenty-first century thinking and the interaction between the visual and the textual, bringing both literary and art historical discourse on the subject to a new level of maturity." Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s guest is Kevin Killeen whose new monograph, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, has just been published by Stanford University Press. This monograph gathers together a range of early modern sources including the mystic Jacob Boehme, the poet and radical John Milton, the writer and royalist Margaret Cavendish, and the prophet Anna Trapnel. Taken together, these chapter offer a vibrant picture of literary culture’s engagements (sometimes critical, sometimes appreciative) of that which can’t quite be understood by the mind, language, or theology. Kevin Killeen is Professor of English at the University of York. His previous books are the monograph, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and the Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700 (2015), co-edited with Helen Smith and Rachel Judith Willie. Kevin also is the editor of the journal Renaissance Studies. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Between September 1793 and July 1794, the French politicians and even the general public seemed positively overcome by the urge to denounce their peers: helping so-called crimes, devious machinations, and secret plots come to light. When the so-called “Reign of Terror” ended, however, liberal, radical, and conservative critics of the era alike continued to suggest that the problem was not an excess of public denunciations, but so many shadowy dealings that had yet to be revealed. By early nineteenth century France, transparency had taken hold as an almost necessary precondition to government legitimacy and public trust. In her new book, Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Nicole Bauer traces the emergence of this discourse and the rejection of secrecy over the course of the eighteenth century. Bauer’s cultural and political history of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France argues that while secrecy was at first envisioned as a way to ensure privacy and honor, it eventually came to be seen as proof of weakness, treachery, and, ultimately, betrayal. Her careful reading of sources—from lettres de cachet to Gothic novels—helps her parse this complex subject and sheds new light on the emergence of key modernizing concepts like public opinion and government transparency that we now often take for granted. Filled with riveting and dramatic stories about prisoners, spies, and screams in the night, Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy is both academically rigorous and a real page-turner. Sarah K. Miles is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who specializes in global francophone history and the history of the French Left. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (skmiles@live.unc.edu). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735. Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, and greed.” Marco Caboara is the Digital Scholarship & Archives Manager at the Lee Shau Kee Library at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In this interview, Marco and I talk about this project, what it says about how Europeans understood China, and his favorite maps in the collection. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Regnum Chinae. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the dying light of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. Much like today, this was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented and immigration waves bolstered the populations of ever-expanding cities. This era also simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to dynamite cities and discharge pistols into the bodies of presidents, police chiefs and emperors. This wave of terrorism was seized upon by an outrage-hungry press that peddled hysteria, conspiracy theories and, sometimes, fake news in response, convincing many a reader that they were living through the end of days. Against the backdrop of this world of fear and disorder, The Rise of Devils: Fear and the Origins of Terrorism (Manchester UP, 2023) chronicles the journeys of the men and women who evoked this panic and created modern terrorism - revolutionary philosophers, cult leaders, criminals and charlatans, as well as the paranoid police chiefs and unscrupulous spies who tried to thwart them. In doing so, this book explains how radicals once thought just in their causes became, as Pope Pius IX denounced them, little more than 'devils risen up from Hell'. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine. Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Throughout Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe (U Chicago Press, 2023), Andrikopoulos demonstrates how inequality, exclusionary practices, and the changing policies of an often-violent state demand innovative ways of doing kinship to successfully navigate complex migration routes. Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and at the University of Amsterdam. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who is believed in our mediated world? In Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, examine this question by introducing the conception of an economy of believability governing who is, and who is not, believed or doubted. Written in the wake of #MeToo, the book engages directly with key contexts such as post-truth and the commodification of sexual violence. Thinking through questions of race and class, the analysis ranges widely, covering representations of sexual violence in fiction and non-fiction media, contemporary controversies and court cases, and the backlash from men in positions of power. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone seeking to understand ongoing gender inequalities in media and in society. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Danny Orbach about his book Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War (Pegasus Books, 2022). Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the enigmatic tale of Nazi fugitives in the early Cold War has never been properly told—until now. In the aftermath of WWII, the victorious Allies vowed to hunt Nazi war criminals “to the ends of the earth.” Yet many slipped away to the four corners of the world or were shielded by the Western Allies in exchange for cooperation. Most prominently, Reinhard Gehlen, the founder of West Germany's foreign intelligence service, welcomed SS operatives into the fold. This shortsighted decision nearly brought his cherished service down, as the KGB found his Nazi operatives easy to turn, while judiciously exposing them to threaten the very legitimacy of the Bonn Government. However, Gehlen was hardly alone in the excessive importance he placed on the supposed capabilities of former Nazi agents; his American sponsors did much the same in the early years of the Cold War. Other Nazi fugitives became freelance arms traffickers, spies, and covert operators, playing a crucial role in the clandestine struggle between the superpowers. From posh German restaurants, smuggler-infested Yugoslav ports, Damascene safehouses, Egyptian country clubs, and fascist holdouts in Franco's Spain, Nazi spies created a chaotic network of influence and information. This network was tapped by both America and the USSR, as well as by the West German, French, and Israeli secret services. Indeed, just as Gehlen and his U.S sponsors attached excessive importance to Nazi agents, so too did almost all other state and non-state actors, adding a combustible ingredient to the Cold War covert struggle. Shrouded in government secrecy, clouded by myths and propaganda, the tangled and often paradoxical tale of these Nazi fugitives and operatives has never been properly told—until now. Danny Orbach is a Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Almost every student that will enroll in a college Shakespeare course can expect two things. Students will have to engage with the style and themes of texts that were composed over four hundred years old. And students will have to submit a piece of original writing that is well-organized, has a fresh argument, and cites early modern sources correctly. Rarely do these two tracks of the course inform each other. Adhaar Noor Desai’s new book, Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition (Cornell University Press, 2023) seeks to address this disjunction. As Desai shows, the early modern archive proposed strategies and ideas about writing that students and teachers might profitably learn—and sometimes unlearn. The innovative structure of Blotted Lines has an introduction, a coda, and five chapters that pair a topic from early modern poetics with a key writer: style (George Gascoigne), invention (Philip Sidney), revision (John Davies of Hereford), editing (Anne Southwell) and performance anxiety (William Shakespeare). After each chapter, Desai offers a brief conversational “reflection,” which offer a combination of practical teaching advice for the Shakespeare classroom and more expansive discussions about pedagogy in the twenty-first century university. Desai is Professor of English at Bard College and is one of the co-founders of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, an international project that brings together practitioners working at the intersection of technology, social justice, and creative practice. His scholarship has been published in English Literary Renaissance, Philological Quarterly, Configurations, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage, and Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare. Blotted Lines is his first monograph. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist. By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War (Stanford UP, 2023) is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age. Peter Stansky is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford University. He has published extensively on the cultural, political, and literary milieu of twentieth-century Britain, including (with William Abrahams) the Orwell biographies The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1980), both finalists for the National Book Award. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and "exploratory" contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted--systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective--and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large. Provocative and challenging, Violence and the Genesis of the Anatomical Image (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023) will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Many early modern humanists would balk at the proposition that what they did amounted to housework. They were far more likely to reach for the heroic image of a farmer striving in the fields, as immortalized in the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. But, as shown in Katie Kadue’s book Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago, 2021), the domestic practice of preservation offered a powerful metaphor for the often-menial, often-overlooked labor. These labors from pickling to correcting to tempering were largely imperceptible but were essential to ward off disorder. Domestic Georgic offers fresh close readings of Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” Montaigne’s Essays, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Through these readings, this study provides a compelling new framework for our understanding of early modern poetics, gender, and labor. Katie Kadue is an incoming professor at SUNY Binghamton and a former Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the University of Chicago Society of Fellows. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Modern Philology, Montaigne Studies, and Studies in Philology, and public-facing work can be found at The Philosopher and the Chronicle of Higher Education. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shouting, music, drumming, and calisthenics. Within a few years, Dada (largely driven by Tzara) became an international artistic movement, a rallying point for young artists in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. With TaTa Dada, Marius Hentea offers the first English-language biography of this influential artist. As the leader of Dada, Tzara created "the moment art changed forever." But, Hentea shows, Tzara and Dada were not coterminous. Tzara went on to publish more than fifty books; he wrote one of the great poems of surrealism; he became a recognized expert on primitive art; he was an active antifascist, a communist, and (after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution) a former communist. Hentea offers a detailed exploration of Tzara's early life in Romania, neglected by other scholars; a scrupulous assessment of the Dada years; and an original examination of Tzara's life and works after Dada. The one thing that remained constant through all of Tzara's artistic and political metamorphoses, Hentea tells us, was a desire to unlock the secrets and mysteries of language. Marius Hentea, a Romanian-born literary scholar, teaches in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. He is the author of Henry Green at the Limits of Modernism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Calvinist Conformity in Post-Reformation England: The Theology and Career of Daniel Featley (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first modern full-scale examination of the theology and life of the distinguished English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645). It explores Featley's career and thought through a comprehensive treatment of his two dozen published works and manuscripts and situates these works within their original historical context. A fascinating figure, Featley was the youngest of the translators behind the Authorized Version, a protégé of John Rainolds, a domestic chaplain for Archbishop George Abbot, and a minister of two churches. As a result of his sympathies with royalism and episcopacy, he endured two separate attacks on his life. Despite this, Featley was the only royalist Episcopalian figure who accepted his invitation to the Westminster Assembly. Three months into the Assembly, however, Featley was charged with being a royalist spy, was imprisoned by Parliament, and died shortly thereafter. While Featley is a central focus of the work, this study is more than a biography. It uses Featley's career to trace the fortunes of Calvinist conformists--those English Calvinists who were committed to the established Church and represented the Church's majority position between 1560 and the mid-1620s, before being marginalized by Laudians in the 1630s and puritans in the 1640s. It demonstrates how Featley's convictions were representative of the ideals and career of conformist Calvinism, explores the broader priorities and political maneuvers of English Calvinist conformists, and offers a more nuanced perspective on the priorities and political maneuvers of these figures and the politics of religion in post-Reformation England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Before this century's first global financial crisis struck Europe in 2007-2012, only people in the Brussels bubble had heard of the Eurogroup. By then, finance ministers from countries using the euro had been meeting in this format every month for ten years but – as Joscha Abels writes in The Politics of the Eurogroup: Governing Crisis and Conflict in the European Union (Routledge, 2023) - “the group had been almost invisible to the public". Over the next decade – and especially during the most acute phase of the Greek debt crisis in 2015 – that all changed. Devised in the 1990s as an informal body without decision-making powers, from 2010 onwards the Eurogroup assumed political authority for negotiating and approving bailout loans and making sure the conditions for those loans were met. Many memoirs have been written about these fraught years – including duelling books by former Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem and short-lived Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – but Abels has written the first book-length theoretical and institutional assessment of the Eurogroup itself. Joscha Abels is a research associate and lecturer in political economy at the University of Tübingen. Educated at Mannheim and Oslo, he completed his PhD at Tübingen with a dissertation on the role of the Eurogroup. His most recent research work is on infrastructure policy and geoeconomics. His new paper - Does the current crisis mark the end of the EU’s austerity era? - published in Comparative European Politics (Volume 21, Issue 2, April 2023) can be found here. *The author's own book recommendations are The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World edited by Milan Babić, Adam Dixon, and Imogen Liu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and Butcher's Crossing by John Williams (first published 1960 - Vintage Classics, 2013). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series on EU history from the inside. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her book, Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023), Marie Arleth Skov examines the punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s. Through archival research, interviews, and an art historical analysis, Skov situates punk as an art movement. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the ‘rear-guard’. Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art protagonists from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, among others the members Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, Hugo Kaagman, as well as email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Skov covers events such as the Prostitution exhibition at the ICA in London in 1976 and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West-Berlin in 1981 and explores paintings, drawings, bricolages, collages, booklets, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, Super 8 films, documentation of performances and happenings, body art, street art. What emerges is how crucial the concept of history was in punk at that point in time. The punk movement's rejection of the tale of progress and prosperity, as it was being propagated on both sides of the iron curtain, evidently manifested itself in punk visual art too. Central to the book is the thesis that punks placed themselves as the rear-guards, not the avant-gardes, a statement which was in made by Danish punks in 1981, when they called themselves “bagtropperne". Behind the rear-guard watchword was the rejection of the inherent notion of progress that the avant-garde name brings with it; how could a "no future" movement want to lead the way? Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Great Schism divided Western Christianity between 1378 and 1417. Two popes and their courts occupied the see of St. Peter, one in Rome, and one in Avignon. Traditionally, this event has received attention from scholars of institutional history. In The Great Western Schism, 1378-1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity (Cambridge UP, 2022), by contrast, Joëlle Rollo-Koster investigates the event through the prism of social drama. Marshalling liturgical, cultural, artistic, literary and archival evidence, she explores the four phases of the Schism: the breach after the 1378 election, the subsequent division of the Church, redressive actions, and reintegration of the papacy in a single pope. Investigating how popes legitimized their respective positions and the reception of these efforts, Rollo-Koster shows how the Schism influenced political thought, how unity was achieved, and how the two capitals, Rome and Avignon, responded to events. Rollo-Koster's approach humanizes the Schism, enabling us to understand the event as it was experienced by contemporaries. Joëlle Rollo-Koster is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Rhode Island. A scholar of the Avignon papacy, she is the author of Avignon and its Papacy, 1309–1417: Popes, Institutions, and Society and Raiding Saint Peter. In 2016, she was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We close Pride Month of 2023 with Jamie Staples talking about queer mysticism. This includes instances in medieval Christianity where an embodied and erotic experience of life, within and between persons, became the basis for an apprehension of divinity. The conversation particularly focuses on the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by 16th century Spanish poet St. John of the Cross and the work of 14th-15th century English mystic Margery Kempe. Jamie shares his own story to show how queer mysticism can offer resources from within Christianity to build a personal and communitarian politics against fundamentalist discrimination and hatred. Starting this fall, Jamie Staples will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval English literature at Trinity College in Hartford. His research takes seriously the productive intersection of mystical theology and poetry in the development of alternative modes of critical thinking in the late Middle Ages. He's recently written two articles focused more specifically on the queer mysticism that he will be discussing today, one on the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, published in Romanic Review, and the other on the fourteenth-century poem Cleanness, published in Exemplaria. Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who are the English upper class? In The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital Since 1945 (Manchester UP, 2023) Daniel Smith, a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University, offers an analysis of the role and power of the upper class in English society. Drawing on, and critiquing, sociology, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, the book uses a vast range of methods and examples to tell the story of the continued dominance of English elites. With examples ranging from fashion and bookshops, through fee-paying schools, to memoirs and money, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, and for anyone interested in understanding Britain’s current social, economic, and cultural crisis. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dr Lynsey Black is a lecturer in criminology, in the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University. She researches in the areas of gender and punishment, the death penalty, historical and postcolonial criminology, and borders. In this interview she discusses her new book, Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64 (Manchester UP, 2022). Gender and Punishment in Ireland explores women's lethal violence in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive archival research, including government documents, press reporting, the remnants of public opinion and the voices of the women themselves, the book contributes to the burgeoning literature on gender and punishment and women who kill. Engaging with concepts such as ‘double deviance’, chivalry, paternalism and ‘coercive confinement’, the work explores the penal landscape for offending women in postcolonial Ireland, examining in particular the role of the Catholic Church in responses to female deviance. The book is an extensive interdisciplinary treatment of women who kill in Ireland and will be useful to scholars of gender, criminology and history. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Middle Ages is a term coined around 1450 to describe a thousand years of European History. In The Middle Ages: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2014), Miri Rubin provides an exploration of the variety, change, dynamism, and sheer complexity that the period covers. From the provinces of the Roman Empire, which became Barbarian kingdoms after c.450-650, to the northern and eastern regions that became increasingly integrated into Europe, Rubin explores the emergence of a truly global system of communication, conquest, and trade by the end of the era. Presenting an insight into the challenges of life in Europe between 500-1500 -- at all levels of society -- Rubin looks at kingship and family, agriculture and trade, groups and individuals. Conveying the variety of European experiences, while providing a sense of the communication, cooperation, and shared values of the pervasive Christian culture, Rubin looks at the legacies they left behind. Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary University of London and Head of the School of History. She was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge. She has taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and has held visiting positions in Paris, Princeton, and New York. Her research has explored areas of the religious cultures of medieval Europe, and has been influenced by an interdisciplinary approach which had benefited from the use of textual, visual and musical sources. She enjoys writing for diverse audiences and discussing history wherever engaged interest arises.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rebecca Whiteley's book Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body (University of Chicago Press, 2023) is first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making. Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe. Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Philip Stern places the corporation―more than the Crown―at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today. Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan―a legal fiction with very real power. Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Harvard UP, 2023) makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago. Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation. Thomas Kingston is an early career scholar and a voracious reader (183 books in 2021). You can find his website at www.thomasekingston.com or reach him on twitter @thomasekingston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the last years of his life, Karl Marx expanded his research in new directions-studying recent anthropological discoveries, analyzing communal forms of ownership in precapitalist societies, supporting the populist movement in Russia, and expressing critiques of colonial oppression in India, Ireland, Algeria, and Egypt. Between 1881 and 1883, he also traveled beyond Europe for the first and only time. Focusing on these last years of Marx's life, this book dispels two key misrepresentations of his work: that Marx ceased to write late in life, and that he was a Eurocentric and economic thinker fixated on class conflict alone. With The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford UP, 2020), Marcello Musto claims a renewed relevance for the late work of Marx, highlighting unpublished or previously neglected writings, many of which remain unavailable in English. Readers are invited to reconsider Marx's critique of European colonialism, his ideas on non-Western societies, and his theories on the possibility of revolution in noncapitalist countries. From Marx's late manuscripts, notebooks, and letters emerge an author markedly different from the one represented by many of his contemporary critics and followers alike. As Marx currently experiences a significant rediscovery, this volume fills a gap in the popularly accepted biography and suggests an innovative reassessment of some of his key concepts.
Marcello Musto is a professor of sociology, and the founding director of the Laboratory for Alternative Theories, at York University in Canada.
David Norman Smith. Professor of Sociology, University of Kansas. His work focuses on the intersection between political sociology, political psychology, and political economy
Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and author of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism
Sean Sayers is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Kent, He has published extensively on topics in Marxist and Hegelian philosophy.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford UP, 2023) investigates the political and social imaginaries of 'terrorism' in early twentieth-century France. Chris Millington traces the development of how the French conceived of terrorism, from the late nineteenth-century notion that terrorism was the deed of the mad anarchist bomber, to the the fraught political clashes of the 1930s when terrorism came to be understood as a political act perpetrated against French interests by organized international movements. Through a close analysis of a series of terrorist incidents and representations thereof in public discourse and the press, the book argues that contemporary ideas of terrorism in France as 'unFrench'--i.e., contrary to the ideas and values, however defined, that make up 'Frenchness'--emerged in the interwar years and subsequently took root long before the terrorist campaigns of Algerian nationalists during the 1950s and 1960s. Millington conceptualizes 'terrorism' not only as the act itself, but also as a political and cultural construction of violence composed from a variety of discourses and deployed in particular circumstances by commentators, witnesses, and perpetrators. In doing so, he argues that the political and cultural battles inherent to perceptions of terrorism lay bare numerous concerns, not least anxieties over immigration, antiparliamentarianism, representations of gender, and the future of European peace. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Chastity Plot (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated.
Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom. Keep your eyes out for Lisabeth's next book, She Did It In Her Sleep, which focuses on the horrifying phenomenon that is comatose rape. Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea (Oxford University Press, 2022), Dr. David Cressy is a work of social history examining community relationships, law, and seafaring over the long early modern period. It explores the politics of the coastline, the economy of scavenging, and the law of 'wreck of the sea' from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the end of the reign of George II. England's coastlines were heavily trafficked by naval and commercial shipping, but an unfortunate percentage was cast away or lost. Shipwrecks were disasters for merchants and mariners, but opportunities for shore dwellers. As the proverb said, it was an ill wind that blew nobody any good. Lords of manors, local officials, officers of the Admiralty, and coastal commoners competed for maritime cargoes and the windfall of wreckage, which they regarded as providential godsends or entitlements by right. A varied haul of commodities, wines, furnishings, and bullion came ashore, much of it claimed by the crown. The people engaged in salvaging these wrecks came to be called 'wreckers', and gained a reputation as violent and barbarous plunderers. Close attention to statements of witnesses and reports of survivors shows this image to be largely undeserved. Dramatic evidence from previously unexplored manuscript sources reveals coastal communities in action, collaborating as well as competing, as they harvested the bounty of the sea. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this interview Mary M. McGlynn, Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, discusses her new book Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2022). While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility. Colleen English is a scholar of Irish and Romantic literature based at Loyola University Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Scholarly Seminar at the Newberry Library. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In recent years the niqab has emerged as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of everything that is perceived to be wrong with Islam: barbarity, backwardness, exploitation of women, and political radicalization. Yet all these notions are assigned to women who wear the niqab without their consultation; “niqab debates” are held without their voices being heard, and, when they do speak, their views are dismissed. Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US (Bloomsbury, 2021) brings niqab wearers' voices to the fore, discussing their narratives on religious agency, identity, social interaction, community, and urban spaces. Anna Piela, Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University, situates women's accounts firmly within UK and US socio-political contexts as well as within media discourses on Islam. The picture painted by the stories told here demonstrates that, for these women, religious symbols such as the niqab are deeply personal, freely chosen, multilayered, and socially situated. In our conversation we discussed religious explanations for wearing niqab, public notions of what constitutes religious practice, mainstream media’s image of niqab wearers, niqabi inclusive journalism, contradictions between religious perspectives and secular frameworks, Muslim use of social media, religious identity and pious dress, and intersections of racism and sexism with wearing the niqab. Kristian Petersen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With the defeat of France in 1940 by the Germans during World War II, its status as a world power was deeply shaken. It wasn't until the liberation by the Allies in 1944 that France was able to rebuild itself but faced many challenges both external and internal. Externally, the war against Germany still waged until May 1945. At the same time, the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union meant France would be forced to pick sides. Internally, the legacy of polarized politics of the 1930s remained with the supporters of Charles de Gaulle on one side and the French Communist Party (PCF) on the other side. In the midst of this volatile mix were the American administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman trying to determine on how best American foreign policy towards France should proceed in the post-liberation era. A common perception promoted by American diplomats in France was that the country was deeply weakened by the German wartime occupation and was on the verge of not only civil war but a Communist takeover as well. This perception would be a major driving force in American foreign policy in the first years of the Cold War. It also marked the beginning of a complex dynamic between diplomacy and intelligence within the U.S. government. This gripping story is the subject of Susan McCall Perlman's Contesting France: Intelligence and US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Susan McCall Perlman is Professor of History and Intelligence Studies at the National Intelligence University. She has published widely on US foreign relations and intelligence and is the 2020 recipient of the Robert Beland Excellence in Teaching Award. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) was a troubled soul – negative, misanthropic, and deeply troubled by his negativity and misanthropy. In A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art (Princeton University Press, 2022), Michael Gill shows how Shaftesbury’s efforts to work on himself resulted in his becoming one of the first philosophers writing in English to develop an aesthetic theory. Shaftesbury conceived of beauty as order or harmony exemplified by wild nature just as it is created by God, in sharp contrast to the prevailing seventeenth-century European view that nature was sinful and needed to be altered for human purposes before it could be aesthetically valuable. Gill, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, explains how Shaftesbury argued for seeing our lives as works of art, and how he responded to critics who claimed that admiring beauty was something only rich lords like himself could afford to do. Instead, Shaftesbury claimed, even the “lowly mechanic” is inherently invested in good craftsmanship and in making himself a good person. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Since the 1990s, Germany has embarked on a daring campaign to restructure its energy system around renewable power, sparking a global revolution in solar and wind technology. But this pioneering energy transition has been plagued with problems. In Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford UP, 2023), Stephen G. Gross explains the deeper origins of the Energiewende--Germany's transition to green energy--and offers the first comprehensive history of German energy and climate policy from World War II to the present. The book follows the Federal Republic as it passed through five energy transitions from the dramatic shift to oil that nearly wiped out the nation's hard coal sector, to the oil shocks and the rise of the Green movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the co-creation of a natural gas infrastructure with Russia, and the transition to renewable power today. He shows how debates over energy profoundly shaped the course of German history and influenced the landmark developments that define modern Europe. As Gross argues, the intense and early politicization of energy led the Federal Republic to diverge from the United States and rethink its fossil economy well before global warming became a public issue, building a green energy system in the name of many social goals. Yet Germany's experience also illustrates the difficulty, the political battles, and the unintended consequences that surround energy transitions. By combining economy theory with a study of interest groups, ideas, and political mobilization, Energy and Power offers a novel explanation for why energy transitions happen. Further, it provides a powerful lens to move beyond conventional debates on Germany's East-West divide, or its postwar engagement with the Holocaust, to explore how this nation has shaped the contemporary world in other important ways. Stephen G. Gross is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University. Filippo De Chirico, History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Harvard UP, 2023) is a sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis. Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind show, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints. The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy. Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is the Associate Professor of British History at the University of Chicago. His current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy. Carl Wennerlind is the Professor of History and Chair at Barnard College, Columbia University. He specializes in the history of early modern Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of ideas about money and credit; ideas on the relationship between economy and nature; and ideas about "improvement" and "modernization." Thomas Edward Kingston is a Berkeley Fellow in South and Southeast Asian Studies and PhD Student with a designated emphasis in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Colonial World: A History of European Empires, 1780s to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Robert Aldrich and Dr. Andreas Stucki provides the most authoritative, in-depth overview on European imperialism available. It synthesizes recent developments in the study of European empires and provides new perspectives on European colonialism and the challenges to it. With a post-1800 focus and extensive background coverage tracing the subject to the early 1700s, the book charts the rise and eclipse of European empires. Dr. Aldrich and Dr. Stucki integrate innovative approaches and findings from the 'new imperial history' and look at both the colonial era and the legacies it left behind for countries around the world after they gained independence. Dividing the text into three complementary sections, Aldrich and Stucki explore different eras of colonisation and decolonisation from early modern European colonialism to the present day. They also examine overarching themes in colonial history, like 'land and sea', 'the body' and 'representations of colonialism'. Finally, they include a global range of snapshot colonial case studies, such as Peru (1780), India (1876), The South Pacific (1903), the Dutch East Indies (1938) and the Portuguese empire in Africa (1971) This is the essential text for anyone seeking to understand the nature and complexities of modern European imperialism and its aftermath. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Exactly a century ago, intelligence agencies across Europe first became aware of a fanatical German nationalist whose political party was rapidly gathering momentum. His name was Adolf Hitler. From 1933, these spy services watched with growing alarm as they tried to determine what sort of threat Hitler's regime would now pose to the rest of Europe. Would Germany rearm, either covertly or in open defiance of the outside world? Would Hitler turn his attention eastwards - or did he also pose a threat to the west? What were the feelings and attitudes of ordinary Germans, towards their own regime as well as the outside world? Despite intense rivalry and mistrust between them, these spy chiefs began to liaise and close ranks against Nazi Germany. At the heart of this loose, informal network were the British and French intelligence services, alongside the Poles and Czechs. Some other countries - Holland, Belgium, and the United States - stood at the periphery. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished British, French, German, Danish, and Czech archival sources, Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler (Oxford UP, 2023) tells the story of Germany and its rearmament in the 1920s and 1930s; its relations with foreign governments and their intelligence services; and the relations and rivalries between Western governments, seen through the prism of the cooperation, or lack of it, between their spy agencies. Along the way, it addresses some of the most intriguing questions that still perplex historians of the period, such as how and why Britain defended Poland in September 1939, and what alternative policies could have been pursued? Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul—where the author worked as an undertaker—Dying Abroad: The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe (Cambridge UP, 2023) offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe. Osman Balkan is Associate Director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on borders and migration, citizenship and identity, race and ethnicity, transnationalism, cultural memory, Islam, and necropolitics. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Wilson finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting. Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Harvard UP, 2023) takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically. Both the empire and the Swiss Confederation were largely defensive in orientation, while German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, yet Austria's strength owed much to its ability to secure allies. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Alongside Switzerland, which relied on traditional militia, both states exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power. Only after Prussia's unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare--a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage. It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany's strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The eighteenth-century Bank of England was an institution that operated for the benefit of its shareholders--and yet came to be considered, as Adam Smith described it, "a great engine of state." In Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England (Princeton UP, 2023), Anne Murphy explores how this private organization became the guardian of the public credit upon which Britain's economic and geopolitical power was based. Drawing on the voluminous and detailed minute books of a Committee of Inspection that examined the Bank's workings in 1783-84, Murphy frames her account as "a day in the life" of the Bank of England, looking at a day's worth of banking activities that ranged from the issuing of bank notes to the management of public funds. Murphy discusses the bank as a domestic environment, a working environment, and a space to be protected against theft, fire, and revolt. She offers new insights into the skills of the Bank's clerks and the ways in which their work was organized, and she positions the Bank as part of the physical and cultural landscape of the City: an aggressive property developer, a vulnerable institution seeking to secure its buildings, and an enterprise necessarily accessible to the public. She considers the aesthetics of its headquarters--one of London's finest buildings--and the messages of creditworthiness embedded in that architecture and in the very visible actions of the Bank's clerks. Murphy's uniquely intimate account shows how the eighteenth-century Bank was able to deliver a set of services that were essential to the state and commanded the confidence of the public.
Anne L. Murphy is Professor of History and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She joined the University of Portsmouth in March 2021. Prior to this she worked at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Exeter. Previously she spent twelve years working in the City trading interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives. Her research focuses on early modern financial markets and publications include articles in Past and Present, Economic History Review, History, Financial History Review and Women's History Review. Her previous monographs are The Origins of English Financial Markets: investment and speculation before the South Sea Bubble (2010) and The Worlds of the Jeake Family of Rye, 1640-1736 (2018). References: -Previous NBN podcasts on money, namely Lawrence H. White and Dror Goldberg. -Books by Amy Froide's Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain's Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 and Daniel Abramson's Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society 1694-1942. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The British monarchy is at a turning point. Concise and engaging, Jeremy Black's A Brief History of the British Monarchy: From the Iron Age to King Charles III (Robinson, 2022) charts the very beginnings of British reign through to the longest serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II - and looks forward to the reign of King Charles III.Much more than a linear history, this is the intertwined story of royalty and state, of divisions, invasions, rivalries, death and glory; the story of nation fates deeply tied with the personal endeavours of monarchs through the ages. Black expertly weaves together thematic chapters from the origins of monarchy, medieval times and sixteenth-century developments, to the crises of the seventeenth-century, settlement and imperialism, and the challenges of the modern age. Exploring the House of Wessex, the Norman Conquest, Henry VIII and the Tudors, Victorianism and key events such as abdication of Edward VIII, this book is a necessary and comprehensive guide to the British Monarchy and how it has shaped history - and our lives today.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Wandering Army: The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022), Dr. Huw J. Davies presents a compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe. At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army’s military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The army’s leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernization—both in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology. In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Dr. Davies traces the British Army’s accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. An essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesized strategy from warzones the world over: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Dr. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovation—leading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A gulf of centuries separates the Byzantine Empire from the academic field of Byzantine studies. The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe offers a new approach to the history of Byzantine scholarship, focusing on the attraction that Byzantium held for Early Modern Europeans and challenging the stereotype that they dismissed the Byzantine Empire as an object of contempt. The authors in this book focus on how and why the Byzantine past was used in Early Modern Europe: to diagnose cultural decline, to excavate the beliefs and practices of early Christians, to defend absolutism or denounce tyranny, and to write strategic ethnography against the Ottomans. By tracing Byzantium’s profound impact on everything from politics to painting, this book shows that the empire and its legacy remained relevant to generations of Western writers, artists, statesmen, and intellectuals as they grappled with the most pressing issues of their day. Refuting reductive narratives of absence or progress, this book shows how “Byzantium” underwent multiple overlapping and often discordant reinventions before the institutionalization of “Byzantine studies” as an academic discipline. As this book suggests, it was precisely Byzantium’s ambiguity—as both Greek and Roman, ancient and medieval, familiar and foreign—that made it such a vibrant and vital part of the Early Modern European imagination. Nathanael Aschenbrenner is a lecturer at the University of California San Diego in the department of history. His research and publications explore empire and ideology in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, as well as Byzantium’s imperial legacy after 1453. Jake Ransohoff is a Hellenisms Past & Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago, and defended his PhD dissertation in History at Harvard University in June, 2022. His current research focuses on the intersection between power, political legitimacy, and attitudes toward the body in the Byzantine world—especially the disfigured and disabled body. Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Dr. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When he was in his late 30s, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri got himself into some serious political trouble and was exiled from his beloved Florence. While in exile, he wrote one of the world’s greatest literary works, the Divine Comedy. In the story, Dante, the main character, must pass through the nine circles of Hell, climb Mount Purgatory, and ascend to Heaven to reach salvation. Along the way he meets all sorts of characters including the Roman poet Virgil, various politicians of his time, teachers from his school, and his one true love. Nassime Chida is a Core Lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Local Power in Dante’s Inferno. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The transatlantic relationship, arguably the bedrock of the world’s post-World War II international security architecture, came under significant threat during Donald Trump’s tenure in office, as Trump complained about European untrustworthiness and talked about pulling the United States out of NATO. Yet in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transatlantic relationship has widely been seen to recover its strength and to grow in military terms as Sweden and Finland are on a path to become NATO members. What is the state of the transatlantic relationship and why does it matter? This week on International Horizons, former State Secretary of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, joins John Torpey to discuss European security policy and transatlantic relations in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. He discusses the motivations that led Putin into the war in Ukraine, as he saw an opportunity after the US withdrawal from the Middle East and doubts about NATO. Gabriel delves into the possibilities of a negotiated outcome in Russia’s war in Ukraine, and analyzes the future prospects of geopolitical competition, where the US will look at the Pacific and will operate under systems of alliances and shared military burdens instead of subsidizing the security system of the West. Finally, Gabriel argues that China is often overestimated, and that a potential strategy for the US and Europe could be to offer alternatives to the Belt and Road Initiative, as China is now coping with domestic economic difficulties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Contemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of this contradiction of culture and history, Afro-Swedes have emerged as a vibrant demographic presence, from generations of diasporic movement, migration, and homemaking. In Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Ryan Thomas Skinner uses oral histories, archival research, ethnography, and textual analysis to explore the history and culture of this diverse and growing Afro-European community. Skinner employs the conceptual themes of "remembering" and "renaissance" to illuminate the history and culture of the Afro-Swedish community, drawing on the rich theoretical traditions of the African and Black diaspora. Remembering fosters a sustained meditation on Afro-Swedish social history, while Renaissance indexes a thriving Afro-Swedish public culture. Together, these concepts illuminate significant existential modes of Afro-Swedish being and becoming, invested in and contributing to the work of global Black studies. The first scholarly monograph in English to focus specifically on the African and Black diaspora in Sweden, Afro-Sweden emphasizes the voices, experiences, practices, knowledge, and ideas of these communities. Its rigorously interdisciplinary approach to understanding diasporic communities is essential to contemporary conversations around such issues as the status and identity of racialized populations in Europe and the international impact of Black Lives Matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1925, on the French occupied island of Martinique, one of the most prominent voices in post colonial theory was born, Frantz Fanon. He was born to parents of both African and French descent, and was brought up in the ways of French culture. For most of Fanon’s life, he identified with French nationality. He even fought for France in WWII. But despite his initial loyalty to France, the French colonizers didn’t see Fanon as equal. In his early adulthood, Fanon began to see colonialism for what it really was. He became a vocal critic of colonialism. In his 1961 text The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote about the psychological effects of colonialism, and the psychological hurdles of decolonization. Manan Ahmed is a historian and associate professor at Columbia University. He is the author of A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years following WWII and the beginning of The Cold War. It was a tense time, full of uncertainty and the spectre of Soviet communism loomed. In 1984, Orwell introduced all kinds of terms to describe the dystopian society of his novel, such as “thought police”, “memory hole”, “big brother”, and “unperson.” And in his view, Orwell wasn’t attempting to describe a fantastical world with no correspondence to our own, or even just satirizing the excesses of the Soviet regime. He was sounding a warning to his own society. Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution and Time’s Monster: How History Makes History See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row is the author of Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. A Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Professor Row serves as the co-chair of the Arts and Design and Humanities Imagine for the project "Dreaming up the Change Disability Makes" and leads the CLA Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop on “Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World.” Professor Row’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and a Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Xabier Irujo about his book (co-authored with Queralt Solé) Nazi Juggernaut in the Basque Country and Catalonia (Center for Basque Studies, 2019) Hitler and Mussolini's decision to help General Franco with war materiel and troops brought war to the Basque Country and Catalonia. Between 1936 and 1939, the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria carried out a brutal campaign of terror bombings that resulted in thousands of air strikes against open cities. This caused innumerable casualties among the civilian population. Franco's victory in 1939 caused the exile of hundreds of thousands of Basque and Catalan civilians, but the beginning of World War Two and the subsequent occupation of the Northern Basque Country and Northern Catalonia by German troops gave rise to new forms of repression: concentration camps, forced labor, executions and imprisonment. As a consequence, the period from 1936 to 1945 is one of the bloodiest episodes in the contemporary history of Catalonia and the Basque Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"An important distinction exists between the politics of rules at which the EU is quite adept and the politics driven by events - which requires improvisation, risk-taking and alertness to opportunities". In Governing the EU in an Age of Division (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), Dalibor Roháč explains how a union built to reflect and export steadiness and consensus has failed to adapt to a decade of fast-moving financial, public health, military and energy crises. But, his book is neither anti-EU nor lacking in practical proposals. Although once an avowed eurosceptic, Roháč describes his new book as "unabashedly pro-European both in the sense that it wishes prosperity and peace for the European continent and in the sense that it sees the EU and much of its institutional architecture as important components of its success". A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies in Brussels, Roháč was educated at Charles University Prague, Oxford, George Mason University, and King’s College London. He previously worked at the Cato Institute, the University of Buckingham, the Legatum Institute, and the Centre for the New Europe in Brussels. He contributes to journals and news outlets and co-hosts The Eastern Front podcast. *The author's book recommendations are: Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars by Azar Gat (Oxford University Press, 2022). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Under Fire: Black Britain in Wartime 1939-45 (The History Press, 2020), Stephen Bourne tells the whole story of Britain's black community during World War II. On the home front, civilians came under fire from the Blitz in cities such as Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, London, and Manchester. Meanwhile, black servicemen and women, many of them volunteers from places as far away as Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana, and Nigeria, risked their lives fighting for the Mother Country in the air, at sea, and on land. Drawing on first-hand testimonies, Bourne sheds light on a wealth of experiences, from evacuees to entertainers, government officials, prisoners of war, and community leaders. Despite facing the discriminatory "color bar," many black civilians were determined to contribute to the war effort where they could, volunteering as civilian defense workers--air-raid wardens, fire-fighters, stretcher-bearers, and first-aiders. Among those remembered are men and women whose stories have only recently come to light, making Under Fire the definitive account of the bravery and sacrifices of black Britons in wartime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. In Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred (Oxford UP, 2021), Kathryn Dickason reveals a long tradition of sacred dance in Christianity, one that the professionalization and secularization of Renaissance dance obscured, and one that the Reformation silenced and suppressed. Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Aidan Enright holds a PhD in History from Queen’s University Belfast and is an Associate Researcher and Part-Time Lecturer in History at Leeds Beckett University, where he teaches Modern British History and he is also a Teacher of Social Sciences at University of Bradford International College. In this interview, he discusses his first book, Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Four Courts, 2022) This book uncovers the world of Charles Owen O’Conor, the O‘Conor Don (1838–1906), one of the most prominent Catholic landlords and Liberal MPs of his generation. The scion of the last high king of Ireland and one of a long line of politically active O’Conors, he was a wealthy, fair-minded landlord who served as MP for his native County Roscommon between 1860 and 1880. In parliament, he supported reforms in education, juvenile care, factory law, Sunday closing, the Irish language and landownership. However, as a loyalist, unionist and imperialist, he was out of step with the mood and aims of popular Irish nationalism, especially on the issue of home rule. Indeed, although he was a devout Catholic, proud Irishman and critic of the union, his liberal Catholic and unionist outlook ensured that he became an increasingly marginalized figure as Irish politics polarized along Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist lines. Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: landlordism, liberal Catholicism and unionism in nineteenth-century Ireland is published by Four Courts Press. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Once upon a time, it was said that Russia was isolated and ignorant until Peter the Great opened Russia to the West and ushered in modernization. While Tsar Peter I surely did look to the West in his quest to modernize Russia, these processes were underway well before Peter ever launched his first sailboat. Thousands of Europeans who lived in Moscow under the first Romanovs contributed in myriad ways to these modernizing processes. A significant portion of them were from the Netherlands, the small republic at Europe’s edge that threw off its Spanish overloads, mastered its marshy littoral, and went to become the economic powerhouse of seventeenth-century Europe. Building from the unfinished work of the late Jordan Kurland, Kees Boterbloem’s Russia and the Dutch Republic, 1566–1725: A Forgotten Friendship (Lexington Books, 2021) guides us through one of Russia’s most important early modern relationships. This brisque and engaging read introduces us to the diplomats, merchants, mercenaries, and shipwrights, who mediated all manner of exchanges between Russia and the Netherlands, offering a fresh perspective on how this important relationship changed before and during the reign of Peter I. Erika Monahan is an editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russia and Eurasian Studies and associate professor of History at the University of New Mexico. In 2023-2024 she is an Alexander von Humboldt fellow with the University of Cologne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Books that Made the European Enlightenment: A History in 12 Case Studies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Gary Kates looks at the multifaceted significance of bestsellers from the time. Kates explores a crucial innovation of the age: the rise of the 'erudite blockbuster', which for the first time in European history, helped to popularize political theory among a significant portion of the society. Gary Kates is H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of History at Pomona College. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Frans Camphuijsen explored records from the law courts of York, Paris, and Utrecht and used them as a base for Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York, and Paris (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out their own position by influencing people's conception of what justice was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These "scripts of justice" took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it. Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts, it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to socio-legal authority. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We moderns often tell ourselves a story that goes something like this: The past was barbaric, especially when it came to punishing criminals or persecuting minorities. Legal punishment used to include hanging, chopping off a head, burning at the stake, quartering, stoning, drowning, and crushing. Eventually, we tell ourselves, we learned to be more humane. But the 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault didn’t believe this story modern people told themselves. He didn’t accept that modern punishment was any more humane than it used to be. In his 1975 text Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes his point by tracing the evolution of punishment and power through history. Camille Robcis is associate professor of French and history at Columbia University. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Italian Renaissance was an era of rebirth in the arts, sciences, engineering, anatomy, and architecture. But also for literature. One of the most influential works from this period was Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic poem Orlando innamorato. While read by the literate upper classes, Boiardo’s incredible story of knights-errant, adventure, justice, chivalry, and true love became popular among the public through puppet theatre in Sicily. Boiardo combined genres to create a beloved work of art that continues to influence Italian culture today. Jo Ann Cavallo is a professor of Italian at Columbia University. Professor Cavallo has adapted episodes from Orlando innamorato that have been performed in various regions of Italy and New York City. She is also the author of Orlando Innamorato per ragazzi. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Robert J. Savage is a professor in the Boston College History Department and served as one of the directors of the University’s Irish Studies program for close to twenty years. He has been awarded Visiting Fellowships at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Galway. Savage’s publications explore contemporary Irish and British history and include The BBC’s Irish Troubles: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland (2015) short listed for the Ewart-Biggs Literary Award; A Loss of Innocence? Television and Irish Society 1960-1972, (2010) winner of the James S. Donnelly Sr. Book Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies and Sean Lemass, a biography (2014). In this interview, he discusses his new book Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2022), which explores issues of censorship, paramilitary violence and British and international politics in the 1980s. Northern Ireland, the BBC and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain is a study of how the Northern Ireland conflict was presented to an increasingly global audience during the premiership of Britain's 'Iron Lady', Margaret Thatcher. It addresses the tensions that characterized the relationship between the broadcast media and the Thatcher Government throughout the 1980s. Savage explores how that tension worked its way into decisions made by managers, editors, and reporters addressing a conflict that seemed insoluble. Margaret Thatcher mistrusted the broadcast media, especially the BBC, believing it had a left-wing bias that was hostile to her interests and policies. This was especially true of the broadcast media's reporting about Northern Ireland. She regarded investigative reporting that explored the roots of republican violence in the region or coverage critical of her government's initiatives as undermining the rule of law, and thereby providing terrorists with what she termed the 'oxygen of publicity'. She followed in the footsteps of the Labour Government that proceeded her by threatening and bullying both the BBC and IBA, promising that the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act would be deployed to punish journalists that came into contact with the IRA. Although both networks continued to offer compelling news and current affairs programming, the tactics of her government produced considerable success. Wary of direct government intervention, both networks encouraged a remarkable degree of self-censorship when addressing 'the Troubles'. Regardless, by 1988, the Thatcher Government, unhappy with criticism of its policies, took the extraordinary step of imposing formal censorship on the British broadcast media. The infamous 'broadcasting ban' lasted six years, successfully silencing the voices of Irish republicans while tarnishing the reputation of the United Kingdom as a leading global democracy. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In terms of its popularity, as well as its production, chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain. Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature (U Toronto Press, 2021) considers chocolate as an object of collective memory used to bridge the transatlantic gap through Spanish literary works of the early modern period, tracing the mention of chocolate from indigenous legends and early chronicles of the conquistadors to the theatre and literature of Spain. The book considers a variety of perspectives and material cultures, such as the pre-Colombian conception of chocolate, the commercial enterprise surrounding chocolate, and the darker side of chocolate's connections to witchcraft and sex. Encapsulating both historical and literary interests, Chocolate will appeal to anyone interested in the global history of chocolate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Few transportation maps can boast the pedigree that London’s iconic ‘Tube’ map can. Sported on t-shirts, keyrings, duvet covers, and most recently, downloaded an astonishing twenty million times in app form, the map remains a long-standing icon of British design and ingenuity. Hailed by the art and design community as a cultural artefact, it has also inspired other culturally important pieces of artwork, and in 2006 was voted second in BBC 2’s Great British Design Test. But it almost didn’t make it out of the notepad it was designed in. The story of how the Underground map evolved is almost as troubled and fraught with complexities as the transport network it represents. Mapping the Underground was not for the faint-hearted – it rapidly became a source of frustration, and in some cases obsession – often driving its custodians to the point of distraction. The solution, when eventually found, would not only revolutionise the movement of people around the city but change the way we visualise London forever. Caroline Roope’s wonderfully researched book The History of the London Underground Map (Pen & Sword, 2022) casts the Underground in a new light, placing the world’s most famous transit network and its even more famous map in its wider historical and cultural context, revealing the people not just behind the iconic map, but behind the Underground’s artistic and architectural heritage. From pioneers to visionaries, disruptors to dissenters – the Underground has had them all – as well as a constant stream of (often disgruntled) passengers. It is thanks to the legacy of a host of reformers that the Tube and the diagram that finally provided the key to understanding it, have endured as masterpieces of both engineering and design. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dieter Reinisch is a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway, and an Adjunct Professor in International Relations at Webster University, Campus Vienna. He holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence). Since 2016, he serves on the editorial board of the academic, open-access journal Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies, published by Florence University Press. In addition to his new book on republican prisoners in Ireland, he is the co-editor (with Luisa Passerini) of Performing Memory: Corporeality, Visuality, and Mobility after 1968 published with Berghahn Books, and Irish Republican Counterpublic: Armed Struggle & the Construction of a Radical Nationalist Community in Northern Ireland, co-edited with Anne Kane and published with Routledge. In this interview, he discusses his new book, Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland (University of Toronto Press, 2022), which uncovers the everyday life and education of IRA prisoners during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Learning behind Bars is an oral history of former Irish republican prisoners in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland between 1971, the year internment was introduced, and 2000, when the high-security Long Kesh Detention Centre/HM Prison Maze closed. Dieter Reinisch outlines the role of politically motivated prisoners in ending armed conflicts as well as the personal and political development of these radical activists during their imprisonment. Based on extensive life-story interviews with Irish Republican Army (IRA) ex-prisoners, the book examines how political prisoners developed their intellectual positions through the interplay of political education and resistance. It sheds light on how prisoners used this experience to initiate the debates that eventually led to acceptance of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Politically relevant and instructive, Learning behind Bars illuminates the value of education, politics, and resistance in the harshest of social environments. Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland is published with University of Toronto Press. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise Ashley, Associate Professor and IHSS Fellow at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Business and Management, explores the history and practice of social mobility into one of Britain’s key professions. The book offers a history of the City and its evolution from a closed world of gentlemen to a seemingly open meritocracy. At the same time, the book destroys the myth of merit, demonstrating how where people went to school, the place they did a degree, who they know, and how they present themselves still determine who is a success. Offering a critique of the City’s superficial attempts to increase its class, race, and gender diversity, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone wishing to understand how inequalities continue in contemporary society. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobic screed related to science fiction of the same period–and to John Locke? Pat Buchanan, American early adapter of Raspail’s hate-mongering, figures prominently. They then turn to Garrett Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat” and John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall to work out the ideas of forming a society beyond or beneath the state in less obviously racist terms than Raspail’s. What kind of hard choices need to be made in allocating resources? What claims about hard choices are just a screen for the powerful to make choices that, for them, aren’t actually that hard? Does gold make things more or less nationalized? Finally, in Recallable Books, Quinn recommends Mutant Neoliberalism, edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, for an attempt to really understand the politics of 2016 and beyond; Elizabeth recommends Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words, an ethnography of central banks; and John recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel of solitary solidarity. Discussed in this episode:
The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail
A Republic, Not an Empire and The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan
Dune, Frank Herbert
“Living on a Lifeboat,” Garrett Hardin
The Lobster Gangs of Maine, James M. Acheson
The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome
Libra, dir. Patty Newman
“Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Jason W. Moore
The Wall, John Lanchester
Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, eds. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi
Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks, Douglas R. Holmes
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin
Read here: RTB Slobodian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For much of his life, the Roman philosopher Boethius was exceptionally fortunate. But towards the end of his life, his luck ran out. He was accused of treason, thrown in jail, and sentenced to death. While he was awaiting execution, he began to reflect on his life and how luck had played such an important part. He wrote his thoughts in what would later become one of the most influential philosophical works in history, The Consolation of Philosophy. John Marenbon is a Fellow of the British Academy, Senior Research Fellow, and Honorary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today Jana Byars talks to her PhD advisor Guido Ruggiero about his latest monograph, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2021) over the meaning of love in the early Renaissance. As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio's collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero's words, a "symphony of life." Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio's world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron's cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo, the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio's stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front (Cornell UP, 2021), Michael Hunzeker develops a novel theory to explain how wartime militaries learn. He focuses on the Western Front, which witnessed three great-power armies struggle to cope with deadlock throughout the First World War, as the British, French, and German armies all pursued the same solutions-assault tactics, combined arms, and elastic defense in depth. By the end of the war, only the German army managed to develop and implement a set of revolutionary offensive, defensive, and combined arms doctrines that in hindsight represented the best way to fight. Hunzeker identifies three organizational variables that determine how fighting militaries generate new ideas, distinguish good ones from bad ones, and implement the best of them across the entire organization. These factors are: the degree to which leadership delegates authority on the battlefield; how effectively the organization retains control over soldier and officer training; and whether or not the military possesses an independent doctrinal assessment mechanism. Through careful study of the British, French, and German experiences in the First World War, Dying to Learn provides a model that shows how a resolute focus on analysis, command, and training can help prepare modern militaries for adapting amidst high-intensity warfare in an age of revolutionary technological change. Michael A. Hunzeker is Assistant Professor in George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. Follow him on Twitter @michaelhunzeker Sam Canter is a policy and strategy analyst, PhD candidate, and Army Reserve intelligence officer. His views are his own and do not reflect any institution, organization, or entity with which he is affiliated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invention, the professionalization of science was still developing. Wells viewed science as an incredibly powerful force. He knew it could either help or hurt humanity--even with that risk, he believed society should fully embrace science. When Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, he kicked off a 50-year-long writing career. He was a pioneer in the science fiction genre, and his stories have inspired generations of audiences, artists, filmmakers, and other writers around the world. Sarah Cole is the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century and At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny (Amsterdam UP, 2021) asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with 'hauntographs' of five Age of 'Discovery' shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In July 1815, six Iranian students arrived in London under the escort of their chaperone, Captain Joseph D'Arcy. Their mission was to master the modern sciences behind the rapid rise of Europe. Over the next four years, they lived both the low life and high life of Regency London, from being down and out after their abandonment by D’Arcy to charming their way into society and landing on the gossip pages. The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen's London (Princeton UP, 2015) tells the story of their search for love and learning in Jane Austen’s England. Drawing on the Persian diary of the student Mirza Salih and the letters of his companions, Nile Green vividly describes how these adaptable Muslim migrants learned to enjoy the opera and take the waters at Bath. But there was more than frivolity to their student years in London. Burdened with acquiring the technology to defend Iran against Russia, they talked their way into the observatories, hospitals, and steam-powered factories that placed England at the forefront of the scientific revolution. All the while, Salih dreamed of becoming the first Muslim to study at Oxford. The Love of Strangers chronicles the frustration and fellowship of six young men abroad to open a unique window onto the transformative encounter between an Evangelical England and an Islamic Iran at the dawn of the modern age. This is that rarest of books about the Middle East and the West: a story of friendships. Nile Green is professor of history at UCLA. His many books include Sufism: A Global History. He lives in Los Angeles. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The notion of freedom and how to ensure it for all has occupied the minds of many modern thinkers. In his text Elements of the Philosophy of Right, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel explored the nature of individual freedom and how society and the government can guarantee it for all citizens. Hegel argued that protecting basic rights wasn’t enough. Governments needed to support a more robust conception of individual freedom. He also believed we need other people in order to help us fully realize our individual freedom. Axel Honneth is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and Director of the Institute for Social Research at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He’s the author of The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory and Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, among other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The fateful days and weeks surrounding 6 June 1944 have been extensively documented in histories of the Second World War, but less attention has been paid to the tremendous impact of these events on the populations nearby. The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells the inspiring yet heartbreaking story of ordinary people who did extraordinary things in defense of liberty and freedom. On D-Day, when transport planes dropped paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions hopelessly off-target into marshy waters in northwestern France, the 900 villagers of Graignes welcomed them with open arms. These villagers - predominantly women - provided food, gathered intelligence, and navigated the floods to retrieve the paratroopers' equipment at great risk to themselves. When the attack by German forces on 11 June forced the overwhelmed paratroopers to withdraw, many made it to safety thanks to the help and resistance of the villagers. In this moving book, historian Stephen G. Rabe, son of one of the paratroopers, meticulously documents the forgotten lives of those who participated in this integral part of D-Day history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution (Reaktion Books, 2022) ends by discussing Napoleon's one great failure--his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this endeavor was abandoned, the fragile peace with Great Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) is rich in archival detail and offers a ground-breaking analysis. In this book, Dr. Charles Read presents a radically new interpretation of British politics and policy failings during the Great Famine. The Irish famine of the 1840s is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the United Kingdom's history. Within six years of the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland in 1845, more than a quarter of its residents had unexpectedly died or emigrated. Its population has not yet fully recovered since. Historians have struggled to explain why the British government decided to shut down its centrally organised relief efforts in 1847, long before the famine ended. Some have blamed the laissez-faire attitudes of the time for an inadequate response by the British government; others have alleged purposeful neglect and genocide. In contrast, The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis uncovers a hidden narrative of the crisis, which links policy failure in Ireland to financial and political instability in Great Britain. More important than a laissez-faire ideology in hindering relief efforts for Ireland were the British government's lack of a Parliamentary majority from 1846, the financial crises of 1847, and a battle of ideas over monetary policy between proponents and opponents of financial orthodoxy. The high death toll in Ireland resulted from the British government's plans for intervention going awry, rather than being prematurely cancelled because of laissez-faire. This book is essential reading for scholars, students and anyone interested in Anglo-Irish relations, the history of financial crises and famines, and why humanitarian-relief efforts can go wrong even with good intentions. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2022), Holger Afflerbach argues that the outcome of the war was actually in the balance until relatively late in the war. Using new evidence from diaries, letters and memoirs, he fundamentally revises our understanding of German strategy from the decision to go to war and the failure of the western offensive to the radicalisation of Germany's war effort under Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the ultimate collapse of the Central Powers. He uncovers the struggles in wartime Germany between supporters of peace and hardliners who wanted to fight to the finish. He suggests that Germany was not nearly as committed to all-out conquest as previous accounts argue. Numerous German peace advances could have offered the opportunity to end the war before it dragged Europe into the abyss. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same name, Orientalism. In his critique, he challenged Europeans’ construction of the so-called “East,” laid bare the biases of Orientalist study, and transformed the course of humanities scholarship. Stathis Gourgouris is a professor of classics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of books such as Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Anna von der Goltz’s The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective—that of center-right student activists. Based on oral history as well as new archival sources, The Other ‘68ers examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of West German students who identified with the long-governing political movement known as Christian Democracy. Writing these activists back into the history of 1968 and its afterlives—including student protest, cultural revolt, internationalism, debates about left-wing violence and the terror of the Red Army Faction, the memory wars of the 1980s, and beyond—yields pioneeringly original conclusions than the traditional focus on left-wing revolutionaries and radicals has heretofore allowed. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the thriving urban economies of late thirteenth-century Catalonia, Jewish and Christian women labored to support their families and their communities. The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women's Work in Medieval Catalan Cities (Penn State Press, 2022) examines how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity shaped how these women lived and worked. Sarah Ifft Decker draws on thousands of notarial contracts as well as legal codes, urban ordinances, and Hebrew responsa literature to explore the lived experiences of Jewish and Christian women in the cities of Barcelona, Girona, and Vic between 1250 and 1350. Relying on an expanded definition of women's work that includes the management of household resources as well as wage labor and artisanal production, this study highlights the crucial contributions women made both to their families and to urban economies. Christian women, Ifft Decker finds, were deeply embedded in urban economic life in ways that challenge traditional dichotomies between women in northern and Mediterranean Europe. And while Jewish women typically played a less active role than their Christian counterparts, Ifft Decker shows how, in moments of communal change and crisis, they could and did assume prominent roles in urban economies. Through its attention to the distinct experiences of Jewish and Christian women, The Fruit of Her Hands advances our understanding of Jewish acculturation in the Iberian Peninsula and the shared experiences of women of different faiths. It will be welcomed by specialists in gender studies and religious studies as well as students and scholars of medieval Iberia. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Don't Think for Yourself: Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy (U Notre Dame Press, 2022), Peter Adamson provides an answer to a question as relevant today as it was in the medieval period: how and when should we turn to the authoritative expertise of other people in forming our own beliefs? He challenges us to reconsider our approach to this question through a constructive recovery of the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Latin Christendom. Adamson begins by foregrounding the distinction in Islamic philosophy between taqlid, or the uncritical acceptance of authority, and ijtihad, or judgment based on independent effort, the latter of which was particularly prized in Islamic law, theology, and philosophy during the medieval period. He then demonstrates how the Islamic tradition paves the way for the development of what he calls a “justified taqlid,” according to which one develops the skills necessary to critically and selectively follow an authority based on their reliability. The book proceeds to reconfigure our understanding of the relation between authority and independent thought in the medieval world by illuminating how women found spaces to assert their own intellectual authority, how medieval writers evaluated the authoritative status of Plato and Aristotle, and how independent reasoning was deployed to defend one Abrahamic faith against the other. This clear and eloquently written book will interest scholars in and enthusiasts of medieval philosophy, Islamic studies, Byzantine studies, and the history of thought. Peter Adamson is professor of philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat. Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A book that casts its attention on the early modern period far and wide, The Curious Eye will be of interest to anyone interested in early modern mathematics, optic technology, poetic theory, and the contested relation of empiricism and empire. Erin is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Erin is a former Research Fellow and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, at the University of London, and is the recipient of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hancock Award for a distinguished article on the poet. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Focusing on the memory of the German Democratic Republic, Towards a Collaborative Memory: German Memory Work in a Transnational Context (Berghahn Books, 2022) explores the cross-border collaborations of three German institutions. Using an innovative theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on relational sociology, network analysis and narrative, the study breaks out of the epistemic coloniality that has underpinned global partnerships across European actors and institutions. Sara Jones reconceptualizes transnational memory towards an approach that is collaborative not only in its practices, but also in its ethics, and shows how these institutions position themselves within dominant relationship cultures reflected between East and West, and North and South. Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is know chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who pose a threat to the country's national security--from Nazi fifth columnists during the Second World War, to Soviet spies during the Cold War and today's domestic extremists. Yet in Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (Verso, 2022), David Caute argues in this radical and revelatory history of the Security Service in the twentieth century, suspicion often fell on those who posed no threat to national security. Instead, this 'other history' of MI5, ignored in official accounts, was often as not fuelled by the political prejudices of MI5's personnel, and involved a huge programme of surveillance against anyone who dared question the status quo. Caute, a prominent historian and expert on the history of the Cold War, tells the story of the massive state operation to track the activities of a range of journalists, academics, scientists, filmmakers, writers and others who, during the twentieth century, the Security Service perceived as a threat to the national interest. Those who were tracked include such prominent figures as Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Foot, Harriet Harman, and others.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss’s life was defined by two events that threatened to undermine the order that he had so stoutly defended: a notorious social scandal and the creation of the Congo Free State. In King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Andrew Fitzmaurice tells the incredible story of a man who, driven by personal events that transformed him from a reactionary to a reformer, rewrote and liberalised international law—yet did so in service of the most brutal regime of the colonial era. In an elaborate deception, Twiss and Pharaïlde van Lynseele, a Belgian prostitute, sought to reinvent her as a woman of suitably noble birth to be his wife. Their subterfuge collapsed when another former client publicly denounced van Lynseele. Disgraced, Twiss resigned his offices and the couple fled to Switzerland. But this failure set the stage for a second, successful act of re-creation. Twiss found new employment as the intellectual driving force of King Leopold of Belgium’s efforts to have the Congo recognised as a new state under his personal authority. Drawing on extensive new archival research, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter recounts Twiss’s story as never before, including how his creation of a new legal personhood for the Congo was intimately related to the earlier invention of a new legal personhood for his wife. Combining gripping biography and penetrating intellectual history, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter uncovers a dramatic, ambiguous life that has had lasting influence on international law. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that humans are born good, but society corrupts them. He was unimpressed with the fixation on wealth that he saw in the French society. In fact, he felt it was evidence of a self-interested, degenerate society. He endeavored to write the formula for a more civically minded society, and in 1762, he published The Social Contract, a treatise in which he argues that the people should run the government. Harvard Professor James Kloppenberg discusses how Rousseau’s ideas on government and society have inspired thinkers and leaders ever since. James Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. He is the author of Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition and Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, and “enigma of sexual violence” in the Free State/Republic. Join us as we chat about psychoanalysis, the struggle to write about child sexual abuse, the anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric of current Florida and Texas “child protection” laws, and the window that literature provides for thinking about Irish history. Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 2022) provides the first comprehensive history of film experiments at the Bauhaus, the famous art school that operated between 1919 and 1933 and was located in Weimar, before moving to Dessau and later to Berlin. While the Bauhaus is commonly associated with the development of modern architecture and industrial design, Design in Motion focuses on film, and demonstrates how the cinematic medium became a proving ground for some of the school’s most innovative work. Laura Frahm is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Frahm's work explores film and media through the lens of architecture, design, spatial theory, ecological thought, and process philosophy. In addition to her latest book Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the Bauhaus (2022), she is the author of Beyond Space: Cinematic Topologies of the Urban (2010), Moving Spaces: Spatial Configurations in Music Videos by Jonathan Glazer, Chris Cunningham, Mark Romanek, and Michel Gondry (2007) and Introduction to Media Cultural Studies (co-edited, 2005). Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
You probably already know the story of Snow White—as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, The Frog Prince, and so many others. These tales have a rich history of oral storytelling. They’ve travelled through culture, adapted and readapted in each retelling and reaching as far as the popular Disney movies that our kids watch over and over. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm saw the power of this folklore and made it their life’s mission to compile and preserve it. But while we tend to think of Grimms’ Fairy Tales as stories for children, the themes found in Jacob and Wilhelm’s book can be pretty mature…and a little dark. Columbia professor Annie Pfeifer discusses how the Grimm brothers ended up creating a whole new literary genre and their stories have been shaped and molded throughout history. Annie Pfeifer is an Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. She has published articles in The New German Critique, German Life and Letters, and the peer-reviewed volumes Que(e)rying Consent and Iran and the West and edited a collection of essays titled “Walk I absolutely Must” in 2019. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus (MIT Press, 2022). This book offers the first English translation of Ruysch's guide to his collection, along with all the illustrations from the original volume, photographs of some his most imaginative extant specimens, and more. Ruysch was at once a brilliant scientist, a preternaturally gifted technician, an esteemed physician, a religious moralizer, and an artist whose prime form of expression was the medium of human remains. His works were sometimes described as Rembrandts of anatomical preparation; today they seem so strange that we can hardly believe that they even existed, much less that they were so popular in their time. His combination of the religious and the scientific, the painstakingly accurate and the extravagantly fantastical, offers vivid testimony of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art. Essays accompanying Ruysch's text and images consider such topics as the historical context of Ruysch's work, the paradox of an artist of death whose work engenders the illusion of life, the conservation of Ruysch's specimens, and the shifting ascendancies of romanticism and rationality in the natural sciences. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Tim Murtagh completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin. He was a historical consultant on the Dublin Tenement Museum at No. 14 Henrietta Street and a book based on this research will be appearing later next year. Since April 2020, Tim has been an Archival Research Fellow with the Beyond 2022 project, an international research project working to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed in the opening engagement of the Irish Civil War in 1922. In this interview he discusses his new book Irish Artisans and Radical Politics, 1776-1820: Apprenticeship to Revolution (Liverpool UP, 2022), a study of working-class life and politics in the major urban centers of Ireland in the years before and after the United Irishman Rebellion of 1798. Irish Artisans and Radical Politics is a comparative study of the political activities of workers in three Irish cities: Dublin, Belfast and Cork. It investigates how Ireland’s journeymen and apprentices engaged in campaigns for political reform, as well as in revolutionary conspiracies, during the years 1776 to 1820. This book marks the first ever attempt to analyse the role of Irish workers in the creation of eighteenth-century republicanism, representing the careful distillation of nearly a decade of research on the topic. It argues that Irish craftsmen truly did serve an ‘apprenticeship to revolution’. In the literal sense, the experience of the workshop provided artisans with a set of traditions which shaped how new revolutionary doctrines were received. But generations of Irish workers also served a figurative apprenticeship to successive political movements: the campaigns of Irish ‘Patriot’ MPs, the Volunteering movement of the 1770s, and the revolutionary campaigns of the United Irishmen. The book explores the role of urban workers within the 1798 Irish Rebellion and Robert Emmet’s 1803 rising and, adopting a transnational framework, places the actions of these Irish artisans within the context of British radicalism and the creation of an industrial working class. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of the world. It’s the place where the world’s most corrupt individuals can park their money safely. How does that work? Where else does it happen and can anything be done about it? Owen Bennett Jones discusses the business of cleaning up dirty money with a journalist and author who has covered kleptocrats and their ill gotten gains for years, Oliver Bullough. He is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything (St. Martin's Press, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world. Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. “Race,” Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born. Adding nuance and historical context to discussions of race and human and animal relations, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2022) provides a close reading of undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World--A 10,000-Year History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), Ian Morris chronicles the eight-thousand-year history of Britain's relationship to Europe as it has changed in the context of a globalizing world. When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other of stupidity, fraud, and treason. In reality, the Brexit debate merely reran a script written eight thousand years earlier, when the rising seas physically separated the British Isles from the European continent. Ever since, geography has been destiny—yet it is humans who get to decide what that destiny means. Ian Morris, the critically acclaimed author of Why the West Rules—for Now, describes how technology and organization have steadily enlarged Britain's arena, and how its people have tried to turn this to their advantage. For the first seventy-five hundred years, the British were never more than bit players at the western edge of a European stage, struggling to find a role among bigger, richer, and more sophisticated continental rivals. By 1500 CE, however, new kinds of ships and governments had turned the European stage into an Atlantic one; with the English Channel now functioning as a barrier, England transformed the British Isles into a United Kingdom that created a worldwide empire. Since 1900, however, thanks to rapid globalization, Britain has been overshadowed by American, European, and—increasingly—Chinese actors. But in trying to find its place in a global economy, Britain has been looking in all the wrong places. The eight-thousand-year story bracingly chronicled by Geography Is Destiny shows that the great question for the coming century is not what to do about Brussels; it's what to do about Beijing. Javier Mejia is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Political Science Department at Stanford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why don't trains run on time? Why are fares so expensive? Why are there so many strikes? Few would disagree that Britain's railways are broken, and have been for a long time. In Derailed: How to Fix Britain's Broken Railways (Manchester University Press, 2022), Dr. Tom Haines-Doran provides an insightful new book that calls for a radical rethink of how we view the railways, and explains the problems we face and how to fix them. Dr. Haines-Doran argues that the railways should be seen as a social good and an indispensable feature of the national economy. With passengers and railway workers holding governments to account, we could then move past the incessant debates on whether our railways are an unavoidably loss-making business failure. An alternative vision is both possible and affordable, enabling the railways to play an instrumental role in decreasing social inequalities, strengthening the economy and supporting a transition to a sustainable future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (U Michigan Press, 2022) explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways—such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and unilateralism—but which policy they choose is based on capacity and on credible partners on the ground. Micinski traces the fifty-year evolution of EU migration management, like border security and asylum policies, and shows how EU officials used “crises” as political leverage to further Europeanize migration governance. In two in-depth case studies, he explains how Italy and Greece responded to the most recent refugee crisis. He concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations regarding contemporary as well as long-term aspirations for migration management in the EU. Nicholas R. Micinski is Libra Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Maine. His research focuses on global governance, particularly how states and international organizations respond to refugees, migration, climate change, and peacebuilding. Micinski is the author of two books: Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (University of Michigan Press, 2022) and UN Global Compacts: Governing Migrants and Refugees (Routledge, 2021). Previously, Micinski was postdoctoral fellow at Université Laval, ISA James N. Rosenau Postdoctoral Fellow, and visiting researcher at the Center for the Study of Europe, Boston University. Before academia, he worked in the NGO sector in London for five years on refugee policy and service delivery. Micinski received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The extraordinary story of the Popish Plot and how it shaped the political and religious future of Britain In 1678, a handful of perjurers claimed that the Catholics of England planned to assassinate the king. Men like the "Reverend Doctor" Titus Oates and "Captain" William Bedloe parlayed their fantastical tales of Irish ruffians, medical poisoners, and silver bullets into public adulation and government pensions. Their political allies used the fabricated plot as a tool to undermine the ministry of Thomas Lord Danby and replace him themselves. The result was the trial and execution of over a dozen innocent Catholics, and the imprisonment of many more, some of whom died in custody. In Hoax: The Popish Plot that Never Was (Yale University Press, 2022), Victor Stater examines the Popish Plot in full, arguing that it had a profound and lasting significance on British politics. He shows how Charles II emerged from the crisis with credit, moderating the tempers of the time, and how, as the catalyst for the later attempt to deny James II his throne through parliamentary action, it led to the birth of two-party politics in England. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nancy November's edited volume String Quartets in Beethoven's Europe (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is the first detailed study of string quartets in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe. It brings together the work of nine scholars who explore little-studied aspects of this multi-faceted genre. Together, this book’s chapters deal with compositional responses to Beethoven’s string quartets and the prestige of the genre; varied compositional practices in string quartet writing, with a particular emphasis on texture and performance elements; and the reception of Beethoven’s string quartets ca. 1800. They include discussions of quartets composed for the amateur and connoisseur markets in Beethoven’s Europe; virtuosity, the French Violin School, and the quatuor brillant; the relationship between quartet composers and their audiences during Beethoven’s era; and the cross-pollination of quartet styles in Europe’s musical centers such as Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1848, as political movements and events were sweeping Europe and Marx and Engels penned their famous Communist Manifesto, Kierkegaard wrote in a letter: “No, politics is not for me. To follow politics, even if only domestic politics, is nowadays an impossibility, for me, at any rate. I love to focus my attention on lesser things, in which one may sometimes encounter exactly the same.” This negation of politics (and it’s negation) is the starting point for Bartholomew Ryan with his book Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukacs, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill, 2014), which looks at Kierkegaard’s own thinking and it’s effect on several more explicitly political thinkers. Kierkegaard’s own politics are somewhat ambivalent, and one might struggle to fit them onto today’s political landscape, but Ryan has a different project in mind. Instead, Kierkegaard’s elusiveness, ambiguity and cultivation of the single individual in all their inner psychological and spiritual richness are shown to be inspiring for thinking politics and history in new ways. In the four figures Ryan looks at Kierkegaard’s presence in all their thinking, both explicit and implicit, emerging with a sophisticated form of inwardness capable of standing against despair, despotism and reification. Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research fellow at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy at the NOVA University Lisbon, where he works at the intersection of literature and philosophy. He is a coeditor of several books; Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (2021), Faces of the Self: Autobiography, Confession, Therapy (2019), Nietzsche and Pessoa: Ensaios (2016), and Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As they worked on the second edition of What is Europe? (Routledge, 2022), Anna Triandafyllidou and Ruby Gropas admit that they struggled to keep up. The problem wasn't just the pace of change since 2015 in the EU - the resolution of the Greek and onset of the refugee crisis, Brexit, pandemic and war - but what each of these did to the concept of "Europe" itself. In their history and sociology of an idea, Triandafyllidou and Gropas find that 'Europe' "takes different shapes and meanings depending on the realm of life on which it is applied and the historical period that we are looking at". Anna Triandafyllidou is a sociologist and recently appointed Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University who previously taught at the University of Surrey, the London School of Economics, Rome, Florence and Thrace. Ruby Gropas leads the social market economy team within the European Commission president’s advisory service and, before that, led the social affairs team at the commission’s in-house think-tank. She is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and is on leave of absence from the University of Thrace. This Open Access book can be downloaded here. *Triandafyllidou's book recommendations are: My Name Is Europe by Gazmend Kapllani (Ekdotikos Oikos A. A. Livani, 2010) and Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other by Bo Stråth (Presses Interuniversitaires Europeennes, 2010). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In an exciting new book titled Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Parris shows how early modern writing about care and sleep were deeply indebted with the Stoic principle of oikeiosis. While sleep could imperil the Christian soul, insomnia too could have deleterious effects on both communal and individual life. In Parris’s analysis, early modern writings by William Shakespeare, Jasper Heywood, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish on the conjunction of sleep and care—and the Stoic philosophy that influenced those writers—opened onto startling revelations about both our obligation to the self and to an ethical engagement with society at large. Parris is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and his work has appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Modern Philology, and SEL: Studies in English Literature. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg (Wiley, 2022) provides an insightful institutionalist perspective on the field of gentrification studies. The book explores the relationship between the operation of gentrification and the institutions underpinning - but also influencing and restricting - it in three neighborhoods in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg. Matthias Bernt demonstrates how different institutional arrangements have resulted in the facilitation, deceleration or alteration of gentrification across time and place. The book is based on empirical studies conducted in Great Britain, Germany and Russia and contains one of the first-ever English language discussions of gentrification in Germany and Russia. It begins with an examination of the limits of the widely established “rent-gap” theory and proposes the novel concept of the “commodification gap.” It then moves on to explore how different institutional contexts in the UK, Germany and Russia have framed the conditions for these gaps to enable gentrification. The Commodification Gap is an indispensable resource for researchers and academics studying human geography, housing studies, urban sociology and spatial planning. Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. To learn more, visit her website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Professor Martin’s A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (Yale, 2022) is a survey of Early Modern European history from the Age of Discovery to the French Revolution with two important distinctions. First, Professor Martin views modernity through the enduring dream of the Apocalypse (which he calls the “stamp of modernity,” 250); second, he compares the Christian philosophy of the Apocalypse to the views of the two other great European religious traditions in this era—Judaism and Islam. The result is a magisterial survey of the age that presents familiar stories examined from a new angle. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike understood the rapidly-changing, modern world they shared in terms of their common Abrahamic faith with its messianic elements, or “Apocalyptic Braid” (13). And, in addition, Christian Habsburgs and Muslim Ottomans entertained competing narratives of World Empire contested on continental battlefields and in the Mediterranean Sea as well as in literature. The Beautiful Ending ultimately was both the balm for the terrible uncertainties of the age but also a motivation for the modern Europeans to shape their own destiny—a motivation that Professor Martin argues has remained with us until today—“the idea that we are not simply made by history but also make history continues to stem from faith, and it matters little whether or not this faith is religious” (247). John Jeffries Martin is a historian of early modern Europe at Duke University. He specializes in social, cultural, and intellectual history of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), which won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004), as well as this book, A Beautiful Ending. He is the author of over 50 articles and essays and several edited volumes, including The Renaissance World (2007). After recording this interview about history for the New Books in History Podcast, Krzysztof Odyniec and John Jeffries Martin recorded a second conversation about Apocalypse from the Early Modern period to the present day for the Almost Good Catholics podcast; the link is here. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. His forthcoming book is Diplomacy at the Edges of Empires: Johannes Dantiscus in Spain, 1519-1352 (published by Brepols). He also hosts and produces the Almost Good Catholics podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help isn’t just an advice manual. It represents the invention of a genre, and not a moment too soon. Smiles was writing at a time when work conditions were extremely poor, and people were looking for ways to educate themselves and improve their conditions. Although Smiles may have written Self-Help with one particular society’s troubles in mind, his advice swiftly travelled around the globe to places like Japan and Egypt. Beth Blum is an assistant professor of English at Harvard University. She specializes in modernist and contemporary literature. She is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture (Cornell UP, 2022), Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide.
The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence. Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Rather than insist that torture is ineffective, torture critics should focus their attention on the morality of torture. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant. At the same time, torture defenders cannot advocate for torture as a counterterrorist "quick fix": torture has never located, nor will ever locate, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" that is frequently invoked to justify brutality in the name of security. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why is religion important in understanding creative industries? In British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Saskia Warren, a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, presents an analysis of the fashion, digital media, and visual arts industries to show, for the first time, the centrality of faith and religion to any intersectional analysis of contemporary cultural production and consumption. The book uses in depth interviews, as well as a rich and detailed understanding of institutions and trends, to map the unique experiences of British Muslim women. Offering insights as to the barriers and exclusions, as well as the successes and forms of resistance, experienced by this community, the book is essential reading across social sciences and the humanities, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how culture is made today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this episode of the Vault, we hear Harry Berger’s talk about Leonardo da Vinci and Vassari’s "Lives of the Painters." Harry Berger was a scholar of Renaissance English literature who wrote books about art history, anthropology, and philosophy. He taught at UC Santa Cruz, where he was an emeritus professor until he died in 2021, at age 96. Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Content Warning: discussion of execution gets a bit gruesome. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England (University of Alabama Press, 2022) provides a new perspective on the representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. A significant part of the execution spectacle-one used to assess the victim's proper acceptance of death and godly repentance-was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure that their words on the scaffold held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women's bodies. Drawing on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, this study explores not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance. The reception of women's speeches, Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and words as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society. The first part of this study investigates the early modern execution, including the behavioral expectations for condemned individuals, the medieval tradition that shaped the ritual, and the gender specific ways English authorities legislated and carried out women's executions. Depictions of the female body are the focus of the second part of the book. The executed woman's body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. These signs, though, were related not just to early modern ideas about female modesty and weakness, but also to the developing martyrdom tradition, which linked bodies and behavior to inner spiritual states. While many representations of women focused on physical traits and behaviors coded as godly, other accounts highlighted the grotesque and bestial attributes of women deemed unrepentant or evil. Part Three considers the rhetorical strategies used by women and their authors, highlighting the ways that women positioned themselves as stereotypically weak in order to defuse criticism of their speeches and navigate their positions in society, even when awaiting death on the scaffold. The greater focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women's roles not just as criminals but as subjects. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her diary, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote “I did not think of myself as a 'woman.' I was me.” Then, in 1949, de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, laying bare the widely accepted gender inequalities of her time and questioning the idea of man as “universal.” Her book incited both outrage and inspiration, and her ideas were quickly adapted by the Second-wave feminist movement. Although feminist ideas have changed over time, de Beauvoir’s vision of a just and equal society in which men and women respect each other as free and responsible subjects was remarkable for her time. Professor Toril Moi is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is the author of books such as Revolution of the Ordinary Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell and Sex, Gender, and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman? See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kings throughout medieval and early modern Europe had extraconjugal sexual partners. Only in France, however, did the royal mistress become a quasi-institutionalized political position. This study explores the emergence and development of the position of French royal mistress through detailed portraits of nine of its most significant incumbents: Agnès Sorel, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Diane de Poitiers, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Françoise d’Aubigné, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, and Jeanne Bécu. Beginning in the fifteenth century, key structures converged to create a space at court for the royal mistress. The first was an idea of gender already in place: that while women were legally inferior to men, they were men’s equals in competence. Because of their legal subordinacy, queens were considered to be the safest regents for their husbands, and, subsequently, the royal mistress was the surest counterpoint to the royal favorite. Second, the Renaissance was a period during which people began to experience space as theatrical. This shift to a theatrical world opened up new ways of imagining political guile, which came to be positively associated with the royal mistress. Still, the role had to be activated by an intelligent, charismatic woman associated with a king who sought women as advisors. The fascinating particulars of each case are covered in the chapters of Tracy Adams and Christine Adams's book The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnes Sorel to Madame DuBarry (Penn State University Press, 2021). Thoroughly researched and compellingly narrated, this important study explains why the tradition of a politically powerful royal mistress materialized at the French court, but nowhere else in Europe. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the French monarchy, women and royalty, and gender studies. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 (U California Press, 2022) presents an original and revisionist narrative of the development of the medieval west from late antiquity to the dawn of modernity. This textbook is uniquely centered on the Mediterranean and emphasizes the role played by peoples and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe in an age when Christians, Muslims, and Jews of various denominations engaged with each other in both conflict and collaboration. Key features:
Fifteen-chapter structure to aid classroom use
Sections in each chapter that feature key artifacts relevant to chapter themes
Dynamic visuals, including 190 photos and 20 maps
The Sea in the Middle and its sourcebook companion, Texts from the Middle, pair together to provide a framework and materials that guide students and scholars through this complex but essential history—one that will appeal to the diverse student bodies of today. Thomas E. Burman is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the Director of the Medieval Institute. He is a scholar of Christian-Muslim-Jewish intellectual and cultural history in the medieval Mediterranean. His book Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom was awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History.
Brian A. Catlos is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the co-director of the Mediterranean Seminar. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean. His most recent book, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain, is available in eight languages and as an audiobook.
Mark D. Meyerson is Professor in the Department of History and Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He works on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in the premodern Mediterranean and on the history of violence. His book A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain was runner-up for the National Jewish Book Award, USA. Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While German unification promised a new historical beginning, it also stirred discussions about contemporary Germany's Nazi past and ideas of citizenship and belonging in a changing Europe. Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 explores the intersections and divergences between Black German, Turkish German, and German Jewish experiences, with reflections on the evolving academic paradigms with which these are studied. Informed by comparative approaches, the volume investigates social and aesthetic interventions into contemporary German public and political discourse on memory, racism, citizenship, immigration, and history. In this episode, the editors, Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik, talk about how they came to cross the bridge of often isolated disciplinary fields and in what ways some of the chapters converse with each other. They discuss four chapters in more detail and open up a path to future dialogue between scholars studying minoritized groups in Germany. Nicole Coleman is Associate Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It involves proper behavior and the avoidance of conflict, encompassing every aspect of one’s place in society as well as one’s relationships with other people. One can “give face,” “get face,” “fight for face,” “tear up face,” and a host of other expressions. But when it began to become known to the Western trading community in China beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was distorted and reduced to two phrases only, “lose face” and “save face,” both of which were used to suggest distinctly Western ideas of humiliation, embarrassment, honor, and reputation. The Chinese were judged as a race obsessed with the fear of “losing (their) face,” and they constantly resorted to vain attempts to “save” it in the face of Western correction. “Lose face” may be an authentic Chinese expression but “save face” is different. “Save face” was actually a Western invention. Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (2017), Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011), The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (HKUP, 2008), The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (2004), and Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (2001). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over. Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society's foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit's personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole--an attitude that helps explain the Society's widespread appeal from its first days. Focusing on the Jesuits' own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy: Biographical Writing in the Early Global Age (Harvard UP, 2022) offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code--a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Martin Fárek's India in the Eyes of Europeans: Conceptualization of Religion in Theology and Oriental Studies (Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2021) is centred around the claim that although the research in Oriental and religious studies seemingly presents unbiased, objective interpretations of Indian traditions, it really puts forward distorted images which primarily reflect the researchers’ own European culture. A thorough examination demonstrates to what extent Oriental studies as well as other humanities are still influenced by theological preconceptions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the tradition of The Lady in Gold and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the remarkable history behind one of the world's most beloved paintings, Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine More than half a millennium ago, a young woman sat before a Grecian-nosed artist known as Leonardo da Vinci. Her name was Cecilia Gallerani, and she was the fourteen-year-old mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Her lover, a ruthless man, was aware that da Vinci's brilliance as a painter would not only capture his mistress's beauty but reflect his own political prowess. Indeed, with this beguiling painting--in which Gallerani holds a strange white ermine close to her breast--da Vinci revolutionized the genre, changing not just what a portrait looked like, but also its purpose. But despite the work's importance in its own time, no records of it from the three hundred years following Gallerini's death exist. In What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo Da Vinci's Most Mysterious Portrait (Doubleday Books, 2022), Eden Collinsworth illuminates the eventual history of this exquisite oil painting, as it journeyed from one owner to the next--from the brutal Milanese Duke to a Polish noblewoman to the Nazis, who added it to Hitler's private collection, to the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow where it is currently displayed. Along the way, Collinsworth reveals a bewildering maze of social alliances and cultural upheavals, polarizing political divisions and territorial fragmentation. Expertly researched and deftly told, What the Ermine Saw is an enthralling account of Renaissance Italy and its actors, a comprehensive study of artistry and innovation, and a reminder that genius, power, and beauty always have a price. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, an investigation into the nature of wealth. Smith is now considered the Father of Capitalism or the Father of Modern Economics. In fact, many people think of him as an economist and only an economist, but scholars tend to think of him as a moral philosopher. Smith lived in an era of great change, and the moral questions of the time were closely linked to developing politics and economies. Glory Liu is a College Fellow in Social Studies at Harvard University. She is currently working on an intellectual history of Adam Smith’s reception in American politics and political economy from the eighteenth century to the present. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War in 1832 after experiencing the Napoleonic wars. The eight books of this text contain Clausewitz’s theory of war. In it, he addresses the relationships between war and policy, tactics and strategy. A basic textbook in military academies, this book is read by both military strategists and political scientists. And it can be interpreted in two very different, but accurate ways. Gil-li Vardi is a military historian and visiting scholar at Stanford University where she teaches about military history, particularly the First and Second World Wars. She has published articles in War in History and the Journal for Strategic Studies. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. For Leonardo da Vinci, water was an enduring fascination, appearing in myriad forms throughout his work. In Watermarks, Leslie Geddes explores the extraordinary range of Leonardo’s interest in water and shows how artworks by him and his peers contributed to hydraulic engineering and the construction of large river and canal systems. In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Leslie Geddes about transforming your dissertation into a book, how one tackles a body of scholarly literature as immense as that on Leonardo, and whether or not the famous Salvator Mundi was indeed painted by Leonardo. Their conversation ranges from what it is like to examine the artist’s Renaissance drawings in person to the power of comparisons within art historical writing and research. Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Immanuel Kant’s early work wasn’t much to write home about. But as his career developed, Kant published incredible works of philosophy that continue to challenge and influence our greatest thinkers. In 1785, he published the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and challenged the foundations of human value. Professor Richard Bourke untangles this complex work and discusses how Kant—whether we realize it or not—has permeated our culture. Richard Bourke is a professor of the History of Political Thought at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke and Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
You may know the term “Machiavellian,” but where does the word really come from? Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian diplomat who worked firsthand with Italy’s most powerful politicians. He wrote his famous book, The Prince, as a sort of instruction manual for the Medici princes of Florence. And while Machiavelli’s ideas were shocking to many—and repugnant to some—the influence of his ideas has been profound. James Hankins is a professor at Harvard University where he teaches History, focusing particularly on Renaissance intellectual history and political thought. He is the author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England: Gender, Law and Political Culture (Boydell Press, 2020) by Dr. E. Amanda McVitty presents a groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender. Conflicts over treason tormented English political society in the later Middle Ages. As legal and political historians have shown, treason was always a constitutional matter as well as a legal one because it was pivotal in mediating the relationship between English kings, their political subjects and the abstraction of the crown. However, despite renewed interest in constitutional history, there has been no extended examination of treason in medieval England since the 1970s. This pioneering study presents a new interpretation of treason, not only as a legal construct, a political weapon and a tool for constitutional thinking, but also as a cultural category, aligning it with questions of gender, vernacularity and national identity. It examines cases from the 1380s to the 1420s, revealing how kings defended their claims to sovereign authority by using the laws of treason to bind their mortal male bodies to the enduring body politic of the realm, and explains how that body politic was masculinised through its entanglement in contests over manly honour and homosocial loyalties. Drawing on evidence from trial records, legislation and chronicles, Dr. McVitty illuminates the ways in which cultural ideals of manhood reinforced or subverted government responses to crises of legitimacy, and demonstrates that gender conditioned understandings of treason in the political arena as well as the definitions embedded in statutes and case law. At the same time, it explores the varied ways men defended themselves from accusations of treason by invoking, and in the process helping to transform, shared beliefs about what it meant to be a man in medieval England. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Although there is extensive research on first-generation immigrants and refugees who traveled from Africa to Italy, there is little scholarship about the experiences of Black people who were born and raised in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself. Contesting Race and Citizenship opens discussions of the so-called migrant "crisis" by focusing on a generation of Black people who, although born or raised in Italy, have been thrust into the same racist, xenophobic political climate as the immigrants and refugees who are arriving in Europe from the African continent. Hawthorne traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism. Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is coeditor of The Black Mediterranean. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change (Manchester UP, 2020) draws on a major mixed-methods research project by Dr. Alan Warde, Dr. Jessica Paddock and Dr. Jennifer Whillans about dining out in England. The book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Given that we live in an era roiled by concerns about how democratic supposedly democratic countries actually are and when skepticism abounds about how truly representative our electoral systems are, a scholarly study of debates on many of these issues among leading theorists of democracy in Victorian Britain is just the ticket. That is what is on offer in Gregory Conti's book Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain (Cambridge UP, 2019). Conti employs the tools of the fields of political theory and political and intellectual history to render vivid and touching the fierce debates among such well-known figures as John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot, as well as “in-between” figures such as Thomas Hare (1806–1891). Fierce in terms of the sometimes cruel lampooning of their respective opponents and touching in that many of the proponents of these proposed reforms (e.g., proportional representation and the single transferable vote) were convinced that their nostrums would usher in a golden age for Britain’s parliament and, thereby, the nation. Note, though, that for many of the figures in this book it was the proper workings of Parliament and its capacity for reasoned deliberation that they cared about, not so much democratic processes per se in terms of how representatives got elected to it. Indeed, much of what was advocated was designed to keep certain groups out of Parliament and government generally. For many of the thinkers discussed in this book, Parliament in its member makeup should mirror the composition of the nation at large. This was particularly true of adherents of the variety-of-suffrages theory who pined for the hodgepodge of electoral constituencies (especially those in the countryside that were controlled by aristocrats and which were derisively referred to as “rotten boroughs” or “pocket boroughs”) that prevailed before passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Bagehot was of this school. Others, like Mill and Hare, were enamored of the rather complex system of proportional representation, believing that it would militate against what they saw as the evil of too much power devolving to political parties, which they feared would be dominated by intellectually inferior plebians. The word “swamped” was often used. Finally, there were straight-up democrats such as the future leader of the Labour Party and future prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who opposed proportional representation as fundamentally elitist and a hindrance to robust debate and effective government. Conti’s book is a fascinating exploration of a relatively neglected period in the history of discourse on what democracies need to thrive, who should be allowed to vote, how voting should be done and whether votes mattered so much as seats in Parliament. There were even arguments that if some people did not get to vote but their interests were represented, that was good enough. Let’s hear from Professor Conti himself about this lively period of democracy talk. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The EU, writes Loukas Tsoukalis, is “a strange vehicle … unlike any others on the roads of the world, surely not a flashy vehicle – rather slow and not easy to drive. However, it has been able to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of passengers and covered a remarkably long distance – often in adverse conditions and with accidents on the way”. However, while the union has shown itself to be resilient, the new economic, societal and geopolitical challenges it faces mean it has to be much more than that. It has to project as well as protect. It has to grow up. In Europe's Coming of Age (Polity, 2022), Tsoukalis explains why and how. Born in Athens, Loukas Tsoukalis studied economics and international relations in Manchester, Bruges, and Oxford where he also taught for many years, followed by chairs at the University of Athens and the London School of Economics, and visiting professorships at Harvard and the College of Europe. Today, he is a professor at Sciences Po in Paris. This is the latest of his many books on the EU including The Politics and Economics of European Monetary Integration, What Kind of Europe? and In Defence of Europe: Can the European Project Be Saved? *The authors' own book recommendations are: The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can't Coexist by Dani Rodrik (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic (Belknap Press, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors and writes the Twenty-Four Two newsletter on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Watching our favorite TV shows and movies today, it’s easy to take the relatable characters and familiar settings for granted. But when Henrik Ibsen debuted his play A Doll’s House, realism was a shocking, new approach. Professor Derek Miller discusses what realism can teach us about our reality and how A Doll’s House rocked the 19th century theatre scene. Derek Miller is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He teaches in the English department as well as courses in theater, dance, and media. He is the author of Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 and is currently working on a project titled Visualizing Broadway. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity. Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Edward Chancellor's just published history of interest rates could not be better timed. As the world adjusts to rising rates after decades of falling ones, Chancellor's historical and sometimes polemical account of rates kept too low for too long seems all too prescient. Chancellor's The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022) is a surprisingly relevant and accessible tool, not only investors but also everyone touched by interest rates. That's all of us. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses on the iteration of the trope of ‘the monstrous vegan’ across 200 years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism’s relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the ‘human’, the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted. Reading Veganism proposes that we can recognize and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First, monstrous vegans do not eat animals, an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second, they are hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman animal parts, destabilizing existing taxonomical classifications. Third, monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction, the product of male acts of creation. And, finally, monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principal contention of the book is that understandings of veganism, as identity and practice, are limited without a consideration of multiplicity, provisionality, failure, and insufficiency within vegan definition and lived practice. Veganism’s association with positivity, in its drive for health and purity, is countered by a necessary and productive negativity generated by a recognition of the horrors of the modern world. Vegan monsters rehearse the key paradoxes involved in the writing of vegan identity. Emelia Quinn is Assistant Professor of World Literatures & Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to this position she received her DPhil (PhD) in English from the University of Oxford. She is author of Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford UP, 2021) and co-editor of Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2022) Callie Smith is a poet and a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022. She reigned for 70 years, longer than any other British sovereign. In this interview, Charles Coutinho discusses her life and legacy with historian Jeremy Black. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How does the state support writers? In State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (Oxford UP, 2020), Asha Rogers, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the University of Birmingham, explores the history of authors, institutions, and governments approach to literature in a changing, imperial and post-imperial, Britain. The book uses a wealth of examples, from key organisations such as the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain, through case studies of key authors such as Salman Rushdie, to concepts such as multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Making a significant contribution to English literature and cultural policy, the book will be essential reading across the arts and humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the relationship between governments and literature. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati―gorgeously dressed and adorned men―to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power. Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials. This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy. Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Martha Rampton, Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how magic was perceived, practiced, and prohibited in western Europe during the first millennium CE. Through the overlapping frameworks of religion, ritual, and gender, Martha Rampton connects early Christian reckonings with pagan magic to later doctrines and dogmas. Challenging established views on the role of women in ritual magic during this period, Rampton provides a new narrative of the ways in which magic was embedded within the foundational assumptions of western European society, informing how people understood the cosmos, divinity, and their own Christian faith. As Rampton shows, throughout the first Christian millennium, magic was thought to play a natural role within the functioning of the universe and existed within a rational cosmos hierarchically arranged according to a "great chain of being." Trafficking with the "demons of the lower air" was the essence of magic. Interactions with those demons occurred both in highly formalistic, ritual settings and on a routine and casual basis. Rampton tracks the competition between pagan magic and Christian belief from the first century CE, when it was fiercest, through the early Middle Ages, as atavistic forms of magic mutated and found sanctuary in the daily habits of the converted peoples and new paganisms entered Europe with their own forms of magic. By the year 1000, she concludes, many forms of magic had been tamed and were, by the reckoning of the elite, essentially ineffective, as were the women who practiced it and the rituals that attended it. Martha Rampton is full of energy and excitement about her book and she and Jana Byars have a wonderful, spirited chat. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Adam Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal - arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence. Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. But this is a book about resistance, considering black liberation movements in the 20th century while utilising a decade of activist research covering spontaneous rebellion, campaigns and protest in the 21st century. Drawing connections between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, it is argued, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalisation. Black Resistance to British Policing is a must read for all those who are interested in the history of the British Empire, its enduring legacies, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. Adam Elliot-Cooper is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public and Social Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He is also co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021). He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group, an anti-racist organisation challenging state racisms and racial violence.
Deniz Yonucu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on counterinsurgency, policing and security, surveillance, left-wing and anti-colonial resistance, memory, racism, and emerging digital control technologies. Her book, Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Metabolic Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2020), Clémentine Deliss, a curator, researcher, and former director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum, explores possible functions for anthropological museums in a postcolonial culture. Anthropological museums in Europe, as products of imperialism, have been compelled to legitimate themselves because the very basis of their exhibitions, the history of their collections, came about all too often through colonial appropriation and outright theft. In this book, Deliss addresses this reality for enthographic or world culture museums in Europe, exploring the possible futures for these institutions. Connecting to reflections on her own work as the director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum with discussions of filmmakers, artists and authors to argue for an entity she calls the Metabolic Museum―an interventionist laboratory that opens up the potential of anthropological collections for the future. Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What makes a nasty woman? Is it her unwillingness to break to the stringent standards of patriarchy, her gameness to get rough, even abject? Or is it the way she reminds polite society that the sweet, gentle screen martyr (the nasty woman’s counterpart) is a fiction too, as much a trick and a dupe as an exploding housemaid on celluloid? And what a surprise—and what a treat—to discover cinema’s earliest days are among their nastiest. Coming from Kino Lorber this December, “this four-disc set showcase more than fourteen hours of rarely seen silent films about feminist protest, slapstick rebellion, and suggestive gender play. These women organize labor strikes, bake (and weaponize) inedible desserts, explode out of chimneys, electrocute the police force, and assume a range of identities that gleefully dismantle traditional gender norms and sexual constraints. The films span a variety of genres including slapstick comedy, genteel farce, the trick film, cowboy melodrama, and adventure thriller. Cinema’s First Nasty Women includes 99 European and American silent films, produced from 1898 to 1926, sourced from thirteen international film archives and libraries, with all-new musical scores, video introductions, commentary tracks, and a lavishly illustrated booklet.” Host Annie Berke sits down with the curators of this set, Drs. Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak, and Ms. Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, to discuss how this project came to be, the steps they took to ensure an anti-racist program, and if the “nasty woman” spirit lives on in the mediascape of the present. Maggie Hennefeld is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature and McKnight Presidential Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), co-editor of the journal Cultural Critique (UMN Press), co-editor of two volumes: Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke UP, 2020). Laura Horak is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab. She is author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (Rutgers UP, 2016) and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana UP, 2014), Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019), a special issue of Somatechnics on trans/cinematic/bodies and an In Focus section of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on “Transing Cinema and Media Studies.” Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi is the Curator of Silent film at Eye Filmmuseum, the national film archive of the Netherlands. Graduated from University of Amsterdam, Film&TV Studies in 1997 and employed since 1999 at Eye, she has worked on the discovery, restoration and presentation of many presumed lost films. She is responsible for the preservation and presentation of Eye's silent film holdings, including among others the Desmet Collection (1907-1916) and the Mutoscope & Biograph Collection (1896-1902). Annie Berke is the film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Literary Hub, Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Jacobin, and the Washington Post. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Alexander Kirshner’s book Legitimate Opposition (Yale UP, 2022) can be seen as a reaction to the politics of Donald Trump and the questions he has raised about the nature of modern democracy. Advocates of western democracy have traditionally pointed to the role of the opposition in holding government to account. The deal has been that oppositions can criticise those in power without going to jail or worse but, in return, they have to offer loser’s consent – if they don’t win an election, they accept someone else governs. What happens when that consent is withdrawn? Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by Its Prisoners (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a history of modern Germany told not through the lives of its leaders, but its lawbreakers. As Nelson Mandela said, “a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Shadowland tells the sometimes inspiring, often painful stories of Germany’s prisoners, and thereby shines new light on Germany itself. The story begins at the end of the Second World War, in a defeated country on the edge of collapse, in which orphaned and lost children are forced into homelessness, scavenging and stealing to stay alive, often laying the foundations of a so-called criminal career. While East Germany developed detention facilities for its secret police, West Germany passed prison reform laws, which erected, in the words of a prisoner, “little asbestos walls in Hell.” Shadowland is Germany as seen through the lives, experiences, triumphs, and tragedies of its lowest citizens. Sarah Colvin is the Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge. She has participated in prison-based arts and education projects and is an advisory group member for the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture. Nicholas Misukanis is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Maryland - College Park. He studies modern European and Middle Eastern history with a special emphasis on Germany and the role energy autonomy played in foreign and domestic German politics during the twentieth century. He is currently working on his dissertation which analyzes why the West German government failed to convince the public to embrace nuclear energy and the ramifications this had on German politics between 1973 and 1986. His work has been published in Commonweal, America: The Jesuit Review, The United States’ Naval Academy’s Tell Me Another and Studies on Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s guest is Jenny Mann, who has a new book titled The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Princeton University Press, 2021). Jenny is Professor in both New York University’s English Department and the Gallatin School, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Cornell University Press, 2012) and is the co-editor with Debapriya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Scientific Forms.” Additionally, Jenny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2022), edited by Maria Berbara, illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions—expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images—and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Royal Childhood and Child Kingship: Boy Kings in England, Scotland, France and Germany, c. 1050–1262 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) refines adult-focused perspectives on medieval rulership. Dr. Emily Joan Ward exposes the problematic nature of working from the assumption that kingship equated to adult power. Children's participation and political assent could be important facets of the day-to-day activities of rule, as this study shows through an examination of royal charters, oaths to young boys, cross-kingdom diplomacy and coronation. The first comparative and thematic study of child rulership in this period, Dr. Ward analyses eight case studies across northwestern Europe from c.1050 to c.1250. Dr. Ward stresses innovations and adaptations in royal government, questions the exaggeration of political disorder under a boy king, and suggests a ruler's childhood posed far less of a challenge than their adolescence and youth. Uniting social, cultural and political historical methodologies, Dr. Ward unveils how wider societal changes between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries altered children's lived experiences of royal rule and modified how people thought about child kingship. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it? We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century. Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert book Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back) (Verso, 2022) explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Italy has just held an election in which it appears that a far-right candidate from a post Fascist Party has won, and his leader will become the next prime minister of the country. What's happening in Italy? What does this election tell us about wider developments in Europe today? In this episode of International Horizons, Andrea Mammone from Sapienza University of Rome explains the linkages of Giorgia Meloni's party, Brothers of Italy with Fascism and the dynamics of 2022 elections, marked by a generational shift from Berlusconi's leadership. Moreover, Mammone discusses how the victory for the far-right reflects the failure of the Center and Center-Left to consolidate durable coalitions, and the paradox that a more forward-thinking left has not been able to present a woman for elections. Finally, the author discusses the implications of this election for Europe, how the EU has legitimized with their speeches the extreme-right movements in Europe and the challenges that Meloni will face in the economic realm where immigrants can no longer be used as a scapegoat for the problems of Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research areas since the introduction of a metrics and quantification regime during the 1980s. Highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of metrics and quantification, as well as the uneven distribution of positive and negative impacts, the book offers essential reading for every academic, irrespective of the nation or institution in which they work. It also will be important for those seeing to better understand the role of metrics and markets in contemporary life. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From Austria to New Zealand, coalition governments often pave the road to foreign policy. In Western Europe, nearly 90 percent of postwar governments include two or more political parties. Israel, the Middle East’s only consolidated democracy according to many, has never experienced single-party rule in its history. Even the United Kingdom, known for its long streak of single-party rule, now navigates multiparty cabinets. Coalitions are everywhere, but we still have little understanding of how they act in foreign affairs. History shows that coalitions can sometime engage in powerful international commitments such as participating in military operations, but at other times, they postpone their decisions, water down their policy positions, or promise to do less than they otherwise would. What explains these differences in behavior? Sibel Oktay's book Governing Abroad: Coalition Politics and Foreign Policy in Europe (U Michigan Press, 2022) unpacks the little-known world of coalition governments to find out. Oktay argues that the specific constellation of parties in government explains why some coalitions can make more assertive foreign policy decisions than others. Building on the rich literature in political science on coalitions, legislatures, and voting behavior, the book weaves together sophisticated statistical analyses of foreign policy events across thirty European countries alongside in-depth case studies from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland. It brings political parties back into the study of foreign policy, demonstrating that the size of the coalition, the ideological proximity of the governing parties, and their relationship with the parliamentary opposition together influence the government’s ability to act in the international arena. This book challenges our existing perceptions about the constraints and weaknesses of coalition governments. It sheds new light on the conditions that allow them to act decisively abroad. Sibel Oktay is associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield and a nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Her research focuses on the interaction between domestic politics and foreign policy, and how leaders influence those relationships. She has published in the European Journal of Political Research, British Journal of Politics and International Affairs, and European Security, among others. She has also written for outlets including War On The Rocks, The Hill, and Responsible Statecraft. She is a 2022-2023 recipient of the Jefferson Science Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
1848 was the Year of Revolutions in Europe. It was also the year that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, proposing a new, classless society. As revolutions erupted across the globe, many turned to the ideals of Communism to replace old and fast-crumbling feudal systems. But Communism didn’t take off everywhere. Harvard professor Louis Menand explains the successes and failures of Marx & Engels’ vision since the publication of the manifesto. Louis Menand is the Lee Simpkins Family Professor or Arts and Sciences and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard, where he also holds the title Harvard College Professor, in recognition of his teaching. He is the author of books such as The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University and The Metaphysical Club, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Join the conversation on the Lyceum app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Positive Atheism: Bayle, Meslier, d’Holbach, Diderot (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Dr. Charles Devellennes looks at the religious, social, and political thought of the first four thinkers of the French Enlightenment: Pierre Bayle, Jean Meslier, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Denis Diderot to explicitly argue for atheism as a positive philosophy. He shows how atheism evolved considerably over the century that spans the works of these four authors: from the possibility of the virtuous atheist in the late 17th century, to a deeply rooted materialist philosophy with radical social and political consequences by the eve of the French revolution. The metamorphosis of atheism from a purely negative phenomenon to one that became self-aware had profound consequences for establishing an ethics without God and the rise of republicanism as a political philosophy. Charles Devellennes is a Senior Lecturer in Political and Social Thought at University of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations. His research interests lie in the interdisciplinary area of the history of political thought, specifically with eighteenth century political thought in the field of religion and politics, and the rise of atheism in France at this time. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. @carrielynnland carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion. In The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022) Dr. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how the plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and the plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons. Setting the rise of Western Europe in a global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As the United Kingdom left the European Union, during a period of international and domestic turmoil, London found itself at a turning point. This critical moment presents an opportunity to look back, with a distinctive perspective, a focus on London in its national and, perhaps even more importantly, its international contexts, rather than on the city itself in isolation. It is the interactions of London that Black considers, and he does so in order to address the question as to why London became the foremost international city, how it sustained that position, and what its future holds. A Brief History of London (Little Brown, 2022) is as much about economics and culture as it is about politics and society. It deals with migration, communications, empire and cultural energy, rather than the mechanisms of parish vestries. London's earlier period is covered, but the principal focus is on the last half millennium, the period during which London became a major trader with the trans-oceanic world, and the ruler of trans-oceanic colonies, while the English language became an increasingly important cultural medium, one centred on London. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Phiroz Mehta, was a self-taught philosopher of religion who became the revered core figure of a universal religion and philosophy centred on concepts of existential freedom. Less well known than his contemporary and associate Jiddu Krishnamurti, Mehta nonetheless cultivated a significant following over some 25 years and influenced an early generation of yoga and meditation teachers and practitioners in the UK, as well as international New Age figures such as Fritjof Capra. His teachings centred on freedom in several ways: by focussing on the soteriologies of liberation in Indian religions, but also in the way that he combined teachings from Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism with Christianity, Judaism (specifically Kabbalah) and Daoism. He offered his tutees the freedom to practice philosophy and religion in whatever way they wished by drawing on a broad range of traditions concurrently. This talk hopes to raise further awareness about the unknown history of this compelling figure and his contribution to the cultural transmission of Indian concepts of spirituality to Britain. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2022) elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860-2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system - a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2022) elucidates a momentous transformation process that changed the world: the struggle to create, for the first time, a modern Atlantic order in the long twentieth century (1860-2020). Placing it in a broader historical and global context, Patrick O. Cohrs reinterprets the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as the original attempt to supersede the Eurocentric 'world order' of the age of imperialism and found a more legitimate peace system - a system that could not yet be global but had to be essentially transatlantic. Yet he also sheds new light on why, despite remarkable learning-processes, it proved impossible to forge a durable Atlantic peace after a First World War that became the long twentieth century's cathartic catastrophe. In a broader perspective this ground-breaking study shows what a decisive impact this epochal struggle has had not only for modern conceptions of peace, collective security and an integrative, rule-based international order but also for formative ideas of self-determination, liberal-democratic government and the West. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the project of ‘decolonisation’ as intellectually unsound and unrealistic. Táíwò rejects decolonisation’s conflation of modernity with coloniality and takes to task the decolonisers’ confused attempts at undoing of global society’s foundations. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German and Portuguese. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015. NBN interview with Olúfẹ́mi on Africa Must Be Modern Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press, 2022) presents a pioneering history that traces the origins of global economic governance—and the political conflicts it generates—to the aftermath of World War I. International economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank exert incredible influence over the domestic policies of many states. These institutions date from the end of World War II and amassed power during the neoliberal era of the late twentieth century. But as Jamie Martin shows, if we want to understand their deeper origins and the ideas and dynamics that shaped their controversial powers, we must turn back to the explosive political struggles that attended the birth of global economic governance in the early twentieth century. In The Meddlers, Dr. Jamie Martin tells the story of the first international institutions to govern the world economy, including the League of Nations and Bank for International Settlements, created after World War I. These institutions endowed civil servants, bankers, and colonial authorities from Europe and the United States with extraordinary powers: to enforce austerity, coordinate the policies of independent central banks, oversee development programs, and regulate commodity prices. In a highly unequal world, they faced a new political challenge: was it possible to reach into sovereign states and empires to intervene in domestic economic policies without generating a backlash? Dr. Martin follows the intense political conflicts provoked by the earliest international efforts to govern capitalism—from Weimar Germany to the Balkans, Nationalist China to colonial Malaya, and the Chilean desert to Wall Street. The Meddlers shows how the fraught problems of sovereignty and democracy posed by institutions like the IMF are not unique to late twentieth-century globalization, but instead first emerged during an earlier period of imperial competition, world war, and economic crisis. Jamie Martin is Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Capitalism in Chaos: How the Business Elites of Europe Prospered in the Era of the Great War (Cornell UP, 2022) explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe as the region became crucially important for German and subsequently French plans of economic and geopolitical expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on extensive research in sixteen archives, five languages, and four states, Máté Rigó demonstrates that wartime destruction and the birth of "war millionaires" were two sides of the same coin. Despite the recent centenaries of the Great War and the Versailles peace treaties, knowledge of the overall impact of war and border changes on business life remains sporadic, based on scant statistics and misleading national foci. Consequently, most histories remain wedded to the viewpoint of national governments and commercial connections across national borders. Capitalism in Chaos changes the static historical perspective by presenting Europe's East as the economic engine of the continent. Rigó accomplishes this paradigm shift by focusing on both supranational regions—including East-Central and Western Europe—as well as the eastern and western peripheries of Central Europe, Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania, from the 1870s until the 1920s. As a result, Capitalism in Chaos offers a concrete, lively history of economics during major world crises, with a contemporary consciousness toward inequality and disparity during a time of collapse. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When it was first published in 1719, many people believed Robinson Crusoe was a true story. Crusoe provides readers with a close look at not only the isolated human on an individual level, but also humanity on the international level through its depictions of global trade and economics. Professor Stephanie DeGooyer is the Fredrick Burkhart fellow at UCLA. She is an associate professor of English, and her current project is titled “Acts of Naturalization: Immigration and the Early Novel.” See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. Andrew has written widely on topics ranging from class struggle in the Forsyte chronicles, Hamlet and Poland, and early modern political theory. He is the author of an authoritative biography of Edmund Spenser and the co-editor of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630: An Anthology. His new book is Literature and Class: From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution, published through Manchester University Press. This new book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain) from the Peasants' Revolt at the end of the fourteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. The book argues throughout that class cannot be seen as a modern phenomenon that occurred after the Industrial revolution but that class divisions and relations have always structured societies and that it makes sense to assume a historical continuity. The book explores a number of themes relating to class: class consciousness; class conflict; commercialisation; servitude; rebellion; gender relations; and colonisation. After outlining the history of class relations, five chapters explore the ways in which social class consciously and unconsciously influenced a series of writers: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Behn, Rochester, Defoe, Duck, Richardson, Burney, Blake and Wordsworth. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The United Kingdom has experienced a number of epochal transitions of late, starting with its departure from the European Union in early 2020, and more recently, the replacement of the chaotic conservative leader Boris Johnson by former Foreign Minister Liz Truss, and soon thereafter the passing of Queen Elizabeth after some seven decades on the British throne. In the aftermath of these developments, questions have been raised about the coherence of the United Kingdom, its relationship to Europe, and indeed its standing in the world. Quo Vadis, Britannia? Where is Britain going? This week on International Horizons, Adrian Favell discusses this transitional moment in British history and more specifically how the changing economy and demography of the UK help explain support for Brexit. Moreover, he challenges the assumption that Brexit support came from “the working class,” as it has more to do with identity politics. Finally, Favell explains the implications of Queen Elizabeth’s death for the future of British nationhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Desertion: Trust and Mistrust in Civil Wars (Cornell UP, 2020) examines the personal and political factors behind soldiers' choices to stay in their unit or abandon their cause. Theodore McLauchlin's explores what might spur widespread desertion in a given group, how some armed groups manage to keep their soldiers fighting over long periods, and how committed soldiers are to their causes and their comrades. To answer these questions, McLauchlin focuses on combatants in military units during the Spanish Civil War. He pushes against the preconception that individual soldiers' motivations are either personal or political, either selfish or ideological. Instead, he draws together the personal and the political, showing how soldiers come to trust each other—or not. Desertion demonstrates how the armed groups that hold together and survive are those that foster interpersonal connections, allowing soldiers the opportunity to prove their commitment to the fight. McLauchlin argues that trust keeps soldiers in the fray, mistrust pushes them to leave, and political beliefs and military practices shape both. Desertion brings the reader into the world of soldiers and rigorously tests the factors underlying desertion. It asks, honestly and without judgment, what would you do in an army in a civil war? Would you stand and fight? Would you try to run away? And what if you found yourself fighting for a cause you no longer believe in or never did in the first place? Theodore McLauchlin is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Université de Montréal and Director of the Centre d'études sur la paix et la sécurité internationales. His research interests lie in civil wars, international security, military behavior, and civil-military relations. He earned his Ph.D. at McGill University (2013), during which time he was also a visiting scholar at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From roughly 1346 to 1353, Europe was paralyzed by the most fatal pandemic in recorded human history; the bubonic plague. The plague killed more than 60% of the total population in Eurasia. This is the backdrop of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of short novellas completed in 1353. Robert Pogue Harrison is a professor of French and Italian Literature at Stanford University. He is author of the books The Dominion of the Dead and Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jean-Jacques Rousseau led an interesting life. He was a philosopher, writer, and music composer in the 18th century. Rousseau believed that society has an enormous influence on human development and behavior. In his later years, he wrote a detailed account of his life to help explain how his own experiences shaped his personality, views, neuroses, and imperfections. This autobiography was called Confessions. Professor David Avrom Bell is a professor of History at Princeton University. He focuses on early modern and modern Europe and is the author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, as well as six other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia (Pegasus, 2022) by Dr. Levi Roach is a tale of ambitious adventures and fierce freebooters, of fortunes made and fortunes lost. The Normans made their influence felt across all of western Europe and the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to North Africa, and Lisbon to the Holy Land. In Empires of the Normans we discover how they combined military might and political savvy with deeply held religious beliefs and a profound sense of their own destiny. For a century and a half, they remade Europe in their own image, and yet their heritage was quickly forgotten - until now. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
By most accounts, the twentieth century was not kind to utopian thought. The violence of two world wars, Cold War anxieties, and a widespread sense of crisis after the 1973 global oil shock appeared to doom dreams of a better world. The eventual victory of capitalism and, seemingly, liberal democracy relieved some fears but exchanged them for complacency and cynicism. Not, however, in West Germany. In Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Harvard UP, 2022), Jennifer Allen showcases grassroots activism of the 1980s and 1990s that envisioned a radically different society based on community-centered politics―a society in which the democratization of culture and power ameliorated alienation and resisted the impotence of end-of-history narratives. Berlin’s History Workshop liberated research from university confines by providing opportunities for ordinary people to write and debate the story of the nation. The Green Party made the politics of direct democracy central to its program. Artists changed the way people viewed and acted in public spaces by installing objects in unexpected environments, including the Stolpersteine: paving stones, embedded in residential sidewalks, bearing the names of Nazi victims. These activists went beyond just trafficking in ideas. They forged new infrastructures, spaces, and behaviors that gave everyday people real agency in their communities. Undergirding this activism was the environmentalist concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Hannah Arendt said that she had one life-long “best friend.” That was Rachel Varnhagen, a Jewish woman who lived in Enlightenment-era Berlin around 1800 and died 73 years before Arendt was born, in 1906. Arendt wrote her first book, a startlingly original literary biography of Varnhagen who founded one of the most celebrated yet short-lived salons in Enlightenment era Prussia. I spoke with Courtney Blair Hodrick, a doctoral candidate completing a book-long study of Arendt, and Professor Amir Eshel, both of Stanford University to discover what is at stake in Arendt’s unusual biography, why the book meant at once so much to Arendt and why she nonetheless almost neglected to publish it, and what this biography of a Jewish women in 19th century Berlin can teach us today about questions of identity, belonging, assimilation, women, Jews, anti-Semitism, freedom, politics, the private and the public, and many of the other topics that concerned Arendt throughout her lifetime. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Empress Eugenie: A Footnote History, 1826-1920 (Grosvenor House, 2022) is the story of the glamorous French Empress who escaped from a vengeful mob in 1870 and spent the next fifty years in exile in England. With a broad brush approach to the political events, it shows her life and times from a different angle, exploring subjects often relegated to mere footnotes. Aided by the increased digitalization of sources which produced many new and interesting discoveries, the book features 53 images of important people and places. Eugenie was born in a makeshift tent during an earthquake in Southern Spain but this impetuous and beautiful young woman's life changed dramatically when she married Napoleon III in 1853. She was to become a worldwide fashion icon but was much more than a trophy wife even though she suffered from a philandering husband. An early feminist with a social conscience, her achievements were negated by many because she wasn't French, becoming the inevitable scapegoat for the ills of the Empire. Yet in November 1869 when Eugenie opened the Suez Canal she was the most famous woman in the world. Less than a year later she made a dramatic escape from those who blamed her for a disastrous war that caused the collapse of the Second Empire. Helped by her American dentist, Eugenie was smuggled out of Paris en route to England and exile. The early death of her husband was followed a few years later by that of her son whilst with the British army in South Africa. A close friend of Queen Victoria, Eugenie lived in Farnborough, a small Hampshire town for 4 decades, building an Imperial Mausoleum for her husband and son and dressing in black for the rest of her days. Condemned in her own mind to live for a hundred years she then recovered her zest for life. Always keen to move with the times she embraced new technology, traveled extensively, and maintained her links with the European royal circle whilst becoming a familiar and much-respected figure in her neighborhood. Eugenie remained remarkably loyal to France and never relinquished her sense of duty, giving up part of her home to be an army hospital during World War 1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Inspired by the reading and writing habits of citizens leading up to the French Revolution, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2021) is a compelling addition to the long-running debate about the link between the Enlightenment and the political struggle that followed. Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond diligently scoured France's local newspapers spanning the two decades prior to the Revolution as well as its first three years shining a light on the letters to the editor. The Writing Public is a history of the thousands of readers and writers who participated in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution by writing to their local newspapers. A form of early social media, these letters constituted a lively and ongoing conversation among readers. Bond takes us beyond the glamorous salons of the intelligentsia into the everyday worlds of the craftsmen, clergy, farmers, and women who composed these letters. As a result, we get a fascinating glimpse into who participated in public discourse, what they most wanted to discuss, and how they shaped a climate of opinion. The Writing Public offers a novel examination of how French citizens used the information press to form norms of civic discourse and shape the experience of revolution. The result is a nuanced analysis of knowledge production during the Enlightenment. The Writing Public won the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. Dr. Elizabeth Andrews Bond is an associate professor of History at The Ohio State University. She is a specialist in the history of print and public opinion, the social history of ideas, the cultural history of the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. Brigid Wallace is a Graduate Student in the History Department at Lehigh University. (Twitter: @faithismine51) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Scotland: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Murray Pittock presents an engaging and authoritative history of Scotland’s influence in the world and the world’s on Scotland, from the Thirty Years War to the present day. Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, yet by some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. Neither a colony of England nor a fully equal partner in the British union, Scotland’s history has often been seen as simply a component part of British history. But the story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance—and global consequence. In this wide-ranging, deeply researched account, Murray Pittock examines the place of Scotland in the world. Pittock explores Scotland and Empire, the rise of nationalism, and the pressures on the country from an increasingly monolithic understanding of “Britishness.” From the Thirty Years’ War to Jacobite risings and today’s ongoing independence debates, Scotland and its diaspora have undergone profound changes. This ground-breaking account reveals the diversity of Scotland’s history and shows how, after the country disappeared from the map as an independent state, it continued to build a global brand. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The pirate attack on the British brig Morning Star, en route from Ceylon to London, near Ascension Island in 1828 was one of the most shocking episodes of piracy in the nineteenth century. Although the captain and many members of the crew were murdered by the pirates led by the notorious Benito de Soto, some survived, escaped and sailed the ship back to Britain. Atlantic Piracy in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Shocking Story of the Pirates and the Survivors of the Morning Star (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) by Dr. Sarah Craze is based on extensive original research in Britain, Spain and Brazil. Dr. Craze retells the story of the Morning Star, provides much new detail and corrects errors present in the many contemporary accounts of the attack. She sets the attack in the wider context of piracy in the period, and discusses many issues which the episode highlights: how pirates' careers began and developed; how they were pursued and tried, often with difficulty; what became of their treasure; how stories of the attack and of the survivors were sensationalised; how the women passengers on the ship endured their ordeal at the hands of the pirates and then, back in Britain, had to endure potential loss of their reputations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Drawing on newly released and digitized archival records, Houlihan’s Theatre and Archival Memory: Irish Drama and Marginalised Histories 1951-1977 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) examines a pivotal period of social and cultural change in the history of Irish theatre, offering unique insights into the production and reception of Irish drama, its internationalization and political influences. From the 1950s onwards, Irish theatre engaged audiences within new theatrical forms at venues from the Pike Theatre, the Project Arts Centre, and the Gate Theatre, as well as at Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey. Incorporating the work of overlooked female playwrights like Edna O’Brien, Mary Manning, Carolyn Swift, and Mairead Ni Ghrada, this book argues for an inclusive historiography reflective of the formative impacts of marginalized performance histories upon modern Irish theatre. This study examines these works' experimental dramaturgical impacts in terms of production, reception, and archival legacies. Theatre and Archival Memory is framed by the device of ‘archival memory’ and serves as a means for scholars and theatre-makers to inter-contextualize existing historiography and to challenge canon formation. It also presents a new social history of Irish theatre told from the fringes of history and reanimated through archival memory. Bridget English is a scholar of Irish literature and culture, modernism, and health humanities, based at the University of Illinois Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library and is the Literature Representative for the American Conference for Irish Studies. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities? Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, Josep Fradera's The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton University Press, 2018) offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects. The book argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings. Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
After its founding in 1540 by an aristocrat turned spiritualist turned intellectual, Ignatius of Loyola, the Society of Jesus—or the Jesuits—established itself as one of the most influential and successful of all religious orders. The Jesuits were important in doctrine, politics, missionary work and of course education. At times they have been out of favour in the Vatican but they have produced a Pope too – Pope Francis. Markus Friedrich, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Hamburg, has written The Jesuits: A History (Princeton UP, 2022), a comprehensive and readable history of the Jesuits – it was originally published in 2016 and is now out in an English translation. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them. In a sweeping narrative, The Triumph of Broken Promises (Harvard University Press, 2022) tells the story of how the pressure to break promises spurred the end of the Cold War. In the West, neoliberalism provided Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with the political and ideological tools to shut down industries, impose austerity, and favor the interests of capital over labor. But in Eastern Europe, revolutionaries like Lech Walesa in Poland resisted any attempt at imposing market discipline. Mikhail Gorbachev tried in vain to reform the Soviet system, but the necessary changes ultimately presented too great a challenge. Faced with imposing economic discipline antithetical to communist ideals, Soviet-style governments found their legitimacy irreparably damaged. But in the West, politicians could promote austerity as an antidote to the excesses of ideological opponents, setting the stage for the rise of the neoliberal global economy. Fritz Bartel is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Elijah Del Medigo (1458-1493) was a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher living in Padua, whose work influenced many of the leading philosophers of the early Renaissance. His Two Investigations on the Nature of the Human Soul uses Aristotle's De anima to theorize on two of the most discussed and most controversial philosophical debates of the Renaissance: the nature of human intellect and the obtaining of immortality through intellectual perfection. In this book, Michael Engel places Del Medigo's philosophical work and his ideas about the human intellect within the context of the wider Aristotelian tradition. Providing a detailed account of the unique blend of Hebrew, Islamic, Latin and Greek traditions that influenced the Two Investigations, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism: Investigating the Human Intellect (Bloomsbury, 2016) provides an important contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Aristotelianisms and scholasticisms. In particular, through his defense of the Muslim philosopher Averroes' hotly debated interpretation of the De anima and his rejection of the moderate Latin Aristotelianism championed by the Christian Thomas Aquinas, Engel traces how Del Medigo's work on the human intellect contributed to the development of a major Aristotelian controversy. Investigating the ways in which multicultural Aristotelian sources contributed to his own theory of a united human intellect, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism demonstrates the significant impact made by this Jewish philosopher on the history of the Aristotelian tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Over recent years, the issues of Brexit, COVID and the 'migrant crisis' put Kent in the headlines like never before. Images of asylum seekers on Kent beaches, lorries queued on motorways and the crumbling white cliffs of Dover all spoke to national anxieties, and were used to support ideas that severing ties with the EU was the best - or worst - thing the UK has ever done. In Borderland: Identity and Belonging at the Edge of England (Manchester UP, 2022), Phil Hubbard - an exiled man of Kent - considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on a number of key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman's feted cottage at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history, and archaeology, to pose important questions about the way that national identities emerge from contested local landscapes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
France is a bellwether for the postcolonial anxieties and populist politics emerging across the world today. Postcolonial France: The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic (Pluto Press, 2018) explores the dynamics and dilemmas of the present moment of crisis and hope in France, through an exploration of recent moral panics. Taking stock of the tensions as they have emerged over the last quarter of a century, Paul Silverstein looks at urban racial violence, female Islamic dress and male public prayer, anti-system gangster rap, and sporting performances in and around which debates over France's multicultural future have arisen. It traces these conflicts to the unresolved tensions of an imperial project, the present-day effects of which are still felt by many. Despite the barriers, which include neo-nationalist racism and Islamophobia, French citizens of various backgrounds have found ways to build flourishing lives. Silverstein shows how they have responded to urban marginalisation, police violence and institutional discrimination in remarkably creative ways. Paul Silverstein is Professor of Anthropology at Reed College, USA. He is author of Postcolonial France (Pluto, 2018) and Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Indiana UP, 2004). He writes on identity politics, postcoloniality, and diasporic popular culture in France and North Africa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
One of the earliest modern encyclopedias was printed in France in the 18th century. Unlike many encyclopedias that came before it, this text was written in French instead of Latin, which was the language of the elite. Its authors aimed to compile all the knowledge in the world. They were also trying to disseminate that knowledge to the general public. James Engell is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He has directed dissertations in American Studies and Romance Languages and Literature (French) and is author of The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
'Theory' - a magical glow has emanated from this word since the sixties. Theory was more than just a succession of ideas: it was an article of faith, a claim to truth, a lifestyle. It spread among its adherents in cheap paperbacks and triggered heated debates in seminar rooms and cafés. The Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: these and others were the exotic schools and thinkers whose ideas were being devoured by young minds. But where did the fascination for dangerous thoughts come from? In The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960-1990 (Polity Press, 2021), Philipp Felsch follows the hopes and dreams of a generation that entered the jungle of difficult texts. His setting is West Germany in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s: in a world frozen in the Cold War, movement only came from big ideas. It was the time of apocalyptic master thinkers, upsetting reading experiences and glamorous incomprehensibility. As the German publisher Suhrkamp published Adorno's Minima Moralia and other High Theory works of the Frankfurt School, a small publisher in West Berlin, Merve Verlag, provided readers with a steady stream of the subversive new theory coming out of France. By following the adventures of the publishers who provided the books and the reading communities that consumed and debated them, Philipp Felsch tells the remarkable story of an intellectual revolt when the German Left fell in love with Theory. Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and planning for, the war to continue into 1919, the year they hoped to achieve a complete military victory over the Central Powers. In Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019), Meighen McCrae illuminates how, throughout this planning process, the Supreme War Council evolved to become the predominant mechanism for coalition war-making. She analyses the Council's role in the formulation of an Allied strategy for 1918-1919 across the various theatres of war and compares the perspectives of the British, French, Americans and Italians. In doing so we learn how, in an early example of modern alliance warfare, the Supreme War Council had to coordinate national needs with coalition ones. Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut, an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves, and works in the aerospace industry. Email: alex.beckstrand@uconn.edu Twitter: @AlexBeckstrand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In NATO’s Burden-Sharing Disputes: Past, Present and Future Prospects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Dr. Tommi Koivula & Heljä Ossa argues that burden-sharing is one of the most persisting sources for tension and disagreement within NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation). It also belongs to one of the most studied issues within NATO with distinguishable traditions and schools of thought. However, this pertinent question has been rarely discussed extensively by academics. The key idea of the book is to make burden-sharing more understandable as a historical, contemporary and future phenomenon. The authors take a comprehensive look at what is actually meant with burden-sharing and how it has evolved as a concept and a real-life phenomenon through the 70 years of NATO’s existence. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Manifesto of Futurism was published in 1909, on the front page of Le Figaro, the oldest daily newspaper in France. Its author was Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, a 33-year-old Italian writer who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1876 and was educated in Egypt and France. With his Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti launched a new artistic movement that opposed what he called pastism, the worship of the past. Jeffrey Schnapp is a Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He specializes in Italian language and culture, art, and media. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this podcast, Amy Edwards, author of Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), provides a fascinating journey into her own research and how she built a picture of a key moment of the 20th century. As a result, she brings together different strands of work such as cultural, business, economic and financial history. The book and podcast will be of interest to anyone old enough to remember the 1980s or whose current life has been shaped by that decade. References to other works discussed in the podcast: Allon, Fiona. 2014. "The Feminisation of Finance", Australian Feminist Studies, 29:79, 12-30, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2014.901279 Chatelain, Marcia. 2020. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Liverlight. NBN Interview by Amanda Joyce here. Effosse, Sabine. 2021. “Financial Empowerment for Married Women in France.” Quaderni Storici 166: 117-141. doi: 10.1408/101558
Martínez-Rodríguez, Susana (2022). “DIANA (1969-1978): The First Women´s Finance Magazine in Spain” Feminist Media Studies (early view). NBN Interview by Paula de la Cruz here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The discussion about objects, human remains and archives from former colonial territories is becoming increasingly heated. Over the centuries, a multitude of items – including a cannon of the King of Kandy, power-objects from DR Congo, Benin bronzes, Javanese temple statues, Mori heads and strategic documents – has ended up in museums and private collections in Belgium and the Netherlands by improper means. Since gaining independence, former colonies have been calling for the return of their lost heritage. As continued possession of these objects only grows more uncomfortable, governments and museums must decide what to do. Inconvenient Heritage: Colonial Collections and Restitution in the Netherlands and Belgium (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jos van Beurden asks: How did these objects get here? Are they all looted, and how can we find out? How does restitution work in practice? Are there any appealing examples? How do other former colonial powers deal with restitution? Do former colonies trust their intentions? The book, provided open access, discusses the answers to these questions - which are far from unambiguous, but indispensable for a balanced discussion This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Play is an essential part of childhood. But according to German philosopher Johann Friedrich von Schiller’s treatise “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” play was a key part of adulthood, too. In fact, in this collection of letters, Schiller claimed that the only way we could achieve utopia was by making play a central aspect of society. Professor Doris Sommer is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative. Her books include The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities and Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing the European Union itself. Looked at in broad terms, it has been an astonishingly successful political project, having delivered 70 years of peace and prosperity. But what lies ahead? What issues does it need to tackle to maintain that kind of success? Luuk van Middelaar is a Dutch historian, Professor of EU law at Leiden University. He has worked at the heart of EU institutions and give his observations and analysis of the underlying tensions in the EU and what lies ahead. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In February 1793, in the wake of the War of American Independence and one year after British prime minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands. France thus initiated nearly a quarter century of armed conflict with Britain. During this fraught and still-contested period, historian Nathaniel Jarrett suggests, Pitt and his ministers forged a diplomatic policy and military strategy that envisioned an international system anticipating the Vienna settlement of 1815. Examining Pitt’s foreign policy from 1783 to 1797—the years before and during the War of the First Coalition against Revolutionary France—Jarrett considers a question that has long vexed historians: Did Pitt adhere to the “blue water” school, imagining a globe-trotting navy, or did he favor engagement nearer to shore and on the European Continent? And was this approach grounded in precedent, or was it something new? While acknowledging the complexities within this dichotomy, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, 1783–1797 (U Oklahoma Press, 2022) argues that the prime minister consistently subordinated colonial to continental concerns and pursued a new vision rather than merely honoring past glories. Deliberately, not simply in reaction to the French Revolution, Pitt developed and pursued a grand strategy that sought British security through a novel collective European system—one ultimately realized by his successors in 1815.
The Lion at Dawn opens a critical new perspective on the emergence of modern Britain and its empire and on its early effort to create a stable and peaceful international system, an ideal debated to this day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Robert Edmund Cotter's book John Cennick (1718-1755): Methodism, Moravianism and the Rise of Evangelicalism (Routledge, 2022) explores the life and spirituality of John Cennick (1718-1755) and argues for a new appreciation of the contradictions and complexities in early evangelicalism. It explores Cennick's evangelistic work in Ireland, his relationship with Count Zinzendorf and the creative tension between the Moravian and Methodist elements of his participation in the eighteenth-century revivals. The chapters draw on extensive unpublished correspondence between Cennick and Zinzendorf, as well as Cennick's unique diary of his first stay in the continental Moravian centres of Marienborn, Herrnhaag and Lindheim. A maverick personality, John Cennick is seen at the centre of some of the principal controversies of the time. The trajectory of his emergence as a prominent figure in the revivals is remarkable in its intensity and hybridity and brings into focus a number of themes in the landscape of early evangelicalism: the eclectic nature of its inspirations, the religious enthusiasm nurtured in Anglican societies, the expansion of the pool of preaching talent, the social tensions unleashed by religious innovations, and the particular nature of the Moravian contribution during the 1740s and 1750s. Offering a major re-evaluation of Cennick's spirituality, the book will be of interest to scholars of evangelical and church history. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works of botany underwent a radical change in the English book trade. A genre that was once produced in smaller cheaper formats became lavishly produced, authoritative editions. But as Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2022) shows, the relationships between making, producing, and consuming of botanical and medical knowledge was much more fluid. Today I am discussing this new book with the author Sarah Neville. Sarah Neville is Associate Professor of English and Creative Director of Lord Denney's Players at Ohio State University. Sarah serves as an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare and an associate coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions, as well as the writer/producer/director of the documentary Looking for Hamlet, 1603, available on Youtube. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, Early Theatre, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance (Princeton University Press, 2022), Dr. Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism. Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Dr. Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city’s most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of “Preacher to the Jews” could make a man’s career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available. Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Frankenstein is a name we all know, even for those who haven’t read Mary Shelley’s novel. But the monster you might imagine is quite different from the one Shelley wrote about in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In fact, Shelley’s writing has much more to say about ethics, philosophy, and modern scientific advancement than many ghost story enthusiasts would guess. In this episode, Professor Deidre Lynch discusses the wisdom and warnings found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Deidre Lynch teaches in the English department at Harvard University. Some of her works include Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees and The Economy of Character : Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A new history explores how one of Renaissance Italy's leading cities maintained its influence in an era of global exploration, trade, and empire. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was not an imperial power, but it did harbor global ambitions. After abortive attempts at overseas colonization and direct commercial expansion, as Brian Brege shows, Tuscany followed a different path, one that allowed it to participate in Europe's new age of empire without establishing an empire of its own. The first history of its kind, Tuscany in the Age of Empire (Harvard UP, 2021) offers a fresh appraisal of one of the foremost cities of the Italian Renaissance, as it sought knowledge, fortune, and power throughout Asia, the Americas, and beyond. How did Tuscany, which could not compete directly with the growing empires of other European states, establish a global presence? First, Brege shows, Tuscany partnered with larger European powers. The duchy sought to obtain trade rights within their empires and even manage portions of other states' overseas territories. Second, Tuscans invested in cultural, intellectual, and commercial institutions at home, which attracted the knowledge and wealth generated by Europe's imperial expansions. Finally, Tuscans built effective coalitions with other regional powers in the Mediterranean and the Islamic world, which secured the duchy's access to global products and empowered the Tuscan monarchy in foreign affairs. These strategies allowed Tuscany to punch well above its weight in a world where power was equated with the sort of imperial possessions it lacked. By finding areas of common interest with stronger neighbors and forming alliances with other marginal polities, a small state was able to protect its own security while carving out a space as a diplomatic and intellectual hub in a globalizing Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The 1929 encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland is considered one of the most important intellectual debates of the twentieth century and a founding moment of continental philosophy. At the same time, many commentators have questioned the philosophical profundity and coherence of the actual debate. In Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge UP, 2022), the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the Davos debate, Simon Truwant challenges these critiques. He argues that Cassirer and Heidegger's disagreement about the meaning of Kant's philosophy is motivated by their different views about the human condition, which in turn are motivated by their opposing conceptions of what the task of philosophy ultimately should be. Truwant shows that Cassirer and Heidegger share a grand philosophical concern: to comprehend and aid the human being's capacity to orient itself in and towards the world. Simon Truwant is FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven. He is the editor of Interpreting Cassirer: Critical Essays and has published articles in journals including Idealistic Studies, and International Journal of Philosophical Studies. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are calling for a reengagement with the natural sciences. Taking their cues from recent breakthroughs in genetics and the neurosciences, advocates of “big history” are reassessing long-held assumptions about the very definition of history, its methods, and its evidentiary base. In Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2021), Elena Aronova maps out historians’ continuous engagement with the methods, tools, values, and scale of the natural sciences by examining several waves of their experimentation that surged highest at perceived times of trouble, from the crisis-ridden decades of the early twentieth century to the ruptures of the Cold War. The book explores the intertwined trajectories of six intellectuals and the larger programs they set in motion: Henri Berr (1863–1954), Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938), Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943), Julian Huxley (1887–1975), and John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971). Though they held different political views, spoke different languages, and pursued different goals, these thinkers are representative of a larger motley crew who joined the techniques, approaches, and values of science with the writing of history, and who created powerful institutions and networks to support their projects. In tracing these submerged stories, Aronova reveals encounters that profoundly shaped our knowledge of the past, reminding us that it is often the forgotten parts of history that are the most revealing. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Siobhra Aiken teaches in the Department of Irish and Celtic Studies at Queens University Belfast. Her research interests include modernist Irish-language poetry; twentieth-century Irish-language literature; the Gaelic Revival in the United States, and 'trauma' and emigration during the Irish Revolution (1916–23). In this interview she discusses his new book Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War (Irish Academic Press, 2022), a study of trauma, memory and forgetting in memoirs and literature of the Irish Civil War Spiritual Wounds challenges the widespread belief that the contentious events of the Irish Civil War (1922–23) were covered in a total blanket of silence. The book uncovers an archive of published testimonies by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, written in both English and Irish. Most of the testimonies discussed were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, and nearly all have been overlooked in historical study to date. Revolutionaries went to great lengths to testify to the ‘spiritual wounds’ of civil war: they adopted fictionalised disguises, located their writings in other places or periods of time, and found shelter behind pen names. This wealth of published testimony reveals that the silence of the Irish Civil War was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries’ inability to speak, but rather reflects the unwillingness of official memory makers to listen to the stories of civil war veterans. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paolo Squatriti asks: Why did weeds matter in the Carolingian empire? What was their special significance for writers in eighth- and ninth-century Europe and how was this connected with the growth of real weeds? In early medieval Europe, unwanted plants that persistently appeared among crops created extra work, reduced productivity, and challenged theologians who believed God had made all vegetation good. For the first time, in this book weeds emerge as protagonists in early medieval European history, driving human farming strategies and coloring people's imagination. Early medieval Europeans' effort to create agroecosystems that satisfied their needs and cosmologies that confirmed Christian accounts of vegetable creation both had to come to terms with unruly plants. Using diverse kinds of texts, fresh archaeobotanical data, and even mosaics, this interdisciplinary study reveals how early medieval Europeans interacted with their environments. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Beyond Exclusion: Intersections of Ethnicity, Sex, and Society Under English Law in Medieval Ireland (Brepols, 2022) offers a fresh look at the legal status of minorities in English Ireland. Through a detailed analysis of case studies gleaned from medieval court rolls, Stephen Hewer challenges the prevailing narrative of wholesale ethnic discrimination and presents a nuanced picture of intersectional identities, strategies of negotiation, and evolving tensions between legal principle and practice. The notion that all Gaelic peoples were immediately and ipso facto denied access to the English royal courts in Ireland, upon the advent of the English in 1167, has become so accepted in academic and popular histories of Ireland that it is no longer questioned. This book tackles this narrative of absolute ethnic discrimination in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English Ireland on the basis of a thorough re-examination of the Irish plea rolls. A forensic study of these records reveals a great deal of variation in how members of various ethnic groups and women who came before the royal courts in Ireland were treated. Specifically, it demonstrates the existence of a large, and hitherto scarcely noticed, population of Gaels with regular and unimpeded access to English law, identifiable as Gaelic either through explicit ethnic labelling in the records or implicitly through their naming practices. Dr. Margaret Smith is a historian of medieval Ireland and Research Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process. In Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance. Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Dr. Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Dr. Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration. Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions. Julia Walker's Berlin Contemporary: Architecture and Politics After 1990 (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin's political and architectural “rebuilding”-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On this episode we have Michael Grenke (St. Johns University) who wrote the introduction to Lise Van Boxel's Warspeak: Nietzsche's Victory Over Nihilism (Political Animal Press, 2020). A comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche's thought, guided by the problem and task that Nietzsche himself identified as the heart of his own life' work: nihilism and the need to overcome it. Warspeak centers on a focused reading of Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morality, driven and ordered by the three major themes Nietzsche used to structure his attack on nihilism and to lay the foundation for his life-affirming counter-ideal: the moral-theological prejudice, the genealogical method, and utilitarianism. Van Boxel tracks the emergence of a new human type in Nietzsche's work, and explains how this represents a victory over nihilism and a more hopeful future for humanity. Provocatively, the book expresses a distinctly feminine conception of philosophy, as a necessary corrective to the excessively masculine form of earlier philosophy. Like Nietzsche's own writing, Warspeak defies traditional academic categories, dealing with poetry, literature, science, politics, and philosophy, in a style that is sometimes analytical and sometimes literary. Threaded through the book as a whole is a novel-like account of the evolution of the latest, most vital human life-form as Nietzsche understands it. Warspeak is the culmination of van Boxel's lifelong study of Nietzsche. A challenging book, by a singular thinker, that boldly confronts the central riddle of Nietzsche's thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Atlantic has borne witness to major historic events that have drastically shaped humanity with each crossing of its path. In A Brief History of the Atlantic (Robinson, 2022), Jeremy Black takes the reader through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world. Black discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such as those bravest to attempt to cross the ocean before Columbus, the beginnings of slavery from 1400-1600, the struggle for control between empires in the 1600s, the way technology adapted with steamships to telegraph cables, the battle of the Falkland, and the Cold War. Black also touches on the Atlantic we know today, and the struggles it faces due to urgent global issues including climate change, pollution, and the trials of the economic rise in the Indo-Pacific world. If you have ever yearned to know more about this famed and vital ocean, this clear and concise history will be a key read as one of the first of its kind on its evolution to becoming an established world ocean. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
By the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The end of this Golden Age was also an era of natural disasters. Between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch communities weathered numerous calamities, including river and coastal floods, cattle plagues, and an outbreak of strange mollusks that threatened the literal foundations of the Republic. Adam Sundberg’s new book, Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge UP, 2022), demonstrates that these disasters emerged out of longstanding changes in environment and society. They were also fundamental to the Dutch experience and understanding of eighteenth-century decline. Disasters provoked widespread suffering, but they also opened opportunities to retool management strategies, expand the scale of response, and to reconsider the ultimate meaning of catastrophe. This book reveals a dynamic and often resilient picture of a society coping with calamity at odds with historical assessments of eighteenth-century stagnation. Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
You think you know British Rail. But you don't know the whole story. Now, award-winning writer Christian Wolmar provides a new perspective on national loss in a time of privatisation in British Rail: A New History (Michael Joseph, 2022). From its creation after the Second World War, through its fifty-year lifetime, British Rail was an innovative powerhouse that transformed our transport system. Uniting disparate lines into a highly competent organisation - heralding 'The Age of the Train' - and, for a time, providing one of the fastest regular rail services in the world. Born into post-war austerity, traumatised, impoverished and exploited by a hostile press, the state-owned railway was dismissed as a dinosaur unable to evolve, and swept away by a government hellbent on selling it off. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is holding the oceans back from entirely flooding the earth? While a twenty-first century thinker may approach the answer to this question within a framework of gravity and geologic deep-time, Lindsay Starkey demonstrates in her monograph, Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond: Redefining the Universe Through Natural Philosophy, Religious Reformations, and Sea Voyaging (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) how thinkers from antiquity to the sixteen-century held their own beliefs explaining the complex relation between dry land and water. After providing a detailed intellectual genealogy connecting the Early Modern Period with antiquity based on the transmission of knowledge through bookish methods, Starkey provides an extensively researched analysis explaining how and why perspectives and concerns about water began shifting in the sixteenth century due to sea voyages that revised medieval speculation about geographic composition of land-mass and oceans in the southern hemisphere. As we join the bookish lineage with Encountering Water in Early Modern Europe and Beyond please enjoy the episode not just for the incredible insight into the past, but to use as an opportunity to reconsider our current water crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Trump’s voters. The yellow jackets in France. Putin’s base in Russia. The Brexiteers. One thing all these groups have in common is anger – anger at being left behind, anger about de industrialization, anger at the arrogance and wealth of the elite. But what more can be said about the nature of that anger and the different aspects of it? In Angrynomics (Agenda Publishing, 2020) Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan address this question. Today I talked to Blyth, a professor of political economy at Brown University. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Harvey Graff's pioneering study presents a new and original interpretation of the place of literacy in nineteenth-century society and culture. Based upon an intensive comparative historical analysis, employing both qualitative and quantitative techniques, and on a wide range of sources, The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century (Transaction, 1991; new edition Routledge, 2017) reevaluates the role typically assigned to literacy in historical scholarship, cultural understanding, economic development schemes, and social doctrines and ideologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts, Decolonising the Conrad Canon (Liverpool UP, 2022) shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad's lesser-known works - breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels - and traces the female characters who voice them off the page and into their transmedia (digital/illustrative/cinematic) afterlives. From Immada and Edith's queer gaze in The Rescue and the periodical illustrations that accompanied its initial serialization, to Aïssa's sustained critique of imperialism in An Outcast of the Islands and her portrayal on mass-market paperback book covers, to the structural female bonds of Almayer's Folly and Nina's embodiment in Chantal Akerman's adaptation La Folie Almayer, this book centres Conrad's female characters as viable, meaning-making citizens of the canon. Through this intervention, Decolonising the Conrad Canon proposes an innovative model for teaching, reading and studying not just Joseph Conrad's work but the colonial literary canon more broadly. Dr. Alice Kelly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the Cold War, the People's Republic of China used Switzerland as headquarters for its economic, political, intelligence, and cultural networks in Europe. Based on extensive research in Western and Chinese archives, China's European Headquarters: Switzerland and China during the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Ariane Knüsel charts not only how Switzerland came to play this role, but also how Chinese networks were built in practice, often beyond the public face of official proclamations and diplomatic interactions. By tracing the development of Sino-Swiss relations in the Cold War, Dr. Knüsel sheds new light on the People's Republic of China's formulation and implementation of foreign policy in Europe, Latin America and Africa and Switzerland's efforts to align neutrality, humanitarian engagement, and economic interests. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Castle: A History (Yale University Press, 2022) Dr. John Goodall presents a vibrant history of the castle in Britain, from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The castle has long had a pivotal place in British life, associated with lordship, landholding, and military might, and today it remains a powerful symbol of history. But castles have never been merely impressive fortresses—they were hubs of life, activity, and imagination. Dr. John Goodall weaves together the history of the British castle across the span of a millennium, from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, through the voices of those who witnessed it. Drawing on chronicles, poems, letters, and novels, including the work of figures like Gawain Poet, Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse, Dr. Goodall explores the importance of the castle in our culture and society. From the medieval period to Civil War engagements, right up to modern manifestations in Harry Potter, Dr. Goodall reveals that the castle has always been put to different uses, and to this day continues to serve as a source of inspiration. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), Itay Lotem explores the remembering of empire in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicized public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities. Itay Lotem earned his Ph.D at the University of London, Queen Mary and is currently a senior lecturer in French Studies at the University of Westminster. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021), Nina Gelbart, Professor of History and Anita Johnson Wand Professor of Women’s Studies at Occidental College, shares the stories of six, incredibly resourceful, and dedicated women who contributed substantially to the sciences of their time. While offering valuable comments on the challenges of writing gender-inclusive histories of science, the book restores the legacies of the mathematician Elisabeth Ferrand, the astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, the botanists Jeanne Barret and Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, the anatomist Marie-Marguerite Bihéron, and the chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville. Minerva’s French Sisters also reads as the personal journey of an historian looking for lost evidence and piecing together traces to offer a unique vision of the Enlightenment sciences through the lens of these women. Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There is only one surviving copy of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, but its story continues to haunt us. When 12th-century monk Thomas of Monmouth learned of a young boy’s murder in his community, he accused his Jewish neighbors of the heinous crime. Over the course of two decades, he wrote a seven-volume conspiracy theory, building out the accusation and cementing it in history. Stanford professor Rowan Dorin discusses the book’s creation and its challenging legacy. Rowan Dorin is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community.The waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of writers—Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul—to trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to an empire that did not belong to them.Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out of place with the realities of imperial decline, in turn figures in their writings as a repository of unconsummated attachments, contradictory desires, and belated exchanges. Their works arrest the linear progression from colonial to postcolonial, from empire to nation, and from subject to citizen. Drawing on a rich body of scholarship on affect and temporality, Tsang demonstrates how the British empire endures as a structure of desire that outlived its political lifespan. By showing how literary reading sets in motion a tense interplay of intimacy and exclusion, Tsang investigates a unique mode of belonging arising from the predicament of being conscripted into a global empire but not desired as its proper citizen. Ultimately, The Obsolete Empire asks: What does it mean to be inside or outside any given culture? How do large-scale geopolitical changes play out at the level of cultural attachment and political belonging? How does literary reading establish or unsettle narratives of who we are? These questions preoccupied writers across Britain's former empire and continue to resonate today. Dr. Philip Tsang is Assistant Professor at Colorado State University. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futurist novel inspired everyday adventurers to traverse the globe by boat, train, bike, and foot—and beat his protagonist’s record. Harvard professor Joyce Chaplin discusses what we can learn from Jules Verne’s classic novel. Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She is the author of Round About The Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Italian Empire and the Great War (Oxford UP, 2021) by Vanda Wilcox brings an imperial and colonial perspective to the Italian experience of the First World War. Italy's decision for war in 1915 built directly on Italian imperial ambitions from the late nineteenth century onwards, and its conquest of Libya in 1911–12. The Italian empire was conceived both as a system of overseas colonies under Italian sovereignty, and as an informal global empire of emigrants; both were mobilized to support the war in 1915–18. The war was designed to bring about 'a greater Italy' both literally and metaphorically. In pursuit of global status, Italy fought a global war, sending troops to the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East, though with limited results. Italy's newest colony, Libya, was also a theatre of the war effort, as the anti-colonial resistance there linked up with the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Austria to undermine Italian rule. Italian race theories underpinned this expansionism: the book examines how Italian constructions of whiteness and racial superiority informed a colonial approach to military occupation in Europe as well as the conduct of its campaigns in Africa. After the war, Italy's failures at the Peace Conference meant that the 'mutilated victory' was an imperial as well as a national sentiment. Events in Paris are analysed alongside the military occupations in the Balkans and Asia Minor as well as efforts to resolve the conflicts in Libya, to assess the rhetoric and reality of Italian imperialism. Lastly, Vanda has answered a few questions about Italy in the war and General Cadorna. Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Covering the pivotal period from the mid-seventeenth century through the era of the French Revolution, Christy Pichichero's The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Cornell University Press, 2018; paperback ed. 2020) is a fascinating interdisciplinary study that pushes us to rethink our ideas about both the military and the Enlightenment in and beyond a a France that was a global, as well as a continental European imperial power. As Pichichero shows, the (long) eighteenth century holds the key to our understanding historical concepts and transformations that we tend to associate with later developments in military thought and practice, from conventions around "good" and "humane" conflict to ideas about community and civility between soldiers fighting together and on opposing sides. The book's five chapters explore a broad range of compelling events and sources, from the work of well known Enlightenment thinkers and authors such as Voltaire and Choderlos de Laclos, to military manuals and debates regarding how wars would and should be waged, how soldiers should be trained to think and act in battle. Now available in a new paperback edition, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in the longue durée of military culture and warfare, as well as those with an interest in all that the Enlightenment did and could mean. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire.She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kimberly Anne Coles is Professor of English at the University of Maryland; her first book, Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Today, we are discussing Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. In Bad Humor, Professor Coles charts how concerns around lineage, religion and nation converged around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination. Professor Coles delineates the process whereby religious error, first resident in the body, becomes marked on the skin. Early modern medical theory bound together psyche and soma in mutual influence. By the end of the sixteenth century, there is a general acceptance that the soul's condition, as a consequence of religious belief or its absence, could be manifest in the humoral disposition of the physical body. The history that this book unfolds describes developments in natural philosophy in the early part of the sixteenth century that force a subsequent reconsideration of the interactions of body and soul and that bring medical theory and theological discourse into close, even inextricable, contact. With particular consideration to how these ideas are reflected in texts by Elizabeth Cary, John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, and others, Professor Coles reveals how science and religion meet nascent capitalism and colonial endeavor to create a taxonomy of Christians in Black and White. John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Charles, First Marquis of Cornwallis (1738-1805), was a leading figure in late eighteenth-century Britain. His career spanned the American War of Independence, Irish Union, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the building of the Second British Empire in India--and he has long been associated with the unacceptable face of Britain's colonial past. In Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World (Yale UP, 2022), Richard Middleton shows that this portrait is far from accurate. Cornwallis emerges as a reformer who had deep empathy for those under his authority, and was clear about his obligation to govern justly. He sought to protect the population of Bengal with a constitution of written laws, insisted on Catholic emancipation in Ireland, and recognized the limitations of British power after the American war. Middleton reveals how Cornwallis' rewarding of merit, search for economy, and elimination of corruption helped improve the machinery of British government into the nineteenth century. Richard Middleton is an independent scholar and was formerly associate professor of American history at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of The Bells of Victory, Colonial America, Pontiac's War, and The War of American Independence. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it become possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community. The Pursuit of Europe: A History (Oxford UP, 2022) tells the story of the evolution of the "European project", from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a "Concert of Europe", right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need to find an answer to this question became more acute after two world wars had shown that if the nations of Europe were to continue to play a role in the world they could now only do so together. To achieve that, however, they had to be prepared to merge their zealously-guarded sovereign powers into a new form of trans-national constitutionalism. This the European Union has tried to do. In the process it has created not, as its enemies have claimed, a "super-state" but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a common body of values and aspirations. It is this, argues Anthony Pagden, that will allow the Union to defeat its political enemies from within, and to overcome the difficulties, from mass migration to the pandemic, which it faces from without. But it will only succeed in doing so if it also continues to evolve as it has over the past two centuries. Anthony Pagden is Professor of Political Science and History, at The University of California, Los Angeles. He was educated in Chile, Spain, and France, and at Oxford. In the past two decades, he has been the reader in intellectual history at Cambridge, a fellow of King's College, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The crossbow is an iconic weapon of the Middle Ages and, alongside the longbow, one of the most effective ranged weapons of the pre-gunpowder era. Unfortunately, despite its general fame it has been decades since an in-depth history of the medieval crossbow has been published, which is why Dr. Stuart Ellis-Gorman’s detailed, accessible, and highly illustrated book The Medieval Crossbow: A Weapon Fit to Kill a King (Pen & Sword, 2022) is so valuable. The book approaches the history of the crossbow from two directions. The first is a technical study of the design and construction of the medieval crossbow, the many different kinds of crossbows used during the Middle Ages, and finally a consideration of the relationship between crossbows and art. The second half of the book explores the history of the crossbow, from its origins in ancient China to its decline in sixteenth-century Europe. Along the way it explores the challenges in deciphering the crossbow’s early medieval history as well as its prominence in warfare and sport shooting in the High and Later Middle Ages. This fascinating book brings together the work of a wide range of accomplished crossbow scholars and incorporates the author’s own original research to create an account of the medieval crossbow that will appeal to anyone looking to gain an insight into one of the most important weapons of the Middle Ages. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external public finance offered emerging nations endless opportunities to overcome barriers to growth, but it also enabled rulers to bypass critical stages in institution building and political development. Pawned States: State Building in the Era of International Finance (Princeton University Press, 2022)' reveals how easy access to foreign lending at early stages of state building has led to chronic fiscal instability and weakened state capacity in the developing world. Drawing on a wealth of original data to document the rise of cheap overseas credit between 1816 and 1913, Didac Queralt shows how countries in the global periphery obtained these loans by agreeing to “extreme conditionality,” which empowered international investors to take control of local revenue sources in cases of default, and how foreclosure eroded a country’s tax base and caused lasting fiscal disequilibrium. Queralt goes on to combine quantitative analysis of tax performance between 1816 and 2005 with qualitative historical analysis in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, illustrating how overreliance on external capital by local leaders distorts their incentives to expand tax capacity, articulate power-sharing institutions, and strengthen bureaucratic apparatus. Panoramic in scope, Pawned States sheds needed light on how early and easy access to external finance pushes developing nations into trajectories characterized by fragile fiscal institutions and autocratic politics. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jeff Hayton's book Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West Germany (Oxford UP, 2022) is a cultural history of punk in Germany. The manuscript tracks “the advent and growth of punk in divided Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, and the social and political responses to the subculture” (23). These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating toward individual and cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity—endeavors considered to be more “real” and “genuine.” Punk, however, was a foreign import and the way Germans in both East and West adapted it to their own local needs, and the divergent, yet surprisingly connected history of punk in both Germanies tell us much about German history and society in the 1980s. Culture from the Slums makes two broad claims. First, Hayton argues “punk was a medium for alternative living and a motor for social change.” (8) Much more than simply a waypoint on the narrative of progress that supposedly led from 1968 towards unification and beyond, it was an important social and musical movement. Second, through a comparative analysis of the subculture, Hayton argues that punk helps explain why West Germany flourished and why East Germany collapsed. Punk by the 1980s ceased to function as an instrument of difference in the west as it entered the mainstream, but the DDR never was able to control punk. Hayton examines the roles which punk played in German politics, society, and culture, and how German contexts transformed punk. Put differently: this study is about punk in Germany, and Germany in punk” (9) Culture from the Slums suggests that the ideas, practices, and communities which came out of Punk transformed both German societies along more diverse and ultimately democratic lines. The book is an important contribution to the growing scholarship of punk, which so far has been overwhelmingly focused on Anglo-American developments. Using a wealth of previously untapped archival documentation, the book integrates punk culture and music subculture into broader narratives of postwar inquiry and explains how punk rock shaped a divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Prevail until the Bitter End: Germans in the Waning Years of World War II (Cornell UP, 2021), Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises. But even in retreat, the militarized national community unleashed ferocious energies, staving off defeat for over two years and continuing a systematic murder campaign against European Jews and others. Was its faith in the Führer never shaken by the prospect of ultimate defeat? Lohse uncovers how Germans experienced life and death, investigates how mounting emergency conditions affected their understanding of the nature and purpose of the conflagration, and shows how these factors influenced the people's relationship with the Nazi regime. She draws on Nazi morale and censorship reports, features citizens' private letters and diaries, and incorporates a large body of Allied intelligence, including several thousand transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations among German prisoners of war in Western Allied captivity. Lohse's historical reconstruction helps us understand how ordinary Germans interpreted their experiences as both the victims and perpetrators of extreme violence. We are immersively drawn into their desolate landscape: walking through bombed-out streets, scrounging for food, burning furniture, listening furtively to Allied broadcasts, unsure where the truth lies. Prevail until the Bitter End is about the stories that Germans told themselves to make sense of this world in crisis. Lea H. Greenberg is a scholar of German and Yiddish literature and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Knox College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Skye C. Cleary is a philosopher, writer and university teacher. In her new book How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) offers an introduction to Beauvoir’s thinking about authenticity and how experience and situation shape the people we become. For Beauvoir, as an existential philosopher, we first exist and spend our lives not uncovering who we are but constructing our identity. Authenticity is the pursuit of self-creation and self-renewal. Under patriarchy women receive a set of myths that stand in the way of taking responsibility for our freedom. Through the experiences and the milestones of friendship, love, marriage, children and confronting death we have opportunity to choose who we will become. Because we live in interdependence with others, Beauvoir’s philosophy of the self and genuine living allows others to also achieve freedom in self-creation through reciprocity. Cleary has given us a lively written book drawing not only from Beauvoir’s life but her own experience in self-creation. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the cultural and intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton UP, 2019) explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. Bringing together eminent scholars, this landmark essay collection compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods. The contributors indicate that the middle class was from its very beginning, even in Europe, the result of international connections and entanglements. Essays are grouped into six thematic sections: the political history of middle-class formation, the impact of imperial rule on the colonial middle class, the role of capitalism, the influence of religion, the obstacles to the middle class beyond the Western and colonial world, and, lastly, reflections on the creation of bourgeois cultures and global social history. Placing the establishment of middle-class society into historical context, this book shows how the triumph or destabilization of bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility (Cornell UP, 2022) relates narratives of Athenians struggling to survive the impoverishment of relentless austerity measures, compounding emergencies, and human disasters of successive national crises in Greece since 2010. Drawing on eight years of fieldwork, Othon Alexandrakis examines the effects of injury, erosion, and upheaval on individuals already pushed beyond their limits but holding on against all odds. Through analysis of everyday scenes across different social locations in the city, he documents the often slow, difficult work of picking up the pieces of one's life and moving them around—and the worlds that fade and the ones that become visible in the process. He shares the stories of a disillusioned anarchist organizer, an exhausted nurse helping a father search for his lost daughter, a misunderstood Romani man rejected by his friends and family, and an undocumented migrant who discovers hope in the trash—stories of individuals finding solace and possibility within, with, and against the tragedies of their lives. Alexandrakis shows how these stories lead to a potentially transformative coming to resilience. In Radical Resilience, Alexandrakis traces the bare edges of radical possibility from within the efforts of those continuing on beyond their limits. Othon Alexandrakis is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. He is the editor of Impulse to Act. Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Maeve Ryan’s new book Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System (Yale UP, 2022) highlights Britain’s early-nineteenth-century, Royal Navy seizures of slave ships and the processes involved in the “liberation” of these enslaved Africans. Nearly two hundred thousand Africans were resettled throughout the British Empire from Sierra Leone to St Helena, the British West Indies, and by treaties to Cuba and Brazil. From 1808 to the end of the Atlantic slave trade, abolitionists attempted to bring relief to these “liberated” Africans. Yet, the needs of Empire often clashed with the moral ideals of abolitionism creating then a “benevolent despotism.” Ryan’s work highlights these imperial experiments across time and the Atlantic and the manifestations of this resettlement. Ryan expertly claims that what Britain did during this period is the beginning ruminations “Humanitarian Governance”; that the evolution of what we today consider humanitarian relief has at its roots this “anti slavery mother.” Back then, the process of liberating Africans from the condition of slavery looked remarkably like slavery itself. But, this humanitarianism was – as Ryan puts it – “a new phenomenon.” Abolitionism evolved as did the processes of humanitarian relief. Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Medieval and Renaissance Cyprus was a fascinating place of ethnic, cultural, and religious encounters. Following almost nine centuries of Byzantine rule, Cyprus was conquered by the Crusaders in 1191, becoming (until 1571) the most important stronghold of Latin Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean—first under the Frankish dynasty of the Lusignans, and later under the Venetians. Modern historiographical readings of Cypriot identity in medieval and early modern times have been colored by British colonialism, Greek nationalism, and Cyprocentric revisionism. Although these perspectives have offered valuable insights into the historical experience of Latin-ruled Cypriots, they have partially failed to capture the dynamics of non-coercive resistance to domination, and of identity preservation and adaptation. Orthodox Cyprus under the Latins, 1191–1571 (Lexington Books, 2018) readdresses the question of Cypriot identity by focusing on the Greek Cypriots, the island’s largest community during the medieval and early modern period. By bringing together theories from the fields of psychology, social anthropology, and sociology, this study explores continuities and discontinuities in the Byzantine culture and religious tradition of Cyprus, proposing a new methodological framework for a more comprehensive understanding of Cypriot Orthodoxy under Crusader and Venetian rule. A discussion of fresh evidence from hitherto unpublished primary sources enriches this examination, stressing the role of medieval and Renaissance Cyprus as cultural and religious province of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Orthodox world. Chrysovalantis Kyriacou (Ph.D.) is a lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at the Theological School at the church of Cyprus. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, and has also taught at the University of Cyprus. His area of specialty is late antique, Byzantine, medieval, and early modern history and culture, focusing on the role of Cyprus as a place of ethnoreligious encounter, interaction, and contention. Evan Zarkadas (MA) is an independent scholar of European and Medieval history and an educator. He received his master’s in history from the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land During the British Civil Wars (Manchester UP, 2020), Dr. David Brown examines the transformation of England's trade and government finances in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution that destroyed Ireland. In 1642 a small group of merchants, the 'Adventurers for Irish land', raised an army to conquer Ireland but sent it instead to fight for parliament in England. Meeting secretly at Grocers Hall in London from 1642 to 1660, they laid the foundations of England's empire and modern fiscal state. But a dispute over their Irish land entitlements led them to reject Cromwell's Protectorate and plot to restore the monarchy. This is the first book to chart the relentless rise of the Adventurers and their profound political influence. It is essential reading for students of Britain and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, the origins of England's empire and the Cromwellian land settlement. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Spoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca--its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "rise of English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign colleagues. Business interests can flourish in the global economy. But the rise of English has very real downsides at times generating intense legal conflicts. In Europe, imperatives of political integration, job mobility, and university rankings compete with pride in national language and heritage as countries like France attempt to curb its spread. In countries like India, South Africa, Morocco, and Rwanda, it has stratified society along lines of English proficiency and devalued commonly spoken languages. In Anglophone countries like the United States and England, English isolates us from the cultural and economic benefits of speaking other languages. In The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language (Oxford University Press, 2021), Dr. Rosemary Salomone offers a commanding view of the unprecedented spread of English and the far-reaching effects it has on global and local politics, economics, media, education, and business. From the inner workings of the European Union to China's use of language as "soft power" in Africa, Salomone draws on a wealth of research to tell the complex story of English--and, ultimately, to argue for English not as a force for domination but as a core component of multilingualism and the transcendence of linguistic and cultural borders. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The era of modern warfare introduced in World War II presented the Allied Powers with one of the more complicated logistical challenges of the century: how to develop an extensive support network that could supply and maintain a vast military force comprised of multiple services and many different nations thousands of miles away from their home ports. The need to keep tanks rolling, airplanes flying, and food and aid in continuous supply was paramount to defeating the Nazi regime. In War of Supply: World War II Allied Logistics in the Mediterranean (University Press of Kentucky, 2022), Dr. David Dworak takes readers behind the scenes and breaks down the nuances of strategic operations for each of the great Mediterranean military campaigns between 1942 and the conclusion of World War II on May 8, 1945. Dr. Dworak gives readers a glimpse behind the curtain, to show how the vast administrative bureaucracy developed by the Allies waged a literal "war of matériel" that gave them a distinct, strategic advantage over the Axis powers. From North Africa to Southern France, their continued efforts and innovation developed the framework that helped create and maintain the theater of war and, ultimately, paved the path to victory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From the creator of UlyssesGuide.com, The Guide to James Joyce's Ulysses (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) weaves together plot summaries, interpretive analyses, scholarly perspectives, and historical and biographical context to create an easy-to-read, entertaining, and thorough review of Ulysses. In The Guide to James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' Patrick Hastings provides comprehensive support to readers of Joyce's magnum opus by illuminating crucial details and reveling in the mischievous genius of this unparalleled novel. Written in a voice that offers encouragement and good humor, this guidebook maintains a closeness to the original text and supports the first-time reader of Ulysses with the information needed to successfully finish and appreciate the novel. Deftly weaving together spirited plot summaries, helpful interpretive analyses, scholarly criticism, and explanations of historical and biographical context, Hastings makes Joyce's famously intimidating novel-one that challenges the conventions and limits of language-more accessible and enjoyable than ever before. He unpacks each chapter of Ulysses with episode guides, which offer pointed and readable explanations of what occurs in the text. He also deals adroitly with many of the puzzles Joyce hoped would "keep the professors busy for centuries." Full of practical resources-including maps, explanations of the old British system of money, photos of places and things mentioned in the text, annotated bibliographies, and a detailed chronology of Bloomsday (June 16, 1904-the single day on which Ulysses is set)-this is an invaluable first resource about a work of art that celebrates the strength of spirit required to endure the trials of everyday existence. The Guide to James Joyce's 'Ulysses' is perfect for anyone undertaking a reading of Joyce's novel, whether as a student, a member of a reading group, or a lover of literature finally crossing this novel off the bucket list.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Joy Wiltenburg's book Laughing Histories: From the Renaissance Man to the Woman of Wit (Routledge, 2022) breaks new ground by exploring moments of laughter in early modern Europe, showing how laughter was inflected by gender and social power. "I dearly love a laugh," declared Jane Austen's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her wit won the heart of the aristocratic Mr. Darcy. Yet the widely read Earl of Chesterfield asserted that only "the mob" would laugh out loud; the gentleman should merely smile. This literary contrast raises important historical questions: how did social rules constrain laughter? Did the highest elites really laugh less than others? How did laughter play out in relations between the sexes? Through fascinating case studies of individuals such as the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, the French aristocrat Madame de Sévigné, and the rising civil servant and diarist Samuel Pepys, Laughing Histories reveals the multiple meanings of laughter, from the court to the tavern and street, in a complex history that paved the way for modern laughter. With its study of laughter in relation to power, aggression, gender, sex, class, and social bonding, Laughing Histories is perfect for readers interested in the history of emotions, cultural history, gender history, and literature. Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 (Cornell University Press, 2022), Dr. Christina Carroll highlights the connections between domestic political struggles and overseas imperial structures. She explains how and why French Republicans embraced colonial conquest as a central part of their political platform. The book explores the meaning and value of empire in late-nineteenth-century France, arguing that ongoing disputes about the French state's political organization intersected with racialized beliefs about European superiority over colonial others in French imperial thought. For much of this period, French writers and politicians did not always differentiate between continental and colonial empire. By employing a range of sources—from newspapers and pamphlets to textbooks and novels—Dr. Carroll demonstrates that the memory of older continental imperial models shaped French understandings of, and justifications for, their new colonial empire. She shows that the slow identification of the two types of empire emerged due to a politicized campaign led by colonial advocates who sought to defend overseas expansion against their opponents. This new model of colonial empire was shaped by a complicated set of influences, including political conflict, the legacy of both Napoleons, international competition, racial science, and French experiences in the colonies. The Politics of Imperial Memory in France, 1850–1900 skillfully weaves together knowledge from its wide-ranging source base to articulate how the meaning and history of empire became deeply intertwined with the meaning and history of the French nation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato says, “I pray thee peace; I will be flesh and blood. / For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently, / However they have writ the style of gods / And make a push at chance and sufferance.” These lines serve as the inspiration for the title of a new book from today’s guest, Donovan Sherman. The Philosopher's Toothache: Embodied Stoicism in Early Modern English Drama, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. Donovan is a Professor of English at Seton Hall University; his previous book is Second Death: Theatricalities of the Soul in Shakespeare’s Drama (2016), from Edinburgh University Press. The Philosopher’s Toothache is a meditation on conceptual latticing of early modern theatre and the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Writers explored in the book range from James I to Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule (Grosvenor House, 2015) is a fascinating and gripping examination of birth, sex and abuse during the Nazi era. Dr Chalmers’ unique lens on the Holocaust provides a stunning and controversial exposé of the voices of both Jewish and non-Jewish women living under Nazi rule. Based on twelve years of study, the book takes an inter-disciplinary view incorporating women’s history, Holocaust studies, social sciences and medicine, in a unique, cutting-edge examination of what women themselves said, thought and did. Dr Chalmers (DSc(Med);PhD) has dedicated her life to studying women’s experiences of giving birth in difficult social, political, economic and religious environments. During her distinguished academic career, she has held professorial appointments in both the Medical and Social Sciences and has served, for decades, as a maternal and child health consultant for numerous United Nations and other global aid agencies. Her inter-disciplinary focus and extensive international experience provide a novel perspective on the Nazi era and on the neglected issue of the Nazi abuse of childbearing and sexuality. "This book should be a ‘must’ for everybody dealing with the cruel chapters of the Holocaust, especially for those who are dealing with research about the subject of women and children, and medicine, during the Shoah” (Prof. Dr. Miriam Gillis-Carlebach, Director, The Joseph Carlebach Institute, Bar-Ilan University, Israel). “This book has an utterly unique, in-depth focus on all aspects of sexuality and reproduction during the Nazi regime; the author has written the first-ever, comprehensive tome on the treatment of women and infants that is essential for many disciplines” (Prof. Caroline Pukall, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Director of SexLab and the Sex Therapy Service, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada). Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While it is an overused cliché, France is indeed a land of contrasts, famous for its paradoxes. In French political history, the most startling may be the progressive policies of the Third Republic (1870-1940) on just about everything except for gender. Despite its embrace of the spirit of 1789, universal manhood suffrage, and secularism, the republic deemed French women second class citizens. Indeed, French women did not get the vote until the Fourth Republic in 1944, a full generation after almost every nation-state in the global north. Karen Offen has written an encyclopedic history of French debates about the soi-dissant “Woman Question”. While Dr. Offen’s Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), was the focus of our discussion, we also touched on its companion book, The Woman Question in France, 1400-1870 (Cambridge UP, 2017). Karen Offen earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University. She is currently a historian and independent scholar, affiliated as a Senior Scholar with the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University. Dr. Offen publishes on the history of Modern Europe, especially France and its global influence; Western thought and politics with reference to family, gender, and the relative status of women; historiography; women's history; national, regional and global histories of feminism; comparative history, and the politics of knowledge. She has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for study and research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Niall Whelehan is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, where he focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and themes of migration, political violence, nationalism and radicalism, mainly relating to Ireland and the Irish diapsora. In this interview he discusses his new book Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War (NYU Press, 2021), which examines radical networks in Ireland and Irish migrant communities in Scotland, England, the United States and Argentina, during the Land War of 1879-1882 The Irish Land War represented a turning point in modern Irish history, a social revolution that was part of a broader ideological moment when established ideas of property and land ownership were fundamentally challenged. The Land War was striking in its internationalism, and was spurred by links between different emigrant locations and an awareness of how the Land League’s demands to lower rents, end evictions, and abolish “landlordism” in Ireland connected with wider radical and reform causes. Changing Land offers a new and original study of Irish emigrants’ activism in the United States, Argentina, Scotland, and England and their multifaceted relationships with Ireland. Niall Whelehan brings unfamiliar figures to the surface and recovers the voices of women and men who have been on the margins of, or entirely missing from, existing accounts. Retracing their transnational lives reveals new layers of radical circuitry between Ireland and disparate international locations, and demonstrates how the land movement overlapped with different types of oppositional politics from moderate reform to feminism to revolutionary anarchism. By including Argentina, which was home to the largest Irish community outside the English-speaking world, this book addresses the neglect of developments in non-Anglophone places in studies of the “Irish world.” Changing Land presents a powerful addition to our understanding of the history of modern Ireland and the Irish diaspora, migration, and the history of transnational radicalism. Changing Land is published by New York University Press, as part of their Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A young imperialist adventurer turned hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, Norwegian journalist, poet, and playwright Nordahl Grieg has become more of a national legend than a real person since his death as a war reporter in Berlin in 1943. A look into Grieg’s intellectual development during the dynamic interwar period sheds light on the political and cultural ideologies that competed in a turbulent Europe. Often portrayed with an emphasis on his humanist and pacifist positions, this antifascist figure becomes more complex in his writings, which reveal shifting allegiances, including an unsavory period as a rigid Stalinist. In The Making of an Antifascist: Nordahl Grieg Between the World Wars (U Wisconsin Press, 2022), Dean Krouk examines a significant public figure in Scandinavian literature and a critical period in modern European history through original readings of the political, ethical, and gender issues in Grieg’s works. This volume offers a first-rate analysis of the interwar period’s political and cultural agendas in Scandinavia and Europe leading to the Second World War by examining the rise of fascism, communism, and antifascism. Grieg’s poetry found renewed resonance in Norway following the 2011 far-right domestic terrorist attacks, making insight into his contradictory ideas more crucial than ever. Krouk’s presentation of Grieg’s unexpected ideological tensions will be thought-provoking for many readers in the United States and elsewhere. Nicholas Misukanis is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Maryland - College Park. He studies modern European and Middle Eastern history with a special emphasis on Germany and the role energy autonomy played in foreign and domestic German politics. He is currently working on his dissertation which analyzes why the West German government failed to convince the public to embrace nuclear energy and the ramifications this had on German politics between 1973 and 1986. He can be reached at misukani@umd.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn’t always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. In The Mercenary River: Private Greed, Public Good--A History of London's Water (Headline, 2022), Nick Higham tells the story of that struggle from the middle ages to the present day. Based on new research, Higham tells a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs; but also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics. Among the breakthroughs was the picturesque New River, neither new nor a river but a state of the art aqueduct completed in 1613 and still part of London’s water supply: the company that built it was one of the very first modern business corporations, and also one of the most profitable. London water companies were early adopters of steam power for their pumps. And Chelsea Waterworks was the first in the world to filter the water it supplied its customers: the same technique is still used to purify two-thirds of London’s drinking water. But for much of London’s history water had to be rationed, and the book also chronicles our changing relationship with water and the way we use it. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s guests are Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Anne Coles who have co-edited a special issue of Spenser Studies in 2021, on “Spenser and Race.” Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia; his previous book Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance, was published through Fordham University Press in 2014. Dennis is the former board president of the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. Kim is Professor of English at the University of Maryland; she has published Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England, with Cambridge University Press in 2008; and Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, with the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. We will be discussing the impetus and contributions of this special issue, which features brilliant scholarship by Tess Grogan, Anna Wainwright, Ayanna Thompson, Melissa Sanchez, Eric Song, Urvashi Chakravarty, Ross Lerner, Andrew Hadfield, Thomas Herron, and Benedict Robinson. John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Alexandra M. Apolloni is about how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined—and sometimes defied—ideas about what it meant to be a young woman. Apolloni takes a case study approach to tease out many different strands of the nature of femininity in 1960s Britain, but she tackles much more than gender in this book. She also considers larger public conversations about authenticity, race, sexuality, and class which dictated and shaped the careers and the reception of the group of singers she writes about. In what is almost a group biography, Apolloni writes about Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Lulu, Dusty Springfield, Millie Small, Marianne Faithfull and P.P. Arnold. They are Black and white, many come from working-class backgrounds, most were born in Britain, and all were very young when they first gained national attention. While most of them have an international following, their careers were rooted in the U.K., but the music they sang was fundamentally influenced by the music of Black Americans. Apolloni carefully separates and interrogates the maelstrom of identity, music, political agendas, and cultural meanings that surround these women. The performances she analyzes reveal the historical and contemporary connections between voice, social mobility, and musical authority, and demonstrate how singers used voice to navigate the boundaries of race, class, and gender. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Race and Gender in the Western Music History Classroom: A Teacher’s Guide, which she wrote with Horace Maxile, was published by Routledge Press in 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Born in Tuscany in 1304, Italian poet Francesco Petrarca is widely considered one of the fathers of the modern Italian language. Though his writings inspired the humanist movement and subsequently the Renaissance, Petrarch remains misunderstood. He was a man of contradictions—a Roman pagan devotee and a devout Christian, a lover of friendship and sociability, yet intensely private. In Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer (Reaktion Books, 2017), Christopher S. Celenza revisits Petrarch’s life and work for the first time in decades, considering how the scholar’s reputation and identity have changed since his death in 1374. He brings to light Petrarch’s unrequited love for his poetic muse, the anti-institutional attitude he developed as he sought a path to modernity by looking backward to antiquity, and his endless focus on himself. Drawing on both Petrarch’s Italian and Latin writings, this is a revealing portrait of a figure of paradoxes: a man of mystique, historical importance, and endless fascination. It is the only book on Petrarch suitable for students, general readers, and scholars alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022). From its founding in 1893, to its decline in the 1970s, the International Colonial Institute (ICI) was one of the most powerful nongovernmental actors on the colonial scene. Styling itself a reformist institution, the ICI applied the tools of transnational scientific exchange to “rationalize” the practice of colonial rule. As part of this reformist project, members of the ICI mobilized progressive ideas in ways that built broad political consensus across Europe while also furthering inequality, exploitation, and segregation in the Global South, even beyond the end of formal empire. Tracing the long history of the ICI reveals fundamental continuities, argues Florian Wagner, that colonialist narratives of change obscure. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dr. Adam Hanna’s Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland (Syracuse University Press, 2022) is a richly detailed exploration of how modern Irish poetry has been shaped by, and responded to, the laws, judgments, and constitutions of both of the island’s jurisdictions. Focusing on poets’ responses in their writing to such contentious legal issues as partition, censorship, paramilitarism, and the curtailment of women’s reproductive and other rights, this volume is the first in the growing field of law and literature to monograph exclusively on modern Ireland. Dr. Hanna unpacks the legal engagements of both major and non-canonical poets from every decade between the 1920s and the present day, including Rhoda Coghill, Austin Clarke, Paul Durcan, Elaine Feeney, Miriam Gamble, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Julie Morrissy, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and W. B. Yeats. Poetry from the time of independence onward has been shaped by two opposing forces. On the one hand, the Irish public has traditionally had strong expectations that poets offer a dissenting counter-discourse to official sources of law. On the other hand, poets have more recently expressed skepticism about the ethics of speaking for others and about the adequacy of art in performing a public role. Dr. Hanna’s fascinating study illuminates the poetry that arises from these antithetical modern conditions. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Based on five years of archival research, Britain's Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power offers a radical reinterpretation of Britain and Spain’s relationship during the growth, apogee and decline of the British Empire. It shows that from the early nineteenth century Britain turned Spain into an ‘informal’ colony, using its economic and military dominance to achieve its strategic and economic ends. Britain’s free trade campaign, which aimed to tear down the legal barriers to its explosive trade and investment expansion, undermined Spain’s attempts to achieve industrial take-off, demonstrating that the relationship between the two countries was imperial in nature, and not simply one of unequal national power. Exploring five key moments of crisis in their relations, from the First Carlist War in the 1830s to the Second World War, the author analyses Britain’s use of military force in achieving its goals, and the consequences that this had for economic and political policy-making in Spain. Ultimately, the Anglo-Spanish relationship was an early example of the interaction between industrial power and colonies, formal and informal, that characterised the post-World War Two period. An insightful read for anyone researching the British Empire and its colonies, this book offers an innovative perspective by closely examining the volatile relationship between two European powers. Dr Nick Sharman is a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. His subject is the economic and political relationship between Britain and Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has had a career in business and local and regional government and is currently a Councillor in the London Borough of Hackney, where he chairs the Audit Committee. Nick has a PhD from the University of Nottingham, an honours degree in economics and politics from Trinity College, Dublin, an MPhil in town planning from University College London, an MBA from Henley Management College and an MA in history from Royal Holloway University of London. He has written widely on strategic and regeneration issues in local and regional Government and, more recently, on the history of the Anglo-Spanish relationship. His book, Britain's Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in late 2021. Luka Haeberle is an enthusiastic student of Latin American and economic history. His main areas of interest are political economy, labor history and political theory. You can find him on Twitter: @ChepoteLuka Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Annette G. Aubert and Zachary Purvis' edited volume Transatlantic Religion: Europe, America, and the Making of Modern Christianity (Brill, 2021) offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century American Christianity that takes into account the century’s major transformations in politics, philosophy, education, and religious doctrine. The book includes previously unexamined material to explain the influences of European ideas on the intellectual diversity and cultural specifics of American Christianity. It gives readers access to a new analytical approach to the transatlantic development of religion in America, one that acknowledges the role of ecumenical and partisan religious journalism, academic-religious mentoring, profound changes in the field of scientific inquiry, and the aims of institution builders. Justin McGeary is Director of Christian Studies at John Witherspoon College and a graduate student at Union School of Theology, Wales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Reccep Tayyib Erdogan is towering politician. He has dominated Turkey for 20 years and is now being compared to Ataturk as a man who has changed the direction of Turkish society. And he matters not only to Turkey but to the international community more generally partly because of Turkey’s geo-strategic position but also because he has the power to influence the future direction of political Islam - so what has he done, what does it signify and is he fearful of being imprisoned if he lost power? Owen Bennett-Jones discusses Erdogan with Dimitar Bechev who has studied the man for his book Turkey Under Erdogan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West (Yale University Press, 2022). Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern UP, 2022) traces how the environmental effects of industrialization reverberated through the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In the early twentieth century, hygiene encompassed the myriad attempts to create healthy spaces for life and work amid the pollution, disease, accidents, and noise of industrial modernity. Examining classic films—including The Last Laugh, Faust, and Kuhle Wampe—as well as documentaries, cinema architecture, and studio practices, Paul Dobryden demonstrates how cinema envisioned and interrogated hygienic concerns about environmental disorder. Framing hygiene within the project of national reconstruction after World War I, The Hygienic Apparatus explores cinema’s material contexts alongside its representations of housework, urban space, traffic, pollution, disability, aging, and labor. Reformers worried about the health risks associated with moviegoing but later used film to popularize hygienic ideas, encouraging viewers to see the world and themselves in relation to public health objectives. Modernist architecture and design fashioned theaters into regenerative environments for fatigued spectators. Filmmakers like F. W. Murnau and Slatan Dudow, meanwhile, explored the aesthetic and political possibilities of dirt, contagion, intoxication, and disorder. Dobryden recovers a set of ecological and biopolitical concerns to show how the problem of environmental disorder fundamentally shaped cinema’s relationship to modernity. As accessible as it is persuasive, the book adds to a growing body of scholarship on biopolitics within German studies and reveals fresh ways of understanding the apparatus of Weimar cinema. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Brecht and the Bible: A Study of Religious Nihilism and Human Weakness in Brecht's Drama of Morality and the City (UNC Press, 2020), Father G. Ronald Murphy argues that Brecht, atheist and Marxist though he was, was also a sensitive reader and interpreter of the Bible. Murphy persuasively shows that Brecht's use of Biblical texts was not only satirical, but was at times deadly serious, particularly concerning the theme of death itself. For Brecht, the Bible provides eloquent reminders of the finitude of life and of the necessity of work, of eating by the sweat of one's brow. The conflict between work and life, for example in the case of Mother Courage's paradoxical dependence on the war for her survival even as it kills her precious children, proves a major theme in Brecht. This is a work that should appeal to scholars of German literature, but also to anyone interested in the interpretation of Brecht, whether for scholarly or artistic reasons. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
James Stafford teaches at Columbia University, where he specializes in the political and intellectual history of Ireland, Britain and Western Europe since 1750, with a particular interest in questions of political economy and international order. In this interview he discusses his new book The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 (Cambridge UP, 2022), which offers a fresh account of Ireland’s place in European debates about commerce and empire during a global era of war and revolution. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have long been seen as a foundational period for modern Irish political traditions such as nationalism, republicanism and unionism. The Case of Ireland offers a fresh account of Ireland's neglected role in European debates about commerce and empire in what was a global era of war and revolution. Drawing on a broad range of writings from merchants, agrarian improvers, philosophers, politicians and revolutionaries across Europe, this book shows how Ireland became a field of conflict and projection between rival visions of politics in commercial society, associated with the warring empires of Britain and France. It offers a new perspective on the crisis and transformation of the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, and restores Ireland to its rightful place at the centre of European intellectual history. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Beginning in 1955, West Germany recruited millions of people as guest workers from Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and especially Turkey. This labor force was essential to creating the postwar German economic miracle. Employers fantasized that foreign "guest workers" would provide labor power in their prime productive years without having to pay for their education, pensions, or medical care. They especially hoped that the workers would leave behind their spouses and children and not encumber the German state or society with the cost of caring for them. As Lauren Stokes argues in Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford UP, 2022), the Federal Republic of Germany turned fear of this foreign family into the basis of policymaking, while at the same time implementing policies that inflicted fear in foreign families. Workers did not always prove willing to live their work lives in the FRG and their family lives elsewhere. They consistently challenged the state's assumption that "family" and "labor" could be cleanly divided, defied restrictive and discriminatory policies, staged political protests, and took their deportation orders to court. In 1973, the federal court legally recognized the constitutional right to family reunification, but almost immediately after the decision, the migration bureaucracy sought to limit that right in practice. Officials derided family migrants as a group of burdensome dependents seeking to defraud the welfare state and demonized them as a dangerous source of foreign values on German soil. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith's puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism. For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey's magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (U Chicago Press, 2020) is what you've been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy's key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and "innovism" made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement. Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey's influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Faddan More Psalter: The Discovery and Conservation of a Medieval Treasure Dr. John Gillis explores the conservation, construction, and context of an early medieval psalter discovered by chance in a bog at Faddan More, Co. Tipperary in July 2006. The different facets of this find are discussed in-depth, along with the pre-existing and newly created methods, tools, and ideas from different disciplines used to reveal its secrets. Gillis shines a light on this incredibly significant manuscript – named one of the National Museum of Ireland’s top ten treasures - that represents the first insular manuscript to be discovered in the past 200 years and the first from a wetland environment. The Faddan More Psalter: The Discovery and Conservation of a Medieval Treasure was published by Wordwell and National Museum of Ireland in 2022. John Gillis is Chief Manuscript Conservator in the Library Preservation and Conservation Department in Trinity College Dublin. In 1988 he established and worked as Head of Conservation in the Delmas Conservation Bindery at Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin. John has been teaching book conservation techniques and theory in Italy for over 20 years. His major achievement to date has been the conservation of the Fadden More Psalter at the National Museum of Ireland Conservation Department over a four-and-a-half year period, for which he won the Heritage Council of Ireland Conservation Award in 2010. Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who recently graduated with her PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is an editorial assistant for the Church Archaeology journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile. In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (Columbia University Press, 2020), Marc David Baer uses Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus’s life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe’s religious, sexual, and cultural politics. Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The three protagonists of Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: A Political History of Italian Food TV (Intellect, 2022) are food, television and politics. These are the three main characters that interrelate, collaborate and fight behind the scenes, while in front of the camera the writers, intellectuals and celebrity chefs talk about, prepare or taste the best Italian dishes. In Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda, Dr. Francesco Buscemi develops a political history of Italian ‘good food’ on national television, and the central role of food in Italian culture. The focus is highly original and this is a unique interdisciplinary study at the intersection between food studies, media studies and politics. The book retraces the history of Italian food television from a political point of view: the early shows of the pioneers under strict Catholic control in the 1950s and 1960s, the left-wing political twist of the 1970s, the conservative riflusso or resurgence of the 1980s, the disputed Berlusconian era and the rise of the celebrity chefs, which, for better or for worse, makes Italy similar to the other western countries. The history of Italy since the mid-1950s is retold through the lenses of food television. This lively book demonstrates that cooking spaghetti in a TV studio is a political act, and tries to uncover how it is possible that, while watching on TV how to make pizza, we become citizens. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and local identity formation processes and discusses the social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities in Palestine via cultural lenses from an entangled perspective. The 17 chapters reflect diverse research interests, from case studies of individual archives to chapters that question the concept of cultural diplomacy more generally. They illustrate the diversity of scholarship that enables a broad-based view of how cultura l diplomacy functioned during the interwar period, but also the ways in which its meanings have changed. The book considers British Mandate Palestine as an internationalized node within a transnational framework to understand how the complexity of cultural interactions and agencies engaged to produce new modes of modernity. With the editors, Karene Sanches Summerer and Sary Zananiri, we discussed the term cultural diplomacy and its varied definition by the contributors of this volume. The book, divided in three parts, looks at various forms of cultural diplomacy, its indigenization, cultural diplomacy as an hegemonic force and lastly a number of scholars discussed a variety of examples of cultural diplomacy as intended by European countries. Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism. To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, amatory as well as bellicose. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today. A contribution to studies in visual culture as well as literary and social history, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia UP, 2014) draws on primary sources ranging from untranslated Middle Eastern manuscripts and European belles-lettres to miniature paintings and photographic erotica that are presented here for the first time. Joseph Allen Boone is a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington, the Stanford Humanity Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has been in residency at the Liguria Center at Bogliasco, the Rockefeller-Bellagio Center, and the Valparaiso Foundation.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman (Cornell University Press, 2021) is a truly interdisciplinary study. Dr. Thurman’s work sits at the intersection of German Studies, History, and Musicology. Beginning in the 1870s with concerts given by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Singing Like Germans covers a century of Black musicians performing classical music in Germany and Austria. This sprawling book takes on how and why Black musicians came to Central Europe to perform classical music from their homes in North America, Africa, or the Caribbean, and what their reception reveals about German ideas of race, nationhood, and musical culture. She traces how the political tumult of one hundred years of war, Nazism, and the division between East and West Germany contributed to the changing circumstances of Black musicians in the area, but also how ideas of race remained remarkably consistent in all that time. Performers such as Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Grace Bumbry, among many others, found opportunities in Central Europe denied them in other places, but audiences and critics understood their musicianship through racialized stereotypes and local political and cultural conditions. Given Singing Like German’s wide breadth—chronologically and as a work of scholarship—this conversation is in the form a roundtable rather than a traditional interview. Three hosts from the New Books Network have come together to interview Dr. Thurman. Kristen Turner from New Books in Music is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Emily Allen (@emmyru91) is a host with New Books in Music and New Books in Celebration Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s carnival. Nicole Coleman from New Books in German Studies is Assistant Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jacob Gotfried Haafner (1754–1809) was one of the most popular European travel writers of the early nineteenth century, writing in the Romantic mode. A Dutch citizen, Haafner spent more than twenty years of his early life living outside of Europe, in India, Ceylon, Mauritius, Java, and South Africa. Books like his popular Travels in a Palanquin were translated into the major European languages, and his essays against the work of Christian missionaries in Asia stirred up great controversy. Haafner worked to spread understanding of the cultures he’d come to know in his journeys, promoting European understanding of Indian literature, myth, and religion, translating the Ramayana into Dutch. In Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-Colonialist Jacob Haafner (NUS Press, 2020), Paul van der Velde tells an affecting story of a young man who made a world for himself along the Coromandel Coast, in Ceylon and Calcutta, but who returned to Europe to live the last years of his life in Amsterdam, suffering an acute nostalgia for Asia. This is compelling reading for anyone interested in European response to the cultures of Asia. Cresa Pugh is a PhD Candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University. For more information visit scholar.harvard.edu/cresa and follow her on Twitter @CresaPugh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (Ohio State UP, 2020), Adam Grener advances a new approach to evaluating realism in fiction by arguing that nineteenth-century literary realism shifted attention to the historical and social dimensions of probability in the period’s literature. In an era in which probability was increasingly defined by statistical concepts of aggregation and abstraction, the realist writers discussed here turned to chance and improbability to address representational problems of contingency, difference, and scale. Contemporary thinking about probability came to recognize the variability and even randomness of the world while also discovering how patterns and order reemerge at scale. Reading chance as a tension between randomness and order, Grener shows how novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy resist the demands of probabilistic representation and develop strategies for capturing cultural particularity and historical transformation. These authors served their visions of realism by tactically embracing improbability in the form of coincidences, fatalism, supernaturalism, and luck. Understanding this strategy helps us to appreciate how realist novels work to historicize the social worlds and experiences they represent and asks us to rethink the very foundation of realism. Su Min Kim is an independent scholar of nineteenth-century British literature. Her research focuses on the intersections of literary and mathematical history in nineteenth-century Europe. She is also a freelance writer and polyglot. For more conversations on her research, writing, and foreign languages, contact her at sumin.kim@u.nus.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? In The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State (Pluto Press, 2022), Rizwaan Sabir writes compellingly about his own experiences of wrongful arrest, detention and subsequent surveillance, placing these in the broader context of 21st century British counterterrorism practices and the policing of Muslims. Writing publicly for the first time about the traumatising mental health effects of these experiences, Sabir argues that these harmful outcomes are not the result of errors in government planning, but the consequences of using a counterinsurgency warfare approach to fight terrorism and police Muslims. To resist the injustice of these policies and practices, we need to centre the lived experiences of those subjected to them and build networks of solidarity and support. Dr Rizwaan Sabir (@RizwaanSabir) is a Lecturer (aka Assistant Professor) in Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University. His research concerns British counterterrorism policy and practice, especially the way in which counterinsurgency theory, doctrine, and practice have been integrated into the UK's domestic 'War on Terror' infrastructure. Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Listeners interested in British policing and surveillance may also appreciate this recent interview about Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network, by the Women Who Uncovered the Shocking Truth (Ebury, 2022). Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States (Stanford UP, 2022), intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of realism as a set of universally binding truths about international affairs, Specter argues that its major features emerged from a century-long dialogue between American and German intellectuals beginning in the late nineteenth century. Specter uncovers an "Atlantic realist" tradition of reflection on the prerogatives of empire and the nature of power politics conditioned by fin de siècle imperial competition, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Focusing on key figures in the evolution of realist thought, including Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe, this book traces the development of the realist worldview over a century, dismantling myths about the national interest, Realpolitik, and the "art" of statesmanship. Sean T. Byrnes is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in middle Tennessee. He is the author of Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right, from LSU Press. Tweet at him @ByrnesSean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Çigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political action by citizens, and how we interpret and discuss that action in context of political structures. The title In the Street is a reference to the seminal French poster from May of 1968 that read “beauty is in the street,” and was adapted by the demonstrators in Turkey decades later, providing one of the many examples of street politics that illustrate the discussion of activism throughout the book. Street politics has many forms, such as protests, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience. Often such actions are confined to the binary analysis of successes and failures, only examining how likely an action is to bring about change. The origins of this understanding stem from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of popular sovereignty, rejection of theatricality, and the idealization of immediacy. Çidam argues that this Rousseauian framework dilutes the value of these actions, forcing them into a reductive duality and failing to acknowledge that movements can fail simply because of the class positions their members are forced to assume. Regardless of their failures, there is an inherent and aesthetic value to these political actions that can last beyond the actions themselves. Çidam’s alternative framework, developed through dissecting the viewpoints of political theorists Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antonio Negri, Jurgen Habermas, and Jacques Ranciere, redefines our understanding of the value of political action. In The Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship provides new perspectives and understandings of events like Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi uprising in Turkey, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Çidam explains that “intermediating practices” are opportunities for encounter and engagement among those who are involved in these street actions. This concept is applied to the ways that individuals might find unity with each other within these political actions. Through intermediating practices, individuals become “political friends,” an Aristotelian concept that builds a relationship of unity and equity between people despite their differences as a result of their shared experiences of political action. These concepts must lead us to the conclusion that the driving forces of political action—anger, rage, joy—cannot be reduced to the binary of either success or failure, as Rousseau would have it. In The Streets re-centers the on-the-ground efforts of individuals, focusing on these communal actions rather than their particular outcomes. Çidam concludes that while these moments of political friendship are fleeting, their transience does not denote failure because the rich and creative practices of political actors are naturally valuable. Tune in to hear about Çigdem Çidam’s interpretations of Negri’s, Habermas’, and Ranciere’s unique political conceptions, how a focus on political friendship in the Gezi protests of 2013 helped to formulate her theoretical lenses for this analysis, and how remembrance of these movements can help us struggle against the powers that be for the next historical moment. Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Dr. Robert McColl Millar presents the first sociolinguistic history of all languages spoken in Scotland. The book includes analyses from across the country including coverage of Gaelic, Scots, Pictish, British, Norn, Immigrant languages and Scottish Standard English. It also covers four case studies dealing with the birth of a dialect or variety: North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Scots. In the book, Dr. Robert McColl Millar examines how language has been used in Scotland since the earliest times. While primarily focusing on the histories of the speakers of Scots and Gaelic, and their competition with the encroaching use of (Scottish) Standard English, he also traces the decline and eventual ‘death’ of Pictish, British and Norn. Four case studies illustrate the historical development of North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Scots. Immigrant languages are also discussed throughout the book. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes (Cambridge UP, 2022) - published to celebrate the book's first publication - helps readers to understand the pleasures of this monumental work and to grapple with its challenges. Copiously equipped with maps, photographs, and explanatory footnotes, it provides a vivid and illuminating context for the experiences of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, as well as Joyce's many other Dublin characters, on June 16, 1904. Featuring a facsimile of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, this version also includes Joyce's own errata as well as references to amendments made in later editions. Each of the eighteen chapters of Ulysses is introduced by a leading Joyce scholar. These richly informative pieces discuss the novel's plot and allusions, while also explaining crucial questions that have puzzled and tantalized readers over the last hundred years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Lilianne Milgrom about L' Origine: The Secret Life of the World's Most Erotic Masterpiece (Girl Friday Books, 2021). In 1866, maverick French artist Gustave Courbet painted one of the most iconic images in the history of art: a sexually explicit portrait of a woman's exposed genitals. Audaciously titled L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the scandalous painting was kept hidden for a century and a half. Today, it hangs in the world-renowned Orsay Museum in Paris, viewed by millions of visitors a year. As the first artist authorized by the Orsay Museum to re-create Courbet's The Origin of the World, author Lilianne Milgrom was thrust into the painting's intimate orbit, spending six weeks replicating every fold, crevice, and pubic hair. The experience inspired her to share her story and the painting's riveting clandestine history with readers beyond the confines of the art world. Pallavi Joshi is a PhD Candidate in French Studies at the University of Warwick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (HarperCollins, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight—until now. In this landmark work of investigative journalism, David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave laborers, and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burned around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how America’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) investigates the place and meaning of consumption in Jewish lives and the roles Jews played in different consumer cultures in modern Europe and North America. Drawing on innovative, original research into this new and challenging field, the volume brings Jewish studies and the history and theory of consumer culture into dialogue with each other. Its chapters explore Jewish businesspeople's development of niche commercial practices in several transnational contexts; the imagining, marketing, and realization of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine through consumer goods and strategies; associations between Jews, luxury, and gender in multiple contexts; and the political dimensions of consumer choice. Together the essays in this volume show how the study of consumption enriches our understanding of modern Jewish history and how a focus on consumer goods and practices illuminates the study of Jewish religious observance, ethnic identities, gender formations, and immigrant trajectories across the globe. Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Denisa Nesťáková and Katja Grosse-Sommer edited volumne If This Is a Woman: Studies on Women and Gender in the Holocaust (Academic Studies Press, 2021) contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences. Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the turbulent relationship between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In doing so, it reveals the complex web of economic, political, cultural, and military connections that linked the two dynasties to each other and to other polities across the medieval Mediterranean. Furthermore, despite the contemporary interfaith holy wars happening around the Zirids and Normans, their relationship was never governed by an overarching ideology like jihad or crusade. Instead, both dynasties pursued policies that they thought would expand their power and wealth, either through collaboration or conflict. The relationship between the Zirids and Normans ultimately came to a violent end in the 1140s, when a devastating drought crippled Ifriqiya. The Normans seized this opportunity to conquer lands across the Ifriqiyan coast, bringing an end to the Zirid dynasty and forming the Norman kingdom of Africa, which persisted until the Almohad conquest of Mahdia in 1160. Previous scholarship on medieval North Africa during the reign of the Zirids has depicted the region as one of instability and political anarchy that rendered local lords powerless in the face of foreign conquest. Matt King shows that, to the contrary, the Zirids and other local lords in Ifriqiya were integral parts of the far-reaching political and economic networks across the Mediterranean. Despite the eventual collapse of the Zirid dynasty at the hands of the Normans, Dynasties Intertwined makes clear that its emirs were active and consequential Mediterranean players for much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with political agency independent of their Christian neighbors across the Strait of Sicily. Matt King is Assistant Professor of Medieval History and Digital Humanities at the University of South Florida. He is also actively involved in National History Day, an outreach program that allows middle school and high school students to conduct original historical research about topics of their choice. Luka Haeberle is an enthusiastic student of Latin American and medieval history. His main areas of interest are political economy, labor history and political theory. You can find him on Twitter: @ChepoteLuka Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jean Jaurès was a towering intellectual and political leader of the democratic Left at the turn of the twentieth century, but he is little remembered today outside of France, and his contributions to political thought are little studied anywhere. In Jean Jaurès: The Inner Life of Social Democracy (Penn State University Press, 2016), Geoffrey Kurtz introduces Jaurès to an American audience. Geoffrey Kurtz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Virginia Reinburg about her book Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France (Cambridge UP, 2019). Pilgrim shrines were places of healing, holiness, and truth in early modern France. By analyzing the creation of these pilgrim shrines as natural, legendary, and historic places whose authority provided a new foundation for post-Reformation Catholic life, Virginia Reinburg examines the impact of the Reformation and religious wars on French society and the French landscape. Divided into two parts, Part I offers detailed studies of the shrines of Sainte-Reine, Notre-Dame du Puy, Notre-Dame de Garaison, and Notre-Dame de Betharram, showing how nature, antiquity, and images inspired enthusiasm among pilgrims. These chapters also show that the category of 'pilgrim' included a wide variety of motivations, beliefs, and acts. Part II recounts how shrine chaplains authored books employing history, myth, and archives in an attempt to prove that the shrines were authentic, and to show that the truths they exemplified were beyond dispute. Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This succinct history of Germany will take you on an incredible journey through time spanning from the 1500s to the present. Focusing on Germany in detail and in a global context, Jeremy Black uncovers the complexity of the country's past as well as the challenges and strengths of its future. The history of Germany is intricately woven. Threaded in time through its struggles and triumphs with religion, industrialisation, enlightenment, politics, unification, and war. In A Brief History of Germany (Robinson, 2022), master historian Jeremy Black, MBE questions how the Germany we know today came to be, chronicling the events that shaped its past, present and future in a fascinating new way. From the fall of Rome in the 1500s to the enlightenment in the 1700s, from World War I and World War II to Germany post-unification, Black's writing will unlock the places and people that formed Germany and enrich your visit with stories of its society and culture. Concise yet explorative, A Brief History of Germany is an astonishing work from a renowned UK historian. Whether you are a long-term reader of Black's expansive history work or are interested in learning more ahead of a short city break or longer trip, this intriguing look at the history of Germany is an essential read. Published by Robinson Press. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity (Routledge, 2020), Olson argues that clothing functioned as part of the process of communication by which elite male influence, masculinity, and sexuality were made known and acknowledged, and furthermore that these concepts interconnected in socially significant ways. This volume also sets out the details of masculine dress from literary and artistic evidence and the connection of clothing to rank, status, and ritual. This is the first monograph in English to draw together the myriad evidence for male dress in the Roman world, and examine it as evidence for men's self-presentation, status, and social convention. Reyes Bertolin is a professor of Classics at the University of Calgary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, and is still of vital relevance for the contemporary audiovisual landscape. It was also the seminal experience for a generation of critics who have dedicated the following half-century to the task of critically responding to the cinema. Daniel Fairfax's The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) (Amsterdam UP, 2021) gives a historical overview of this period in the journal's history, combining biographical accounts of the critics who were involved with Cahiers in the post-1968 and theoretical explorations of the text they wrote. In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Fairfax describes the beginnings of his love of cinema, breaks down the most pivotal essays from this moment in Cahiers' history, and argues for the "annees rouge"'s continuing relevance to contemporary film and cultural criticism. Note: This interview was conducted on May 16, three days before the passing of Jean-Louis Comolli at the age of 80. One of the most influential figures of Cahiers' Red Years (and, indeed, of the entire journal's run), Comolli made a tremendous impact on film theory and criticism, and he will be missed by cinephiles all over the world. Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why does the monarchy matter? In Running the Family Firm: How the Monarchy Manages Its Image and Our Money (Manchester UP, 2021), Laura Clancy, a Lecturer in Media and Lancaster University, considers the British monarchy in the context of contemporary financialised capitalism, exposing the tensions and contradictions between the public face of royalty and the reality of the infrastructures, labour relations, financial arrangements, and political economies of Britain’s ‘family firm’. The book uses a huge range of examples, from the monarchy’s role in politics and public life, through to the personalities that drive much media coverage. Rich with detailed case studies and analysis, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how power and elites function in Britain today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale UP, 2022) explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native Franche-Comté to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world. In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Dr. Galvez about why he felt we needed another book on Courbet, how he tackled the voluminous scholarship on this artist, and how to make claims about an artist’s intentions from a historical standpoint. Their conversation ranges from how to best use comparisons in art historical argumentation to the difficulties of reproducing some art works—even with high resolution digital photography. Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule. Shelley Puhak introduces readers to Brunhild, who was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet-in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport-these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms, changing the face of Europe. The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a decades-long civil war-against each other. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne's empire. Yet after the queens' deaths-one gentle, the other horrific-their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend. In The Dark Queens, award-winning writer Shelley Puhak sets the record straight. She resurrects two very real women in all their complexity, painting a richly detailed portrait of an unfamiliar time and striking at the roots of some of our culture's stubbornest myths about female power. The Dark Queens offers proof that the relationships between women can transform the world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake (McFarland, 2021), by Ray Argyle is the first modern biography of the founder of Secularism, describing a transformative figure whose controversial and conflict-filled life helped shape the modern world. Jailed for atheism and disowned by his family, Holyoake came out of an English prison at the age of 25 determined to bring an end to religion’s control over daily life. Ever on the front lines of social reform, Holyoake has been hailed for having won “the freedoms we take for granted today.” With Secularism again under siege, Argyle argues that Holyoake’s vision of a “virtuous society” rings today with renewed clarity. Ray Argyle is the author of eleven books, including five biographies, three political histories, a memoir, and a novel of Victorian Canada. He’s worked as a journalist, a publishing executive, and a communications consultant, with articles appearing in Canada’s major newspapers, as well as magazines such as Reader’s Digest, France Today, and World War II History. Having grown up in British Columbia, he is now based in Canada’s province of Ontario. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Venice Ghetto was founded in 1516 by the Venetian government as a segregated area of the city in which Jews were compelled to live. The world's first ghetto and the origin of the English word, the term simultaneously works to mark specific places and their histories, and as a global symbol that evokes themes of identity, exile, marginalization, and segregation. To capture these multiple meanings, the editors of this volume conceptualize the ghetto as a "memory space that travels" through both time and space. This interdisciplinary collection engages with questions about the history, conditions, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, including its legacy as a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed space. Contributors also consider the ghetto's influence on the figure of the Renaissance moneylender, the material culture of the ghetto archive, the urban form of North Africa's mellah and hara, and the ghetto's impact on the writings of Primo Levi and Marjorie Agosín. In addition to the volume editors, The Venice Ghetto: A Memory Space That Travels (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) features a foreword from James E. Young and contributions from Shaul Bassi, Murray Baumgarten, Margaux Fitoussi, Dario Miccoli, Andrea Yaakov Lattes, Federica Ruspio, Michael Shapiro, Clive Sinclair, and Emanuela Trevisan Semi. Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland (Oxford UP, 2021) contains explanations of over 3,800 family names, of any origin, that are established in Ireland, both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. It provides an entry for every family name that has more than 100 bearers in the 1911 Census of Ireland. The entries bring together a variety of sources, medieval to modern, to uncover the histories, contexts, and transformations of surnames in Ireland. Research Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jacob Collins's The Anthropological Turn: French Political Through After 1968 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) examines some of the most important currents in French intellectual life through the 1970s. In the wake of the upheaval of 1968, and confronted with the economic and other crises of the decade that followed, a number of political thinkers and social theorists in France interrogated "the social" borrowing anthropological concepts and approaches to religion, identity, citizenship, and the state. Collins's account of the decade focuses on the work of four key thinkers from across the political spectrum in France: Alain de Benoist, Marcel Gauchet, Emmanuel Todd, and Régis Debray. Across chapters that explore the work of these authors in depth, the book tracks the common methodological ground these figures shared, the individual and collective influence they exerted on the French political landscape of the era. In different ways, the book argues, the ideas of these and other "political anthropologists" have shaped approaches to fundamental social, political, and cultural questions in France over the past several decades. The Anthropological Turn will be a compelling read for students and scholars of French history, political thought, and culture from the last third of the twentieth century to the present. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Europeans have been writing about China for centuries–ever since The Travels of Marco Polo described it as a faraway and mystical kingdom. European thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu used China to support their own theories of political philosophy, then writers in early modernity tried to explain why China was falling behind–and then, with the rise of Maoist China, how it represented true revolutionary potential. China Through European Eyes: 800 Years Of Cultural And Intellectual Encounter (World Scientific, 2022), edited by Professor Kerry Brown and Gemma Chenger Deng collects an assortment of these observations written over several centuries, from illustrious writers like Matteo Ricci, Voltaire, Leibniz, Weber, Marx, and Beauvoir. In this interview, Kerry and I talk about how the way Europeans understood China changed and shifted over eight centuries–and the ways in which they parallel the way we talk about cHina today. Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London. He is an Associate of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House, London, an adjunct of the Australia New Zealand School of Government in Melbourne, and the co-editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, run by the German Institute for Global Affairs in Hamburg. From 1998 to 2005 he worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as First Secretary at the British Embassy in Beijing, and then as Head of the Indonesia, Philippine and East Timor Section. He is the author of almost 20 books on modern Chinese politics. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of China Through European Eyes. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In a mere four years, England’s monastic tradition—one of the richest in all of Europe—came to an end. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, as it’s come to be known, stands in popular consciousness as a token of religious reformation and muscular government. But the Dissolution is wrapped up in partisan narratives that have obscured the role of the religious in their own day, their perception of events, others’ perceptions of them, and the meaning and impact of their demise. In a searching, compendious yet eminently readable study, James Clark rewrites the history of this most pivotal moment in England’s past. The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History (Yale University Press, 2021) traces in magnificent granularity the world of monastic England, the critical events of 1536-40, and the landscape left behind when the last monastic bells rang across country granges and city throughways. Jonathan Megerian was a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He worked on late medieval and Renaissance England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"With the eurozone crisis going back to 2010, the refugee crisis that culminated in 2015, the crisis of the EU-Russia relationship going back to the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2013-14, to the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, the EU has struggled to live up to the expectations it raised both in relation to its own people and neighbouring countries. This is not an accident". Could this really be by design? In European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency (Hurst in the UK, OUP in the US, 2022), Stefan Auer argues that the EU's hybrid form – falling somewhere between a multinational state and a multilateral organisation – comes closest to the ideals of Germany, its most powerful member. This attempt to bypass politics has weakened the EU in the many emergencies it has faced over the last 15 years. Today, he says, "Europeans do not have the luxury of living in a politics-less world". Stefan Auer is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, having previously taught in Melbourne and Dublin and twice held Jean Monnet chairs. A prolific contributor to political science journals, he won the 2005 UACES Best Book in European Studies prize for his Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe (Routledge, 2004). *The authors' own book recommendations are: After Europe by Ivan Krastev (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Time of the Magicians: The Great Decade of Philosophy, 1919-1929 by Wolfram Eilenberger (2022). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is the hidden history of performers of colour in in British theatre? In British Black and Asian Shakespeareans: Integrating Shakespeare, 1966–2018 (Arden Shakespeare, 2022), Jami Rogers, an honorary fellow at Department of English at University of Warwick, examines this question with one of the most central parts of British theatre and culture- performances of Shakespeare. The book tells a story of discrimination and barriers to success, whilst celebrating career triumphs and demonstrating the significance of actors, directors, and theatre companies. The book uses archival material including theatre criticism, a new database of performances and performers, and interviews with a range of the British Black and Asian Shakespearian greats. The book will be essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for social scientists, and anyone interested in understanding British arts and culture. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. In An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press, 2021), Dr. Kate Mulry examines ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, showing how agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. This book investigates how Restoration officials endeavoured to recover control and counteract any lingering questions about the king’s rightful authority after this long exile by reforming and cultivating environments on both sides of the Atlantic. An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The theme of exile in Irish writing often calls to mind Joyce or Beckett, but rarely does it conjure up other writers or literary networks, particularly those of the often-overlooked literary history of the nineteen thirties. Goldstone’s original new study, Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art, Exile and War (Routledge, 2020) takes up the theme of art and exile by focusing on four Irish writers—Leslie Daiken, Charles Donnelly, Ewart Milne and Michael Sayers—and brings to light important local and global aspects of the Popular Front cultural movement. Tracing literary networks from interwar London to the Spanish Civil War and the USSR Goldstone skillfully exposes the ways that these lives overlapped and entwined, revealing the relationships between these writers and George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, William Carlos Williams, and others, thus illuminating internationalist aspects of a Leftist cultural history. This book is commendable for its discussion of how Irish literary women on the left defied marginalization, and in this way provides a framework for further study on the topic. In its examination of this neglected period of Irish literary history Irish Writers and the Thirties re-imagines Irish writing of the mid-twentieth century and will prove of great interest to scholars and students of cultural history, Irish studies, and Jewish studies, as well as to more general readers interested in the thirties. Bridget English is a scholar of Irish literature and culture, modernism, and health humanities, based at the University of Illinois Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library and is the Literature Representative for the American Conference for Irish Studies. Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bridgetrenglis2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With the war in Ukraine showing no signs of stopping anytime soon, it was thought a worthwhile idea to have an informed discussion with four expert historians of 19th and 20th century European and Eastern European, diplomatic and military history. As you can readily see from the below biographies, this is a superior and award-winning panel. Please listen and enjoy. University of Exeter, Professor of History Jeremy Black discusses various aspects of the subject at length with Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society in this new episode of 'Arguing History: Slavery in World History'. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred & fifty books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.” Professor Thomas Otte teaches Diplomatic, International and Military History. He is the author or editor of some fifteen books, including, most recently, the award-winning July Crisis: How the World Descended into War, Summer 1914 (CUP, 2014); he has also has published numerous essays in edited collections and articles in leading journals, including the English Historical Review, Historical Journal, and History. Professor Otte is widely regarded as being one of the leading diplomatic historians of his generation. Professor David R. Stone, the William E. Odom Professor of Russian Studies, joined the Strategy and Policy Department in 2015. He received a B.A. from Wabash College and a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He previously taught at Kansas State University. His book “Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union” (2000) won the Shulman Prize of ASEEES and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published “A Military History of Russia” (2006) and “The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917” (2015). He edited “The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945” (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles on Russian military history and foreign policy. Alex Watson's latest book is The Fortress. The Great Siege of Przemysl (London: Allen Lane, 2019). This is the story of the First World War’s longest siege, and of the opening of the brutal tragedy which befell East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It follows a ragtag Habsburg garrison of old soldiers as they desperately defend Central Europe from Russian invasion, and recounts the vicious fighting, starvation and anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing which began in the region already in 1914. The book won a Society for Military History 2021 Distinguished Book Award and was a BBC History Magazine and Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’. The Times newspaper praised it as ‘a masterpiece’. ‘Vividly written and well researched …it deserves to become a classic of military history.’ His two prior books were also award winners. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives. Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster—women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. In Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies (Norton, 2021), Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art—think Titian, Botticelli, and Millais—and the image-saturated world of fashion photographs, advertisements, and social media, and boldly counters these depictions by turning to the work of women artists like Morisot, Ringgold, Lacy, and Walker, who offer alternative images for exploring women’s identity, sexuality, race, and power in more complex ways. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain. This interview was conduced by Alison Renna, a PhD candidate studying the history of ideas at Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time. The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self. Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity. According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is the future for the House of Commons? In Held in Contempt: What’s Wrong with the House of Commons? Hannah White, Deputy Director of the Institute for Government, sets out a critique of the way a key institution at the heart of British democracy is failing to deliver for citizens, staff, and Members alike. Set against the backdrop of Brexit, the Coronavirus pandemic, and various institutional scandals, the book details how the Commons fails in its role of holding government to account; is unrepresentative of the population as a whole; is overly complicated and arcane; and is housed in a building that is no longer fit for purpose. At the heart of the book is a challenge to MPs to reform both their own culture and the Commons itself. Ultimately, the book is a defence of the high standards that the Commons should aspire to and has a range of recommendations to make this happen. It is essential reading for every British citizen, and anyone interested in politics. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Carolyn Eichner's new book, The Paris Commune: A Brief History (Rutgers University Press, 2022) was published on March 18th, the anniversary of the eruption of Paris Commune of 1871. In this accessible history of the 72-day uprising during which the working-class people of Paris established their own government; experimented with forms of radical democracy and social change; and resisted the forces of the French state and military, Eichner explores the Commune within the context of nineteenth-century political, economic, and cultural history in France and beyond its borders. Structured in three parts/chapters that take up the metaphorics of illumination, fluorescence, and explosion, the book follows the lives, ideas, and actions of Communards who sought to bring about a new society, and were ultimately crushed in their efforts. After two and a half months, the French government under the leadership of Adolphe Thiers crushed the Commune during the "Bloody Week" of May 21st-28th. Thousands of Communards met their violent ends in the streets of Paris while others were arrested, tried, and deported. The book is short and rich, clear and dramatic, an excellent resource for students, readers academic and non, anyone interested in a smart, clear introduction to these events and figures with such mythological status in the histories of popular resistance and revolution. It is also a fascinating account for those more familiar with the Commune. Attentive to the role of women and gender throughout, and interested in understanding the Commune's achievements as well as its limitations, Eichner's account revisits some of the long-standing debates about the Commune's course, and its legacies. Bonne lecture! Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Britain in the 1840s should have been, observes Simon Heffer, a time of great social improvement. Instead it was a country that was beset by poverty, unrest, assassination attempts on young Queen Victoria and her Prime Minister, and fears of revolution. Yet just forty years later, it was as if none of that had ever happened. It had become a prosperous and progressive nation, transformed by advances not only in industrialization, but also in politics, science, religion, and education. That Britain had become such a society was not an accident, but the result of intelligent and directed purpose The story of that purpose, and what it wrought, is the subject of Heffer’s book High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain (Pegasus Books, 2022). It is an investigation not simply of political, social, or cultural change, but of a change of mind—by which I mean not merely changing ideas, like changing clothes from season to season, but of changing the way things are seen Simon Heffer is an eminent British journalist, essayist, historian, and author of numerous books, including lives of the 19th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and 20th century politician Enoch Powell, and a series of histories of Britain of which High Minds is the first. For Further Investigation
In our wide-ranging conversation we touched on topics covered in previous episodes of the podcast. If you haven’t already, then listen to Jonathan Rose talk about the intellectual life of the British working class; or Will Hay describe the importance of an obscure Prime Minister.
High Minds was published in 2013 in Britain, but is only now being published in the United States by Pegasus Books. It has been followed by The Age of Decadence–A History of Britain: 1880-1914, which was confusingly published in the United States before High Minds. Staring at God: Britain in the Great War has not been published in America; you’ll need to order it from Britain along with the good Cadbury’s chocolate they keep for themselves. The final volume in the series, now being written, will end the story in 1939.
Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the excellent podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
To many the city might seem simply a large urban area to live within, but it actually forms an important political concept and community that has been influential throughout European history. From the polis of Ancient Greece, to the Roman Republic, to the city-states of the Italian Renaissance, and down to the present day. Modern concepts of democracy and citizenship that have shaped European thought have historically originated from the political community of the “city”. Addressing this multifaceted topic is Ferenc Hörcher's The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, Through City-State, to Megalopolis? (Lexington Books, 2021) Ferenc Hörcher is a political philosopher, historian of political thought and a philosopher of art. He is director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Public Service in Budapest and senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Science. Stephen Satkiewicz is independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When looking at historic records of all kinds—from prehistoric cave drawings and ancient rock art in Africa and India, from poetic narrations of travelers to hunter memoirs and press stories about zoos, from reports of mystical graveyards to museum warehouses collecting bones—notions about elephants in the West have come a long way. These ideas (their transformation; their persistence) tell perhaps more about how Western cultures have understood themselves than about the actual lives and potential histories of proboscideans. In Elephant Trails: A History of Animals and Cultures (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), Nigel Rothfels follows the paths of concrete elephant lives, their struggles and their deaths, in order to produce a history of one particular elephant, that which inhabits Western mentalities up to the present and which is composed as much of fantasy as thick skin. In this conversation, Dr. Rothfels expands on some of the tenets of this book, as well as the trails that he himself followed in order to better understand how present notions about elephants in the West have been historically configured. This is a history of ideas about the magnificent animal we call the elephant, threaded with stories of flesh and blood. Marcela Hernández, PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, is currently writing a dissertation on animals and gestures in films. She can be reached at m.hernandez@stud.uni-frankfurt.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s copyright laws are predicated on the idea that music is intellectual property; a commodity that has value to its creator and to its publisher. But, how did that concept originate and why? From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022) by Rebecca Geoffroy Schwinden tackles this question with an insightful examination of the years around the French Revolution when the legal protections for music moved from a system of monopolies granted by the sovereign that regulated music as an activity to a framework that assumed music was a kind of property. Before the French Revolution, making music was an activity that required permission. After the revolution, music was an object that could be possessed.In Geoffroy-Schwinden’s analysis, this is far from a simple history of commodification, it is, instead, a process entwined with the political, ideological, and cultural agendas of the French Revolutionaries. It is also a history of the development of new institutions, and how the Paris Conservatory, founded in the fluid and sometimes violent aftermath of the French Revolution, became the conservator and arbiter of French musical traditions and pedagogy. Musicians capitalized on new kinds of legal protections to guard their professionalization within new laws and institutions, while excluding those without credentials from their elite echelon. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the past few years, museums of contemporary art have come under a fair deal of scrutiny. Pressures from groups such as Decoloinise This Space or the oxycontin scandal have forced changes to the governance of some of the world’s best-known institutions. At the same time, the work of journalists and museum scholars has revealed that the relationships between trustees, curators, collections, and the public are often far more complex than the narratives of public benefit and private value would have us believe. Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) is a critical analysis of contemporary art collections and the value form. In the United States, institutions administered by the nonprofit system have an ambiguous status as they are neither entirely private nor fully public. Among nonprofits, the museum is unique as it is the only institution where trustees tend to collect the same objects they hold in ‘public trust’ on behalf of the nation. Shaked argues that the public serves as an alibi for establishing the symbolic value of art, which sustains its monetary value and its markets. In The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum (Lund Humphries, 2022), Adam tracks the phenomenon of the collector’s museum in the 21st century. There are some 400 private art museums around the world, and an astonishing 70% of those devoted to contemporary art were founded in the past 20 years. Although private museums have been accused of being tax-evading vanity projects or ‘tombs for trophies’, the picture is complex and nuanced. Private museums can add greatly to the cultural life of a community, giving a platform to emerging artists, supplying educational programmes and revitalising declining or neglected regions. But their relationship with public institutions can also be problematic. Are museums purely public affairs? How do private collections serve the greater good? What happens when these missions become confused? Georgina Adam and Nizan Shaked speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the 500-year history and the recent rise of the private art museum and consider if even public museums are, in the end, private. Georgina Adam is a journalist specialising in the art market. She writes for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper. She is the author of Big Bucks and The Dark Side of the Boom. Nizan Shaked is a professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies at California State University Long Beach. She is the author of The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art.
Museum Susch
The Fisher collection at SF MoMA
Warren Kanders leaves the board of the Whitney
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As the culture wars intensify, it seems that all sources of neutral authority get challenged and that includes opinion polls. Accusations about bias and unreliability fly around and yet everyone seriously engaged in the political process studies polls closely because they think they contain important truths. So are polls becoming more reliable because of improved techniques or less so because of the increasingly fractured and perhaps, increasingly difficult to measure nature of western democracies. British polling expert Mark Pak – author of Polls Unpacked - discusses the future of opinion polls. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 510 BC, an obscure Greek city located literally on a backwater revolted against its tyrant. This was not extraordinary; such things happened regularly in the many Greek city-states. What followed however was extraordinary, and even world-changing. Athens became a democracy. Then just seventeen years after that, Athens and its tiny ally of Plataea defeated a raid by the mighty Persian Empire. The great century of Athenian glory had begun.Yet the history of Athens did not end with either Spartan victory in the Peloponnesian War, or with the supremacy of Macedon, or even with conquest by Rome. While never quite attaining its heights under Pericles, Athens was often important; and even when it was relatively unimportant, it always remained interesting. The history of Athens, both during its decades of glory and its centuries of relative peace and quiet, is chronicled by Bruce Clark in his new book Athens: City of Wisdom. Clark is a writer for The Economist, where he covers European affairs and religion. He moves from Athenian origins, to Periclean Athens; from to the medieval city when the Parthenon was the castle of the Duke of Athens, to Ottoman conquest; to Greek independence, and Athens becoming the capital of a new Kingdom of Greece; and all the way into the 21st century. For Further Investigation
Also by Bruce Clark, a history of events mentioned in our conversation (as well as in the conversation with Roderick Beaton): Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Formed Modern Greece and Turkey
For a very important part of Athenian history we deliberately ignored, see the conversation with classical historian Jennifer Roberts in Episode 121: The War Between the Greeks, or, The Forever War
For another different perspective on Athens, see Episode 179: What’s the Good of Ambition, or, Socrates and Alcibiades
The Acropolis Museum
Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite sites to browse, and here’s The Atlas Obscura Guide To Athens: 55 Cool, Hidden, and Unusual Things to Do in Athens Greece
Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the excellent podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Poland in the 1940s and '50s, a new kind of Catholic intended to remake European social and political life--not with guns, but French philosophy. Piotr H. Kosicki's book Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and 'Revolution,' 1891-1956 (Yale UP, 2018) examines generations of deeply religious thinkers whose faith drove them into public life, including Karol Wojtyla, future Pope John Paul II, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the future prime minister who would dismantle Poland's Communist regime. Seeking to change the way we understand the Catholic Church, World War II, the Cold War, and communism, this study centers on the idea of "revolution." It examines two crucial countries, France and Poland, while challenging conventional wisdom among historians and introducing innovations in periodization, geography, and methodology. Why has much of Eastern Europe gone back down the road of exclusionary nationalism and religious prejudice since the end of the Cold War? Kosicki helps to understand the crises of contemporary Europe by examining the intellectual world of Roman Catholicism in Poland and France between the Church's declaration of war on socialism in 1891 and the demise of Stalinism in 1956. Brenna Moore teaches in the Department of Theology at Fordham University and works in the areas of Catholic Intellectual History, particularly in modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of World War II. But French diplomats had other motives, too. From Africa to Southeast Asia, France’s empire was unraveling. France insisted that Algeria—the crown jewel of the empire and home to a nationalist movement then pleading its case to the United Nations—be included in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. The French hoped that Algeria’s involvement in the EEC would quell colonial unrest and confirm international agreement that Algeria was indeed French. French authorities harnessed Algeria’s legal status as an official département within the empire to claim that European trade regulations and labor rights should traverse the Mediterranean. Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany conceded in order to move forward with the treaty, and Algeria entered a rights regime that allowed free movement of labor and guaranteed security for the families of migrant workers. Even after independence in 1962, Algeria remained part of the community, although its ongoing inclusion was a matter of debate. Still, Algeria’s membership continued until 1976, when a formal treaty removed it from the European community. In this book, Dr. Brown combats understandings of Europe’s “natural” borders by emphasizing the extracontinental contours of the early union. The unification vision was never spatially limited, suggesting that contemporary arguments for geographic boundaries excluding Turkey and areas of Eastern Europe from the European Union must be seen as ahistorical. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
2019 marked the five-hundred year anniversary of the launch of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world–a milestone marked by commemorative sailings, museum exhibitions, and a joint submission from Spain and Portugal to UNESCO. Two years later, the Philippines marked their own commemoration of Magellan’s voyage: the 500th anniversary of his death at the hands of local leader Lapu-Lapu. A master voyager in Spain and Portugal, a defeated imperialist in the Philippines–these are just two of the ways that Magellan’s image has evolved and changed over the past five centuries. But what was the man actually like? Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tries to get at who Magellan was in his latest book Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan (University of California Press: 2022). Relying on first-hand accounts of Magellan’s voyage, Felipe portrays Magellan as a self-promoter, devious over-promiser, lover of chivalric literature, ruthless authoritarian and, at the end, a believer in his own hype. In this interview, Felipe and I talk about Magellan: the man, his voyage (and what it was actually supposed to do), and the legacy of his expedition. Felipe holds the William P. Reynolds Chair of Mission in Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor in the Departments of History and Classics and the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. His most recent books are Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It (University of California Press: 2019) and, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of the World (Oxford University Press: 2021) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Straits. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new and fascinating book, Britain Alone: How a Decade of Conflict Remade the Nation (Manchester UP, 2022), Dr. Liam Stanley explores how, over the past decade or so, various crises have encouraged a particular process of nationalization in Britain. Typically, increased scarcity of resources will twist and intensify existing tensions about access to those resources – who should have access, who shouldn’t, and why. Stanley’s project in Britain Alone is to take a deep dive into the stimuli of a single decade to identify the cultural and economic motivators of that impulse. From the funding of the NHS to the Scottish Independence referendum, from Brexit to the COVID response, the ways they all had the potential to both reinforce or undermine the forces of nationalization and nationalism are the focus of Britain Alone. Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-host of the Lies Agreed Upon podcast and author of Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Maria Theresa (1717–1780) was once the most powerful woman in Europe. At the age of twenty-three, she ascended to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, a far-flung realm composed of diverse ethnicities and languages, beset on all sides by enemies and rivals. Master historian, Professor Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger provides the definitive biography of Maria Theresa, in her outstanding biography, Maria Theresa: The Habsburg Empress in her Time (Princeton University Press, 2022). Situating this exceptional empress within her time while dispelling the myths surrounding her. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Professor Stollberg-Rilinger examines all facets of eighteenth-century society, from piety and patronage to sexuality and childcare, ceremonial life at court, diplomacy, and the everyday indignities of warfare. She challenges the idealized image of Maria Theresa as an enlightened reformer and mother of her lands who embodied both feminine beauty and virile bellicosity, showing how she despised the ideas of the Enlightenment, treated her children with relentless austerity, and mercilessly persecuted Protestants and Jews. Work, consistent physical and mental discipline, and fear of God were the principles Maria Theresa lived by, and she demanded the same from her family, her court, and her subjects. A panoramic work of scholarship that brings Europe’s age of empire spectacularly to life, Maria Theresa paints an unforgettable portrait of the uncompromising yet singularly charismatic woman who left her enduring mark on the era in which she lived and reigned. In the words of John Adamson in the Literary Review, Professor Stollberg-Rilinger’s treatment of the Habsburg ruler will stand "as the basic reference point for studies of Maria Theresa for decades to come". Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Afropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin (Peter Lang, 2022), the first book in the new series “Imagining Black Europe,” explores what Afropolitanism does. Mobile people of African descent use this term to address their own lived realities creatively, which often includes countering stereotypical notions of being African. Afropolitan practices are enormously heterogeneous and malleable, which constitutes its strengths and, at the same time, creates tensions. Anna von Rath traces the theoretical beginnings of Afropolitanism and moves on to explore Afropolitan practices in London and Berlin. Afropolitanism can take different forms, such as that of an identity, a political and ethical stance, a dead–end road, networks, a collective self–care practice or a strategic label. While not a unitary project, the vast variety of Afropolitan practices provide approaches to contemporary political problems in Europe and beyond. In this book, Afropolitan practices are read against the specific context of German and British colonial histories and structures of racism, the histories of Black Europeans, and contemporary right–wing resurgence in Germany and England, respectively. Nicole Coleman is Assistant Professor of German at Wayne State University. She tweets @drnicoleman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Otto Dix fought in the First World War for the better part of four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. Marked by the experience, he made monumental, difficult and powerful works about it. Whereas Dix has often been presented as a lone voice of reason and opposition in Germany between the wars, this book locates his work squarely in the mainstream of Weimar society. Informed by recent studies of collective remembrance, of camaraderie, and of the popular, working-class socialist groups that commemorated the war, Michael Mackenzie's book Otto Dix and the First World War: Grotesque Humor, Camaraderie and Remembrance (Peter Lang, 2019) takes Dix's very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist's studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war. The author argues that Dix sought to establish a community of veterans through depictions of the war experience that used the soldier's humorous, grotesque language of the trenches and that deliberately excluded women and other non-combatants. His depictions were preoccupied with heteronormativity in the context of intimate touch and tenderness between soldiers at the front and with sexual potency in the face of debilitating wounds suffered by others in the war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence (UP of Mississippi, 2021) explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls’ book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls’ book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them. Julie Pfeiffer is a professor of English at Hollins University. She is editor of Children’s Literature, the annual of Children’s Literature Association. Renee Garris is a professor of Humanities in Virginia. She teaches the Humanities as a discipline as well as hosts authors on this network as well as the Performing Arts channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2021) is a ground-breaking history of the British monarchy in the First World War and of the social and cultural functions of monarchism in the British war effort. Heather Jones examines how the conflict changed British cultural attitudes to the monarchy, arguing that the conflict ultimately helped to consolidate the crown's sacralised status. She looks at how the monarchy engaged with war recruitment, bereavement, gender norms, as well as at its political and military powers and its relationship with Ireland and the empire. She considers the role that monarchism played in military culture and examines royal visits to the front, as well as the monarchy's role in home front morale and in interwar war commemoration. Her findings suggest that the rise of republicanism in wartime Britain has been overestimated and that war commemoration was central to the monarchy's revered interwar status up to the abdication crisis. In short, this is very much the work that master-historian David Stevenson accurately notes: "sheds new light on crucial aspects of the British (and Irish) experience between 1914 and 1918". In short, For King and Country is a must read book. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man (U Toronto Press, 2022) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941. Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish men’s gender identities, intersecting with categories of ethnicity, race, class, and age, underwent a profound process of marginalization that destabilized accustomed ways of performing masculinity. At the same time, in their attempts to sustain their conceptions of masculinity these men maintained agency and developed coping strategies that prevented their full-scale emasculation. Huebel draws on a rich archive of diaries, letters, and autobiographies to interpret the experiences of these men, focusing on their roles as soldiers and protectors, professionals and breadwinners, and parents and husbands. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man sheds light on how the Nazis sought to emasculate Jewish men through propaganda, the law, and violence, and how in turn German-Jewish men were able to defy emasculation and adapt – at least temporarily – to their marginalized status as men. Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these gems and uses them to illuminate the lives of the earliest English speakers. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friendship, and where you might grow up to be a laughter-smith. The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English (Princeton UP, 2022) takes readers on a journey through Old English words and customs related to practical daily activities (eating, drinking, learning, working); relationships and entertainment; health and the body, mind, and soul; the natural world (animals, plants, and weather); locations and travel (the source of some of the most evocative words in Old English); mortality, religion, and fate; and the imagination and storytelling. Each chapter ends with its own “wordhord”—a list of its Old English terms, with definitions and pronunciations. Entertaining and enlightening, The Wordhord reveals the magical roots of the language you’re reading right now: you’ll never look at—or speak—English in the same way again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The American Army in Germany, 1918–1923: Success against the Odds (UP of Kansas, 2021) by Dean A. Nowowiejski fills a gap in American military and political history through thorough research and a compelling narrative of the Rhineland occupation. After the armistice ended the fighting on the Western Front in World War I, the Third US Army marched into the American occupation zone around the city of Koblenz, Germany, in December 1918. American forces remained there as part of an “inter-Allied” coalition until early 1923. Nowowiejski reintroduces us to a successful military-diplomat, Major General Henry T. Allen, who faced two major challenges: build an efficient army and handle the complexity of working with the Allied powers of France, Britain, and Belgium in the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission (IARHC). Allen’s ability to balance the interests of the French with those of the occupied Germans made him an indispensable participant in the High Commission. As the French sought revenge and added security against Germany, Allen moderated their actions with diplomatic skill. When the French sent forces into Germany in 1920 and 1921, Allen ensured that the US zone around Koblenz remained free of French interference. These achievements were without the support of the administration, and Congress had no desire to take part in European affairs. Allen also had to create a competent American army in the Rhineland so that the Allied powers and the Germans would respect American views and interests. He successfully took a large number of new recruits, who replaced World War I combat veterans, and molded them into a professional fighting force. As a result, the American Forces in Germany became an exemplar for the entire US Army and a symbol to the Allies and Germans of American power and resolve. This force competently accomplished the difficult task of postwar occupation according to the highest international standards. The US administration made the decision in 1922 to radically cut back the size of Allen’s army, and in 1923 to remove all US troops from Germany. The author analyzes this withdrawal as a “missed opportunity” for US leverage on diplomatic developments in Europe. Dean A. Nowowiejski is the Ike Skelton Distinguished Chair for the Art of War and director, Art of War Scholars Program, US Army Command and General Staff College. Alex Beckstrand is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut, a lecturer at Central Connecticut State University, and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves. He works in the aerospace industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Charly Coleman's latest book, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021) is at once a history of ideas, the economy, religion, and material culture. Pursuing the imbrication of the economy and theology with respect to both worldly and spiritual value and wealth, the book explores the emergence and development of a specifically Catholic ethic of capitalism particular to the French context in the century and more leading up to the French Revolution. In its six chapters, the book examines the Eucharist, John Law's system, speculation and debt, usury, consumption, luxury, and more. By the time this reader reached the epilogue, it became clear that The Spirit of French Capitalism is both a history of the Age of Enlightenment and a genealogy/prehistory of the commodity fetishism elaborated by Marx and Marxist thinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Faith in infinite wealth creation, obsessive consumption, pleasure, abundance, and enchantment are as much a part of the history of capitalism as scarcity, regulation, and restraint. Provocative and complicated, the book will be of great interest scholars and students of the histories of the early modern economy, religion, and the state in France and elsewhere, as well as the history of capitalism more broadly. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era’s canonical works. Butterfield-Rosen analyzes a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon in European art: how artists departed from conventions for posing the human figure that had long been standard. In the decades around 1900, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, both archaic and modern, broke with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being’s physical volume and capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This formal departure destabilized prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject. Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky— replete with new archival discoveries—Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition (U Chicago Press, 2021) combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Spiritual Empires in Europe and India: Cosmopolitan Religious Movements from 1875 to the Interwar Era (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021) provides a comparative analysis of cosmopolitan (esoteric) religious movements, such as Theosophy, Groupe Independent des Études Ésotériques, Anthroposophy, and Monism, in England, France, Germany, and India during the late nineteenth-century to the interwar years. Ultimately, it illustrates how an innovative religious discourse converged with the secular world and became applied to envision a new social order—to spiritually re-engineer the world. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On the eve of the First World War, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the largest and most powerful socialist party in the world. German Social Democracy through British Eyes: A Documentary History, 1870–1914 (U Toronto Press, 2021) examines the SPD’s rise using British diplomatic reports from Saxony, the third-largest federal state in Imperial Germany and the cradle of the socialist movement in that country. Rather than focusing on the Anglo-German antagonism leading to the First World War, the book peers into the everyday struggles of German workers to build a political movement and emancipate themselves from the worst features of a modern capitalist system: exploitation, poverty, and injustice. The archival documents, most of which have never been published before, raise the question of how people from one nation view people from another. The documents also illuminate political systems, election practices, and anti-democratic strategies at the local and regional levels, allowing readers to test hypotheses derived only from national-level studies. This collection of primary sources shows why, despite the inhospitable environment of German authoritarianism, Saxony and Germany were among the most important incubators of socialism. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Portuguese Member of Parliament and internationally renowned biologist Alexandre Quintanilha about the many valuable lessons Portugal's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic could teach all of us, if only we'd take the time to pay attention. Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the eleventh and twelfth-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily. Traditionally, scholars have considered iconic works like the Cappella Palatina and the Bayeux Embroidery in a geographically piecemeal fashion that prevents us from seeing their full significance. Here, Reilly examines these works individually and within the larger context of a connected Norman world. Just as Rollo founded the Normandy "of different nationalities", the Normans created a visual culture that relied on an assemblage of forms. To the modern eye, these works are perceived as culturally diverse. As Reilly demonstrates, the multiple sources for Norman visual culture served to expand their meaning. Norman artworks represented the cultural mix of each locale, and the triumph of Norman rule, not just as a military victory but as a legitimate succession, and often as the return of true Christian rule. Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media. Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in “looking good.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (University of London Press, 2022) by Professor Simon P. Newman reveals the hidden stories of enslaved and bound people who attempted to escape from captivity in England’s capital. In 1655 White Londoners began advertising in the English-speaking world’s first newspapers for enslaved people who had escaped. Based on the advertisements placed in these newspapers by masters and enslavers offering rewards for so-called runaways, this book brings to light for the first time the history of slavery in England as revealed in the stories of resistance by enslaved workers. Featuring a series of case-studies of individual "freedom-seekers", this book explores the nature and significance of escape attempts as well as detailing the likely routes and networks they would take to gain their freedom. The book demonstrates that not only were enslaved people present in Restoration London but that White Londoners of this era were intimately involved in the construction of the system of racial slavery, a process that traditionally has been regarded as happening in the colonies rather than the British Isles. An unmissable and important book that seeks to delve into Britain’s colonial past. R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jeroen Koch, Senior Lecturer of European History at the University of Utrecht talks to Jana Byars about his 2018 book, The House of Orange in Revolution and War, just published in English (Reaktion Books, 2022). About half discussion about the importance of public intellectuals and popular history and half history lesson, this unusual and lively interview is sure to delight. An epic account of the House of Orange-Nassau over one hundred and fifty years of European history. Three rulers from the House of Orange-Nassau reigned over the Netherlands from 1813 to 1890: King William I from 1813 to 1840, King William II from 1840 to 1849, and King William III from 1849 to 1890. Theirs is an epic tale of joy and tragedy, progress and catastrophe, disappointment and glory--all set against the backdrop of a Europe plagued by war and revolution. The House of Orange in Revolution and War relates one and a half centuries of House of Orange history in a gripping narrative, leading the reader from the last stadholders of the Dutch Republic to the modern monarchy of the early twentieth century, from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars to World War I and the European Revolutions that came after it. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Diana Garvin’s Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women's Food Work (U Toronto Press, 2022) is an expansive and multifaceted look at women’s food work in Fascist Italy. From less-explored archives, Garvin has assembled a diverse set of sources―diaries, work songs, cookbooks, kitchen plans and utensils, factory records, and more―to tell the story of how women negotiated the daily tasks of producing and preparing food under a Fascist regime, its autarkic policies, and, as the war progressed, increasingly dire food rationing and shortages. Feeding Fascism is particularly attentive to the intersections of class, gender, and the politics and realities of women’s food work, as well as to the material culture of life under Fascism and what it says about the dialectic between practicality and patriotism, resistance and consent. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"The rule of law is a means by which [western EU members] want to knead us into something that resembles them," warned Viktor Orbán during his successful campaign for a fourth consecutive term as Hungary's prime minister. Yet, until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU has held back on the demands it makes of members regarding core democratic norms and values. For a decade, the EU's institutions and most of its members have worried about the possibility of the emergence of a full autocracy within its borders but have been held back by diplomatic interests and the constraints imposed by unanimity in the use of Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union. The war, Orbán's re-election, a split in the Polish-Hungarian axis, and the lengthening queue of eastern membership applicants have changed the backdrop. The political will to ensure a liberal-democratic union has been reinforced but Article 7 is still inadequate to the task. Tom Theuns, assistant professor of political theory and European politics at Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science, has a nuclear option in his new paper: The Need for an EU Expulsion Mechanism: Democratic Backsliding and the Failure of Article 7 (Res Publica, Springer - 2022). https://link.springer.com/arti... Mentioned: Memory and the future of Europe: Rupture and integration in the wake of total war by Peter Verovšek (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Adding a Bite to a Bark? A Story of Article 7, the EU Enlargement, and Jörg Haider by Wojciech Sadurski (Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 10/01) *The authors' book recommendations are: Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (OUP Oxford, 2021) and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Little Brown, 2013). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we talk to Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon about Wasteland with Words (Reaktion, 2010) and about microhistory as a method. Iceland is an enigmatic island country marked by contradiction: it’s a part of Europe, yet separated from it by the Atlantic Ocean; it’s seemingly inhospitable, yet home to more than 300,000. Wasteland with Words explores these paradoxes to uncover the mystery of Iceland. In Wasteland with Words Sigurdur Gylfi Magnússon presents a wide-ranging and detailed analysis of the island’s history that examines the evolution and transformation of Icelandic culture while investigating the literary and historical factors that created the rich cultural heritage enjoyed by Icelanders today. Magnússon explains how a nineteenth-century economy based on the industries of fishing and agriculture—one of the poorest in Europe—grew to become a disproportionately large economic power in the late twentieth century, while retaining its strong sense of cultural identity. Bringing the story up to the present, he assesses the recent economic and political collapse of the country and how Iceland has coped. Throughout Magnússon seeks to chart the vast changes in this country’s history through the impact and effect on the Icelandic people themselves. Up-to-date and fascinating, Wasteland with Words is a comprehensive study of the island’s cultural and historical development, from tiny fishing settlements to a global economic power. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rejecting claims that migration is a crisis for Europe, Europe's Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2020) instead suggests that the 'migration crisis' reflects a more fundamental breakdown of a modern European tradition of humanism. Squire provides a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of the EU's response to the 'crisis', highlighting the centrality of practices of governing migration through death and precarity. Furthermore, she unpacks a series of pro-migration activist interventions that emerge from the lived experiences of those regularly confronting the consequences of the EU's response. By showing how these advance alternative horizons of solidarity and hope, Squire draws attention to a renewed humanism that is grounded both in a deepened respect for the lives and dignity of people on the move, and an appreciation of longer histories of violence and dispossession. Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. Her research explores the politics of migration, displacement, asylum and solidarity activism across various contexts. She is author of several books, including Reclaiming Migration (2021, Manchester University Press), Europe’s Migration Crisis (2020, Cambridge University Press), Post/Humanitarian Border Politics Between Mexico and the US (2015, Palgrave) and The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (2009, Palgrave). She currently leads a large collaborative project, Data and Displacement, which explores the data-based humanitarian assistance to IDPs (internally displaced persons) in north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But in Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State (Princeton UP, 2021), Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half-century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws. Agents of Reform tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. Agents of Reform compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes in Germany, France, Belgium, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Foregrounding the agency of individual reformers, it challenges existing explanations of welfare state development and advances a new pragmatist field theory of institutional change. In doing so, it moves beyond standard narratives of interests and institutions toward an integrated understanding of how these interact with political actors’ ideas and coalition-building strategies. Agents of Reform is a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the emergence of the welfare state and the role of social movements in political reform. Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
(Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2019) takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire-building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, cartography, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It examines a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest. Please also see this related article by Dr. Biedermann (which was mentioned during the interview): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/714972 Dr. Zoltán Biedermann is Professor of Early Modern History in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London. Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I spoke to Prof. Adrian Shubert, professor of History at York University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada about his book on the nineteenth century Spanish soldier statesman Baldomero Espartero published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021. Baldomero Espartero (1793–1879) who Shubert compares to Napoleon and Garibaldi and on whom a postage stamp was released in May 2020 in Spain (after the publication of The Sword..), led a life resembling that of a character created by Stendhal or Gabriel García Márquez. Indeed Espartero was famed to have been the peacemaker who promoted national unity who had brought an end to the horrific Carlist civil war, a highly internationalized conflict. He became the harbinger of a nationalism that was not elitist but collective. In The Sword of Luchana: Baldomero Espartero and the Making of Modern Spain, 1793–1879 (U Toronto Press, 2021), based on comprehensive archival research in Spain, Argentina, and the United Kingdom, the historian explores the public and private lives of Espartero and his wife Jacinta who he describes as the power couple of 19th century Spain. He affirms that her role in his life and public life brought to the fore gender issues in the 19th century and were a constitutive part of the liberal revolution. Shubert’s work touches diverse aspects during times of war, revolution, and political and social change and brings to life a Spanish hero who Karl Marx mentioned in his writings and who has fallen into oblivion. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509-1670 (Ohio UP, 2019), Jared Staller tells the history of how the myth of cannibalism in West Central Africa developed between 1509 and 1670 in the context of mis-understandings between European and Africans. Many of these misunderstandings were in fact intentional, given that the myth of cannibalism proved very useful to Portuguese slavers seeking to bypass the restrictions imposed by the Papacy as to who could be justifiably enslaved. On the African side, rulers of the Kongo kingdom used the discourse of cannibals to secure Portuguese support at a time of political upheaval. The increasing chaos and violence that resulted from the slow decline of existing political structures such as the Kongo, coupled with a protracted drought, contributed to the formation of new political formations that relied heavily on violence and terror and who found the myth of cannibalism useful in their attempts to compete and survive in a dangerous and insecure world. Back in Europe, stories about African cannibals were also used as a means to reflect on the religious conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era, allowing the myth to be passed on and survive into the modern world. Staller tells this compelling story by re-reading the most important European sources where African cannibals are mentioned as well as the few African sources that exist for this period. By carefully cross-referencing these sources and building on the knowledge that historians of Africa have been able to secure from oral and ethnographic sources, Staller is able to revisit old debates in African historiography and demonstrate that European sources, when carefully read, can illuminate our understanding of African perspectives. The book includes a detailed explanation of the methodology used, suggested readings for every chapter and brief excerpts from the sources, all of which make this book a robust contribution to the history and historiography of Africa and the Atlantic world. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As modern empires rise and fall, ancient Rome becomes ever more significant. We yearn for Rome's power but fear Rome's ruin--will we turn out like the Romans, we wonder, or can we escape their fate? That question has obsessed centuries of historians and leaders, who have explored diverse political, religious, and economic forces to explain Roman decline. Yet the decisive factor remains elusive. In New Rome: The Empire in the East (Harvard UP, 2022), Paul Stephenson looks beyond traditional texts and well-known artifacts to offer a novel, scientifically-minded interpretation of antiquity's end. It turns out that the descent of Rome is inscribed not only in parchments but also in ice cores and DNA. From these and other sources, we learn that pollution and pandemics influenced the fate of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. During its final five centuries, the empire in the east survived devastation by natural disasters, the degradation of the human environment, and pathogens previously unknown to the empire's densely populated, unsanitary cities. Despite the Plague of Justinian, regular "barbarian" invasions, a war with Persia, and the rise of Islam, the empire endured as a political entity. However, Greco-Roman civilization, a world of interconnected cities that had shared a common material culture for a millennium, did not. Politics, war, and religious strife drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Braiding the political history of the empire together with its urban, material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers the most comprehensive explanation to date of the Eastern Empire's transformation into Byzantium. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Patronage has long been an important topic of study in musicology, but is much more likely to be one that specialists in medieval or renaissance music research. In The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France (Boydell Press, 2021), Louis Epstein turns to patronage in the twentieth century to reveal an important part of the musical economy that is often overlooked. Many different types of patrons existed in this period, from music publishers and the French government to institutions and wealthy individuals. Far from mere sources of funding, early twentieth-century patrons collaborated closely with composers, treating commissions for new music as opportunities to express their own artistry. Although some of these patrons tried to interfere with the compositional process, most were engaged in a more subtle form of labor. For instance, they curated like-minded composers, encouraged people to write in expensive genres like opera or orchestral music, and supported French nationalism. Epstein also finds that the French example helped to influence the flowering of institutional patronage in post-World War II America. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Poland in a Colonial World-Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918-1939 (Routledge, 2021) is a study of the interwar Polish state and empire building project in a changing world of empires, nation-states, dominions, protectorates, mandates, and colonies.Drawing from a wide range of sources spanning two continents and five countries, Piotr Puchalski examines how Polish elites looked to expansion in South America and Africa as a solution to both real problems, such as industrial backwardness, and perceived issues, such as the supposed overrepresentation of Jews in "liberal professions." He charts how, in partnership with other European powers and international institutions such as the League of Nations, Polish leaders made attempts to channel emigration to South America, to establish direct trade with Africa, to expedite national minorities to far-away places, and to tap into colonial resources around the globe. Puchalski demonstrates the intersection between such national policies and larger processes taking place at the time, including the internationalist turn of colonialism and the global fascination with technocratic solutions. Carefully researched, the volume is key reading for scholars and advanced students of twentieth-century European history. Piotr Puchalski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of History and Archival Studies of the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland. His academic interests include Polish, French, British, and American diplomacy, as well as Western colonialism, totalitarian regimes, and modern ideologies. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Julius Caesar was no aspiring autocrat seeking to realize the imperial future but an unusually successful republican leader who was measured against the Republic's traditions and its greatest heroes of the past. Catastrophe befell Rome not because Caesar (or anyone else) turned against the Republic, its norms, and institutions, but because Caesar's extraordinary success mobilized a determined opposition that ultimately preferred to precipitate civil war rather than accept its political defeat. Based on painstaking re-analysis of the ancient sources in the light of recent advances in our understanding of the participatory role of the People in the republican political system, a strong emphasis on agents' choices rather than structural causation, and profound skepticism toward the facile determinism that often substitutes for historical explanation, Julius Caesar and the Roman People (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a radical reinterpretation of a figure of profound historical importance who stands at the turning point of Roman history from Republic to Empire. Robert Morstein-Marx is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we speak to Rebecca Cypess, Associate Professor at Rutgers University, about her new book: Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (University of Chicago, 2022). Interest in music sociability during the eighteenth century, including domestic and semi-domestic music-making, has been steadily growing. As scholars have noted, musical salons were crucial in providing a space where women could perform in public, which was otherwise impossible, for the most part. In this book, music scholar and performer Rebecca Cypess focuses on the figure of the salonnière, the female host at the center of most musical salons in Europe and America in the second half of the eighteenth century. Through case studies include the salons of Anne-Louise Brillon in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia, and the painter Angelika Kauffman in Rome, Cypess addresses several far-reaching issues in Enlightenment musical culture. Among them are questions having to do with collaboration and improvisation vs. authorship, sensual vs. intellectual experiences, the role of women in 'governing' the salons and collecting musical scores and instruments, and how these collections can function as texts that illuminate the lived experiences of eighteenth-century music. In this richly written book, Cypess draws on letters, diaries, and other written documents, as well as iconography, to make connections with non-musical practices, including games, and to recreate the salon as an immersive musical and creative environment. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dr. Lucy Donkin’s Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2022) illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in Medieval Western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces. The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. “The ground beneath our feet goes unnoticed for the most part. Yet it guides our steps and shapes our identity in many ways. We obey or disregard markings that indicate where to cross the road, stand back from the edge of the platform, or position ourselves on a sports pitch…Differencing convention in homes and places of worship remind us that our own treatment of the surface is culturally constructed." Dr. Donkin argues that “In the Middle Ages too, the surface of the ground conveyed information to those who stood on it, prompted physical and imaginative responses, and marked out individual and groups in accordance with the values and concerns of the time. Indeed, in some respects, it played a greater role today in articulating space and identity, especially within ecclesiastical settings…. This book focuses on Medieval interaction with holy ground, within and beyond the church interior, asking how these shaped both place and people.” By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Dr. Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities. Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Dr. Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description. For many artists, however, the practice of Surrealist art took on an explicitly political and therefore practical dimensions. In Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021), art historian Abigail Susik argues that many Surrealists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. Abigail Susik speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Oscar Domínguez. She brings these questions into the present by engaging with the work of the Chicago Surrealists of the 1960s and 70s. Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Art History at Willamette University and co-editor of Surrealism and film after 1945.
Man Ray, Séance de rêve éveiillé
Oscar Domínguez, Machine à coudre électro-sexuelle
Surrealism Without Borders at Tate Modern
Abigail’s op-eds in the Washington Post and New York Times
Abigail’s forthcoming book Radical Dreams
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On Sunday April 3rd, Hungarians decide whether to elect Viktor Orbán and his special form of eurosceptical "illiberal democracy" to a fourth consecutive term in office as war rages on their northeastern border. Since he returned to power in 2010, Orbán has established a new style of government that is hard to capture with standard political vocabulary. In previous podcasts, András Körösényi opted for plebiscitary leader democracy, Gábor Scheiring for authoritarian capitalism, and Tímea Drinóczi and Agnieszka Bień-Kacała for illiberal constitutionalism. Whatever term best explains it, Orbánism has attracted a fan base among national-conservatives globally: most prominently Donald Trump's intellectual outriders and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. In his new edition of Orbanland: Why Viktor Orbán's Hungary Matters (New Europe Books, 2022), Lasse Skytt - a Danish journalist who has lived in provincial Hungary since 2013 - investigates what is uniquely Hungarian about Orbanism and what is just a more politically efficient channelling of the global reaction against liberalism and globalisation. He writes: "Through understanding what is going on in Hungary - and why - perhaps we will be able to predict how the current polarisation might shape the future of both sides of the Atlantic''. *The authors' own book recommendations are: After Europe by Ivan Krastev (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant (WH Allen, 2021). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses instead the role of more fundamental drivers of events – including the energy markets and the international monetary system. That’s one way in which her book is distinctive. It’s also a very broad book. While much of academic output has a very narrow focus, this book is unusual in attempting a sweeping overview of what’s happening in the world. What role has energy played in disrupting politics especially since the 1970s? How has the US dominance of the international financial system impacted international relations? And how has the EU influenced democratic development in Europe? Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany (Oxford UP, 2021) explores ways of thinking, feeling, and talking about being gay in the 1970s, an influential decade sandwiched between the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1969, and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Moving beyond divided Cold War Berlin, it also focuses on lesser-known cities, such as Aachen, Cologne, Frankfurt, Münster, and Stuttgart, to name just a few of the 53 localities that were home to a gay group by the end of the 1970s. These groups were important, and this book tells their story. In 1970s West Germany gay liberation did not take place only in activist meetings, universities, and on street demonstrations, but also on television, in magazine editorial offices, ordinary homes, bedrooms, and beyond. In considering all these spaces and individuals, this book provides a more complex account than previous histories, which have tended to focus only on a social movement and only on the idea of 'gay pride'. By drawing attention to ambivalence, this book shows that gay liberation was never only about pride, but also about shame; characterized not only by hope, but also by fear; and driven forward not just by the pushes of confrontation, but also by the pulls of conformism. Ranging from the painstaking emergence of the gay press to the first representation of homosexuality on television, from debates over the sexual legacy of 1968 and the student movement to the memory of Nazi persecution, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation is the first English-language book to tell the story of male homosexual politics in 1970s West Germany. In doing so, this book changes the way we think about modern queer history. Craig Griffiths is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he teaches and researches queer history, the history of sexuality, and modern European history. He is an Associate of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, and a co-founder and co-convenor of the Seminar Series in the History of Sexuality at the Institute of Historical Research, London. Leslie Waters is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe and assistant professor at The University of Texas at El Paso. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Long before Herodotus told the story of the Greeks, the ancient Mediterranean teemed with what the Greeks themselves would recognize as hallmarks of civilization: trade and commerce, cities and colonies, luxury goods and craftsmanship, cults and votives, inscriptions and their prerequisite, written language. Behind this vast network, stretching as it did across hundreds of miles and years, were a group of canny Levantine urbanites, the Phoenicians. But, due to a dearth of surviving literature and, more directly, western investment in the charmed “miracle” of Greek civilization, this is a story few of us know. In an incisive study that ranges over as many miles and centuries as the Phoenicians themselves, Carolina López-Ruiz corrects the record. The Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (Harvard University Press, 2021) puts the Phoenicians back into the spotlight where they belong. We see them as merchants and artisans who shaped—and were shaped by—the interconnected world of the Iron Age Mediterranean. It is an index of this study’s strength that López-Ruiz manages both to assert their agency in stitching together this Levantine “koine” and capture the unique contours of this hybridity everywhere it appeared—from Iberia to Sicily, Etruria to Assyria. The Phoenicians is thus not merely the history of a particularly industrious group of seafarers. It is also a glimpse into colonization and coexistence, indigenous response and adaptation, cultural innovation, and the foundations of a shared past. Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The wars between 1792 and 1815 saw the making of the modern world, with Britain and Russia the key powers to emerge triumphant from a long period of bitter conflict. In his innovative book, The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Strategies for a World War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), master historian, Jeremy Black focuses on the strategic contexts and strategies involved, explaining their significance both at the time and subsequently. Reinterpreting French Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, strategy, and their consequences, he argues that Napoleon’s failure owed much to his limitations as a strategist. Black uses this framework as a foundation to assess the nature of warfare, the character of strategy, and the eventual ascendance of Britain and Russia in this period. Rethinking the character of strategy, this is the first history to look holistically at the strategies of all the leading belligerents from a global perspective. It will be an essential read for military professionals, students, and history buffs alike. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the past decade, adventurous travelers have flocked to the island nation of Iceland to enjoy its many wonders: stunning nature and wildlife, innovative and unique cuisine, a compelling history that includes Vikings, and the rich literary tradition rooted in the Icelandic Sagas, which is still vibrantly alive today in this well read nation. Once in Iceland, travelers may also note that Iceland has one of the happiest populations with one of the highest rates of acceptance for LGBTQIA individuals, and with no military, Iceland is also one of the more peaceful nations on the planet. Iceland is also a great place to be a woman in 2022. Just how and why that is, and whether Iceland’s proximity to gender parity can serve as a model for other nations, is explored in a marvelous new book by Iceland’s current first lady, Canadian born Eliza Reid. “Secrets of the Sprakkar Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World” explores Iceland’s unique history, people, politics, and of course nature, and how these have enabled women to pursue the equality that they know to be their right. In the pages of Secrets of the Sprakkar: What the Outstanding Women of Iceland Know about Equality (Sourcebooks, 2022), Reid introduces us to several extraordinary “sprakkar” or powerful women. This is an ancient Icelandic word that perfectly describes the pioneering politicians, medieval heroines, stand-up comedians, fishermen, search and rescue team leaders, and immigrants to Iceland, like Reid herself who populate the book. As Reid delves into the stories of these extraordinary women, she tells her own story of immigrating to Iceland for love, having a family, and forging her own professional path as the founder of the Popular Iceland Writers Retreat. Life threw Reid and her husband Guðni Jóhannesson a curve ball in 2016: Jóhannesson, a professor of history, was invited to be a pundit on Icelandic TV in the run up to the presidential election following the explosive Panama Papers. And then, as Reid recounts, the phone began to ring. Jóhannesson was elected president and Reid assumed the very public role of First Lady. In “Secrets of the Sprakkar,” she muses about the oddity of the role, but her decision to embrace it with dignity and enthusiasm. She speaks eloquently about how it is important for Iceland’s growing community of immigrants to hear her speak in public forums with an accent, just as they do, and know that what she — and they — have to say is important. “Secrets of the Sprakkar” is a slim volume that packs a big punch: part history, part political science, rooted in social observation of a society that has actively pursued gender parity and may well be closing in on it. But above all, this is a love letter to Iceland, from its still-besotted First Lady. Eliza Reid is a Canadian-Icelandic writer, co-founder of Iceland Writers Retreat, and has been Iceland’s First Lady since 2016. Reid was educated at the University of Toronto and Oxford University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Diplomatic Enlightenment: Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation (Brill, 2021) reconfigures the study of the origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire. Challenging dominant interpretations of the period, this book shows that early eighteenth-century Spanish authors turned to Enlightenment ideas to reinvent Spain’s role in the European balance of power. And while international law grew to provide a legal framework that could safeguard peace, Spanish officials, diplomats, and authors, hardened by the failure of Spanish diplomacy, sought instead to regulate international relations by drawing on investment, profit, and self-interest. The book shows, on the basis of new archival research, that the Diplomatic Enlightenment sought to turn the Spanish Empire into a space for closer political cooperation with other European and non-European states and empires. Edward Jones Corredera is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 2020. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Ulrich Gutmair about his book The First Days of Berlin: The Sound of Change (John Wiley and Sons, 2021). Berlin in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall: this is the place to be. Berlin-Mitte, the central district of the city, with its wastelands and decaying houses, has become the centre of a new movement. Artists, musicians, squatters, club owners, DJs and ravers are reclaiming the old city centre and bringing it back to life. This interregnum between two systems – the collapse of the old East Germany, the gentrification of the new Berlin – lasts only a few years. West Berliners, East Berliners and new residents from abroad join together to create music, art and fashion, to open bars and clubs and galleries, even if only for a few weeks. In the months following the fall of the Wall, there is a feeling of new beginnings and immense possibilities: life is now, and to be in the here and now feels endless. The phrase ‘temporary autonomous zone’ is circulating, it describes the idea – romantic and naive but, in the circumstances, not absurd – that, at a certain moment in history, you can actually do whatever you want. Ulrich Gutmair moved to West Berlin as a student in autumn 1989: two weeks later the Wall came down. He spent the next few years studying during the day in the West and exploring the squats, bars and techno clubs in the East at night. He fell in love with House and Techno and raved at Tresor, Elektro, Bunker and many other places that in the meantime have almost disappeared from collective memory. Ten years later he decided to write a book about that period in between, when one regime was brought down and a new one wasn’t yet established. When utopia was actually a place to inhabit for a moment. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD Candidate at the University of Florida. He can been contacted on twitter @craig_sorvillo or via email at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sarah Farmer's Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a history of national, regional, and local transformations during the period known as the Trente Glorieuses in France from 1945 to 1975. Rural communities and landscapes did not disappear during these years, but existed in complex relationship to urban populations, spaces, economies, and culture. "Modernization" was also a phenomenon in the countryside in various ways and the myth of an unchanging peasant world was just that. Examining state infrastructural and agricultural plans and projects; a rising French and international interest in second, "country" homes; utopian rural experiments and environmental activisms; peasant autobiographies; and (sometimes) nostalgic representations of rural life and landscapes in photographs and other visual sources, the book considers a range of objects and perspectives from/on the French countryside. Packed with compelling stories, actors, and arguments about some of the fundamental contradictions that structured French society during this period, the book challenges us to question our assumptions about what we mean when we say or think "rural" and "postwar" together. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Devin O. Pendas examines how German courts conducted Nazi trials in the immediate postwar context. His work combines close readings of legal discourses in conjunction with very human stories to present a narrative of both irony and tragedy. In a masterful comparison of all four occupation zones, this book successfully musters historical data to challenge and overturn standard conceptualizations of “transitional justice.” It thus belongs definitively in the repertoire of legal scholars, political scientists, historians, and international relations theorists. Eric Grube is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Boston College. He studies modern German and Austrian history, with a special interest in right-wing paramilitary organizations across interwar Bavaria and Austria."Casualties of War? Refining the Civilian-Military Dichotomy in World War I", Madison Historical Review, 2019. "Racist Limitations on Violence: The Nazi Occupation of Denmark", Essays in History, 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, The Jews of Denmark in the Holocaust: Life and Death in Theresienstadt Ghetto (Routledge, 2020), Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane uses previously unexplored personal accounts and archival documentation in order to examine life and death in the Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims from Denmark. The book covers an important aspect of the experience of Danish Jews during the Holocaust, one that has long stood in the shadow of the hegemonic story regarding the rescue of the Danish Jews in October 1943. Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane’s book covers all aspects of the Danish Jews’ experience with Theresienstadt, from their deportation through their relationships and life in the ghetto to their return to Denmark and their postwar lives. Silvia Goldbaum Tarabini Fracapane is a historian and an independent scholar. She obtained her PhD in modern history from Technical University Berlin, and she has an MA in comparative literature from University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses primarily on everyday life in the Theresienstadt ghetto seen from the perspective of Danish ghetto inmates. Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paul Dover argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. Dr. Dover argues that “paper, as never before, became the transactional medium; the repository of personal, communal, and institutional memory; the avenue of communication; the lifeblood of bureaucracies; and the foundation and residue of learning. Early modern Europeans, whether or not they sought to, and whether or not they were pleased with or trusted the new reality, put paper inscribed with text at the centre of their lives.” He argues that these developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life. The book focuses on “two related and simultaneous developments in early modern Europe: the great increase in information created and circulating in European society, largely rendered on paper, and the accompanying efforts to manage and make sense of it, also chiefly via paper.” The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (U Toronto Press, 2022) traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted gay men - and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as well as oral histories with witnesses and survivors, Huneke reveals that communist East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than democratic West Germany. Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Challenging persistent geopolitical asymmetries in feminist knowledge production, this collection depicts collisions between concepts and lived experiences, between academic feminism and political activism, between the West as generalizable and the East as the concrete Other. Borderlands in European Gender Studies (Routledge, 2020) narrows the gap between cultural analysis and social theory, addressing feminist theory’s epistemological foundations and its capacity to confront the legacies of colonialism and socialism. The contributions demonstrate the enduring worth of feminist concepts for critical analysis, conceptualize resistance to multiple forms of oppression, and identify the implications of the decoupling of cultural and social feminist critique for the analysis of gender relations in a post-socialist space. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), Sarah Shortall examines the twentieth-century transformation of Roman Catholicism by tracing the origins and evolution of the so-called nouvelle théologie. Developed in the interwar years by French Jesuits and Dominicans, “new theology” reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. By recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, and colonialism and nuclear war. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Patricia Tilburg's Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019) is at once a cultural, gender, urban, and labour history of the Belle Epoque era. The midinette is the central figure the book chases across serval chapters. Named for the lunch hour when thousands of female garment workers spilled into the streets of Paris each day, this female garment worker became a symbol of French taste and skill, the embodiment of productive labour and the pleasures of the modern capital. Represented by a range of observers during the period as young, cheerful, attractive, and sexually available, the midinette became the subject of (male) fantasy and philanthropy, her image working to assuage anxieties about a rapidly changing world. The lived experiences and activisms of the women workers who inspired these projections play significant roles throughout the book. Using a wide array of sources--state and police documents, municipal and philanthropic archival collections, press, fiction, music, letters, and more--the author ensures that the conditions of their working lives, their voices and demands, do not get lost in the swirl of ideas surrounding them. A cultural history that moves deftly between the material and the metaphoric, Working Girls is a pleasure to read, and I so enjoyed speaking with its author. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I spoke with Eric Protzer (Harvard University) and Paul Summerville (University of Victoria) about their great new book: Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, published by Polity in 2022. The book provides an original and counterintuitive analysis of what triggered populism around the world. It has received excellent reviews by journalists, policy makers, economists, and academic colleagues. Those who read with interest 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' and those who disagreed with Thomas Piketty shall read this book. Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville argue that populism is a response to a profound sense that many of the world’s leading economies are unfair. The countries that have been hit by the worst populist upheavals - like the US, UK, France, and Italy – have low social mobility. Unequal economic outcomes would be better tolerated in a society where individual efforts in education and work were fully recognised. The book, based on solid empirical data, demonstrate that illiberal populism strikes hardest when success is influenced by family origins rather than talent and effort. ‘Reclaiming Populism is about 230 pages long and is organised in five chapters: 1 – The Inequality Delusion and Other Scapegoats for Populism; 2 – The Fairness Instinct; 3 – Economic Unfairness and the Rise of Populism; 4 – The Twin Virtues of Equal Opportunity and Fair Unequal Outcomes; 5 – Constraints and Solutions to Economic Fairness. What explains contemporary developed-world populism? A largely-overlooked hypothesis, advanced herein, is economic unfairness. This idea holds that humans do not simply care about the magnitudes of final outcomes such as losses or inequalities. They care deeply about whether each individual’s economic outcomes occur for fair reasons. Thus citizens turn to populism when they do not get the economic opportunities and outcomes they think they fairly deserve. A series of cross-sectional regressions show that low social mobility – an important type of economic unfairness – consistently correlates with the geography of populism, both within and across developed countries. Conversely, income and wealth inequality do not; and neither do the prominent cultural hypotheses of immigrant stocks, social media use, nor the share of seniors in the population. Collectively, this evidence underlines the importance of economic fairness, and suggests that academics and policymakers should pay greater attention to normative, moral questions about the economy. The book is very interesting and accessible to a wide public. For policymakers and scholars in economics, politics and sociology it is a must-read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. She is also the author of Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games: International Sport’s Cold War Battle with NATO (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of the East German sporting travel ban, the NATO alliance and the competition to host the 1968 Summer and Winter Olympics, and the role of smaller NATO members in reshaping the alliance’s border and travel regulations. In Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games, Dichter examines a little-known and understudied until now diplomatic conflict between NATO and the International Olympic Committee. In the 1950s and 1960s, NATO members struggled to balance their adherence to the Hallstein Doctrine – non-recognition of state-symbols of East Germany – with their participation in and desire to host sports mega-events. The Hallstein doctrine limited travel for East German athletes, who could only participate as members of a club or a German team, as well as banned the inclusion of the East German anthem or flag in public. The IOC’s strict claims to apoliticism and their demand that all athletes be allowed to travel to competitions made NATO’s obstruction of East German travel unpopular and untenable. In the press, NATO members pointed to the Berlin Wall as the ultimate barrier to free travel, but behind the scenes and then later in public, the alliance’s solidarity threatened to crumble as Canada, France, and the United States competed for the right to host the Olympic Games. Although the East German travel ban featured in press commentary about the 1968 Olympics, most histories of Cold War sports overlook this crucial moment in European sport. Dichter’s work moves beyond previous histories through an extensive analysis of a wide range of archives across multiple countries, including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Germany and Norway. Her research includes not only newspapers, but more importantly diplomatic documents from NATO, NATO alliance members, and the IOC that enable her to better understand the diplomatic strategies pursued by the competing interests: nation-states, military alliances, sporting bodies, athletic federations and even athletes. Only through this transnational and multi-archival approach can Dichter illustrate the importance that NATO members placed on sport and explain why sport proved so difficult for them to handle despite broad agreement in other diplomatic arenas. The Bidding for the 68 Olympic Games is a fascinating account of a largely unknown and poorly understood conflict between NATO and a range of international sporting organizations, including the International Olympic Committee. It will appeal to people interested in sport, international diplomacy, and the Cold War. Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, out now with Manchester University Press, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has been preserved and only recently become available to researchers. Drawing on archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, Stuart Elden's The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021) is the most detailed study yet of Foucault's early career. It recounts his debt to teachers including Louis Althusser, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl; his diploma thesis on Hegel; and his early teaching career. It explores his initial encounters with Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumézil, and analyses his sustained reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Also included are detailed discussions of his translations of Ludwig Binswanger, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Immanuel Kant; his clinical work with Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux; and his cultural work outside of France. Investigating how Foucault came to write History of Madness, Stuart Elden shows this great thinker's deep engagement with phenomenology, anthropology and psychology. An outstanding, meticulous work of intellectual history, The Early Foucault sheds new light on the formation of a major twentieth-century figure. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rita Koganzon’s new book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought (Oxford UP, 2021), examines the structure and function of the family within early modern political thought while also teasing out the way that early childhood education may often be at odds with the claims to freedom within liberal states. Koganzon’s book traces the problem of authority in early modern thought in regard to how children need to be managed by those who are responsible for them—and how they are to be taught to be citizens, to be free, to have liberty, and to understand sovereignty. All of these teachings are complicated by the need to impose an authority of knowledge and expertise in the course of a child’s education. When these forms of authority are contextualized within liberal states, the tension is obvious between the idea of individual liberty and freedom, as pursued by adults in society, and the need to educate through this position of the authority of knowledge. Koganzon’s work traces the approach and theorizing about the family and education through the work of Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But the book starts with Hannah Arendt’s insight about education being an “inherently authoritarian undertaking” and that this is the conundrum for contemporary liberal thinkers. The first sections of the book examine the rise of sovereignty theory, especially in the work of Bodin and Hobbes. This work also brings up the logic of congruence, that the sovereign and the patriarch should be mirrors of each other in terms of their rule within their distinct realms. The thrust of the book, though, is in the exploration of the work by Locke and Rousseau, and their critiques of the sovereignty theory put forward by those who preceded them. Koganzon examines how both Locke’s work and Rousseau’s work also push against the logic of congruence in terms of the form of education. Liberal States, Authoritarian Families delves into the problem, particularly for Locke and Rousseau, of the tyranny of public opinion (the problem of peer pressure is real!), and how anti-authoritarian liberalism, particularly in the contemporary period, has done away with many of the components of authoritarianism within education that helped to limit this tyranny. This is a very clear and lively discussion and will be of interest to a wide range of readers and scholars. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How can we rethink anthropology beyond itself? In this book, twenty-one artists, anthropologists, and curators grapple with how anthropology has been formulated, thought, and practised 'elsewhere' and 'otherwise'. They do so by unfolding ethnographic case studies from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland - and through conversations that expand these geographies and genealogies of contemporary exhibition making. This collection considers where and how anthropology is troubled, mobilised, and rendered meaningful. Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (Leuven UP, 2020) charts new ground by analysing the convergences of museums, curatorial practice, and Europe's reckoning with its colonial legacies. Situated amid resurgent debates on nationalism and identity politics, this book addresses scholars and practitioners in fields spanning the arts, social sciences, humanities, and curatorial studies. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and ProjectMuse. Margareta von Oswald is a research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (also known as CARMAH), at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Jonas Tinius is also an associated research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2021), Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized. Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales (John Murray, 2022), Nick Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Baba Yaga'. From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children's literature, they include a German apothecary's daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar. Following these and other unlikely protagonists, the book travels from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland. “This is how the history of fairy tales operates: stories splintering along zigzagging pathways, carrying long-sounding echoes that turn down narrative alleyways suggested elsewhere or replicate each other with astonishing exactitude.” In the process, Jubber discovers fresh perspectives on some of our most frequently told stories. Filled with adventure, tragedy and real-world magic, this bewitching book uncovers the stranger lives behind the strangest of tales. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, focusing on qualitative analyses of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. However, she is also a life-long lover of fairy tales & fantasy; her father continues to be surprised that her PhD did not once mention dragons, elves, or castles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are with Katherine Harvey, author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2021). An illuminating exploration of the surprisingly familiar sex lives of ordinary medieval people. The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much--or too little--sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. Other experiences are more familiar. Like us, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner or trying to get pregnant (or trying not to). They also struggled with many of the same social issues, such as whether prostitution should be legalized. Above all, they shared our fondness for dirty jokes and erotic images. By exploring their sex lives, the book brings ordinary medieval people to life, revealing details of their most personal thoughts and experiences. Ultimately, it provides us with an important and intimate connection to the past. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A unique, illustrated book that aspires to bring medieval history closer to the general audience will change the way you see medieval history, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History (Icon Books, 2021) busts the myth of the ‘Dark Ages’, shedding light on the medieval period’s present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style. This history takes us through the rise and fall of empires, papacies, caliphates and kingdoms; through the violence and death of the Crusades, Viking raids, the Hundred Years War and the Plague; to the curious practices of monks, martyrs and iconoclasts. We’ll see how the foundations of the modern West were established, influencing our art, cultures, religious practices and ways of thinking. And we’ll explore the lives of those seen as ‘Other’ – women, Jews, homosexuals, lepers, sex workers and heretics. Join historian Eleanor Janega and illustrator Neil Max Emmanuel on a romp across continents and kingdoms as we discover the Middle Ages to be a time of huge change, inquiry and development – not unlike our own. Eleanor Janega is a medieval historian at the London School of Economics specializing in sexuality, propaganda, apocalypticism, and the urban experience in the medieval period generally and in late medieval Bohemia in particular. Her focus is on communicating medieval history for a general audience, and to that end she blogs at going-medieval.com and has written for The Washington Post, BBC History and History Today among others. At the same time, she can also be found hosting medieval history programs on History Hit TV. Neil Max Emmanuel is a motion graphics animator, illustrator, storyboard artist, cartoonist, visual facilitator, media trainer, and consultant. For ten years he has worked for Channel 4’s Time Team alongside the country’s leading historical experts and filmmakers. He has worked for many historical documentaries for BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic and History Channel to name a few. Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France--all without destroying itself in the process? In Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire (Pegasus Books, 2021), Katja Hoyer tells the story of the German Empire from its violent beginnings to its calamitous defeat in the First World War. This often startling narrative is a dramatic tale of national self-discovery, social upheaval, and realpolitik that ended, as it started, in blood and iron. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Erotics of Grief: Emotions and the Construction of Privilege in the Medieval Mediterranean (Cornell UP, 2021) considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of medieval elite culture. Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels. In her reading of the performance of grief as one of community and remembrance, Moore assesses why some lives are imagined as mattering more than others and explores how a language of grief becomes a common language of status among the medieval Mediterranean elite. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The past decade has been pivotal in the development of the European Union. The single currency has been tested to the limits by successive crises in the financial system, public-debt sustainability and public health. A migration crisis stress-tested the EU's free-travel area and its under-developed refugee and asylum policies. The Hungarian and Polish governments are backsliding on the union's foundational commitments to democracy and rule of law and, for the first time in the Communities' six-decade history, a full member state has left altogether. The weaknesses of the EU’s part-federal, part-intergovernmental design have been exposed but so has its resilience through flexibility. Flexible Europe: Differentiated Integration, Fairness, and Democracy (Bristol University Press, 2022) explores this design and its "demoicratic" (not democratic) nature. Differentiated integration, the co-writers conclude, is “not only functionally necessary but also normatively desirable given the ineliminable diversity and pluralism of any union as large as the EU”. Richard Bellamy is professor of political science at University College London and founder of its European Institute. Sandra Kröger is associate professor of political science at the University of Exeter and Director of its Centre for European Studies. Marta Lorimer is a fellow in European Politics at the London School of Economics’ European Institute. *The authors' own book recommendations are: Worldmaking after Empire by Adom Getachew (Princeton University Press, 2020), Europa by Tim Parks (Vintage, 1998), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Profile Books, 2019), Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić (Jonathan Cape, 2021 - translated by Damion Searls), The Struggle for EU Legitimacy by Claudia Sternberg (Palgrave Macmillan; 2013), and The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese (first published in 1949 - latest English version from Penguin Modern Classics, 2021 translated by Tim Parks). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (U Chicago Press, 2021) pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Brenna Moore takes us inside a global network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With meticulous attention to the complexity of real lives, Brenna Moore explores how this group sought a middle way anchored in “spiritual friendship”—religiously meaningful friendship understood as uniquely capable of facing social and political challenges. Some of the figures are still well-known—philosopher Jacques Maritain, Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon, poet of the Harlem renaissance Claude McKay—while others have unjustly faded from memory. Friendship, they believed, was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nicholas Canny is an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland-Galway (NUIG). Since completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania he has pursued an influential publishing career spanning the early 1970s until today. He is the author or editor of 11 books and has written over 70 published papers. He was founding Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at NUIG and served as Director there from 2000-2011 at National University of Ireland Galway. From 2008 to 2011 he was President of the Royal Irish Academy. He has served on the Scientific Council of the European Science Foundation and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. In this interview he discusses his new book Imagining Ireland's Pasts: Early Modern Ireland Through the Centuries (Oxford UP, 2021) through the Centuries which surveys the contradictory ways in which Ireland’s different religious, ethnic, and linguistic communities understood the violent events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Imagining Ireland's Pasts describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. The book details how authors extolled the merits of their progenitors, offered hope and guidance to the particular audience they addressed, and disputed opposing narratives. Prof. Canny shows how competing scholars, whether contributing to vernacular histories or empirical studies, became transfixed by the traumatic events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they sought to explain either how stability had finally been achieved, or how the descendants of those who had been wronged might secure redress. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For three centuries, the city attracted scholars, lawyers, craftsmen, and religious luminaries, becoming a true cultural and political capital. Bringing this extraordinary history marvelously to life, Judith Herrin rewrites the history of East and West in the Mediterranean world before the rise of Islam and shows how, thanks to Byzantine influence, Ravenna played a crucial role in the development of medieval Christendom. Drawing on deep, original research, Herrin tells the personal stories of Ravenna while setting them in a sweeping synthesis of Mediterranean and Christian history. She narrates the lives of the Empress Galla Placidia and the Gothic king Theoderic and describes the achievements of an amazing cosmographer and a doctor who revived Greek medical knowledge in Italy, demolishing the idea that the West just descended into the medieval “Dark Ages.” Beautifully illustrated and drawing on the latest archaeological findings, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (Princeton UP, 2020) provides a bold new interpretation of Ravenna’s lasting influence on the culture of Europe and the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people move through the Gare du Nord train station in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, the largest train station in Europe. Julie Kleinman's Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris (University of California Press, 2019) delves into the contemporary life of the station, and especially the lives and social world of the West African migrants who congregate there daily. The project makes connections between twentieth and twenty-first-century stories and politics and the longer-term of the Gare du Nord as a transportation hub and a crossroads for French histories of urban infrastructure, labour and class, mobility, racial inequality, and identity (African and French primarily in this case). Drawing on a decade of archival and fieldwork that included the investigation of state and police archives, an internship at the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF-the French national railway company), as well as in-depth interviews and interactions with a group of (mostly male) West African migrants who spend time regularly at the station, the book is a fascinating exploration of the community and life strategies of migrants in and around this practical and social hub where issues of labour, employment, surveillance, violence, resistance, family, and friendship meet. Informed by a deep knowledge of the broader historical and contemporary culture and politics of France and empire, the book stays close to the perspectives, stories, and analyses of the West African "adventurers" at the heart of the project. In doing so, it also offers a compelling and illuminating view of the Gare du Nord and all that its busy spaces lead to and from within and beyond the borders of France. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order. In Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (U Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger--and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right. Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events--and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members of the laity by virtue of their augmented claims to holiness. Because clerical celibacy was key to this distinction, religious authorities of all stripes—patristic authors, popes, theologians, canonists, monastic founders, and commentators—became progressively sensitive to sexual scandals that involved the clergy and developed sophisticated tactics for concealing or dispelling embarrassing lapses. According to Dyan Elliott, the fear of scandal dictated certain lines of action and inaction, the consequences of which are painfully apparent today. In The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020), she demonstrates how, in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy, scandal-averse policies at every conceivable level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have enabled the widespread sexual abuse of boys and male adolescents within the Church. Elliott examines more than a millennium's worth of doctrine and practice to uncover the origins of a culture of secrecy and concealment of sin. She charts the continuities and changes, from late antiquity into the high Middle Ages, in the use of boys as sexual objects before focusing on four specific milieus in which boys and adolescents would have been especially at risk in the high and later Middle Ages: the monastery, the choir, the schools, and the episcopal court. The Corrupter of Boys is a work of stunning breadth and discomforting resonance, as Elliott concludes that the same clerical prerogatives and privileges that were formulated in late antiquity and the medieval era—and the same strategies to cover up the abuses they enable—remain very much in place. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance: The Varieties of Architectural Experience (Cambridge UP, 2021) is the first study of Renaissance architecture as an immersive, multisensory experience that combines historical analysis with the evidence of first-hand accounts. Questioning the universalizing claims of contemporary architectural phenomenologists, David Karmon emphasizes the infinite variety of meanings produced through human interactions with the built environment. His book draws upon the close study of literary and visual sources to prove that early modern audiences paid sustained attention to the multisensory experience of the buildings and cities in which they lived. Through reconstructing the Renaissance understanding of the senses, we can better gauge how constant interaction with the built environment shaped daily practices and contributed to new forms of understanding. Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance offers a stimulating new approach to the study of Renaissance architecture and urbanism as a kind of 'experiential trigger' that shaped ways of both thinking and being in the world. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe were times of intense technological, social and political change and transformation, and so it’s no surprise that much of the art and literature of this period was equal in its innovative intensity, attempting to make sense of times that were radically out of joint. Traditional scholarship on this period has focused on the alienation and disassociation that can be experienced when trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of modern life. But is this what the artists and writers of the day were trying to communicate to their audience? Without discounting the alienating effects of modernity, Malika Maskarinec has stepped in with a fascinating monograph on the period, The Forces of Form in German Modernism (Northwestern UP, 2018), which challenges and complicates this reading, drawing our attention to other themes present in the work of the period. Turning to various archival sources to see what the artists and their peers were interested in, Maskarinec finds a collection of figures reflecting on questions of the forces and forms that hold bodies together against the weight of gravity. In this intellectual milieu, buildings and statues capacity to hold themselves up can be part of profound aesthetic experience, abstract shapes maintaining their position on a page can stir feelings of empathy, and even simple everyday activities such as laying down, standing up and walking around are activities of profound existential importance. Touching on figures such as Schopenhauer, Rodin, Simmel, Klee and Kafka, Maskarinec’s book is overflowing with insights that will help students and scholars of the period revisit these works with fresh eyes, and like the artists and writers discussed, she will prove an excellent interlocutor for all those interested in what it means to be human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe’s Democratic Age: 1945-1968 (Princeton UP, 2021), Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe’s postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe’s Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. In Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021), Rich Brownstein explores these trends--and many others--with a comprehensive guide to hundreds of films and made-for-television movies.Recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films are included, along with an educational guide, a detailed listing of all films covered and a four-part index-glossary. The book also has a companion website, Holocaust Cinema Complete. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this episode, Howard Burton talks with Ester Salgarella, Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, University of Cambridge, about her groundbreaking work on the intriguing relationship between Linear A and Linear B and its consequent sociohistorical implications. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When the legendary Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome in 753 BCE, Plovdiv―today the second-largest city in Bulgaria―was thousands of years old. Indeed, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam are all are mere infants compared to Plovdiv. This is just one of the paradoxes that haunts and defines the New Europe, that part of Europe that was freed from Soviet bondage in 1989, and which is at once both much older than the modern Atlantic-facing power centers of Western Europe while also being much younger than them. Eastern Europe! (New Europe Books, 2021) is a brief and concise (but informative) introduction to Eastern Europe and its myriad customs and history.
Even those knowledgeable about Western Europe often see Eastern Europe as terra incognito, with a sign on the border declaring “Here be monsters.” Tomek Jankowski's book is a gateway to understanding both what unites and separates Eastern Europeans from their Western brethren, and how this vital region has been shaped by but has also left its mark on Western Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. It is a reader-friendly guide to a region that is all too often mischaracterized as remote, insular, and superstitious.
The book comprises three parts, The first sums up modern linguistic, geographic, and religious contours of Eastern Europe, while the second, main part delves into the region's history, from the earliest origins of Europe up to the end of the Cold War. Closing the book is a section that makes sense of geographical name references -- many cities, rivers, or regions have different names -- and also includes an "Eastern Europe by Numbers" feature that provides charts describing the populations, politics, and economies of the region today. Throughout are boxed-off anecdotes ("Useless Trivia") describing fascinating aspects of Eastern European history or culture.
Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University
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The astronomer's chair is a leitmotif in the history of astronomy, appearing in hundreds of drawings, prints, and photographs from a variety of sources. Nineteenth-century stargazers in particular seemed eager to display their observing chairs--task-specific, often mechanically adjustable observatory furniture designed for use in conjunction with telescopes. But what message did they mean to send with these images? In The Astronomer's Chair: A Visual and Cultural History (MIT Press, 2021), Omar W. Nasim considers these specialized chairs as both image and object, offering an original framework for linking visual and material cultures. Observing chairs, Nasim ingeniously argues, showcased and embodied forms of scientific labor, personae, and bodily practice that appealed to bourgeois sensibilities. Viewing image and object as connected parts of moral, epistemic, and visual economies of empire, Nasim shows that nineteenth-century science was represented in terms of comfort and energy, and that "manly" postures of Western astronomers at work in specialized chairs were contrasted pointedly with images of "effete" and cross-legged "Oriental" astronomers. Extending his historical analysis into the twentieth century, Nasim reexamines what he argues to be a famous descendant of the astronomer's chair: Freud's psychoanalytic couch, which directed observations not outward toward the stars but inward toward the stratified universe of the psyche. But whether in conjunction with the mind or the heavens, the observing chair was a point of entry designed for specialists that also portrayed widely held assumptions about who merited epistemic access to these realms in the first place. Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine. She holds the chair of history of medicine at the School of Advanced Studies of the University of Tyumen (Russian Federation) and teaches Disability Studies at Sciences-Po (Paris). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn Books, 2021) provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen. Daniel M. Knight is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is author of History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (Palgrave, 2015) and co-author of The Anthropology of the Future (Cambridge, 2019, with Rebecca Bryant). Alize Arıcan is a Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Lucie Fremlova's book Queer Roma (Routledge, 2021) offers in-depth insight into the lives of queer Roma, thus providing rich evidence of the heterogeneity of Roma. The lived experiences of queer Roma, which are very diverse regionally and otherwise, pose a fundamental challenge to one-dimensional, negative misrepresentations of Roma as homophobic and antithetical to European and Western modernity. The book platforms Romani agency and voices in an original and novel way. This enables the reader to feel the individuals behind the data, which detail stories of rejection by Romani families and communities, and non-Romani communities; and unfamiliar, ground-breaking stories of acceptance by Romani families and communities. Combining intersectionality with queer theory innovatively and applying it to Romani Studies, the author supports her arguments with data illustrating how the identities of queer Roma are shaped by antigypsyism and its intersections with homophobia and transphobia. Thanks to its theoretical and empirical content, and its location within a book series on LGBTIQ lives that appeals to an international audience, this authoritative book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It will a be useful resource for libraries, community and social service workers, third-sector Romani and LGBTIQ organisations, activists and policymakers. Dr. Lucie Fremlova is an independent researcher who works at the interface between academia, social movements and policy. Her close-up, transdisciplinary research focuses on ethnic, ‘racial’, sexual and gender identities, particularly in relation to queer Roma. Her article ‘LGBTIQ Roma and queer intersectionalities: the lived experiences of LGBTIQ Roma’, published by the European Journal of Politics and Gender in 2019, won the EJPG 2021 Best Article and the Council for European Studies Gender and Sexuality Research Network 2019 Best Article Award. Her article ‘Non-Romani researcher positionality and reflexivity: queer(y)ing one’s privilege’ was the most-read article published in 2019 in volume 1, number 2 of the Critical Romani Studies Journal. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Luis Lobo-Guerrero is one of the three editors of this volume—Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires—and one of the six contributing authors. He wrote the preface, “Poseidonians and the Tragedy of Mapping European Empires,” and the first two chapters, “Mapping and the Making of Imperial European Connectivity” and “Mapping and the Invention of the Early ‘Spanish’ Empire.” In this interview, Professor Lobo-Guerrero discusses the role of the map in imperial imagination over time. Thinking in terms of connectivity, Lobo-Guerrero discusses the new empires that leapt the Atlantic (or rather, “Ocean Sea”) into the unknown, and later dominated our world. In this conversation, Lobo-Guerrero relates the example of Juan de la Cosa’s 1500 mappa mundi and how this extraordinary specimen of cartography reveals the mentality of its makers and their understanding of the world. Here's a link to a high quality image of the map discussed. Here's a link to the previous interview with Lobo-Guerrero on his first book in the series. Dr. Lobo-Guerrero is professor of History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen. His works in post-structuralist thought, the history of early modern science, historical epistemology, and geopolitics—including topics of biopolitics and security and the big questions of globality and connectivity. He has written Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk (2012), Insuring War: Sovereignty, Security and Risk (2013), and Insuring Life: Value, Security and Risk (2016), as well as two edited volumes, Imaginaries of Connectivity (2019), and Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires (2021), the book he discusses today. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: Could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation? In answering these and other essential questions he focuses on the human contingencies of the war, weighing directly at the roles of individuals and the outcomes determined by luck or chance. Moreover, he looks intimately at the changes in wartime British society and culture. Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941 (Knopf, 2020) draws on a large cast of characters--from the leading statesmen and military commanders who made the decisions, to the ordinary men, women, and children who carried them out and lived through their consequences--in a comprehensible and compelling single history of forty-six million people. For better or worse, much of Britain today is ultimately the product of the experiences of 1938-1941. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Generous welfare states are losing their key characteristics, not least in Sweden, where privatisation of funding has proceeded privatisation of provision, beginning in the 1990s. Supplementary exclusionary sources of welfare in healthcare, education, and social care, have proliferated throughout European welfare states under the neoliberal agenda that has dominated debate across the developed world. Rather than full privatisation, we see semi-private solutions, in which the citizen becomes the consumer, but remains subsidised by the state in their pursuit of private welfare, via tax breaks that benefit the richest in society most, rather than those with the greatest need. At the same time, private providers have been able to free-ride on the state, for example by hiring like doctors and teachers trained on state-funded courses, whilst the divided welfare state erodes the more generous, universal system by undermining the trust in it and the willingness of people to contribute to it. Ultimately, it replaces one view of social policy as an investment, something that generates wealth and contributes to the future, with another, of social policy as a cost, that takes up resources rather than generates them. John Lapidus' The Quest for a Divided Welfare State: Sweden in the Era of Privatization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) charts the development of this process in Sweden, beginning with the privatisation of provision, such as private hospitals and tutoring, and how it lays the groundwork for private funding, which puts pressure on existing generous and universal welfare systems sustained by the public sector. In our discussion, we identify the methods through which neoliberal advocates promote privatisation, and how ongoing privatisation becomes self-reinforcing to nullify opponents, win over ambivalent actors, and dominate the debate in the political sphere. We end on an optimistic note, looking at the education sector and discussing what we can learn from debates in this area to promote and restore equality throughout the welfare state. John is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Business, Economics and Law within the University of Gothenberg in Sweden, where he earnt his PhD in 2015. Prior to John’s academic career, he spent several years as a journalist, and also spent time working in Nicaragua for the Swedish-Nicaragua Friendship Association, an international NGO that helps communities build self-help organisations and tackle poverty. Leo Nasskau is an expert on the future of work and interviews authors writing about public policy and political economy — particularly how capitalism can be reformed to deliver sustainable prosperity for all. To join the discussion about this book, visit leonasskau.co.uk, and to give Leo anonymous feedback, go to bit.ly/Feedback-Leo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
By exploring the uniquely dense urban network of the Low Countries, Janna Coomans debunks the myth of medieval cities as apathetic towards filth and disease. Based on new archival research and adopting a bio-political and spatial-material approach, Coomans traces how cities developed a broad range of practices to protect themselves and fight disease. Urban societies negotiated challenges to their collective health in the face of social, political and environmental change, transforming ideas on civic duties and the common good. Tasks were divided among different groups, including town governments, neighbours and guilds, and affected a wide range of areas, from water, fire and food, to pigs, prostitutes and plague. In Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries (Cambridge UP, 2021), Coomans offers new comparative insights and bolsters our understanding of the importance of population health and the physical world - infrastructures, flora and fauna - in governing medieval cities. Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester UP, 2021), Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo explains how the modernization of this great city shaped and was shaped by print media and mass culture. A growing population, industrial immigration, mass connection with the wider world (making it both smaller and bigger), and the twilight of an empire shaped the Madrileños, their sense of identity, and their feelings of being modern and visually aware. A history of print media—and itself an example of print media—the book shows how people adapted to the dawning of a transnational, information age (perhaps a timely and familiar topic for today’s listener?) and presents a remarkable ‘glocal’ history of this event. Vanesa Rodriguez Galindo is a cultural and visual historian, working in urban studies, print cultures in Spain and Latin America, transnationalism, and women’s studies. She holds an MA in Metropolitan History from the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and a PhD in History of Art from UNED, Madrid. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spain and the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Kate Rigby's book Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation (Bloomsbury, 2020) rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, the book discovers a rich vein of Romantic ecomaterialism and brings these canonical poets into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists. Kate Rigby demonstrates the ways in which Romantic ecopoetics responds to postcolonial challenges and environmental peril to offer a collaborative artistic practice for an era of human-non-human cohabitation and kinship. Eyad Houssami makes theatre and has participated in the revitalization of an ancient organic farm in southern Lebanon. He is editor of the Arabic-English book Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre (Pluto/Dar Al Adab) and was editor-at-large of Portal 9, a bilingual literary and academic journal about urbanism. His doctoral research project at the University of Leeds and this work are supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. A Syrian multinational, he studied at Yale and earned a certificate in beekeeping from SOILS Permaculture Association Lebanon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (Voltaire Foundation, 2021) argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans – some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins – translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining. In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment. Lauren R. Cannady, assistant clinical professor in University Honors at the University of Maryland, is a historian of early modern art and architecture with an interest in intellectual and cultural history. Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from MIT. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How do terror and popularity merge under a dictatorship? How did the Gestapo deal with critics of Nazism? Based on hundreds of secret police case files, Enemies of the People explores the day-to-day reality of political policing under Hitler. Examining the Gestapo's policy of 'selective enforcement', J. Ryan Stackhouse challenges the abiding perception of the Gestapo as policing exclusively through terror. Instead, he reveals the complex system of enforcement that defined the relationship between state and society in the Third Reich and helps to explain the Germans' abiding support for Hitler and their complicity in the regime's crimes. Stories of everyday life in Nazi Germany paint the clearest picture yet of just how differently the Gestapo handled certain groups and actions, and the routine investigation, interrogation, and enforcement practices behind this system. Enemies of the People: Hitler's Critics and the Gestapo (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers penetrating insights into just how reasonable selective enforcement appeared to Germans, and draws unavoidable parallels with the contemporary threat of authoritarianism. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the "most shocking single event" of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response--a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain. The successful Nazi invasion of France destabilized American planners' strategic assumptions. At home, the result was huge increases in defense spending, the advent of peacetime military conscription, and domestic spying to weed out potential fifth columnists. Abroad, the United States decided to work with Vichy France despite its pro-Nazi tendencies. The US-Vichy partnership, intended to buy time and temper the flames of war in Europe, severely strained Anglo-American relations. American leaders naively believed that they could woo men like Philippe Pétain, preventing France from becoming a formal German ally. The British, however, understood that Vichy was subservient to Nazi Germany and instead supported resistance figures such as Charles de Gaulle. After the war, the choice to back Vichy tainted US-French relations for decades. Our collective memory of World War II as a period of American strength overlooks the desperation and faulty decision making that drove US policy from 1940 to 1943. Tracing the key diplomatic and strategic moves of these formative years, When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance (Harvard UP, 2021) gives us a more nuanced and complete understanding of the war and of the global position the United States would occupy afterward. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is the first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of these tensions. Using three major Enlightenment encyclopedias from England, France, and Switzerland, the book provides a rich contextualization of the conflicting ideas of equality and race in eighteenth-century thought. Enlightenment thinkers used physical features to categorize humanity into novel "racial" groups in a discourse that was imbued with Eurocentric aesthetic and moral judgments. Simultaneously, however, these very same thinkers politicized equality by putting it to new uses, such as a vitriolic denunciation of slavery and inhumane treatment that was grounded in the nascent philosophy of human rights. Vartija contends that the tension between Enlightenment ideas of race and equality can best be explained by these thinkers' attempt to provide a naturalistic account of humanity, including both our physical and moral attributes. Enlightenment racial classification fits into the novel inclusion of humanity in histories of nature, while the search for the origins of morality in social experience alone lent equality a normative authority it had not previously possessed. Eschewing straightforward approbation or blame of the Enlightenment, The Color of Equality demonstrates that our present-day thinking about human physical and cultural diversity continues to be deeply informed by an eighteenth-century European intellectual revolution with global ramifications. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Herculaneum Uncovered is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director of Research and Honorary Professor of Roman Studies in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. This wide-ranging conversation covers his fascinating archeological work done in Herculaneum and Pompeii, the politics of excavation, and life in the ancient Roman world. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Eric Berkowitz has written a short history of a censorship, a large topic that has been a phenomenon since the advent of recorded history. In Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West from the Ancients to Fake News (Beacon Press, 2021), Berkowitz reviews the motives and methods of governments, religious authorities, and private citizens to quell freedom of thought and expression. One theme Berkowitz reveals is how ineffective many censorship efforts have been. For example, after the printing press multiplied the sources available to readers and the opportunities for the Church and governments to suppress books and pamphlets, the attempts to censor speech served to heighten interest and encourage more dissent, creating profitable black markets for forbidden topics. Some publishers actually encouraged authors to write something likely to be forbidden. Yet, Berkowitz forthrightly acknowledges the dangers under which free thinker have lived and continue to live in our contemporary world. The dangers of daring to express oneself are present not only in authoritarian polities but in our own, and Berkowitz’s history seeks to reveal the common motives of censors and their targets. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations (Brill, 2021) examines five key moments in the Wigalois / Viduvilt tradition that highlight transitions between narratological and meta-narratological patterns and audiences of different religious-cultural or lingual background. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sovereignty is the vital organizing principle of modern international law. Daniel Lee's book The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the origins of that principle in the legal and political thought of its most influential theorist, Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596). As the author argues in this study, Bodin's most lasting theoretical contribution was his thesis that sovereignty must be conceptualized as an indivisible bundle of legal rights constitutive of statehood. While these uniform 'rights of sovereignty' licensed all states to exercise numerous exclusive powers, including the absolute power to 'absolve' and release its citizens from legal duties, they were ultimately derived from, and therefore limited by, the law of nations. The book explores Bodin's creative synthesis of classical sources in philosophy, history, and the medieval legal science of Roman and canon law in crafting the rules governing state-centric politics. The Right of Sovereignty is the first book in English on Bodin's legal and political theory to be published in nearly a half-century and surveys themes overlooked in modern Bodin scholarship: empire, war, conquest, slavery, citizenship, commerce, territory, refugees, and treaty obligations. It will interest specialists in political theory and the history of modern political thought, as well as legal history, the philosophy of law, and international law. Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Students in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the alleged traits of Jews, Saracens, Greeks, Saxons and Britons and their acceptance or rejection of Christianity. Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250, Medicine, Power and Religion (Boydell and Brewer, 2021), provides a radical new approach to representations of nationhood in medieval western Europe, the author argues that ethnic stereotypes were constructed and wielded rhetorically to justify property claims, flaunt military strength, and assert moral and cultural ascendance over others. The gendered images of ethnicity in circulation reflect a negotiation over self-representations of discipline, rationality and strength, juxtaposed with the alleged chaos and weakness of racialized others. Interpreting nationhood through a religious lens, monks and schoolmen explained it as scientifically informed by environmental medicine, and ancient theory that held that location and climate influenced the physical and mental traits of peoples. Drawing on lists of ethnic character traits, school textbooks, medical treatises, proverbs, poetry and chronicles, this book shows that ethnic stereotypes served as rhetorical tools of power, crafting relationships within communities and towards others. Claire Weeda is a cultural historian at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Netherlands. Her main fields of interest include ethnic stereotyping, the history of the body, Greco-Arabic medicine, and organic politics in Europe, 1100-1500. Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Charlie Louth’s illuminating recent book, Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines why Rilke’s poems have exercised such preternatural attraction for now several generations of readers. The early 20th century German-language poet captured the experience of European culture irrevocably lurching into modernity, where an entire continent was forced to trade in its untenable and ultimately fantastically unrealistic Romantic worldview for the sober realization that humans are capable of even greater evil than any gods, and that life has meaning only if we continually create it. But unlike some other modernists, Rilke captured this vast cultural rupture in exceptionally beautiful and ever more effectively crafted, if ever less formal, poetry. Instead of explaining this effect away, Louth deepens the transformative experience of reading Rilke by offering his interpretation as one option among others and thus engaging the reader directly in the unfolding of each of Rilke’s words. Louth’s book follows the chronology of Rilke’s life (1875 – 1926) but focuses on the works, often in the context of the situation when they were written, rather than on Rilke’s itinerant life. I spoke with Charlie about the enduring importance of Rilke, about the Duino Elegies, and whether Rilke’s 1915 poem “Death” – or any of his works in general – can alleviate the cold fact that as humans, no matter how blessed, we will face inconsolable loss. Charlie Louth is Associate Professor of German and Fellow of Queen’s College, at Oxford University, in England. His research interests include poetry from the 18th century onwards, especially Goethe, Hölderlin, Mörike, Rilke and Celan; romanticism; translation; and comparative literature. His books include: Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford: OUP, 2020); Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation (Oxford: Legenda, 1998); (editor, with Patrick McGuinness), Gravity and Grace: Essays for Roger Pearson (Oxford: Legenda, 2019); (editor, with Florian Strob), Nelly Sachs im Kontext — eine »Schwester Kafkas«? (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), and other works. He’s also translated Rilke’s Letters to Young Poet & The Letter from the Young Worker (Penguin, 2011). Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Speaking of…” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nearly 50 years since the European Foreign Ministers issued their first declaration on the conflict between Israel and Palestine in 1971, the European Union continues to have close political and economic ties with the region. Based exclusively on primary sources, Anders Persson's EU Diplomacy and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, 1967-2019 (Edinburgh UP, 2020) offers an up-to-date overview of the European Union’s involvement in the Israeli-Arab conflict since 1967. This study uses an innovative conceptual methodology to examine keyword frequency in a sample of more than 2300 declarations and statements published in the Bulletin of the European Communities/European Union (1967–2009) as well as council reports and press interviews (2009–2018) to uncover broad patterns for qualitative analysis. The study suggests that the Israeli-Arab conflict is more important to the EU than any other conflict, having been key to shaping EU’s foreign policy overall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the Catholic church with the French state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalizing a Concordat in 1801, relations between them rapidly deteriorated. In 1809, Napoleon ordered the Pope’s arrest. Dr. Ambrogio Caiani, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Kent, in his book, To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII (Yale University Press, 2021), provides a pioneering account of the tempestuous relationship between the emperor and his most unyielding opponent. Drawing on original source materials in the Vatican and other European archives, Dr. Caiani uncovers the nature of Catholic resistance against Napoleon’s empire; charts Napoleon’s approach to Papal power; and reveals how the Emperor attempted to subjugate the church to his vision of modernity. Gripping and vivid, this splendid book shows the struggle for supremacy between two great individuals—and sheds new light on the conflict that would shape relations between the Catholic church and the modern state for centuries to come. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for Greece. Mark Mazower's wonderful The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (Penguin, 2021) recreates one of the most compelling, unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of near impossible odds, the people of the villages, valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held on until military intervention by Russia, France and Britain finally secured the kingdom of Greece. Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged towns, the stories of itinerant priests, sailors and slaves, ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging across the Eastern Mediterranean and far beyond, he explores the central place of the struggle in the making of Romanticism and a new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across Europe to die in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves - the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how people decided to see their world differently and, at an often terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history. Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of Governing the World, Hitler’s Empire and The Balkans: A Short History, winner of the Wolfson Prize for History, among other books. He lives in New York City. Thomas Kingston is currently a Huayu Enrichment Scholar, studying Mandarin Chinese at National Taiwan University, as he finds himself in post MPhil and pre PhD limbo. He holds an MA in Pacific Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London and an MPhil in Philosophy from Renmin University of China. His research interests focus on the political and intellectual histories of nationalism(s), imaginaries and colonialism in the East and Southeast Asian context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
An accessible and compelling read, Emile Chabal's France (Polity, 2020) is an overview of the nation's political history from 1940 right up to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organized thematically around the paradoxes at the heart of the French Republic since the period of the Second World War (and with roots well before this period), the book is an excellent introduction to historical contests over what France means--and what it means to be "French"-- the legacies of which persist well into the twenty-first century. An introduction that will be extremely helpful to students and non-specialists, the book also offers a reading and arguments regarding French politics and history that will inspire discuss among those more familiar with this terrain. In chapters that fit well together while making strong individual arguments, France examines defeat and resistance after 1940, the colonial and anti-colonial pasts, strategies and narratives of grandeur and decline, the political divisions of left and right, republicanism, and tensions between the local and global. Moving from a complex past towards what promises to be a no less complex future, the book is serious, smart, quick, and a pleasure to read. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What have the Romans ever done for us? That’s the question put to his pals by Reg, in a much quoted scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The debate is notionally about imperial oppression of Judea, but the assembled radicals ultimately agree that, in fact, the Romans were the bringers of sanitation, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health. In other words, they got things done. In his new book, A Useful History of Britain: The Politics of Getting Things Done (Oxford UP, 2021), Michael Braddick explores the Romans and the peoples who succeeded them on Britain from the vantage point of the politics of getting things done. It is a concise but wide ranging book, which localises global history by focussing on agency – the power to do things. In a historical field dominated by attention to power, rulers and parliaments, this book insists on a shift in perspective and makes a convincing case for history as a resource for meeting the future, rather than a source of comfort and national group think. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull, where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Group. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sir Paul Preston’s A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence, and Social Division in Modern Spain (Liveright, 2020) is a masterful synthesis that offers a novel way of thinking about the turbulent history of Spain. Preston marshals an impressive amount of secondary and primary evidence to explain why corruption and political incompetence have consistently undermined the progress of Spain and created cleavages within Spanish society, eroding social cohesion and resulting in episodes of frequent violence. In examining these two themes of corruption and political incompetence, Preston avoids merely reproducing stereotypes of Spain as a backward and inherently violent country—the so-called “Black Legend” of Spain—and instead shows, with great nuance and appreciation for irony, the manifold ways that these two factors have decisively shaped modern Spain. Preston, a professor at the London School of Economics, is the author of over a dozen books on the history of twentieth-century Spain. His work is marked by a critical engagement with the history of Spain, elegant prose, and virtuosic command of detail. Preston’s scholarship has been showered with many accolades from institutions inside and outside of the UK, and translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, Catalan, German, and Russian. Within Spain, Preston’s work is widely read and respected. His 2011 book, The Spanish Holocaust, has been central to informing discussions of historical memory about the Spanish Civil War by providing evidence of the systematic nature of the atrocities committed during this period. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we talk to Vincent Evener of United Theological Seminary about his new book, Enemies of the Cross: Suffering, Truth, and Mysticism in the Early Reformation (Oxford UP, 2020). Enemies of the Cross examines how suffering and truth were aligned in the divisive debates of the early Reformation. Vincent Evener explores how Martin Luther, along with his first intra-Reformation critics, offered "true" suffering as a crucible that would allow believers to distinguish the truth or falsehood of doctrine, teachers, and their own experiences. To use suffering in this way, however, reformers also needed to teach Christians to recognize false suffering and the false teachers who hid under its mantle. This book contends that these arguments, which became an enduring part of the Lutheran and radical traditions, were nourished by the reception of a daring late-medieval mystical tradition — the post-Eckhartian — which depicted annihilation of the self as the way to union with God. The first intra-Reformation dissenters, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, have frequently been depicted as champions of medieval mystical views over and against the non-mystical Luther. Evener counters this depiction by showing how Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer developed their shared mystical tradition in diverse directions, while remaining united in the conviction that sinful self-assertion prevented human beings from receiving truth and living in union with God. He argues that Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer each represented a different form of ecclesial-political dissent shaped by a mystical understanding of how Christians were united to God through the destruction of self-assertion. Enemies of the Cross draws on seldom-used sources and proposes new concepts of "revaluation" and "relocation" to describe how Protestants and radicals brought medieval mystical teachings into new frameworks that rejected spiritual hierarchy. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Is the West finished as a political idea? In recent years, observers have begun pointing to signs that the transatlantic community is eroding. When the European Union expanded, the classic European nation state was in decline. Now, nationalism is on the rise. Furthermore, nations within the EU are less willing to cooperate with the US on policies that require sacrifice and risks, such as using military force alongside the US. Today, following the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump’s election, the concept of a unified Western transatlantic community seems to be a relic. But, in Pax Transatlantica: America and Europe in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford UP, 2021) the international historian Jussi Hanhimäki explains why the West is far from over. Hanhimäki argues that despite Trump’s inflammatory, dismissive rhetoric, NATO continues to provide robust security for its member states. NATO has survived by expanding its remit and scope, and it is viewed favorably by member states overall. Moreover, the transatlantic relationship boasts the richest and most closely connected transcontinental economy in the world. Despite the potential fallout from current trade wars—especially between the US and China—and the rise of economic nationalism, the West still benefits from significant transatlantic trade and massive investment flows. Lastly, Hanhimäki traces the parallel evolution of domestic politics on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing on the rise of populism. He contends that populism is not causing a rift between the US and Europe. Rather, the spread of populism evinces that their politics are in fact closely integrated. Shifts and even crises abound in the history of the transatlantic relationship. Still, the West endures. Conflicts, rather than undermining the relationship, illustrate its resilience. Hanhimäki shows that the transatlantic relationship is playing out this cycle today. Not only will the "Pax Transatlantica" continue to exist, Hanhimäki concludes, it is likely to thrive in the future. Jussi Hanhimaki is Professor of International History and co-director of the History and Policy Initiative at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He is the author of many books, including the award-winning The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (2004) and The Rise and Fall of Détente: American Foreign Policy and the Transformation of the Cold War (2013). Joe Renouard is Resident Professor of American Studies and Fei Yi-Ming Journalism Foundation Chair of American Government and Comparative Politics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Nanjing, China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
He was the son of a prominent politician, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, and viewed by many as the Duce’s likely successor, only to die before a fascist firing squad near the end of the Second World War. In Galeazzo Ciano: The Fascist Pretender (U Toronto Press, 2021), Tobias Hof examines Ciano’s career for the many insights it has to offer into Italian fascism and Italian politics during the years of its dominance. As Hof explains, Ciano benefited considerably both from his father Costanzo’s political connections during the early part of his career and from his 1930 marriage to Mussolini’s daughter Edda. During the 1930s Ciano enjoyed a rapid ascent to high office, which fueled the belief that he was being groomed to succeed his father-in-law. Yet Hof demonstrates how Ciano’s positions and bourgeois public persona often were at odds with the views of committed fascists, and that he enjoyed little support from either the monarchy or the Catholic Church. Instead, Ciano found himself increasingly marginalized once Italy entered the war in 1940, while his vote to oust Mussolini from his position as prime minister led to his trial and execution less than a year later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dilek Kurban’s Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey's Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge UP, 2020) considers the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) engagement with Turkey’s ongoing Kurdish conflict. Tracing the legal mobilization of Kurdish people alongside legal and political histories, Kurban’s work highlights the factors enabling ongoing violence in the Kurdish region. As Kurban argues, considering the effectiveness of supranational courts, like the ECtHR, in cases like that of Turkey invokes difficult questions about international human rights regimes. Limits of Supranational Justice contributes to studies of supranational courts and legal mobilization—as well as broader conversations about human rights—by pointing to new avenues of sociolegal inquiry alongside the broader sociohistoral context in the case of Turkey. Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims of belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When I/we think about the early modern relationship between France and Persia, Montesquieu's 1721 Lettres persanes is a text that comes to mind immediately. Susan Mokhberi's The Persian Mirror: Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2019) is a kind of a pre-history of Montesquieu's work that is, in different ways, more of a commentary on France and the French than Persia or Persians during this period. The Persian Mirror's several chapters examine a range of cultural and political texts, including letters, literature, travel writing, and material artifacts from the period, excavating the French relationship to Persia and Persian culture as both reflective and distorting. Distinct from other sites in the region, Persia fascinated the French who were also hopeful that a political alliance with the Safavid Empire might work to counter the powerful Ottoman Empire. French observers in the period lingered on different forms of affinity between France and Persia while also tracking and commenting on the cultural divide that was evident in diplomatic and other exchanges between the two powers. The book brings together analysis of the French cultural imagination of Persia with a careful reading of real-life encounters such as the visit to France by the Persian ambassador Mohamed Beg in 1715. In addition to the perceptions of a common ground between cultures and political regimes, Franco-Persian relations also included misunderstanding and conflict. Concerns about the resemblance between France and Persia morphed and grew as political critiques of despotism, political power, decadence, and inequality emerged and proliferated in the period. After the fall of the Safavid Empire, France's anxious attention focused with increasing intensity on the Ottoman Empire into the later eighteenth century. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre: Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe (Berghahn Books, 2021) compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Caroline A. Kita's Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater (Indiana UP, 2019) shows how they reimagined myths of the Old Testament to offer new aesthetic and ethical views of compassion. These Jewish artists, including Gustav Mahler, Siegfried Lipiner, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Stefan Zweig, and Arnold Schoenberg, reimagined biblical stories through the lens of the modern Jewish subject to plead for justice and compassion toward the Jewish community. By tracing responses to antisemitic discourses of compassion, Kita reflects on the explicitly and increasingly troubled political and social dynamics at the end of the Habsburg Empire. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Consolations of History is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Teofilo Ruiz, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. Teo Ruiz is a scholar of the social and popular cultures of late medieval and early modern Spain and the Western Mediterranean. He received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for his “inspired teaching and writing”. This wide-ranging conversation provides captivating insights into his Cuban origins, how he became a professional historian, the challenges and excitement of teaching, and what the future might hold. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dr. Emily Greble, Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021). Focusing on the Muslim inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and later Yugoslavia, as they repeatedly adjusted to shifting borders and modern state building projects between the 1870s and the 1940s, Dr. Greble shows how Ottoman political, legal, economic, and social legacies shaped post Ottoman successor states, and how ordinary Balkan Muslims understood, negotiated, and reworked the rapidly changing ideological landscapes into which the late nineteenth century had thrown them. The book forcefully argues that modern European constructs of law, national minority, and public education developed in a distinct Christian context. By recovering the Balkan Muslims’ struggle to define the role of Islam in their new, nationalizing states and societies, the book sheds new light on the historical dynamics of modern citizenship and multiculturalism, but also illuminates Muslims’ oft overlooked agency in the making of modern Europe. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Hungarian Marxist philosopher George Lukács has long occupied a complicated place in the Marxist canon of thinkers, both his lived and theoretical practice subject to much critical commentary and debate. While History and Class Consciousness is considered to be a classic of critical sociology, it has also often been held at arms length by Marxists, many of whom find it’s use of Hegelian speculative philosophy unhelpful, while others find the overemphasis on praxis at the expense of other forms of life and inquiry reductive. In spite of these hesitations, the text has maintained a canonical status for a century now, leaving philosophers on the left with a difficult set of questions about how to read it and what to do with it. Stepping into this difficult terrain is Daniel Andres Lopez with his massive book Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (Haymarket Books, 2020). Lopez’s work reconstructs Lukács’ thought of the 1920’s by putting it back into it’s tumultuous context, allowing us not only to get a close look at the theory, but it’s purpose in maintaining political, historical and philosophical clarity in a world filled with war, revolution and upheaval. Much like our current moment, Lukács occupied a time where everything seemed possible, but translating the infinite possibilities into concrete realities was a formidable challenge, and would require not only the courage to step into physical danger, but also political confusion. Nothing in this moment was guaranteed, so rigorous philosophical speculation was required, and Lukács stepped in to provide communists with a rigorous theoretical framework. However, this book goes well beyond simply reconstructing Lukács theoretical output. Rather than be satisfied with writing a straightforward commentary, this book is interested in wrestling with Lukács’ successes as well as his limitations. To that effect, Lopez works through a number of critiques of Lukács, both of others as well as his own. This allows him to explore various other questions on the margins of Lukács’ work about the relation between philosophical theory and political practice, and the role of critical thinking in emancipatory movements. The scope and rigor of the text, as well as the various questions and themes it addresses, will make this an incredible resource not just for newcomers to Lukács, or those seasoned in his thought, but for all those interested in learning how to think, and how to translate that thinking into action. Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series. Daniel Andres Lopez is an honorary research associate with the Thesis Eleven Forum for Social and Political Theory. His work has appeared in a number of places, including the journal Historical Materialism. He is an editor at Jacobin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When inspiration struck Robert McCrum to write a book about the Bard, it came while watching one of the playwright’s plays in Central Park, New York. Here, McCrum realized that we, today, are undoubtedly living in Shakespearean times. Joe Krulder, a British Historian, interviews Robert about his latest book, Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption (Pegasus Books, 2021) Current events such as the Covid-19 Pandemic, the election and then four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, and this twenty-first-century obsession with conspiracy theories, mirror London’s many plagues from 1592 to 1603, Shakespeare’s Caesar and Richard III, and of course our post-modern social media outlets are simply riddled with conspiracies. Shakespearean, indeed. What Shakespearean: On Life and Language in Times of Disruption accomplishes is to place the reader in William Shakespeare’s London. There is danger at Bishops Gate, the neighborhood the Bard chose to reside in; danger appeared both from below and above. Sword fights, punch ups, and stabbings demarcate a rough “from below” existence while political intrigues from the execution of the Earl of Essex to the Gun Powder Plot of 1605 imperilled all of London’s theatre productions if not William Shakespeare himself. Robert McCrum is the author of dozens of works, fiction as well as non-fiction, plus he’s an Emmy Award-winning documentarian. A long-time editor for Faber and Faber and The Observer, McCrum career continues on despite a stroke. His recovery gave him time to read and Shakespeare, once again, filled his gaze. Joe Krulder is the author of The Execution of Admiral John Byng as a Microhistory of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Routledge 2021) teaching college History in Northern California. Joe earned his doctorate at the University of Bristol in West England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Jay Rubenstein, Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California, and provides us with fascinating insights into medieval society. How did the First Crusade happen? What could have suddenly caused tens of thousands of knights, commoners and even nuns at the end of the 11th century to leave their normal lives behind and trek thousands of miles across hostile territory in an unprecedented vicious and bloody quest to wrest Jerusalem from its occupying powers? Jay Rubenstein, historian of the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual worlds of Europe in the Middle Ages, carefully explores those questions based on his extensive research while discussing the Apocalypse: the crusaders’ sincere belief that the end of the world was approaching and their opportunity to participate in the last stage of the divine plan. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Foresters, Borders, and Bark Beetles: The Future of Europe’s Last Primeval Forest (Indiana University Press, 2020), Eunice Blavascunas provides an intimate ethnographic account of Białowieża, Europe's last primeval forest. At Poland’s easternmost border with Belarus, the deep past of ancient oaks, woodland bison, and thousands of species of insects and fungi collides with authoritarian and communist histories. Foresters, biologists, environmentalists, and locals project the ancient Białowieża Forest as a series of competing icons in struggles over memory, land, and economy, which are also struggles about whether to log or preserve the woodland; whether and how to celebrate the mixed ethnic Polish/Belarusian peasant past; and whether to align this eastern outpost with ultra-right Polish politics, neighboring Belarus, or the European Union. Drawing on more than twenty years of research, Blavascunas untangles complex conflicts between protection and use by examining which forest pasts are celebrated, which fester, and which have been altered in the tumultuous decades following the collapse of communism. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Democratic Lessons: What the Greeks Can Teach Us is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Josiah Ober, Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. This extensive conversation includes topics such as the serendipitous factors that led him to study the classical world, the insights that examining rhetoric provide about ancient Athenian society, and how social media might help us fruitfully recreate aspects of the past. Prof. Ober discusses his insights that the ancient Athenians didn’t just happen to stumble upon the idea of democracy—they somehow managed to make it work in practice for the better part of 200 years, all the while facing many of the same divisive societal pressures that we are currently grappling with. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The image of the Ottoman Turks and their interaction with the Christian West, has undergone many changes in the past: from William Gladstone's famous comment that: “[The Turks] one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.” To the more recent revisionist views of the 'cultural exchange' school, who de-emphasize the military conquest, endemic violence and proto-ethnic cleansing that were in fact part and parcel of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and elsewhere. And, instead emphasize cultural interaction between the Christian West and the Muslim East. In his new book The Last Muslim Conquest: The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe (Princeton UP, 2021), Ottoman specialist, Professor Gabor Agoston, of Georgetown University, goes beyond both of the above schools, in a post-revisionist treatment which while not ignoring some aspects of the 'cultural exchange' school, retains the correct emphasize on Ottoman Turk policies of military conquest, violence and expansionism in the Balkans and elsewhere. In a treatment which depends upon rich stream of research in Ottoman Turkish archives as well as elsewhere, Professor Agoston provides the reader with an in depth analysis of the military structure that made the Ottoman Turks one of the great, military and imperial powers of the 16th and 17th centuries. And why that power's failure to adapt, eventually resulted in its long decline and eventual fall. In short, Professor Agoston's treatment is a splendid work, aimed at both the academic and the lay educated audience. A sheet delight to read. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the 1960s, the radical youth of Western Europe’s New Left rebelled against the democratic welfare state and their parents’ antiquated politics of reform. It was not the first time an upstart leftist movement was built on the ruins of the old. New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2021) traces the history of neoleftism from its antifascist roots in the first half of the twentieth century, to its postwar reconstruction in the 1950s, to its explosive reinvention by the 1960s counterculture. Terence Renaud demonstrates why the left in Europe underwent a series of internal revolts against the organizational forms of established parties and unions. He describes how small groups of militant youth such as New Beginning in Germany tried to sustain grassroots movements without reproducing the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and supposedly obsolete structures of Social Democracy and Communism. Neoleftist militants experimented with alternative modes of organization such as councils, assemblies, and action committees. However, Renaud reveals that these same militants, decades later, often came to defend the very institutions they had opposed in their youth. Providing vital historical perspective on the challenges confronting leftists today, this book tells the story of generations of antifascists, left socialists, and anti-authoritarians who tried to build radical democratic alternatives to capitalism and kindle hope in reactionary times. Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The fashionable and decorous men whom we recognize in portraits and letters from the Italian Renaissance penned some of the most scathing critiques of the courts in which they served. Such anti-courtly discourse furnished a platform for discussing pressing questions of early modern Italian society. The court was the space that witnessed a new form of negotiation of identity and prestige, the definition of masculinity and of gender-specific roles, the birth of modern politics and of an ethics based on merit and on individual self-interest. In The Court and Its Critics: Anti-Court Sentiments in Early Modern Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Paola Ugolini analyzes anti-courtly critiques using a wide variety of sources including manuals of courtliness, dialogues, satires, and plays, from the mid-fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. The book is the first work of its kind, as it systematically investigates anti-court sentiments across an impressive number of primary sources. At its core, the book reimagines the agency of authors who served in roles they often despised, and it prompts questions of the psychological effect of transforming the self in order to please those in power. An elegantly written study, The Court and Its Critics will be of interest to scholars of the early modern period as well as to those who are curious about the fraught history of the development of the self. Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. His NBN interview is available at Moral Combat: Women, Gender, and War in Italian Renaissance Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today Judith Pollmann, professor of early modern dutch history at Leiden University in Leiden, The Netherlands, to talk about her book, Catholic Identity and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1520 – 1625, first published in 2011 by Oxford University Press, on the occasion of its paperback release this year, 2021. The Revolt that ripped apart the sixteenth-century Netherlands began as a rebellion against Habsburg authority but it eventually became a war of religion that resulted in the formation of two new states. Although the Southern Netherlands ultimately witnessed the triumph of the militant Catholicism of the Baroque, Catholics throughout the Low Countries found that the Revolt had changed their lives forever. Mining the unusually rich diaries, memoirs, and poems written by Netherlandish Catholics, Judith Pollmann explores how Catholic believers experienced religious and political turmoil in the generations between Erasmus and Rubens. She investigates the initial passivity of Catholics in the face of Calvinist aggression, and asks why they actively supported a Catholic revival after 1585. By listening to the voices of individual Catholics, lay and clerical, Judith Pollmann offers a new perspective both on the Revolt of the Netherlands and on the formation of early modern Catholic identity. Exploring what it took to turn traditional Christians into the agents of their own Counter-Reformation, she sees the dynamic relationship between priests and people as a catalyst for religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Byzantium: Beyond the Cliché is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Maria Mavroudi, Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Maria Mavroudi specializes in the study of the Byzantine Empire and this wide-ranging conversation explores her extensive research on the Byzantine Empire and how it has repeatedly been undervalued by historians despite its having been a military and cultural powerhouse for more than a millennium. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"One of the most enduring myths of history writing about Europe in the 20th century is that the century can be neatly divided into a tale of two halves, with the first half made up of episodes of war, revolution and mass violence while the second is a tale of relative peace and prosperity”. In Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe After the Second World War (Basic Books, 2021), Paul Betts challenges this two-halves historical narrative. This modern political history of the use of the concept of “civilisation" confronts the self-image of the European Union with lessons for core debates about democracy and the rule of law today. Paul Betts is a professor of European history at Saint Antony's College, Oxford, whose work centres on modern cultural history with a special focus on 20th century Germany. His Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (OUP Oxford, 2010) received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History awarded by the Wiener Library. *The author's own book recommendations are: Project Europe: A History by Kiran Klaus Patel (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi (Allen Lane, 2021). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on the US, rival factions in Asquith's government battled over whether or not to seek a negotiated end to the First World War. In this riveting new account, Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge UP, 2021) by Daniel Larsen tells the full story for the first time of how Asquith and his supporters secretly sought to end the war. He shows how they supported President Woodrow Wilson's efforts to convene a peace conference and how British intelligence, clandestinely breaking American codes, aimed to sabotage these peace efforts and aided Asquith's rivals. With Britain reading and decrypting all US diplomatic telegrams between Europe and Washington, these decrypts were used in a battle between the Treasury, which was terrified of looming financial catastrophe, and Lloyd George and the generals. This book's findings transform our understanding of British strategy and international diplomacy during the war. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Britain and France waged war eight times in the century following the Glorious Revolution, a mutual antagonism long regarded as a "Second Hundred Years' War." Yet officials on both sides also initiated ententes, free trade schemes, and colonial bargains intended to avert future conflict. What drove this quest for a more peaceful order? In Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (Yale UP, 2021), John Shovlin reveals the extent to which Britain and France sought to divert their rivalry away from war and into commercial competition. The two powers worked to end future conflict over trade in Spanish America, the Caribbean, and India, and imagined forms of empire-building that would be more collaborative than competitive. They negotiated to cut cross-channel tariffs, recognizing that free trade could foster national power while muting enmity. This account shows that eighteenth-century capitalism drove not only repeated wars and overseas imperialism but spurred political leaders to strive for global stability. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. Dora Osborne's book What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture (Camden House, 2020) argues that memory culture in the Berlin Republic is marked by an archival turn that reflects this shift from embodied to externalized, material memory and responds to the particular status of the archive "after Auschwitz." What remains in this late phase of memory culture is the post-Holocaust archive, which at once ensures and haunts the future of Holocaust memory. Drawing on the thinking of Freud, Derrida, and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book traces the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture across different media and genres. In its discussion of recent memorials, documentary film and theater, as well as prose narratives, all of which engage with the material legacy of the Nazi past, it argues that the performance of “archive work” is not only crucial to contemporary memory work but also fundamentally challenges it. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
FASCISM...FRANCE. Two words/ideas that scholars have spent much time and energy debating in relationship to one another. Chris Millington's A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a work of synthesis that also draws on the author's own research for key examples and evidence to support its narrative and claims. Moving chronologically, the book's chapters take the reader from the impact of the First World War right up to the contemporary period in French politics, culture, and society. A narrative and analysis focused on the French context, the book situates France within a broader European frame. Engaging the complex historiographic battles surrounding French fascism in ways that will be helpful to non-specialists, and especially to student readers, the book condenses decades of previous scholarship while delving into concrete cases and moments that help to illustrate the stakes of this historical and political field. Examining movements like the Croix-de-Feu, Faisceau, Jeunesses Patriotes, Partie Social Français, and the Cagoulards within the broader interwar landscape of right-wing thought and politics, the book goes on to consider the Vichy period and the emergence of the National Front after the Second World War. *Special note: Chris and I ran out of time before I could ask him about what he's been working on since the publication of A History of Fascism in France. Readers may also be interested in his most recent book, France in the Second World War: Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020). Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Focusing on the world of Norwegian Opioid Substitution Treatment (OST) in the aftermath of significant reforms, Aleksandra Bartoszko's book Treating Heroin Addiction in Norway: The Pharmaceutical Other (Routledge, 2021) casts a critical light on the intersections between medicine and law, and the ideologies infusing the notions of "individual choice" and "patient involvement" in the field of addiction globally. With ethnographic attention to the encounters between patients, clinicians, and bureaucrats, the volume shows that OST sustains the realities it is meant to address. The chapters follow one particular patient through complex clinical and legal battles as they fight to achieve a better quality of life. The study provides ethnographic insight that captures the individual, experiential aspects of addiction treatment, and how these experiences find a register within different domains of treatment and policy, including the familial, social, legal, and clinical. Offering a rare view of addiction treatment in a Scandinavian welfare state, this book will be of interest to scholars of medical and legal anthropology and sociology, and others with an interest in drug policy and addiction treatment. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The early modern Mediterranean was an area where many different rich cultural traditions came in contact with each other, and were often forced to co-exist, frequently learning to reap the benefits of co-operation. Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and their interactions all contributed significantly to the cultural development of modern Europe. Cross-Cultural Interaction Between Byzantium and the West, 1204-1669: Whose Mediterranean Is It Anyway? (Routledge, 2020) addresses, explores, re-examines, and re-interprets one specific aspect of this cross-cultural interaction in the Mediterranean - that between the Byzantine East and the (mainly Italian) West. The investigation of this interaction has become increasingly popular in the past few decades, not least due to the relevance it has for cultural exchanges in our present-day society. The starting point is provided by the fall of Constantinople to the troops of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In the aftermath of the fall, a number of Byzantine territories came under prolonged Latin occupation, an occupation that forced Greeks and Latins to adapt their life socially and religiously to the new status quo. Venetian Crete developed one of the most fertile 'bi-cultural' societies, which evolved over 458 years. Its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1669 marked the end of an era and was hence chosen as the end point for the conference. By sampling case studies from the most representative areas where this interaction took place, the volume highlights the process as well as the significance of its cultural development. Angeliki Lymberopoulou is Senior Lecturer in Art History (late and post-Byzantine art) at The Open University, UK. Her research interests focus on Venetian Crete (1211-1669) and the cross-cultural interactions and exchanges between Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians in the wider Mediterranean. Evan Zarkadas is a graduate student of European history at the University of Maine focusing on Medieval Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, medieval identity, and ethnicity during the late Middle Ages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2021) draws upon previously unavailable materials to tell the stories of the war they fought. Though these people came from a variety of backgrounds and held a range of different left-wing political views, what united them was their opposition to fascism. Despite their disorganization and lack of training, they made an impact on the battlefield soon after their deployment, and became a highly visible presence in the war against Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces. While the Spanish Republic they fought for was ultimately defeated, Tremlett explains how many of those who served in the Brigades continued their struggle against fascism during the Second World War, reflecting the lasting legacy of their service for their cause. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Among Eastern Europe’s postwar socialist states, Yugoslavia was unique in allowing its citizens to seek work abroad in Western Europe’s liberal democracies. Brigitte Le Normand's book Citizens Without Borders: Yugoslavia and Its Migrant Workers in Western Europe (U Toronto Press, 2021) charts the evolution of the relationship between Yugoslavia and its labour migrants who left to work in Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines how migrants were perceived by policy-makers and social scientists and how they were portrayed in popular culture, including radio, newspapers, and cinema. Created to nurture ties with migrants and their children, state cultural, educational, and informational programs were a way of continuing to govern across international borders. These programs relied heavily on the promotion of the idea of homeland. Le Normand examines the many ways in which migrants responded to these efforts and how they perceived their own relationship to the homeland, based on their migration experiences. Citizens without Borders shows how, in their efforts to win over migrant workers, the different levels of government – federal, republic, and local – promoted sometimes widely divergent notions of belonging, grounded in different concepts of "home." Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Berlin Ethnological Museum is one of the world's largest and most important anthropological museums, housing more than a half million objects collected from around the globe. In Humboldt's Shadow tells the story of the German scientists and adventurers who, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's inclusive vision of the world, traveled the earth in pursuit of a total history of humanity. It also details the fate of their museum, which they hoped would be a scientists' workshop, a place where a unitary history of humanity might emerge. H. Glenn Penny shows how these early German ethnologists assembled vast ethnographic collections to facilitate their study of the multiplicity of humanity, not to confirm emerging racist theories of human difference. He traces how Adolf Bastian filled the Berlin museum in an effort to preserve the records of human diversity, yet how he and his supporters were swept up by the imperialist currents of the day and struck a series of Faustian bargains to ensure the growth of their collections. Penny describes how influential administrators such as Wilhelm von Bode demanded that the museum be transformed into a hall for public displays, and how Humboldt's inspiring ideals were ultimately betrayed by politics and personal ambition. In Humboldt's Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology (Princeton UP, 2021) calls on museums to embrace anew Bastian's vision while deepening their engagement with indigenous peoples concerning the provenance and stewardship of these collections. Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Over the past decade, Poland and Hungary have become laboratories for a new kind of government: proto-authoritarian regimes that still have regular elections, vibrant oppositions and are externally constrained by EU law and potential loss of fiscal transfers. Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister since 2010, especially has generated a comprehensive academic literature attempting to understand the special nature of his regime. Two earlier podcasts with András Körösényi and Gábor Scheiring about their efforts to classify Orbánism can be found in the NBN library and a conversation Lasse Skytt about his new edition of Orbanland (New Europe Books, 2021) is coming soon. In their new book - Illiberal Constitutionalism in Poland and Hungary: The Deterioration of Democracy, Misuse of Human Rights and Abuse of the Rule of Law (Routledge, 2021) - Professors Drinóczi and Bień-Kacała redefine the models of government practised by Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński. By examining Polish and Hungarian history, identity, and political and legal systems, as well as the influence of European rule of law, they alight on what they believe is a new political phenomenon: illiberal constitutionalism. Agnieszka Bień-Kacała (a Pole) teaches law at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and Tímea Drinóczi (a Hungarian) teaches law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. *The authors' own book recommendations are Poland's Constitutional Breakdown by Wojciech Sadurski (OUP Oxford, 2019) and Democratic Decline in Hungary Law and Society in an Illiberal Democracy by András László Pap (Routledge, 2017). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley advisors (a division of Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don't Need No Thought Control: Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Berghahn Books, 2020) explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Thomas O. Haakenson's book Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada (Bloomsbury, 2021) focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedländer/Mynona, Brugman, Höch, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity. Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are joined by Philippe Vonnard, Senior SNSF Researcher at the University de Lausanne, and the author of Creating a United Europe of Football: The Formation of UEFA (1949-1961) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the role UEFA played in the production of European identity, the global origins of the European confederation, and how European sports bureaucrats were able to navigate the Cold War. In Creating a United Europe of Football, Vonnard explains the rise of UEFA through a close examination of the rarely utilized UEFA archives. His work pushes past a prosopography of European football bureaucrats – such as Stanley Rous, Ottorino Barassi, Ernst Thommen – and instead situates UEFA’s emergence in the rise of the global football and the Cold War. He argues that rather than simply a movement of European football officials, UEFA was also inspired by the South American confederation (CONMEBOL, founded 1916) provided an impetus and model for UEFA. Vonnard does not shy away from the details of the FIFA Executive: he shows how debates over the reorganization of FIFA necessitated the creation of a European confederation to promote officers to the Executive Committee. A new cadre of European football officials, however, opted for a more expansive confederation with independent financial resources rather than a minimalist association organized only to decide that limited question. A more extensive UEFA fought alongside and with FIFA as a major sports stakeholder. UEFA’s professionalism and scope expanded over the 1950s as it responded to issues and opportunities. As UEFA organized a ever wider series of competitions, it crowded out nascent challenges to its control over European football. It succeeded where other political, cultural, and economic unions failed, producing a genuine European-wide organization that formed and operated successfully across the Cold War East-West divide. Vonnard explains the qualities of leadership and strategies that made possible their achievements. Creating a United Europe of Football is a fascinating work from an important francophone sports historian. Now in English translation it provides a compelling read for people interested in the continental conversations about football’s role in European identity and the rise of sports diplomacy during the Cold War. There is also a free French version pour les francophones. https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/65151 Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Post-Reformation Era, 1559-1689 (Oxford UP, 2020) traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Political Theorist Jason Frank, the John L. Senior Professor of Government at Cornell University, has written a new book, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly (Oxford UP, 2021), that explores the concept of “people out of doors” and how we think about demonstrations by citizens in the streets, popular assemblies, and other configurations of the voice of the people. The idea of “the people” is a key component of democratic thinking and democratic theory, and Frank’s analysis examines these concepts and ideas as they have also evolved over the years since the Age of Revolution. Historians and sociologists have spent time researching and writing about popular assemblies and the role of the crowd, but political theory, as a discipline, has not provided much work on these concepts. The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly is an attempt to at least open the conversation in political theory, integrating some of the analysis by major political thinkers where they have confronted these concepts of the “people out of doors” and how they have responded to this important and understudied area of democratic theory. The issue of the people, in the streets, demonstrating, at the barricades, protesting, is part of our understanding of democracy, and it is the actual visual presentation of the power within democracy. This is part of Frank’s discussion of the aesthetic in democratic theory. He notes that aesthetic considerations are essential, this is how democratic people imagine and experience themselves as a people, as a form of government, as the power of the state. The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly is an interdisciplinary examination of the move towards democratic politics in the Age of Revolution, integrating analysis of work by Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Edmund Burke along with visual iconography, paintings and artistic renderings of the people as political body, and poetic and fictional works that dive into this same discussion. The Democratic Sublime examines the basis of democracy not so much as the constitutional frameworks or political institutions that came to replace so many monarchies or colonial powers, but as the much more ephemeral assembly of the people themselves, and how the people see and understand themselves in this context. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A concise, accessible account of strategy and the Second World War, Strategy and the Second World War: How the War Was Won, and Lost (Robinson, 2021), by renowned Historian Jeremy Black offers up a new look at this somewhat tired subject. In 1941, the Second World War became global, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union; Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor; and Germany declared war on the United States. In this timely book, which fills a real gap, Black engages with the strategic issues of the time - as they developed chronologically, and interacted - and relates these to subsequent debates about the choices made, revealing their continued political resonances. Beginning with Appeasement and the Soviet-German pact as key strategic means, Black examines the consequences of the fall of France for the strategies of all the powers. He shows how Allied strategy-making was more effective at the Anglo-American level than with the Soviet Union, not only for ideological and political reasons, but also because the Americans and British had a better grasp of the global dimension. He explores how German and Japanese strategies evolved as the war went badly for the Axis powers, and discusses the extent to which seeking to mold the post-war world informed Allied strategic choices from 1943 onwards, and the role these played in post-war politics, notably in the Cold War. Strategy was a crucial tool not only for conducting the war; it remains the key to understanding it today. In short, Strategy and the Second World War is both educational and enjoyable look at this always interesting topic. A book for both the academic and the lay educated public. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The collapse of the Berlin Wall has come to represent the entry of an isolated region onto the global stage. On the contrary, this study argues that communist states had in fact long been shapers of an interconnecting world, with '1989' instead marking a choice by local elites about the form that globalisation should take. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2019) draws on material from local archives to international institutions to explore the place of Eastern Europe in the emergence, since the 1970s, of a new world order that combined neoliberal economics and liberal democracy with increasingly bordered civilisational, racial and religious identities. An original and wide-ranging history, it explores the importance of the region's links to the West, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America in this global transformation, reclaiming the era's other visions such as socialist democracy or authoritarian modernisation which had been lost in triumphalist histories of market liberalism. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (Princeton UP, 2021), looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a new interpretation. Professor Jonathan Haslam, in the words of historian, Geoffrey Roberts, “the doyen of Soviet Diplomatic History”, looks at the neglected thread connecting them all: the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the inter-war period. Marshalling an array of archival sources, including records from the Communist International, Professor Haslam seeks to transform our understanding of the deep-seated origins of World War II, its conflicts, and its legacy. In Haslam’s interpretation fascism’s emergence in conjunction with the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, helped to upend the existing world order. World War I had economically destabilized many nations, and the threat of Communist revolt loomed large in the ensuing social unrest. As Moscow supported Communist efforts in France, Spain, China, and beyond, opponents such as the British feared for the stability of their global empire, and viewed fascism as the only force standing between them and the Communist overthrow of the existing order. The appeasement and political misreading of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that followed held back the spectre of rebellion—only to usher in the later advent of war. Illuminating ideological differences in the decades before World War II, and the continuous role of pre- and postwar Communism, The Spectre of War provides unprecedented context for one of the most momentous calamities of the twentieth century. While not everyone will agree with his thesis and his overall interpretation of Soviet foreign policy in the inter-war period, Professor Haslam has written a book that will be required reading for anyone seriously interested in the period covered by the book. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It’s been 44 years since the Young European Federalists first coined the term “democratic deficit” – two years before the first direct elections to the European Parliament, 10 before the Single European Act and more than 20 before the advent of the euro. Over those years – as the single market and the new currency shifted powers from the nation to the union – the conviction that the EU suffers such a deficit has taken root among europhiles and eurosceptics alike. While national powers have been ceded to the EU, they say, democratic accountability has not. But is this entirely true and, if it is, should this deficit be filled by the European Parliament? In European Representation in EU National Parliaments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Lucy Kinski concludes that not only do national parliaments have “a stronger claim to democratic legitimacy than the overarching supranational tier” but that many national MPs are already acting as representatives for non-nationals and the wider union. Lucy Kinski is a researcher and lecturer at the Salzburg Centre for European Union Studies. She studied at the Hertie School in Berlin, the Utrecht School of Economics, the Graduate Institute in Geneva and obtained her doctorate at the University of Vienna. Before going to Salzburg, she was a senior researcher at the University of Düsseldorf. *The author's own book recommendations are Framing TTIP in the European Public Spheres: Towards an Empowering Dissensus for EU Integration by Alvaro Oleart (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (Melville House Publishing, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global (Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Most often our engagement with the Holocaust is a process of wrestling with the absence of presence and the presence of absence. This is right and important and necessary. But Elizabeth Anthony's new book The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust (Wayne State UP, 2021) reminds us that the story of the Holocaust is also the story of return, of resurfacing, of presence itself. Anthony studies the return of Viennese Jews to Vienna after the end of the Second World War. She starts by reminding us that for some Jews, those who survived in hiding or by being married to non-Jews, to return was to become visible again. But for many Jews, this was a physical relocation, a conscious decision to return home, with all that meant. Anthony offers a careful interpretative framework for understanding the waves of returnees and how they experience a new Vienna. But Anthony has an eye for telling anecdotes and details and the book is packed with stories and details drawn from interviews, memoirs, diaries and letters. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Festive Enterprise: The Business of Drama in Medieval and Renaissance England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), Dr. Jill Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. By analyzing a wide range of genres and a diverse range of venues, Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’ techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike. Dr. Jill Ingram is associate professor of English at Ohio University. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What happened to the Filipinas who migrated to Denmark to staff iconic new international hotels in the 1960s and 1970s? Why did the Philippine government encourage so many talented people to leave the country? How did Danes react to this influx of lively Southeast Asians? What was the impact on the Danish labor movement? And why did so many lives change forever? In this conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Danish journalist and researcher Nina Trige Andersen discusses both the socio-economic context for the influx of Philippine workers in postwar Denmark, and the individual stories she chronicles in her meticulously-researched book Labor Pioneers: Economy, Labor, and Migration in Filipino-Danish Relations, 1950-2015 (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2019). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we have John Christopoulos, Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, to talk about his new book, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021) In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Italians maintained a fundamental ambivalence about abortion. Italians from all levels of society sought, had, and participated in abortions. Early modern Italy was not an absolute anti-abortion culture, an exemplary Catholic society centered on the “traditional family.” Rather, Christopoulos shows, Italians held many views on abortion, and their responses to its practice varied. Bringing together medical, religious, and legal perspectives alongside a social and cultural history of sexuality, reproduction, and the family, Christopoulos offers a nuanced and convincing account of the meanings Italians ascribed to abortion and shows how prevailing ideas about the practice were spread, modified, and challenged. Christopoulos begins by introducing readers to prevailing ideas about abortion and women’s bodies, describing the widely available purgative medicines and surgeries that various healers and women themselves employed to terminate pregnancies. He then explores how these ideas and practices ran up against and shaped theology, medicine, and law. Catholic understanding of abortion was changing amid religious, legal, and scientific debates concerning the nature of human life, women’s bodies, and sexual politics. Christopoulos examines how ecclesiastical, secular, and medical authorities sought to regulate abortion, and how tribunals investigated and punished its procurers—or did not, even when they could have. Abortion in Early Modern Italy offers a compelling and sensitive study of abortion in a time of dramatic religious, scientific, and social change. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke. Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed." Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kathryn Smithies a medieval historian at the University of Melbourne, Australia, to talk about her new book, Introducing the Medieval Ass, out 2020 with the University of Wales Press. Introducing the Medieval Ass presents a lucid, accessible, and comprehensive picture of the enormous socioeconomic and cultural significance of the ass, or donkey, in the Middle Ages and beyond. In medieval times, the ass was a vital, utilitarian beast of burden, rather like ubiquitous white delivery vans today. At the same time, however, the ass had a rich, paradoxical reputation. Its hard work was praised but its obstinacy condemned. It exemplified the good Christian, humbly bearing Christ to Jerusalem, but also represented sloth, a mortal sin. It had a potent sexual reputation—in one literary work, an ass had sex with a woman—even as it was simultaneously linked to sterility. Over time, the ass also became synonymous with human idiocy, a comic figure representing foolish peasants, students too dull to learn, and their asinine teachers. This trope of foolishness was so prevalent that by the eighteenth century the word “ass” began to be replaced by “donkey.” Introducing the Medieval Ass offers a wide-ranging account of the importance, and often surprising cultural prevalence, of this common domesticated animal. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the West, the study of the phenomenon known as the Crusades has long been dominated by European concerns: European periodization, European selection of important moments and personages, and, most of all, European sources. In recent years, scholars such as Carole Hillenbrand, Paul Cobb, and Michael Lower have mined Arabic-language material with the purpose of creating a more balanced view of the Crusades--one that gives the Muslim experiences a voice in the English language. Now, Dr. Suleiman Mourad, Professor of Religion at Smith College, and Dr. James Lindsay, Professor of History at Colorado State University, have produced an anthology known as Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology (Hackett, 2021). Covering a wide range of topics and a diverse set of sources, Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period makes new translations of primary source material available to English-speaking students and scholars of the Crusades. In our conversation, Jim, Suleiman and I touch upon how the Crusades are perceived differently in Muslim sources than they are in European sources; how to categorize an anthology, and what sort of sources to include; and the importance of establishing the diversity of opinion even within the Muslim sources. Aaron M. Hagler is an associate professor of history at Troy University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A short and entertaining narrative of France from prehistory to the present, recounting the great events and personalities that helped create France’s cultural and political influence today. Country and destination, nation and idea, France has a rich and complex history that fascinates the world and attracts millions of visitors each year to its chateaux and cathedrals, boulevards and vineyards. In this succinct and entertaining volume, Veteran historian Jeremy Black narrates how France’s past has created its distinct character and powerful artistic, intellectual, and political influence across the globe. In France: A Short History (Thames & Hudson, 2021), Black takes readers from the cave paintings of Lascaux and the origins of Gothic architecture, to Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and the Lumiere brothers, and even into the cataclysm of the 1789 revolution, the countercultural student protests of 1968, and the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) today. His account presents a vivid take on history that emphasizes the unexpected nature of events and unpredictable outcomes of a fragmented and crisis-prone nation. In retelling France’s story, Black explores some of its most famous philosophy, literature, art, and architecture—and ties them to the military, political, and cultural shifts that led to their development. With color illustrations, France is a short, easy-to-digest history of a vast subject, and a helpful guide to understanding France today. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"The populist radical right is by far the best-studied party family within political science”. Extremism expert Cas Mudde may be right but, as Léonie de Jonge argues in The Success and Failure of Right-Wing Populist Parties in the Benelux Countries (Routledge, 2021), less studied are the specific conditions under which right-wing populism succeeds and - just as importantly - fails. Why, for example, do these parties poll above 40% in Italy and France yet remain absent in Portugal and Ireland? Part of the answer to this puzzle could lie in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium (and more specifically in its Dutch- and French-speaking regions). "In the earlier phases of a party’s development", writes Professor de Jonge, the success and failure of right-wing populist parties depends to a large extent on exogenous factors – notably the degree of political and social ostracism they face in a given polity”. Léonie de Jonge graduated from Cornell College, Iowa, and the University of Cambridge, where she also obtained her PhD, and is now an Assistant Professor in European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen. *The author's book recommendations were Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right by Cynthia Miller-Idriss (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown (Allen Lane, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In July 2021, nine summers after its then president saved the euro with three choice words (“whatever it takes”), the European Central Bank published the results of a thoroughgoing review of its strategy. A policy framework built for times when inflation posed a modest upside challenge had coped – but only just – with successive financial, sovereign-debt, banking and health crises that threatened chronically weak inflation at best and deflation at worst. Essential to the review was research conducted to mark the 20th anniversary of the ECB in 2019 and now updated and published as a book: Monetary Policy in Times of Crisis: A Tale of Two Decades of the European Central Bank (Oxford UP, 2021) by Massimo Rostagno, Carlo Altavilla, Giacomo Carboni, Wolfgang Lemke, Roberto Motto, Arthur Saint Guilhem and Jonathan Yiangou. This exhaustive analytical history concludes that the ECB operated two policy regimes – one from 1999 to 2012 and a second crisis-informed strategy until the narrative ends before the onset of the pandemic. With its strategic review over, the history lessons from this book will be an essential guide to ECB thinking as it prepares a slow and careful unwinding of its emergency policy settings. Massimo Rostagno has been the ECB’s Director General Monetary Policy since August 2017 and has worked at the central bank since 1998. He has served as head of the Monetary Policy Strategy Division and Director Monetary Policy and, before that, worked at the Banca d’Italia and the International Monetary Fund. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. (Any views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of the ECB). *The author's own book recommendations are Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Harvard University Press, 2014) and The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era by Barry Eichengreen (OUP USA, 2018). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global (Energy Aspects). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
After a turbulent political revolt against the military superpower of the early modern world, the tiny Dutch Republic managed to situate itself as the dominant printing and book trading power of the European market. The so-called Dutch Golden Age has long captured the attention of art historians, but for every one painting produced by the Dutch during the seventeenth century, at least 100 books were printed. In The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019), Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen present the untold story of how a group of family-owned businesses transformed the economics of printing and selling and conquered the European communications economy. This printing revolution helped to turn their pluralistic population into a highly literate and engaged society. Andrew Pettegree (@APettegree) is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014), and Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin, 2015). Arthur der Weduwen (@A_der_Weduwen) is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He researches and writes on the history of the Dutch Republic, books, news, libraries and early modern politics. He is the author of Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2017), and two books on early newspaper advertising in the Netherlands (both Brill, 2020). His latest project is The Library, A Fragile History, co-written with Andrew Pettegree and published by Profile in 2021. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (1194–1270), known in English as Nahmanides and by the acronym the Ramban, was one of the most creative kabbalists, one of the deepest and most original biblical interpreters, and one of the greatest Talmudic scholars the Jewish tradition has ever produced. Join us as we talk with Moshe Halbertal about his recent book: Nahmanides: Law and Mysticism (Yale UP, 2020), where he provides a broad, systematic account of Nahmanides’s thought, exploring his conception of halakhah and his approach to the central concerns of medieval Jewish thought, as well as the relationship between Nahmanides’s kabbalah and mysticism and the existential religious drive that nourishes them. Moshe Halbertal is the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Hebrew University and Gruss Professor of Law at NYU Law School. He has also written Maimonides: Life and Thought. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The world is in a midst of a renewable energy revolution, with the price of utility scale photo-voltaic solar power falling by nearly 90% between 2009 and 2019, and the price of wind power falling by 70% during the same period. Annual global investment in renewable electricity generation assets is now more than double that for fossil fuel and nuclear-powered generation facilities combined, and yet the pace of adoption varies greatly across countries. In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Assistant Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and coordinator of Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, moderates a discussion on the various barriers and opportunities countries in Asia and the Nordics face in trying to take advantage of this renewable energy revolution. He is joined by Paul Midford a Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, in Yokohama, Japan, Espen Moe, a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and Eric Zusman, senior policy researcher and area leader at the Institute for Global Environmental Studies in Hayama, Japan. The talk focuses on two new books: New Challenges and Solutions for Renewable Energy: Japan, East Asia and Northern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), edited by Midford and Moe, and Aligning Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies in Asia (Springer, 2021), edited by Zusman with Hooman Farzaneh and Yeora Chae. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The city that sits on the River Foyle on the North side of the Irish isle in many ways has stood as a microcosm of the conflicts in Northern Ireland, even to the contestation over the name of Derry/Londonderry. In Derry City: Memory and Political Struggle in Northern Ireland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), Margo Shea examines the popular and cultural identity formations in this emblematic city over the century leading up to the sectarian clash known commonly as as "The Troubles." Throughout the period Shea examines, Irish nationalist communities developed a cultural memory that fostered a social identity and shared heritage as an alternative to the loyalist sanctioned commemorations, festivals, and community histories. Shea's study models a fruitful method of reading cultural history, especially of communities without recourse to political power and the usual means of archival representation. This book will be of interest for those interested in the formation of cultural identity and the development of Northern Ireland. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Devil's Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant examine the many ways in which the medieval past has been manipulated to promote discrimination, oppression, and murder. Tracing the fetish for “medieval times” behind toxic ideologies like nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy, Kaufman and Sturtevant show us how the Middle Ages have been twisted for political purposes in every century that followed. The Devil’s Historians casts aside the myth of an oppressive, patriarchal medieval monoculture and reveals a medieval world not often shown in popular culture: one that is diverse, thriving, courageous, compelling, and complex. Amy S. Kaufman is a scholar of medieval studies and popular culture. Paul B. Sturtevant is Editor in Chief of The Public Medievalist and a Visitor Research Specialist at The Smithsonian Institution. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Meryl Altman's new book Beauvoir in Time, published by Brill Rodopi Press (2020), situates Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) in its historical context and responds to criticism that muddles what she actually said about sex, race and class. She takes up three aspects of Beauvoir's work today’s feminists find problematic: the characterizations of the frigid woman and lesbians, the analogy of race and class that obscures Black and working-class women and her examples drawn from white middle-class experience. Charged with ethnocentrism, her contribution is distorted by not considering her place and time. Through close reading of Beauvoir's writing in many genres, alongside expansive criticism, Altman shows that what appears as a problem for feminist theory is best understood by a full consideration of Beauvoir’s engagement with Freudian, Marxist and anticolonial thinkers. Extremely helpful in understanding the place of The Second Sex within international feminist theory, Altman offers insights into how Beauvoir is still relevant in the age of intersectionality and identity politics. Meryl Altman is Professor of English and Women's Studies at DePauw University. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On January 10th, 1795, a very tired caravan arrives in Beijing. The travelers have journeyed from Canton on an accelerated schedule through harsh terrain in order to make it to the capital in time for the Qianlong Emperor’s sixtieth anniversary of his reign. The group is led by two Dutchmen: Isaac Titsingh and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, who are there to represent the interests of the Dutch Republic at the imperial court. It’s a momentous occasion, especially after the disastrous British Embassy from George Macartney two years earlier. Little did they know that their embassy would be the last by Westerners in the traditional Chinese court. Their journey is the subject of Professor Tonio Andrade’s The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton University Press, 2021), published earlier this year: a rich and readable volume that tells the story of an event long-neglected by history and historians. In this interview, Tonio and I talk about the Dutch Embassy, its protagonists and the nature of the imperial court. We discuss the perilous and rushed journey the ambassadors made to Beijing, and what their experience tells us about the nature of diplomacy. Tonio Andrade is professor of Chinese and global history at Emory University. His books include The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton University Press, 2017), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West (Princeton University Press, 2011), and How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia University Press, 2007). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Last Embassy. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Andrew Jenks' book Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth (Anthem Press, 2021) explores the era of space collaboration (from 1970 to the present). This period has been largely ignored by historians in favor of a focus on the earlier space race. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a key program and catalyst for Détente, marked the transition to the new age of space collaboration, which continued through the Soviet Interkosmos missions, the Mir-Shuttle dockings of the early 1990s, and on through the International Space Station. Europeans, Americans, and Russians envisioned space collaboration as a way to reconfigure political and international relations. The shift toward collaboration was a result of a new focus on safety, which displaced the earlier emphasis on risk-taking in the first phase of the space race, when military imperatives often overshadowed peaceful goals. Apollo-Soyuz (ignored by Cold War historians) was thus imagined as a test project for a docking mechanism that would allow a manned-capsule stranded in orbit to dock with another capsule and provide an escape hatch back to earth (it was actually inspired, in part, by the 1969 Hollywood film “Marooned” with Gene Hackman). The focus on engineering for safety grew out of the broader concerns about environmental degradation and nuclear war that in turn reflected a growing sense in the 1970s and 1980s of the dangers associated with excessive risk-taking in politics and engineering. Few historians or social scientists have examined the social construction of safety and its use in engineering and politics. The book draws on the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, Nixon and Reagan libraries and National Archives Collections, NASA headquarters library documents, and various memoirs and other published sources in English and Russian. Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Once described as a “German oddity”†, Ordoliberalism was one of a number of new liberalisms that emerged from the political maelstrom of the interwar period. But, unlike the other neoliberal splinters, Ordoliberalism – founded at the University of Freiburg by economist Walter Eucken and jurist Franz Böhm – was quickly tested in the real world. The West Germany rebuilt out of the ashes of war was founded on its principles: rules-based economics, independent agencies protected from politics and the state as arbiter. The country's recovery and successful reunification were a testament to Ordoliberalism’s effectiveness but, as the European Community became a union and created the euro, its other members were keener to import the success than the rules. When crisis struck from 2008, the EU's architecture was severely stress-tested and remains under strain in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Is the long EU political crisis due to Ordoliberalism or due to its non-implementation? Can and should Ordoliberalism adapt and survive? These are some of the questions addressed in Ordoliberalism and European Economic Policy: Between Realpolitik and Economic Utopia (Routledge paperback, 2021) co-edited by Malte Dold and Tim Krieger. Malte Dold is a Freiburg university graduate who now an assistant professor of economics at Pomona College in California, and Tim Krieger is Freiburg's Wilfried Guth professor of constitutional political economy. *As their book recommendations, Tim Krieger chose Conservative Liberalism, Ordo-liberalism, and the State: Disciplining Democracy and the Market by Kenneth Dyson (OUP Oxford, 2021) and Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought by Robert S. Taylor (OUP Oxford, 2017); and Malte Dold chose The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Penguin, 2020) and The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen (Penguin, 2010). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors (Energy Aspects). †Ordoliberalism: A German oddity? ed. Thorsten Beck and Hans-Helmut Kotz (CEPR Press 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his underwear. "I ran into a new problem when we walked," Stewart wrote, "the shorts and I didn't get along. They would crawl up on me all the time." Crawling underwear may have been a small price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the utter wretchedness of the moment, it was quite natural for soldiers like Stewart to lose sight of that end. In Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII (U Chicago Press, 2021), Mary Louise Roberts focuses on the corporeal experiences of the soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last two years of the Second World War. In the horrendously unhygienic and often lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down, stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good nutrition. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military strategy that dominate many WWII histories, Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the "screaming meemies," the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane sight of rotting corpses. Told in inimitable style by one of our most distinctive historians of the Second World War, Sheer Misery, published by the University of Chicago Press, gives readers both an unprecedented look at the ground-level world of the common soldier and a deeply felt rendering of the experience of being a body in war. Douglas Bell is a historian who focuses on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State (Cambridge University Press 2020) advances a new understanding of how democratic social movements work with welfare institutions to challenge structures of domination. Steven Klein develops a novel theory that depicts welfare institutions as “worldly mediators,” or sites of democratic world-making fostering political empowerment and participation within the context of capitalist economic forces. Drawing on the writings of Weber, Arendt, and Habermas, and historical episodes that range from the workers' movement in Bismarck's Germany to post-war Swedish feminism, the book challenges us to rethink the distribution of power in society, as well as the fundamental concerns of democratic theory. Ranging across political theory and intellectual history, The Work of Politics provides a vital contribution to contemporary thinking about the future of the welfare state. Tejas Parasher is Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The extra Calvinisticum, that the eternal Son maintains his existence beyond the flesh during his earthly ministry and perpetually, divided the Lutheran and Reformed traditions during the Reformation. K. J. Drake's book The Flesh of the Word: The Extra Calvinisticum from Zwingli to Early Orthodoxy (Oxford UP, 2021) explores the emergence and development of the extra Calvinisticum in the Reformed tradition by tracing its exposition from Ulrich Zwingli to early Reformed orthodoxy. Rather than being an ancillary issue, the questions surrounding the extra Calvinisticum were a determinative factor in the differentiation of Magisterial Protestantism into rival confessions. Reformed theologians maintained this doctrine in order to preserve the integrity of both Christ's divine and human natures as the mediator between God and humanity. This rationale remained consistent across this period with increasing elaboration and sophistication to meet the challenges levelled against the doctrine in Lutheran polemics. The study begins with Zwingli's early use of the extra Calvinisticum in the Eucharistic controversy with Martin Luther and especially as the alternative to Luther's doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ's human body. Over time, Reformed theologians, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Antione de Chandieu, articulated the extra Calvinisticum with increasing rigor by incorporating conciliar christology, the church fathers, and scholastic methodology to address the polemical needs of engagement with Lutheranism. The book illustrates the development of christological doctrine by Reformed theologians offering a coherent historical narrative of Reformed christology from its emergence into the period of confessionalization. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world. Émigrés: French Words That Turned English (Princeton UP, 2020) demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete. At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this history, military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting in The Western Front: A History of the First World War (Liveright, 2021). As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was dynamic and defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies—machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers—were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war. Douglas Bell received his PhD in history at Texas A&M University and was recently the Postdoctoral Fellow at the US Army Heritage an Education Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art (Princeton UP, 2021) presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that—to date—have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London’s Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today on New Books in History, Rod Phillips, Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, talks about his book, French Wine: A History, out in 2016 with the University of California Press, and published in paperback in 2020. For centuries, wine has been associated with France more than with any other country. France remains one of the world’s leading wine producers by volume and enjoys unrivaled cultural recognition for its wine. If any wine regions are global household names, they are French regions such as Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Within the wine world, products from French regions are still benchmarks for many wines. French Wine is the first synthetic history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. Rod Phillips places the history of grape growing and winemaking in each of the country’s major regions within broad historical and cultural contexts. Examining a range of influences on the wine industry, wine trade, and wine itself, the book explores religion, economics, politics, revolution, and war, as well as climate and vine diseases. French Wine is the essential reference on French wine for collectors, consumers, sommeliers, and industry professionals. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?” asks Benjamin Steege—Assistant Professor of Music Theory, Columbia University—in his new book An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This deceptively subtle question exercised the minds of some of Europe's most delicate musical thinkers at a time of great social and political upheaval, and continues to be of interest to musicologists today. Putting a little-discussed set of German-language primary sources into historical context (among others, the writing of Günther Anders (né Stern), Gustav Güldenstein, and Herbert Eimert) and expertly introducing them to an Anglophone audience, Steege explains the shared interests of a post–World War I constellation of musical thinkers whose disinterest in psychological and music-historical orthodoxy coalesces into a vital, if not entirely homogeneous, program for the phenomenology of music. Enriched by convincing music-analytical examples, careful handling of philosophical terms of art, and an ethical sensitivity not unlike that of its historical interlocutors, Steege's book—and the writers whose work it examines—is sure to draw attention from music historians and historians of philosophy alike, who will question the relative unfamiliarity of its subject matter and set out to reach out across this gap to explore the models of historical listening it offers. Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. A History of Art History (Princeton UP, 2019) shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance—Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari—measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however—Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich—struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline.
Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today on the podcast, Ruth Mazo Karras, the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin talks about her new book, Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages, out this year, 2021 with University of Pennsylvania Press. "How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?" Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men, or what these practices meant to them in terms of masculinity. Yet no less than in our own time, masculinity was a complicated construct in the Middle Ages. In Thou Art the Man, Karras focuses on one figure, King David, who was important in both Christian and Jewish medieval cultures, to show how he epitomized many and sometimes contradictory aspects of masculine identity. For late medieval Christians, he was one of the Nine Worthies, held up as a model of valor and virtue; for medieval Jews, he was the paradigmatic king, not just a remnant of the past, but part of a living heritage. In both traditions he was warrior, lover, and friend, founder of a dynasty and a sacred poet. But how could an exemplar of virtue also be a murderer and adulterer? How could a physical weakling be a great warrior? How could someone whose claim to the throne was not dynastic be a key symbol of the importance of dynasty? And how could someone who dances with slaves be noble? Exploring the different configurations of David in biblical and Talmudic commentaries, in Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literatures across Europe, in liturgy, and in the visual arts, Thou Art the Man offers a rich case study of how ideas and ideals of masculinity could bend to support a variety of purposes within and across medieval cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Any study of the Crusades — the religious wars waged by Latin Catholics to recapture the Holy Land — is primarily an exploration of men and their military deeds, with scant consideration of women, save perhaps the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine who accompanied her husband, King Louis VII of France, on the Second Crusade. But the history of the Christian Crusader states established after the success of the First Crusade is a different matter. From 1099 to 1187, the four polities, known collectively as “Outremer” or “the lands beyond the sea” — the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, and the Counties of Tripoli and Edessa — were more often ruled by queens, princesses, and countesses in their own right. The captivating story of these women is the subject of Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule (Hachette, 2021) by Katherine Pangonis. In taking up the story of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, her rebel sister, Princess Alice of Antioch, and their descendants, Pangonis set herself the challenging task of peeling back the layers of recorded history — primarily chronicles written by men — to create a realistic portrait of these vital, ambitious, and dynamic women, a task that requires the historian to wear many hats: archivist, detective, archeologist, and psychologist. Pangonis is well up to the task; she is an outstanding narrative historian, and in addition to scrutinizing all extant sources on Outremer, Pangonis also took the time to walk in the footsteps of her protagonists, and this allows readers of “Queens of Jerusalem” to experience medieval Outremer in vibrant detail. The queens, princesses, and countesses of Outremer were keen builders of edifices, which still form parts of the skylines of of the region: the Crusader castles, the Convent of Bethany, and the all-important Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In “Queens of Jerusalem” this topography leaps off the page in very satisfying detail. Pangonis’s writing is elegant and evocative, always informative but never pedantic. Her ability to marshall her sprawling cast of characters, many of whom confusingly share the same names, is impressive, with each person emerging as a separate and vivid personality with distinct character traits. Pangonis argues that like their European cousins, none of the women of Outremer was ever destined to rule, but that the inherent violence of Outremer rendered the mortality rate for men such that women were often the only potential heirs. Some women, such as Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, were well prepared for their task from childhood, while others, like her sister Alice, struggled to establish and maintain power. Pangonis also considers the fates of several Byzantine princesses who married into the Crusader states, such as the colorful Theodora Komnene, foreigners forced to weather their own challenges in navigating power in Outremer. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Rob Tempio, the editor of a wonderful collection of books from Princeton University Press called "Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers." The series presents the timeless and timely ideas of classical thinkers in lively new translations. Enlightening and entertaining, these books make the practical wisdom of the ancient world accessible for modern life. The titles of the various volumes gives you a good idea of what's on offer.
How to Drink (Obsopeous)
How to Be Content (Horace)
How to Be a Bad Emperor (Suetonius)
How to Think about God (Cicero)
How to Win an Argument (Cicero)
How to Be Free (Epicutetus)
How to Run a Country (Cicero)
How to Grow Old (Cicero)
How to Keep your Cool (Seneca)
There are 19 pearls of Ancient Wisdom currently in the series with more to come. Enjoy! Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 2020-21, the UK left first the EU and then the 30-nation European Economic Area. Much of the impact has been masked by the coronavirus pandemic but, as that lifts, there will be profound effects on patterns of employment, national strategic positioning, political cleavages and even on the continued cohesion of the kingdom itself. This did not have to be the case. Short of never leaving the EU, there were less disruptive exit models available. Why weren’t they taken and why did the Brexit process radicalise between 2016 and 2019? These are the questions Christopher Grey explores in Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Wanted (and Why They Were Never Going To) (Biteback, 2021). Emeritus Professor of Organisation Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, Chris Grey previously taught at Leeds, Cambridge and Warwick and is the author and co-author of nine other books. He stumbled into the Brexit debate during the referendum campaign and started writing a blog (Brexit and Beyond) that soon turned into a must-read - propelling him into the front rank of Brexitologists and earning @chrisgreybrexit 54,000 Twitter followers. *The author's own book recommendations are Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole (Apollo, 2019) and A Question Of Loyalties by Allan Massie (Canongate Books, 2002 - first published in 1989) Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Since the 2008 financial crisis, complex capital flows have ravaged everyday communities across the globe. Housing in particular has become increasingly precarious. In response, many movements now contest the long-held promises and established terms of the private ownership of housing. Immigrant activism has played an important, if understudied, role in such struggles over collective consumption. In Dispossession and Dissent: Migrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid (Stanford UP, 2021), Sophie Gonick examines the intersection of homeownership and immigrant activism through an analysis of Spain's anti-evictions movement, now a hallmark for housing struggles across the globe. Madrid was the crucible for Spain's urban planning and policy, its millennial economic boom (1998–2008), and its more recent mobilizations in response to crisis. During the boom, the city also experienced rapid, unprecedented immigration. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Gonick uncovers the city's histories of homeownership and immigration to demonstrate the pivotal role of Andean immigrants within this movement, as the first to contest dispossession from mortgage-related foreclosures and evictions. Consequently, they forged a potent politics of dissent, which drew upon migratory experiences and indigenous traditions of activism to contest foreclosures and evictions. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Sophie L. Gonick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Alize Arıcan is an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis. She is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rituality and Social (Dis)Order: The Historical Anthropology of Popular Carnival in Europe (Routledge, 2020) is the first comparative historical anthropology of popular European Carnival in the English language, with a focus on its symbolic, religious, and political dimensions and transformations throughout the centuries. It builds on a variety of theories of social change and social structures, questioning existing assumptions about what folklore is and how cultural gaps and differences take shape and reproduce through ritual forms of collective action. It also challenges recent interpretations about the performative and political dimension of European festive culture, especially in its carnivalesque declension. While presenting and exploring the most important features and characteristics of European pre-modern Carnival and discussing its origins and developments, Dr. Alessandro Testa offers fresh evidence and up-to-date analyses about its transversal and long-lasting significance in European societies. Dr. Alessandro Testa is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917 (PublicAffairs, 2021), by renowned author and former government official, Philip Zelikow, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world. Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history. Professor Zelikow, has written revisionist history at its very best: over-turning old paradigms and interpretations and offering up a new way of seeing the historical canvas. The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On this episode of New Books in History, Jamie Kreiner, Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia, talks about her new book, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West, out in 2020 with Yale University Press. In the early medieval West, from North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture. In this fascinating book, Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far-reaching consequences. Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals—and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig’s own identity was transformed: at the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Calvin in Context (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers a comprehensive overview of Calvin's world. Including essays from social, cultural, feminist, and intellectual historians, each specially commissioned for this volume, the book considers the various early modern contexts in which Calvin worked and wrote. It captures his concerns for Northern humanism, his deep involvement in the politics of Geneva, his relationships with contemporaries, and the polemic necessities of responding to developments in Rome and other Protestant sects, notably Lutheran and Anabaptist. The volume also explores Calvin's tasks as a pastor and doctor of the church, who was constantly explicating the text of scripture and applying it to the context of sixteenth-century Geneva, as well as the reception of his role in the Reformation and beyond. Demonstrating the complexity of the world in which Calvin lived, John Calvin in Context serves as an essential research tool for scholars and students of early modern Europe. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in history at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.
A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is revisionist history at its very best: breaking down old paradigms and narratives and bringing to the fore new understandings of the historical process. All from a historian who has the best claim to be the closest, modern-day American equivalent of A. J. P. Taylor. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Duplex Regnum Christi: Christ's Twofold Kingdom in Reformed Theology (Brill, 2020), Jonathon D. Beeke surveys the development of thinking among early modern Reformed theologians about the relationship between religion and civil government. Taking cues from Calvin, but showing how the Reformed tradition variegates around his contribution, Beeke shows how the medieval ideas of two cities and two swords were brought into the "two kingdoms" ideas of the earlier magisterial reformers, and how later generations of protestants, especially among the Reformed, preferred to refer in the singular to the "two-fold kingdom" of Christ. Beeke's new work promises to add significant historical light to recent discussions among protestant theologians as to the relationship between church and state. What kinds of government did early modern Reformed theology prefer? Why was Calvin consistent in arguing that heretics who disturbed public peace should face the ultimate sanction? And why were these views so normative among Reformed thinkers - and for so long? Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbia UP, 2020), Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time. Murray tells the cathedral’s story from the overlapping perspectives of the social groups connected to it, exploring the ways that the layfolk who visit the cathedral occasionally, the clergy who use it daily, and the artisans who created it have interacted with the building over the centuries. He considers the cycles of human activity around the cathedral and shows how groups of makers and users have been inextricably intertwined in collaboration and, occasionally, conflict. The book travels around and through the spaces of the cathedral, allowing us to re-create similar passages by our medieval predecessors. Murray reveals the many worlds of the cathedral and brings them together in the architectural triumph of its central space. A beautifully illustrated account of a grand, historically and religiously important building from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of time periods, this book offers readers a memorable tour of Notre-Dame of Amiens that celebrates the cathedral’s eight hundredth anniversary. Notre-Dame of Amiens is enhanced by high-resolution images, liturgical music, and animations embedded in an innovative website. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice. Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2021) sheds light on the emergence of social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily, anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the material and affective well-being of society at large. Megan A. Carney is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, The Conversation, and Civil Eats. She is the author of the award-winning book The Unending Hunger. Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on the refugee women's commoning practices to build sustainable futures in Turkey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are joined by Martha Moffitt Peacock, Professor of Art History at Brigham Young University about her new book, Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives: Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age, out in 2020 with Brill. In Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, Peacock provides a novel interpretive approach to the artistic practice of imaging women of consequence in the Dutch Golden Age. From the beginnings of the new Republic, visual celebrations of famous heroines who crossed gender boundaries by fighting in the Revolt against Spain or by distinguishing themselves in arts and letters became an essential and significant cultural tradition that reverberated throughout the long seventeenth century. This collective memory of consequential heroines who equaled, or outshone, men is frequently reflected in empowering representations of other female archetypes: authoritative harpies and noble housewives. Such enabling imagery helped in the structuring of gender norms that positively advanced a powerful female identity in Dutch society. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic relationship to political power. Her powerful paintings with vigorous female protagonists chime with modern audiences, and she is celebrated by feminist critics and scholars. Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe (Reaktion Books, 2020) breaks new ground by placing the artist in the context of women’s political history. Mary D. Garrard, noted Gentileschi scholar, shows that the painter most likely knew or knew about contemporary writers such as the Venetian feminists Lucrezia Marinella and Arcangela Tarabotti. She discusses recently discovered paintings, offers fresh perspectives on known works, and examines the artist anew in the context of feminist history. This beautifully illustrated book gives for the first time a full portrait of a strong woman artist who fought back through her art. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the mid-sixteenth century, English reformers invited a group of continental Protestant refugees to London and surrounding provinces. The ecclesiastical authorities allowed them liberty to establish their own churches with relatively little oversight by the English church. These "Stranger Churches," many of whom still maintained close ties to their friends and families in the Low Countries, faced internal tensions about how to relate to the political and religious upheavals that would transform the Netherlands. In Shaping the Stranger Churches: Migrants in England and the Troubles in the Netherlands, 1547–1585 (Brill, 2020), Silke Muylaert traces the saga of how tensions back home agitated internal conflicts among these refugee churches. In her expertly researched study, Muylaert challenges the existing narratives of the Strangers' relations to the Dutch revolt and reformation. By paying closer attention to the disagreements among the Strangers in England, Muylaert suggests that these Protestant refugees were far from united or "radicalized" in their attitudes toward religious Reformation and political violence. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern industry, and a history of aristocratic consumption of porcelain as these stories open into an economic history of globalized markets, as well as a social history of sorts of Central Europe’s fledgling bourgeois and lower-class consumer public. Marchand traces these interlocking stories across three centuries, from the first European firing of porcelain in 1708 under the supervision of Johann Friedrich Böttger to the present day, where contemporary tastes threaten to consign the white tableware of Europe’s past to the flea markets of today. Porcelain in Marchand’s hands acts as something like an objet de memoire, to think of Pierre Nora and other scholars’ work on national histories. One of the book’s many virtues is the sense of Professor Marchand reassembling a continental pattern out of several shards. Porcelain, as Professor Marchand writes, “is a rich and complicated adventure, in which we not only visit lavishly decorated palaces but also linger in blisteringly hot craft workshops and spartan working-class homes. Though actual porcelain objects in all their splendor and strangeness play a central role, the focus is really on the people who made, marketed, and purchased them, whether they were princes, or peddlers, or middle-class housewives.” It is also an attempt to write Central European history in a new way, one that the author hopes will be taken up by other scholars of history and material culture. John Raimo is a PhD. Candidate in History at NYU finishing up my dissertation (on postwar publishing houses) this summer in European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge UP, 2018), Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an accessible, highly contextual, and non-partisan introduction, Ocker says that religious conflict itself served as the engine of religious change. He shows that the Luther affair had a complex political anatomy which extended far beyond the borders of Germany, making the debate an international one from the very start. His study links the Reformation to pluralism within western religion and to the coexistence of religions and secularism in today's world. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this compelling history of the co-ordinated, transnational defence of medical experimentation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Rob Boddice explores the experience of vivisection as humanitarian practice. He captures the rise of the professional and specialist medical scientist, whose métier was animal experimentation, and whose guiding principle was 'humanity' or the reduction of the aggregate of suffering in the world. He also highlights the rhetorical rehearsal of scientific practices as humane and humanitarian, and connects these often defensive professions to meaningful changes in the experience of doing science. Humane Professions: The Defence of Experimental Medicine, 1876-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2021) examines the strategies employed by the medical establishment to try to cement an idea in the public consciousness: that the blood spilt in medical laboratories served a far-reaching human good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Between voting to leave the European Union in 2016 and doing it four years later, the British political and media classes debated what kind of relationship they should have with the EU after withdrawal. Should it be Norwegian, Canadian or even - said government spinners - Australian? Now the UK is outside both the EU and the wider 30-nation European Economic Area (EEA), Routledge has launched a four-book Dealing with Europe series edited by John Erik Fossum and Christopher Lord (University of Oslo) to explore the options. The series opens with Switzerland-EU Relations: Lessons for the UK after Brexit? (Routledge, 2021) edited by Paolo Dardanelli and Oscar Mazzoleni. Next year, it will be 30 years since the Swiss voted against joining the EEA, thereby launching three decades of bilateral negotiations to create a patchwork version of something close to the same thing. In this book, Professors Dardanelli, Mazzoleni and 10 other Swiss-EU specialists examine the background to the 1992 vote, the bilateral agreements, the impact on domestic Swiss politics and society, and the lessons for the UK post-Brexit. Paolo Dardanelli is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Kent and has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Cologne, Berne, and Madrid. He was educated at the universities of Turin and Durham and at the London School of Economics. *The author's own book recommendations are How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Viking, 2018) and Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies (Penguin, 2012). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today on New Books in History, Juergen Martschukat, professor of North American History at Universitat Erfurt, talks about his new book, The Age of Fitness: How the Body Became a Sign of Success and Performance (Polity Press, 2021), to celebrate its translation into and publication in English with Polity Press, this year, 2021. The book was originally published in 2019, by S. Fischer, in German. We live in the age of fitness. Hundreds of thousands of people run marathons and millions go jogging in local parks, work out in gyms, cycle, swim, or practice yoga. The vast majority are not engaged in competitive sport and are not trying to win any medals. They just want to get fit. Why this modern preoccupation with fitness? In this new book, Jurgen Martschukat traces the roots of our modern preoccupation with fitness back to the birth of modern societies in the eighteenth century, showing how the idea of fitness was interwoven with modernity's emphasis on perpetual optimization and renewal. But it is only in the period since the 1970s, he argues, that the age of fitness truly emerged, as part and parcel of our contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism enjoins individuals to work on themselves, to cultivate themselves in body and mind. Fitness becomes a guiding principle of social life, an era-defining network of discourses and practices that shape individuals' actions and self-conceptions. The pursuit of fitness becomes a cultural repertoire that is deeply ingrained in our institutions and way of life. This wide-ranging book shows how deeply fitness is inscribed in modern societies, and how important fitness has become to success or failure, recognition or exclusion, in a society that sets great store by self-responsibility, performance, market, and competition. It will be of great value not only to those interested in sport and fitness, but also to anyone concerned with the conditions of success and failure in our societies today. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Dave Seminara about his book Footsteps of Federer: A Fan’s Pilgrimage Across 7 Swiss Cantons in 10 Acts (Post Hill Press, 2021) Dave Seminara is a writer, former diplomat, and passionate tennis fan. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of other publications. His two previous books are Bed, Breakfast & Drunken Threats: Dispatches from the Margins of Europe and Breakfast with Polygamists: Dispatches from the Margins of The Americas. Who do so many tennis fans revere Roger Federer? His success and talent are givens at this point, but not to be overlooked says Seminara is Federer’s sportsmanship, humor and vulnerability. This is a guy, after all, who might smash racquets during matches as a junior player but who would also sit and cry for as long as an hour after a losing match. In a country without America’s hero worship of celebrities, Federer remains low-key off-court and always meticulous. This episode ranges from Federer stories and details to a look at the other big names in men’s tennis, with sunny Federer a contrast with intense, even grim Rafa Nadal (on court) and Novak Djokovic’s eyes-wide focus while receiving serve in particular. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 2021, Ukraine celebrates its thirty-year independence anniversary. During this relatively short period of time—when considered in historical terms—Ukraine underwent a number of drastic changes that have so far shaped the country’s domestic and international environments. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine: A Contemporary History, 1991-2021 (Ibidem Press, 2021), edited by Georgiy Kasianov, Matthew Rojansky, and Mykhailo Minakov, guides its readers through the labyrinthine developments that provide a wide spectrum of views and approaches that help receive a better understanding of the contemporary history of Ukraine. While detailing how independent Ukraine was taking shape locally, the editors and contributors of the volume simultaneously position Ukraine in the international environment that arouse after the fall of the USSR. Ukraine is thus inscribed into the international political map, which further complicates and advances the surveys presented in the volume. After the collapse of the USSR, the country faced a number of challenges: in addition to learning how to construct and narrate its own history, the new independent state also had to find a way to present itself to the global community. From “the Ukraine” to Ukraine outlines trajectories that illustrate a gradual process of the country’s political awareness, ambitions, and maturity. Thirty years may seem like an inconsiderable amount of time for a new independent state. The material presented in the book proves otherwise. In a concise and yet acute way, the contributors touch upon the most challenging and sensitive issues which have shaped the recent history of Ukraine: ranging from the enthusiastic support of independence to the current Russian-Ukrainian war, the volume constructs a multilayered historical scene which at the same time invites further surveys and elaborations. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Linda Colley is a luminary in the fields of British and imperial history, and the Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Her captivating new book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2021) narrates a sweeping global history of written constitutions from the 18th to the 21st century. Bold, imaginative, and strikingly original, it challenges established accounts and uncovers the close connection between constitution-making and warfare. Colley brings to the fore historiographically neglected sites and actors, from Catherine the Great to Sierra Leone's James Africanus Beale Horton and Tunisia's soldier-constitutionalist Khayr-al-Din. The monograph focuses on the myriad ways in which constitutions crossed boundaries and intersected with wider political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces in all corners of the globe. By displaying both the emancipatory and the repressive effects of modern constitutions, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen retells the serpentine story of successful and failed attempts to redefine the functions and limits of state governments. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From the beginning of his career, Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) was often in conflict with the spirit of his times. While during the First World War German poets and philosophers became intoxicated by the experience of community and transcendence, Barth fought against all attempts to locate the divine in culture or individual sentiment. This freed him for a deep worldly engagement: he was known as "the red pastor," was the primary author of the founding document of the Confessing Church, the Barmen Theological Declaration, and after 1945 protested the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany. In Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford UP, 2021), Christiane Tietz compellingly explores the interactions between Barth's personal and political biography and his theology. Numerous newly-available documents offer insight into the lesser-known sides of Barth such as his long-term three-way relationship with his wife Nelly and his colleague Charlotte von Kirschbaum. This is an evocative portrait of a theologian who described himself as "God's cheerful partisan," who was honored as a prophet and a genial spirit, was feared as a critic, and shaped the theology of an entire century as no other thinker. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A new and incisive account of how Mussolini pioneered policies which we would not label ‘populism’ in reaction to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 —and thereby reinforced his role as a model for later authoritarian leaders On the tenth anniversary of his rise to power in 1932, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) seemed to many the “good dictator.” He was the first totalitarian and the first fascist in modern Europe. But a year later Hitler’s entrance onto the political stage signaled a German takeover of the fascist ideology. In this definitive account, eminent historian, Professor of History R.J.B. Bosworth charts Mussolini’s leadership in reaction to Hitler. Professor Bosworth shows how Italy’s decline in ideological pre-eminence, as well as in military and diplomatic power, led Mussolini to pursue a more populist approach: angry and bellicose words at home, violent aggression abroad, and a more extreme emphasis on charisma. In his embittered efforts to bolster an increasingly hollow and ruthless regime, it was Mussolini, rather than Hitler, who offered the model for all subsequent authoritarians. In short, Mussolini and the Eclipse of Italian Fascism: From Dictatorship to Populism (Yale University Press), is a must read for any scholar or lay educated reader interested in Mussolini and his regime. R.J.B. Bosworth is Emeritus Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He is a leading authority on Mussolini & 20th century Italian history and is the author of more than two dozen books on fascism and Italy’s twentieth-century experience. He lives in Oxford, UK. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Calvin's 1559 Institutes takes the reader on a journey that ends not in the celestial city but rather an ordinary, terrestrial city with all the attendant political and social secular concerns. Michelle Chaplin Sanchez, associate professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, brings this crucial text into conversation with critical theories of secularization, modernity, and political theology. In her theoretically-informed study, Calvin and the Resignification of the World: Creation, Incarnation, and the Problem of Political Theology in the 1559 Institutes (Cambridge UP, 2019), Sanchez helps readers of Calvin contextualize his continual revisions of his most well known work. Her attention to artifactuality, design, and genre offers students of the Institutes an window into a text that defies periodization and challenges static readings of this dynamic text. Calvin's attention to providence and incarnation become the dominant lenses through which he develops his understandings of divine and political sovereignty. This monograph deserves attention by anyone interested in Reformed theology, secularization, and the rise of modern political theory. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (Cambridge UP, 2020), Ned Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake. Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. With the threat of war and revolutionary terror still looming large, the coalition launched an unprecedented experiment to re-establish European security. With over one million troops remaining in France, they established the Allied Council to mitigate the threat of war and terror and to design and consolidate a system of deterrence. The Council transformed the norm of interstate relations into the first, modern system of collective security in Europe. Drawing on the records of the Council and the correspondence of key figures such as Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington and Alexander I, Beatrice de Graaf tells the story of Europe's transition from concluding a war to consolidating a new order. In her new book Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge UP, 2020), she reveals how, long before commercial interest and economic considerations on scale and productivity dictated and inspired the project of European integration, the common denominator behind this first impulse for a unification of Europe in norms and institutions was the collective fight against terror. George Giannakopoulos is a historian of Modern Britain and Europe. He has recently guest edited the special issue Britain, European Civilization and the idea of Liberty” for the History of European Ideas (2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Erich Ludendorff is a contentious figure in military history. Focused, energetic, and hailing from humble origins, Ludendorff rose through the ranks of the largely aristocratic late-nineteenth century German officer corps to play a leading role in the First World War. As a field officer at Liège and Tannenberg, as a driving force behind the development of the Siegfried Line, and as the architect of the 1918 German Spring Offensive, Ludendorff consistently demonstrated a formidable military acumen and a penchant for tactical, if not always strategic, innovation. Over the past century, that wartime record garnered more than its fair share of respect—and not an insignificant amount of awe—from numerous First World War scholars. Those who look upon Ludendorff’s martial prowess with admiration, however, face a dilemma: how to reconcile Ludendorff’s military achievements with his abhorrent post war activities and beliefs. The one-time Quartermaster General of the German Army did not acquit himself well in the post war world. Germany’s surrender in November 1918 strongly contradicted Ludendorff’s reputation as a Feldherr or “Battle Lord.” Trying to comprehend that disconnect led Ludendorff down a path of antisemitism, conspiratorial thinking, right wing nationalist politics, fringe spirituality, personal and professional conflict, and flirtation with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Overwhelmingly, Ludendorff’s biographers have explained away these sordid details by attributing them to a nervous breakdown Ludendorff suffered in August 1918. But, writing in his most recent work, Dragonslayer: The Legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich (Cornell University Press, 2021), historian Jay Lockenour argues that questions of Ludendorff’s sanity are besides the point. Whether sane or not, Ludendorff was an influential figure in Weimar and Nazi Germany—a position he maintained, Louckenour contends, through the conscious construction of a mythic identity that personified far right politics, pagan spirituality, and the German public’s thirst for revenge. Meticulously researched and lucidly argued, Dragonslayer reveals the true extent of Erich Ludendorff’s impact on the political cultures of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It is a must read for scholars of the First World War and for curious readers interested in understanding the evolution of Germany from nascent republic to Fascist dictatorship in the lead up to the Second World War. Jay Lockenour is Associate Professor of History at Temple University. He is author of Soldiers as Citizens and former host of the New Books in Military History podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In April 1917, Lenin arrived at Petrograd's Finland Station and set foot on Russian soil for the first time in over a decade. For most of the past seventeen years, the Bolshevik leader had lived in exile, moving between Europe's many "Russian colonies"--large and politically active communities of emigres in London, Paris, and Geneva, among other cities. Thousands of fellow exiles who followed Lenin on his eastward trek in 1917 were in a similar predicament. The returnees plunged themselves into politics, competing to shape the future of a vast country recently liberated from tsarist rule. Yet these activists had been absent from their homeland for so long that their ideas reflected the Russia imagined by residents of the faraway colonies as much as they did events on the ground. The 1917 revolution marked the dawn of a new day in Russian politics, but it also represented the continuation of decades-long conversations that had begun in emigration and were exported back to Russia. In Utopia's Discontents: Russian Emigres and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s (Oxford UP, 2021), Faith Hillis examines how emigre communities evolved into revolutionary social experiments in the heart of bourgeois cities. Feminists, nationalist activists, and Jewish intellectuals seeking to liberate and uplift populations oppressed by the tsarist regime treated the colonies as utopian communities, creating new networks, institutions, and cultural practices that reflected their values and realized the ideal world of the future in the present. The colonies also influenced their European host societies, informing international debates about the meaning of freedom on both the left and the right. emigres' efforts to transform the world played crucial roles in the articulation of socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and Zionism across borders. But they also produced unexpected--and explosive--discontents that defined the course of twentieth-century history. This groundbreaking transnational work demonstrates the indelible marks the Russian colonies left on European politics, legal cultures, and social practices, while underscoring their role during a pivotal period of Russian history. You can check out the book companion site and maps for Utopia’s Discontents at here. Faith Hillis is associate professor of Russian History at the University of Chicago. She is on Twitter @FaithCHillis and her website is here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The "decline of the West" is once again a frequent topic of speculation. Often cited as one element of the alleged decline is the succession of prolonged and unsuccessful wars--most notably those waged in recent decades by the United States. This book by three Danish military experts examines not only the validity of the speculation but also asks why the West, particularly its military effectiveness, might be perceived as in decline. Temporality is the central concept linking a series of structural fractures that leave the West seemingly muscle-bound: overwhelmingly powerful in technology and military might but strategically fragile. This temporality, the authors say, is composed of three interrelated dimensions: trajectories, perceptions, and pace. First, Western societies to tend view time as a linear trajectory, focusing mostly on recent and current events and leading to the framing of history as a story of rise and decline. The authors examine whether the inevitable fall already has happened, is underway, or is still in the future. Perceptions of time also vary across cultures and periods, shaping socio-political activities, including warfare. The enemy, for example, can be perceived as belong to another time (being "backward" or "barbarian"). And war can be seen either as cyclical or exceptional, helping frame the public's willingness to accept its violent and tragic consequences. The pace of war is another factor shaping policies and actions. Western societies emphasize speed: the shorter the war the better, even if the long-term result is unsuccessful. Ironically, one of the Western world's least successful wars also has been America's longest, in Afghanistan. War Time: Temporality and the Decline of Western Military Power (Brookings/Chatham House, 2020) is thus a critical assessment of the evolution and future of Western military power. It contributes much-needed insight into the potential for the West's political and institutional renewal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“It is no secret that European studies has suffered a setback in the academy”, write William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel in their contribution to European Studies: Past, Present and Future (Agenda Publishing, 2020). In the US, area studies have waned, funding streams have dried up and students are questioning what job being a “Europeanist” will get them. In the UK, as Professor Helen Drake has written, “European Studies has all but disappeared from British university curricula”. Why? What can be done? Does the setback in the discipline mirror the EU’s own crises over the past decade? For this first book in the Council for European Studies’ Understanding Europe series, Erik Jones assembled 55 Europeanists to write 45 answers to these questions and to think aloud about the future of the discipline and the continent. Erik Jones is the Director of European and Eurasian Studies and Professor of European Studies and International Political Economy at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. *The author's own book recommendations are Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze (Allen Lane, 2018) and The Once and Future King by T. H. White (Penguin, 2016 - first published in 1958). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the late nineteenth century, Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs became captivated with Hispanism, a movement of transatlantic rapprochement between Spain and Latin America. Not only was this movement envisioned as a form of cultural empire to symbolically compensate for Spain?s colonial decline but it was also imagined as an opportunity to materially regain the Latin American markets. Paradoxically, a central trope of Hispanist discourse was the antimaterialistic character of Hispanic culture, allegedly the legacy of the moral superiority of Spanish colonialism in comparison with the commercial drive of modern colonial projects. This study examines how Spanish authors, economists, and entrepreneurs of various ideological backgrounds strove to reconcile the construction of Hispanic cultural identity with discourses of political economy and commercial interests surrounding the movement. Drawing from an interdisciplinary archive of literary essays, economic treatises, and political discourses, The Spirit of Hispanism: Commerce, Culture, and Identity Across the Atlantic, 1875-1936 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) revisits Peninsular Hispanism to underscore how the interlacing of cultural and commercial interests fundamentally shaped the Hispanist movement. The Spirit of Hispanism will appeal to scholars in Hispanic literary and cultural studies as well as historians and anthropologists who specialize in the history of Spain and Latin America. Ethan Besser Fredrick is a graduate student in Modern Latin American history seeking his PhD at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the Transatlantic Catholic movements in Mexico and Spain during the early 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Calvin was known foremost for his powerful impact on the fundamental doctrines of Protestantism, and his biblical interpretation continues to attract interest and inquiry. Calvin, the Bible, and History investigates Calvin's exegesis of the Bible through the lens of one of its most distinctive and distinguishing features: his historicizing approach to scripture. Barbara Pitkin here explores how historical consciousness affected Calvin's interpretation of the Bible, sometimes leading him to unusual, unprecedented, and occasionally controversial exegetical conclusions. Through several case studies, Pitkin explores the multi-faceted ways that historical consciousness was interlinked with Calvin's interpretation of biblical books, authors, and themes, analyzing the centrality of history in his engagement with scripture from the Pentateuch to his reception of the apostle Paul. First establishing the relevant intellectual and cultural contexts, Pitkin situates Calvin's readings within broader cultural trends and historical developments, demonstrating the expansive impact of Calvin's concept of history on his reading of the Bible. Calvin, the Bible, and History (Oxford UP, 2020) reveals the significance of his efforts to relate the biblical past to current historical conditions, reshaping an earlier image of Calvin as a forerunner of modern historical criticism by viewing his deep historical sensibility and distinct interpretive approach within their early modern context. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stands among the canon’s most-cited figures, with aphorisms dotting texts on a variety of topics, and his name evokes strong responses from almost anyone who has ever heard of him. His aphoristic and poetic writing style have made it difficult at times to understand what he meant, although the wealth of commentaries pulling him in a variety of different directions points to the fact that he did mean something. On the political right he has been credited as an influence among many reactionary political movements, but even on the left he is cited as an emancipatory figure, suspicious of the powers that be. Aside from these, his writings on art and psychology have remained influential for many. It would seem then that there are numerous Nietzsche’s one can pull from, and due to the loose nature of his writing, one would seem to be warranted in reading Nietzsche a bit more freely. However, that freedom and flexibility misses that there may in fact be a unifying thread to Nietzsche’s thought, and it may in fact be a much darker thread than many of his apologists have realized. This is the main argument of the book we’ll be discussing today, Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Balance Sheet. Originally published about 20 years ago in Italian, it has recently been delivered to English audiences by Gregor Benton and with an introduction by Harrison Fluss as part of the Historical Materialism book series. Clocking in at just over 1000 pages, it is both a literal and figurative bombshell, delivering a rigorous and systematic account of Nietzsche’s thought. A major part of the books length comes from the fact that Losurdo refuses to treat Nietzsche in isolation, and instead spends a large amount of time recreating Nietzsche’s various contexts, 19th century Germany and Europe more broadly, as a way of making the political orientation of Nietzsche’s thought all the more explicit. Through his investigation, Losurdo reveals a Nietzsche who is committed to fighting against the democratic movements happening all around him and being an advocate for a superior elite at the expense of everyone else, whose main purpose in life is to serve them. Domenico Losurdo was an Italian Marxist historian and philosopher. Harrison Fluss received his PhD in philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is a professor at Manhattan College, NYC and wrote the introduction to the English edition of The Aristocratic Rebel. Daniel Tutt studied at American University and the European Graduate School. He teaches in the philosophy department at George Washington University. He reviewed The Aristocratic Rebel for Historical Materialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Stella Ghervas's Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard University Press, 2021) is a bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace. Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification. Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a "spirit" of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars. Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world. Stella Ghervas is Professor of Russian History at Newcastle University (UK) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is also an Associate of the History Department at Harvard University and Visiting Professor at Harvard Summer School since 2015. Her main interests are in intellectual and international history of modern Europe, with special reference to the history of peace and peace-making, and in Russia’s intellectual and maritime history. She is the author of Alexandre Stourdza (1791-1854): Un intellectuel orthodoxe face à l’Occident (1999), Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance (which won several book prizes, including the Guizot Prize from the Académie Française, 2008) and Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (2021), and the editor of Penser l’Europe – Quarante ans d’études européennes à Genève (2003), Lieux d’Europe: Mythes et limites (2008) and A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsburg, with David Armitage, 2020). Her website is at https://www.ghervas.net/ and you can follow her on Twitter @StellaGhervas Steven Seegel, Professor of History, University of Northern ColoradoMaphead, Founding Board @H__Ukraine, Borderologist, Translator for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Podcast Host, Proud Slow Runner, Dog Valet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The First World War marked the end point of a process of German globalization that began in the 1870s, well before Germany acquired a colonial empire or extensive overseas commercial interests. Structured around the figures of five influential economists who shaped the German political landscape, Professor of History, Erik Grimmer-Solem’s Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores how their overseas experiences shaped public perceptions of the world and Germany's place in it. These men helped define a German liberal imperialism that came to influence the 'world policy' (Weltpolitik) of Kaiser Wilhelm, Chancellor Bülow, and Admiral Tirpitz. They devised naval propaganda, reshaped Reichstag politics, were involved in colonial and financial reforms, and helped define the debate over war aims in the First World War. Looking closely at German worldwide entanglements, Learning Empire recasts how we interpret German imperialism, the origins of the First World War, and the rise of Nazism, inviting reflection on the challenges of globalization in the current century. Grimmer-Solem, has written an imaginative and first-rate account of several aspects of Kaiserreich Germany’s politics. No one will in the future look at Germany in this period without referencing this book. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This year, more than 40 books will be published in English with 'Neoliberal' or 'Neoliberalism' in the title. For many in the academy, these words have become interchangeable with “capitalist”, “laissez-faire”, “fiscally austere” or pretty much anything short of full socialism. Yet, when it was first coined by self-proclaimed neoliberals on either side of the second world war, the term had a specific meaning that has since been lost in a culture-war of words. By taking us back to neoliberalism’s embryonic debates in 1920s Vienna and a fly-on-the-wall account of the movement’s founding conference in the Swiss Alps in 1947, Ola Innset brings neoliberalism's specific "dual argument" to life. Ola Innset is a postdoctoral researcher at the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo. He has published three other books in Norwegian - the most recent being The Market Turn, a history of neoliberalism in Norway. Reinventing Liberalism: The Politics, Philosophy and Economics of Early Neoliberalism (1920-1947) (Springer, 2021), which is based on a PhD thesis for which he won the 2019 Joseph Dorfman Dissertation Prize from the History of Economics Society, is his first book in English. *The author's own book recommendations are Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper (Zone Books, 2017) and the Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber, 2018-19). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While a number of books came out on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, few seriously considered how the 20th century would have unfolded differently if the violent forces of counter-revolution and White terror had not crushed the Marxist dreams of a new future. What if the revolution had successfully spread to Western Europe and the United States of America? What would have happened if Rosa Luxemburg was not murdered by Freikorps thugs? What if the colonial empires had turned into non-racist mechanisms for egalitarian global development? As historians, we are not supposed to ask these “what if” questions, but our friends in political science can engage in such thought experiments. Philip Cunliffe’s Lenin Lives! Reimagining the Russian Revolution 1917-2017 (Zero Books, 2017) dares to ask these questions and then to carefully think through the answers. This counter-factual history plays out the consequences of a successful Russian and, more importantly, German Revolution. Cunliffe explores how not only politics and economics would have followed different historical trajectories (for example: no fascism!), but he also considers the environmental and scientific consequences of Lenin living just a little longer. Above all, Lenin Lives! is an exercise in historical empathy and social optimism. How would early 20th century Marxists have shaped the world had they not been subjected to generations of violent repression? Could they have built a better world? Dr. Philip Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer in International Conflict at the University of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations. His research interests include Peacekeeping, Humanitarian Intervention, Responsibility to Protect, Self-Determination, Sovereignty, Critical Theory, and IR Theory. He is the author of Legions of Peace: UN Peacekeepers from the Global South (2013), Cosmopolitan dystopia: International intervention and the failure of the West (2020) and The New Twenty Years’ Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019 (2020). He has also published several anthologies. If his voice sounds familiar, you may recognize it from Aufhebunga Bunga, which bills itself as the global politics podcast at the end of the End of History. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Though poverty and vagrancy as social phenomena greatly preoccupied authorities of Colonial Mexico, the social and individual lives of vagabonds and strangers of Spanish American early modernity remain elusive to the historian. In his new book, Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico (University of California Press, 2021), William B. Taylor uncovers the fascinating stories of two wanderers in Colonial Mexico. Joseph Aguayo and Juan Atondo were priest impersonators and serial liers whose lives of deceit are recorded in archives of the Spanish Inquisition. Through their encounters with ecclesiastical authorities, Taylor shows how these two common men navigated colonial law, subversively shaped their identity in Mexican society as Spanish rule was coming to an end. How do we make sense of historical agents such as Aguayo and Atondo who have left few traces in the archive? Taylor turns to literary sources, specifically to Spanish picaresque novels. By engaging social history with works such as Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, Francisco de Quevedo's La vida del buscón and José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's El periquillo sarniento, Fugitive Freedom considers these cases through the lens of the cultural myth of the pícaro. William B. Taylor is Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor Emeritus of Latin American History, University of California Berkeley. Daniela Gutierrez is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Mehmet the Conqueror shook Europe to its foundations when he captured Constantinople in 1453 and, over the next decades, the Ottoman sultan continued his westward advance through the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But one Albanian fortress became an “unexpected bone in Mehmed’s throat” (xviii). David Hosaflook’s The Siege of Shkodra is the first English rendition of Marin Barleti’s 1504 eye-witness account of that standoff that includes the Christian victory in 1474 and subsequent defeat in 1479. The year after that, the Turks were in Italy (Otranto, 1480), though they would not keep it their foothold. This volume includes Barleti’s compelling story, essays that place it in historical and cultural context, and a number of Ottoman sources that corroborate or contrast with the Christian version. Barleti is also important today as “the first Albanian author” and thus an important national figure in the last century since the end of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. In the discussion today, Professor Hosaflook explains the siege, its political and strategic importance, and the Albanian position between the Ottoman Empire, Venice, and the Christian West. He talks about Early Modern Mediterranean slavery, religion, and diplomacy. In addition, he discusses the military lessons we find in this primary source, and his own exploration of castle ruins. He also reflects on his scholarship and three decades of living in a rapidly-changing Albania. David Hosaflook is a professor of European History, Intercultural Studies, Philosophy of Religion, and Christianity. He’s also the cofounder and executive director of the Institute of Albanian and Protestant Studies. In 2019, he became laureate of the (first annual) ‘22nd of November Prize’ from the Republic of North Macedonia. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Political Theorist and activist Dana Mill’s latest new book, Rosa Luxemburg (Reaktion Books, 2020), is part of an extensive series of books published by Reaktion Books, Ltd, which focuses both on the ideas or creations and the lives of many leading cultural figures of the modern period. These volumes are not long, but they are thorough, and they help the reader to understand the historical context in which these thinkers, artists, writers, etc. lived, created, and worked. Mill’s contribution to this series centers on the turbulent life of Rosa Luxemburg, who lived, worked, studied, and advocated in Europe in the late 1800s and into the 1900s. Mills provides a biographical guide to Luxemburg as we learn about her young life growing up in Poland and her move to Zurich to pursue a PhD in Economics. Luxemburg becomes involved in politics in the late 1880s and 1890s, and she is also developing her thinking about economics, politics, exploitation, and nationalism during this same period. As Mills makes clear, Luxemburg quite enjoyed the experience of thinking and engaging ideas, taking on the dialectical arguments that were very much the mode and method of learning and teaching, particularly among those focusing on economics and Marxism. Luxemburg transferred this method of learning and teaching to her own work as a teacher, a very talented teacher in the trade union schools. Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned for long stretches of her life—and, as a result of these experiences, she learned quite a lot about what incarceration does to a person, how this form of constraint impacts the individual psyche. This also contributed to her continued thinking about what freedom and equality actually mean to people, how these concepts are dimensions of justice, and how justice may be achieved in a colonial, imperial world marked by nationalism and material inequality. Mills’ biographical analysis incorporates Luxemburg’s murder, which, as Mills notes, is indeed tragic, but does not make Rosa Luxemburg into a tragic figure. Luxemburg was very much the author of her own life story, but she anticipated her murder, which was committed by right-wing fascists who would ultimately become members of the Nazi Party under Hitler. Dana Mills brings Rosa Luxemburg to life, exploring her revolutionary thinking and writing, all while helping the reader get to know Red Rosa, who always took brisk walks, loved reading Goethe’s Faust, regularly corresponded with V.I. Lenin, and continually worked towards an open and just future. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are joined by Bruce Berglund, author of The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports (University of California Press, 2020). In this sweeping look at hockey, Bruce Berglund examines how a niche sport became a global favorite. Hockey has crossed cultures from North America to Europe and Asia, and has been a political flashpoint several times, most notably during the Summit Series of 1972 and the “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics. Berglund’s research combs the archives of Central and Eastern Europe, and he gives a thorough overview of hockey from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The impact of players like Wayne Gretzky, the influence of youth leagues and the emergence of women in the sport are areas that Berglund explores. Berglund weaves his research with his own personal experiences with hockey to create a compelling narrative. An “anxious child of the Cold War,” Berglund examines the rise of the Soviet hockey team — the Red Machine — and how it took over the international game. Berglund also explores the beginnings of hockey, which descended from a game called bandy. He demonstrates that hockey, while a passion for fans in Canada, has spread worldwide. The Stanley Cup, long a Canadian point of pride, now resides in Tampa, Florida, showing how even in warm-weather climates, hockey has made inroads. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jeremy Black, one of the most prolific and punchy of historians of modern Britain, has written a new account of a period on which he has previously published. A Brief History of Britain 1851-2021: From World Power to ? (Robinson, 2021) traces an arc of decline and opportunity, from the confidence that was reflected in the Crystal Palace’s Great Exhibition of 1851 to the uncertainty about national purpose or international significance that was reflected in the construction of the Millennium Dome. Balancing hard and soft power with the homogenisation and diversification of lived experience, while thinking about politics, culture, demographics, and the impact of conflict, Black asks some far-reaching questions about the kind of country that Britain has become. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Often called “Europe’s last dictator”, Alexander Lukashenka has ruled Belarus – a land-locked European country of close to 10 million people bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland and two Baltic states - since 1994. For more than a quarter-century, his regime has consistently rigged votes but blatant election fraud in 2020 triggered rolling protests that spread beyond the usual suspects and beyond Minsk and appear, for the first time, to threaten Lukashenka's hold on power. Will he survive? Who is this former border guard and collective-farm manager, and how did he hang on to power while the likes of Slobodan Milošević and Viktor Yanukovych fell? Using the framework of “adaptive authoritarianism”, Belarus under Lukashenka: Adaptive Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2020) explains how and hints at what may happen next. Matthew Frear is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of History at Leiden University. He researches Russian and Eurasian politics, and comparative authoritarianism with a special focus on Belarus. He holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham and previously taught there and at Aston University before joining Leiden in 2013. *The author's own book recommendation is In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak, translated by Sam Garrett (Vintage, 2008). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This is a reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Dr. Stefano Marcuzzi, Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, tries to shed new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defense and Italy's ambition for imperial expansion in his book: Britain and Italy in the Era of the First World War: Defending and Forging Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Taking Anglo-Italian bilateral relations as a special lens through which to understand the workings of the Entente in World War I, Dr. Marcuzzi reveals how the ups-and-downs of that relationship influenced and shaped to a limited degree Allied grand strategy. Dr. Marcuzzi considers three main issues – war aims, war strategy and peace-making – and examines how, under the pressure of divergent interests and wartime events, the Anglo-Italian 'traditional friendship' turned increasingly into competition by the end of the war, casting a shadow on Anglo-Italian relations both at the Peace Conference and in the interwar period. While not everyone will be convinced by some of his arguments and propositions (such as the partial rehabilitation of such rightly discredited figures as Salandra and Sonnino), that does not take away from the great effort that Dr. Marcuzzi has made. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today on New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network we are joined by Kenneth L. Shonk, Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse to talk about his new book, Ireland’s New Traditionalists: Fianna Fail Republicanism and Gender, 1926 – 38, out this year, 2021, with Cork University Press. The creation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 marked a new era in Irish politics wherein an evolved version of Irish republicanism, suited to operate in the Irish Free State, entered the political arena. Fianna Fáil was indeed a political organisation, but it was also a nationalist project, intent on creating a wide-reaching electorate and shaping Ireland’s political discourse. De Valera’s party defied the moribund direction of Irish republicanism, reversing the trend to the extent that the movement ultimately triumphed with the passage of the 1937 Bunreacht na hÉireann (Constitution of Ireland) and the Éire Confirmation Bill of 1938. Ireland’s New Traditionalists situates Fianna Fáil’s nationalist republican project within a broader European context by analysing the republican aesthetic through the lens of gender theory as well as situating Ireland within the context of interwar Europe. This analytical approach reveals that Fianna Fáil—the party that ‘made’ the modern Irish Republic—spent a great deal of time and energy in building a national discourse rooted in a male/female binary that served to ‘correct’ short term crises and long-term traumas by fabricating versions of an idealised Irish Feminine and Masculine that served to embody the party’s vision of a traditionalist, yet modern Ireland. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Pedro Gustavo Teixeira about his new book The Legal History of the European Banking Union: How European Law Led to the Supranational Integration of the Single Financial Market (Hart, 2020) Since 1950, the political and economic integration of Europe has tended to accelerate through functional mini-unions: coal and steel, nuclear power, and – in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic - it could well be healthcare next. The most recent of these mini-federations is the European Banking Union; born out of necessity at the height of the sovereign-debt crisis in 2012-13 but, as this new history emphasises, built on foundations laid in the 1970s. Within three years of its political green light, the EBU's core agencies - the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) under the authority of the European Central Bank and the Single Resolution Mechanism - were in place yet, while huge changes have taken place, critical business has been left unfinished. "A regime geared towards ever more integration with distributive consequences, but without stabilisation capacity in the form of risk-sharing among member states and largely insulated from democratic politics will likely not be sustainable", writes Pedro Gustavo Teixeira. Pedro Gustavo Teixeira is director-general of governance and operations of the Single Supervisory Mechanism of the European Central Bank, secretary of its Supervisory Board, and a lecturer at the institute for law and finance at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. (Any views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of the ECB). *The author's own book recommendation is Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower (Penguin, 1999 - latest edition 2018). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today on New Books in History, Mark A. Waddell, Associate professor of History, Philosophy & Sociology of Science in the Department of History at Michigan State University in beautiful East Lansing Michigan, talks about his recent book, Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the recovery of ancient ritual magic at the height of the Renaissance to the ignominious demise of alchemy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Mark A. Waddell explores the rich and complex ways that premodern people made sense of their world. He describes a time when witches flew through the dark of night to feast on the flesh of unbaptized infants, magicians conversed with angels or struck pacts with demons, and astrologers cast the horoscopes of royalty. Ground-breaking discoveries changed the way that people understood the universe while, in laboratories and coffee houses, philosophers discussed how to reconcile the scientific method with the veneration of God. This engaging, illustrated new study introduces readers to the vibrant history behind the emergence of the modern world. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) arrives at an extraordinarily consequential moment for the future of asylum protections. Even as more and more people around the world find themselves displaced and endangered by violent conflict, climate change, and material deprivation, the small set of countries that once welcomed refugees and asylum seekers have closed themselves off. From the outside, we see Fortress Europe, kids in cages, and the criminalization of asylum seekers--but look closer, and there are far more elaborate geographical games taking place to effectively erase the possibility of asylum. In this award-winning book, Mountz traces the global chain of remote detention centers used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical idea, along with the continued death of asylum seekers themselves. Alongside her written work, Mountz and her colleague Kim Rygiel have started a podcast called Displacements that follows ongoing ongoing scholarship and activism in the migration space. Alongside her collaborate Lisa Molomot, she has released a documentary film called Safe Haven that follows Vietnam-war era resistors who sought protection in Canada. Alison Mountz is Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration, and she is Director of the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. You can follow Alison on Twitter @AlisonMountz, and the host, Dino Kadich, @dinokadich. The New Books in Geography Twitter page is @NewBooksGeog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is one of the most popular philosophical works by sales to the public, while in academic philosophy he is considered somewhat of a philosophical lightweight. In Marcus Aurelius (Routledge, 2020), John Sellars argues that this academic perception mistakes the Meditations as a failed work of theoretical argument, when instead it is a series of spiritual training exercises to condition the Roman emperor’s character in accordance with the Stoic doctrines he learned as a bookish boy. Sellars, who is reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, sees Marcus Aurelius as using his Meditations as an antidote to corrupting pressures of his powerful position and debilitating suffering in the face of adversity in his personal life and in his military campaigns against Germanic tribes. The book accessibly introduces the main Stoic doctrines that form the background of Marcus Aurelius’s writings, and shows how he reviews the day’s events and where he has gone wrong in his responses to them in their light. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was an important forerunner of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier; a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings; a preacher and exegete; and a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities; Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. Cedric Cohen-Skalli’s Don Isaac Abravanel: An Intellectual Biography (Brandeis University Press, 2020) is the first new intellectual biography of Abravanel in twenty years and depicts his life in three cultural milieus — Portugal, Castile, and post-expulsion Italy — and analyzes his major literary accomplishments in each period. Abravanel was a traditionalist with innovative ideas, a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. An erudite scholar, author of a monumental exegetical opus that is still studied today, and an avid book collector, he was a transitional figure, defined by an age of contradictions. It is these very contradictions that make him such an important personality for understanding the dawn of Jewish modernity. Cedric Cohen-Skalli teaches early modern and modern Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa and is the director of the Bucerius Institute for the Research of Contemporary German History and Society. Makena Mezistrano is the Assistant Director of the Sephardic Studies Program in the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. She holds an MA in Biblical and Talmudic studies from Yeshiva University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sasha Roseneil, Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Studies at University College London joins today to talk about the new book The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe, out 2020 with UCL Press. The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm explores the ongoing strength and insidious grip of couple-normativity across changing landscapes of law, policy and everyday life in four contrasting national contexts: the UK, Bulgaria, Norway and Portugal. By investigating how the couple-norm is lived and experienced, how it has changed over time, and how it varies between places and social groups, this book provides a detailed analysis of changing intimate citizenship regimes in Europe, and makes a major intervention in understandings of the contemporary condition of personal life. The authors develop the feminist concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ and propose the new concept of ‘intimate citizenship regime’, offering a study of intimate citizenship regimes as normative systems that have been undergoing profound change in recent decades. Against the backdrop of processes of de-patriarchalization, liberalization, pluralization and homonormalization, the ongoing potency of the couple-norm becomes ever clearer. The authors provide an analysis of how the couple-form is institutionalized, supported and mandated by legal regulations, social policies and everyday practices, and how this serves to shape the intimate life choices and trajectories of those who seem to be living aslant to the conventional heterosexual cohabiting couple-form. Attending also to practices and moments that challenge couple-normativity, both consciously chosen and explicit, as well as circumstantial, subconscious and implicit, The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm makes an important contribution to literatures on citizenship, intimacy, family life, and social change in sociology, social policy, socio-legal studies, gender/sexuality/queer studies and psychosocial studies. This book was researched and written through an EU grant by a pan-European group of scholars. As a result, it is available for free; follow the link above. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today on the New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network, we’re here today with Christopher Close, Associate Professor of History at St. Joseph’s University in the incomparable city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to talk about his latest book, State Formation and Shared Sovereignty: The Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, 1488- 1696, out this year, 2021, with Cambridge University Press. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dozens of alliances asserting shared sovereignty formed in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. Many accounts of state formation struggle to explain these leagues, since they characterize state formation as a process of internal bureaucratization within individual states. This comparative study of alliances in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries focuses on a formative time in European history, from the late fifteenth century until the immediate aftermath of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, to demonstrate how the sharing of sovereignty through alliances influenced the evolution of the Empire, the Dutch Republic, and their various member states in fundamental ways. Alliances simultaneously supported and constrained central and territorial authorities, while their collaborative policy-making process empowered smaller states, helping to ensure their survival. By revealing how the interdependencies of alliance shaped states of all sizes in the Empire and the Low Countries, Christopher W. Close opens new perspectives on state formation with profound implications for understanding the development of states across Europe. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Economics is the long-run driver” in the history of Europe’s monetary union, writes Richard Pomfret in the first of a new Cambridge Elements series on the Economics of European Integration: The Road to Monetary Union (Cambridge University Press, 2021). “Politics often determined the timing of the next step ... but it has not determined the direction of change”. In this "Element" – intended to be “longer than standard journal articles yet shorter than normal-length book manuscripts”, according to series editor Nauro Campos – Pomfret runs through the 50-year history of the project but with that core theme. While decisive political moments like German reunification are acknowledged, it is the economic drivers – the development of common policies, the single market and global value chains – that assume a central role in the process. Richard Pomfret is professor of economics at the University of Adelaide and was, until 2020, the Jean Monnet Chair in the Economics of European Integration. Before moving to Australia in 1992, he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, Bologna and Nanjing. *The author's own book recommendations are Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis (William Collins, 2020), and Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck (Granta Books, 2018 - translated by Susan Bernofsky). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ramsey McGlazer's Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, 2020), traces the ways in which a group of modernist cultural practitioners (thinkers, politicians, artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers) across varied linguistic and cultural contexts ((Italian, English, Irish, and Brazilian) resisted certain notions of education perceived as “progressive”. At the heart of this remarkable study, pulses a nexus of issues that are of interest to anyone teaching anything anywhere: What is education? How does it differ from “instruction”? What is education for? (if anything) What does it mean to ask the question “what is education for”? Who is education for? What are the stakes of that question? Education reforms from the end of the Victorian Era until the mid-20th century sought to surpass the “sterile and narrow” forms of education that insisted on rote learning (memorization, declamation, imitation, and so forth) that did not help students of any age or grade “transform.” Resisting the ideology of “progressive” education, the figures in McGlazer’s fascinating study propose instead a “counter tradition” that sought to offer resistant strategies in “old school” pedagogies focusing on rote means, reproducing (though McGlazer will “queer” that term) ordained content. The practitioners McGlazer focuses on include figures like Walter Pater, author of the influential Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873 and whose interest in mechanistic pedagogies anchors the first chapter. Giovanni Pascoli and his focus on grammar follows, then a chapter on “direct instruction” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. McGlazer concludes by focusing on films centering on instruction, like the pedagogy of pain in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and avant-garde Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s film Claro (1975). McGlazer’s focus on this nucleus of texts and practitioners from the end of the 19th Century to about the middle of the 20th gives rise to questions about tradition, resistance, and the ideology of education that are evergreen and of interest to educators in a wide array of places and spaces and Old Schools will be of interest to anyone who has taught and anyone who has learned. Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la futura consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What role did culture play in the British Empire? In Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire Caroline Ritter, an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, explores the importance of culture in maintaining Imperial domination, and then in supporting post-Imperial British influence. Using core case studies of key institutions- the British Council, the BBC, and Oxford University Press- the book shows the ongoing legacy of the Imperial cultural project, even if, on the surface, all three institutions have radically changed since the formal end of the British Empire. Rich in historical detail, as well as contemporary relevance, the book will be essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well a for anyone interested in the current, and historical, politics of culture. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900): A Cultural and Sociolinguistic Study of Dutch as a Contact Language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan (Brill, 2020), Christopher Joby offers the first book-length account of the knowledge and use of the Dutch language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. For most of this period, the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan. Using the analytical tool of language process, this book explores the nature and consequences of contact between Dutch and Japanese and other language varieties. The processes analyzed include language learning, contact and competition, code-switching, translation, lexical, syntactic, and graphic interference, and language shift. The picture that emerges is that the multifarious uses of Dutch, especially the translation of Dutch books, would have a profound effect on the language, society, culture, and intellectual life of Japan. You can get The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900) at a discount at the Brill website by entering the code 72150 on check out. (Promo Code effective until May/31/2021) Jingyi Li is a Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Join us today for a roundtable conversation with three leading medieval scholars about the phenomenon of conspiracy theories in history. Michael T. Bailey, professor of history at Iowa State University is one of the world’s leading scholars on the development of the idea of the Witches’ Sabbath, the verifiable hysterical historical panic about a gathering of diabolical witches joined together to dance with the devil himself in order to spread evil power, a nocturnal festival capable of destroying flora and fauna. Miri Rubin, professor of history at Queen Mary University of London, and translator of the first Blood Libel accusation in England, speaks on her historical forte: the dangerous, long-lived, and utterly spurious assertion that Jews ritually murder a Christian child to celebrate Passover. Emerging in medieval England and flourishing throughout the whole of the premodern era, the Blood Libel was responsible for another form or murderous hysteria. Sean Field, a specialist on religious life in medieval France, speaks about the creation of mystery around the Templars. This is a different kind of conspiracy theory, that develops later around a specific and very real event. King Philip IV of France accused the Templars of a laundry list of spiritual and corporeal crimes; almost all the accused were entirely innocent. Though there was much furor contemporaneously, there was no belief that the Templars were involved in some sort of international secret financial skullduggery. Instead that modern balderdash developed much later and sticks with us. Our conversation covers the appeal of conspiracy theories, how they gain traction, and how they might be handled. Though our discussion is based in history it has strong repercussions for the current political and cultural situation. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called ‘Colombia of Europe’ or, ‘the international drug supermarket’. Increasing state regulations and interventions led to the proliferation of a ‘hydra’ of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumvent the enforcement of regulation. Networks of smugglers and suppliers of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, XTC, and other drugs were organized without a strict formal hierarchy and based on personal relations and cultural affinities rather than on institutional arrangements. These networks created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself. Their operations were made possible and developed because of the deep historical social and cultural ‘embeddedness’ of criminal anarchy in Dutch society. Using examples from the rich history of drug smuggling, Drug Smuggler Nation: Narcotics and the Netherlands, 1920-95 (Manchester UP, 2021) investigates the deeper and hidden grounds of the illegal drug trade, and its effects on our drug policies. Geert Slabbekorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Central Europe, limited success in revisiting the role of science in the segregation of Roma reverberates with the yet-unmet call for contextualizing the impact of ideas on everyday racism. This book attempts to interpret such a gap as a case of epistemic injustice. It underscores the historical role of ideas in race-making and provides analytical lenses for exploring cross-border transfers of whiteness in Central Europe. In the case of Roma, the scientific argument in favor of segregation continues to play an outstanding role due to a long-term focus on the limited educability of Roma. In Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (Routledge, 2021), Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette N. Jaworsky trace the long-term interrelation between racializing Roma and the adaptation by Central European scholars of theories legitimizing segregation against those considered non-white, conceived as unable to become educated or "civilized." Along with legitimizing segregation, sterilization and even extermination, theorizing ineducability has laid the groundwork for negating the capacity of Roma as subjects of knowledge. Such negation has hindered practices of identity and quite literally prevented Roma in Central Europe from becoming who they are. This systematic epistemic injustice still echoes in contemporary attempts to historicize Roma in Central Europe. The authors critically investigate contemporary approaches to historicize Roma as reproducing whiteness and inevitably leading to various forms of epistemic injustice. The methodological approach herein conceptualizes critical whiteness as a practice of epistemic justice targeted at providing a sustainable platform for reflecting upon the impact of the past on the contemporary situation of Roma. Victoria Shmidt brings together the issue of historical roots of segregation with the legacy of colonial and socialist policies in Central Eastern European countries. Since 2019 Victoria leads the project "Race science: Undiscovered Power of building the nations" at the University of Graz. Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic), and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (Indiana UP, 2021), Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists--experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators--not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities. Jill Massimo is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. In The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One (University of Toronto Press, 2021), William Max Nelson argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history of science, as well as the history of France, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We are here today with Sara Ritchey, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, about her new book, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health, out with Cornell University Press this year, 2021. The author of Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Cornell, 2014) and numerous articles, including “Caring by the Hours: the Psalter as a Source of Gendered Healthcare,” “Health, Healing, and Salvation: Hagiography as a Source of Medieval Healthcare,” “The Wound’s Presence and Bodily Absence: The Experience of God in a Fourteenth-Century Manuscript,” Dr. Ritchey discusses her profound understanding in the intersection of religious practice (writ large) and the practice of medicine (writ large) in the Medieval era. In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we hear from Mayte Green-Mercado, Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey to talk about Visions of Deliverance: Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2019). In Visions of Deliverance, Mayte Green-Mercado traces the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts known as joferes through formal and informal networks of merchants, Sufis, and other channels of diffusion among Muslims and Christians across the Mediterranean from Constantinople and Venice to Morisco towns in eastern Spain. The movement of these prophecies from the eastern to the western edges of the Mediterranean illuminates strategies of Morisco cultural and political resistance, reconstructing both productive and oppositional interactions and exchanges between Muslims and Christians in the early modern Mediterranean. Challenging a historiography that has primarily understood Morisco apocalyptic thought as the expression of a defeated group that was conscious of the loss of their culture and identity, Green-Mercado depicts Moriscos not simply as helpless victims of Christian oppression but as political actors whose use of end-times discourse helped defineNBN and construct their society anew. Visions of Deliverance helps us understand the implications of confessionalization, forced conversion, and assimilation in the early modern period and the intellectual and theological networks that shaped politics and identity across the Mediterranean in this era. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Eilish Gregory, Catholics During the English Revolution, 1642-1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty (Boydell Press, 2021) is the first book to examine thoroughly the ways in which Catholics adapted to political and social change during the turbulent years of the English Revolution. The book examines several important aspects of the Catholic experience in this period. It explores the penal laws by which the estates of Catholics were sequestrated, discussing the extent to which politicians designed the new laws to target Catholics specifically, rather than Royalists more generally, and outlining how the sequestration legislation operated in practice. It considers how Catholic gentry utilised their networks with influential Protestants with wider political connections when applying to have their sequestrations discharged. More broadly the book reveals how Catholics demonstrated their loyalty and assimilated into society despite being viewed as the natural enemies of the English Republic and Protectorate. The book also compares Catholic experiences to those of other religious minorities and sets the situation in England in the wider European international context of Catholic-Protestant rivalry and warfare, which made Catholics a particularly vulnerable religious minority in Puritan England. Eilish Gregory is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Royal Historical Society. She has held research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Durham University and Marsh's Library and teaches at the University of Reading. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Brendan McNamara, who teaches religion at University College Cork, Ireland, has published an excellent new book on the expansion of the Bahá’í faith into western Europe. In the late nineteenth century, religious scholars and clergy in Britain became aware of a movement of reform in Persia that they framed as a revitalisation project within Islam, and which attracted converts including the former Oriel Professor for the Interpretation of Scripture at the University of Oxford. As the teachings of the Bahá’í faith came into better focus, in the early twentieth century, they attracted the attention of an extremely diverse group of spiritualists, Celticists, and liberal protestants, who, for various reasons, saw in the life and work of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá an opportunity to advance the brotherhood of humanity and its religious possibilities. In The Reception of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Britain: East Comes West (Brill, 2020), McNamara describes the sometimes adulatory, sometimes rather colonial, appreciation of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his two visits to Britain in the early 1910s. But McNamara also suggests reasons why this extraordinary wave of interest in the Bahá’í faith was not sustained – not least because the crisis to all religions that was represented by the First World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Todays’ guest is Mack P. Holt, Professor Emeritus of History at George Mason University in Virginia, talking about his recent book, The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630, out 2018 with Cambridge University Press. In the late fifteenth century, Burgundy was incorporated in the kingdom of France. This, coupled with the advent of Protestantism in the early sixteenth century, opened up new avenues for participation in public life by ordinary Burgundians and led to considerably greater interaction between the elites and the ordinary people. Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes from Burgundy's re-incorporation into France in 1477 until the Lanturelu riot in Dijon in 1630, focusing on the local wine industry. Indeed, the vineyard workers were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the province until 1630 when, following royal attempts to reduce the level of popular participation in public affairs, Louis XIII tried to remove them from the city altogether. More than just a local study, this book shows how the popular classes often worked together with local elites to shape policies that affected them. This joyful conversation lingers on the delights of the archive, a variety of historical methodologies, and the contours of the historical craft. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Phil Zuckerman's book, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (2nd ed.) (New York University Press, 2020), points out that religious conservatives around the world often claim that a society without a strong foundation of faith would necessarily be an immoral one, bereft of ethics, values, and meaning. Indeed, the Christian Right in the United States has argued that a society without God would be hell on earth. Zuckerman, however, challenges these claims. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with more than 150 citizens of Denmark and Sweden, among the least religious countries in the world, he shows that, far from being inhumane, crime-infested, and dysfunctional, highly secular societies are healthier, safer, greener, less violent, and more democratic and egalitarian than highly religious ones. Society without God provides a rich portrait of life in a secular society, exploring how a culture without faith copes with death, grapples with the meaning of life, and remains content through everyday ups and downs. Phil Zuckerman is an Associate Dean and Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. He is also a regular affiliated professor at Claremont Graduate University, and he has been a guest professor for two years at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 2011, Phil founded the first Secular Studies department in the nation, he regularly writes for Psychology Today, Huffington Post, and numerous scholarly journals, and his books have been translated and published in Danish, Farsi, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Italian. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Take a look at a globe. Europe is there in big letters, and, to us, this hardly merits a passing thought. But Europe is a concept, a construct, an idea. So too is modernity. These categories have rich and contested histories. It is to their lineage that Robert Launay looks in Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder (University of Chicago Press, 2018). In this lucid and discerning volume, Professor Launay explores how a host of European luminaries used others to think about themselves and their worlds. Prior to the nineteenth century, discourses about the New World and China were much less about domination than about understanding their authors’ own social and political milieus. The figure of the Native America, the political life of China, the character of classical antiquity—all these “others” assumed different significances to different thinkers depending on the critique they sought to make about contemporary society. Ranging as it does from Mandeville to Montaigne, Montesquieu, Kant, and many others, this book synthesizes an immense—and immensely complex—body of political thought into an accessible narrative that is doubtless of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike. Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the decade after World War I, German-American relations improved swiftly. While resentment and bitterness ran high on both sides in 1919, Weimar Germany and the United States managed to forge a strong transatlantic partnership by 1929. But how did Weimar Germany overcome its post-war isolation so rapidly? How did it regain the trust of its former adversary? And how did it secure U.S. support for the revision of the Versailles Treaty? Elisabeth Piller, winner of the Franz Steiner Preis für Transatlantische Geschichte 2019, explores these questions not from an economic, but from a cultural perspective. In Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918-1933 (Franz Steiner Verlag/German Historical Institute, 2020), she illustrates how German state and non-state actors drew heavily on cultural ties - with German Americans, U.S. universities and American tourists - to re-win American trust, and even affection, at a time when traditional foreign policy tools had failed to achieve similar successes. Contrary to common assumptions, Weimar Germany was never incapable of selling itself abroad. In fact, it pursued an innovative public diplomacy campaign to not only normalize relations with the powerful United States, but to build a politically advantageous transatlantic friendship. Dr. Elisabeth Piller is Assistant Professor of Transatlantic and North American History at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her Ph.D. dissertation on which the book is based won three prestigious prizes: the Ifa-Forschungspreis Auswärtige Kulturpolitik (2018), the Franz Steiner Preis für Transatlantische Geschichte (2019), and the Friedrich-Ebert-Preis (2020). She works on U.S. and German foreign policy, the history of diplomacy and modern humanitarianism, and transatlantic relations in the 19th and 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today New Books in History features Karl Schlögel, Professor Emeritus at the Europa Universitat Viadrina, Frankfort to talk about his new book, The Scent of Empires: Chanel no. 5 and Red Moscow, out this year, 2021 with Polity Press. Can a drop of perfume tell the story of the twentieth century? Can a smell bear the traces of history? What can we learn about the history of the twentieth century by examining the fate of perfumes? In this remarkable book, Karl Schlögel unravels the interconnected histories of two of the world’s most celebrated perfumes. In tsarist Russia, two French perfumers – Michel Beaux and Auguste Michel – developed related fragrances honouring Catherine the Great for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Beaux fled Russia and took the formula for his perfume with him to France, where he sought to adapt it to his new French circumstances. He presented Coco Chanel with a series of ten fragrance samples in his laboratory and, after smelling each, she chose number five – the scent that would later go by the name Chanel No. 5. Meanwhile, as the perfume industry was being revived in Soviet Russia, Auguste Michel used his original fragrance to create Red Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Piecing together the intertwined histories of these two famous perfumes, which shared a common origin, Schlögel tells a surprising story of power, intrigue and betrayal that offers an altogether unique perspective on the turbulent events and high politics of the twentieth century. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Yugoslavia and Political Assassinations: The History and Legacy of Tito’s Campaign Against the Emigrés (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first book in English to analyse how and why the Yugoslav State Security Service carried out multiple targeted assassinations, over the country's forty-six years of existence, under the pretext of protecting the Yugoslav communist party-state. Offering a detailed history of the programme, from the inception of the State Security Service to the recent trials of individuals involved, it draws on Christian Axboe Nielsen's unique wealth of experience and research as an academic and as an expert witness in numerous criminal trials. The result is a ground-breaking contribution to the history of targeted assassinations, communist history, state security services and related criminal trials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When Europe’s Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against their Turkish rulers and allied with the British on the promise of an independent Arab state. In October 1918, the Arabs’ military leader, Prince Faisal, victoriously entered Damascus and proclaimed a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. Faisal won American support for self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference, but other Entente powers plotted to protect their colonial interests. Under threat of European occupation, the Syrian-Arab Congress declared independence on March 8, 1920 and crowned Faisal king of a “civil representative monarchy.” Sheikh Rashid Rida, the most prominent Islamic thinker of the day, became Congress president and supervised the drafting of a constitution that established the world’s first Arab democracy and guaranteed equal rights for all citizens, including non-Muslims. But France and Britain refused to recognize the Damascus government and instead imposed a system of mandates on the pretext that Arabs were not yet ready for self-government. In July 1920, the French invaded and crushed the Syrian state. The fragile coalition of secular modernizers and Islamic reformers that had established democracy was destroyed, with profound consequences that reverberate still. In How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress of 1920, and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020), Elizabeth Thompson describes the extraordinary, brief moment of unity and hope―and of its destruction. Elizabeth F. Thompson is the Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at American University’s School of International Service. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How do we make sense of Turkey’s recent turn against the West – after decades of Turkish cooperation and desire to be integrated into the European and wider Western community in terms of foreign policy? Dr. Oya Dursun-Özkanca’s new book Turkey-West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition (Cambridge UP, 2019) interrogates the dynamics of the relationship between Turkey and the West, particularly the EU, NATO, and the United States. The compelling book develops a framework of intra-alliance opposition to explain this shift from Turkey’s engagement with the West as a desirable ally to Turkey’s increasingly hostility to the West after 2010. Moving beyond the power and personality of Erdogan, Dursun-Özkanca develops an analytical framework of the politics of intra-alliance opposition and provides a comprehensive and nuanced account of how and why Turkish foreign policy has changed within the transatlantic alliance. She offers three categories of intra-alliance opposition behavior: boundary testing; boundary challenging; boundary breaking. She deploys these categories to differentiate between the motivations behind the use of each tool – providing an analysis of Turkey that can also be exported to other cases. This extensively researched book depends upon extensive fieldwork and more than 200 semi-structured elite interviews conducted with government officials, diplomats, academics, officials, and journalists in Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, the UK, Germany, and the U.S. The book provides 6 case studies (Turkey’s pragmatic foreign policy in the Western Balkans, the Turkish vote over the EU-NATO security exchange, the EU-Turkey deal on the refugee crisis, Turkey’s energy policies, Turkish rapprochement with Russia in security and defense and Turkish foreign policy on Syria and Iraqi) that demonstrate the 3 categories. The book concludes three possible alternative futures for Turkey’s relations with the West and the podcast includes an analysis of what the change in U.S. leadership (Biden-Blinken) might mean for Turkish-Western relations. Dr. Dursun-Özkanca is the Endowed Chair of International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Elizabethtown College. She has edited two books – The European Union as an Actor in Security Sector Reform (Routledge, 2014) and External Interventions in Civil Wars (co-edited with Stefan Wolff, Routledge, 2014) – and has a forthcoming book entitled The Nexus Between Security Sector Reform/Governance and Sustainable Development Goal-16: An Examination of Conceptual Linkages and Policy Recommendations, forthcoming by Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF) (London: Ubiquity Press). Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. In Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jeffrey Shandler presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present. Shandler tells the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile, revealing surprising insights through a series of thematic chapters. He addresses key aspects of Yiddish as the language of a diasporic population, whose speakers have always used more than one language. As the vernacular of a marginalized minority, Yiddish has often been held in low regard compared to other languages, and its legitimacy as a language has been questioned. But some devoted Yiddish speakers have championed the language as embodying the essence of Jewish culture and a defining feature of a Jewish national identity. Despite predictions of the demise of Yiddish-dating back well before half of its speakers were murdered during the Holocaust-the language leads a vibrant, evolving life to this day. Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz have edited an outstanding volume that breaks important new ground in the history of early modern science and religion. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the long-standing discussion of natural theology gave way in the mid-seventeenth century to a new conversation about physico-theology, a distinctive genre of science and religion writing that emphasised the goodness and the predictability of the divine being. Emerging first in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of the English civil wars, this discourse emphasised order and causality, and subjected the being of God to the science of order that was emerging in the same period. But, constructed to explain the benevolence of the creator and creation, physico-theology struggled to make sense of creaturely suffering, and eventually was understood as undermining its own presuppositions. Just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Physico-Theology: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650-1750 will be a landmark text in early modern intellectual history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Motivated by a theology that declared missionary work was independent of secular colonial pursuits, Protestant missionaries from Germany operated in ways that contradict current and prevailing interpretations of nineteenth-century missionary work. As a result of their travels, these missionaries contributed to Germany's colonial culture. Because of their theology of Christian universalism, they worked against the bigoted racialism and ultra-nationalism of secular German empire-building. Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021) provides a detailed political and cultural analysis of missionaries, mission societies, mission intellectuals, and missionary supporters. Combining cases studies from East Africa with studies of the metropole, this book demonstrates that missionaries' ideas about race and colonialism influenced ordinary Germans' experience of globalization and colonialism at the same time that the missionaries shaped colonial governance. By bringing together religious and colonial history, the book opens new avenues of inquiry into Christian participation in colonialism. During the Age of Empire, German missionaries promoted an internationalist vision of the modern world that aimed to create a multinational, multiracial "heavenly Fatherland" spread across the globe. Jeremy Best is an assistant professor of modern Europe at Iowa State University with a specific interest in the cultural history of Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story. At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend. Alisha Rankin's The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (U Chicago Press, 2021) sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Everyday Nationalism in Hungary: 1789-1867 (De Gruyter, 2019) examines Hungarian nationalism through everyday practices that will strike most readers as things that seem an unlikely venue for national politics. Separate chapters examine nationalized tobacco, nationalized wine, nationalized moustaches, nationalized sexuality, and nationalized clothing. These practices had other economic, social or gendered meanings: moustaches were associated with manliness, wine with aristocracy, and so forth. The nationalization of everyday practices thus sheds light on how patriots imagined the nation's economic, social, and gender composition. Nineteenth-century Hungary thus serves as the case study in the politics of "everyday nationalism." The book discusses several prominent names in Hungarian history, but in unfamiliar contexts. The book also engages with theoretical debates on nationalism, discussing several key theorists. Various chapters specifically examine how historical actors imagine relationship between the nation and the state, paying particular attention Rogers Brubaker's constructivist approach to nationalism without groups, Michael Billig's notion of 'banal nationalism, ' Carole Pateman's ideas about the nation as a 'national brotherhood', and Tara Zahra's notion of 'national indifference.' Alexander Maxwell studied at the University of California Davis, Georg-August University in Göttingen Germany, and Central European University before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He held brief postdoctoral positions in Erfurt, Swansea, Reno and Bucharest before joining the faculty of Victoria University of Wellington, in New Zealand, where he is currently associate professor of history. His is the author of Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czech Language, and Unintended Nationalism (I.B. Tauris, 2009), and Patriots Against Fashion: Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions (Palgrave, 2014). He has published widely on Central European history, nationalism theory, and history pedagogy. He is currently researching Habsburg Panslavism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
If, as expected, he re-emerges as prime minister after the Dutch election on March 17, Mark Rutte is on track to become the Netherlands' longest-serving prime minister. By mid-2022, he will beat the record set by Ruud Lubbers in 1994 and, assuming everything goes according to plan, he will serve until at least 2025. Yet, despite being a veteran on the European stage, Rutte remains an enigma - even at home. As Petra De Koning discovered from conversations with the prime minister's old friends and associates for this political biography, Rutte has never been in a relationship, cooked a meal or even had a political strategy. In a European Union without the UK and soon to be without Angela Merkel, Rutte is emerging as the spokesman of the EU’s pragmatic, fiscally conservative, free trading, and Putin-sceptical wing. But who is he? How has he refashioned his liberal party and Dutch politics, and can he reshape Europe? Petra De Koning is political editor of NRC and the 2020 winner of the Anne Vondeling Prize for political reporting. Formerly a correspondent in Kosovo and Brussels, she returned to The Hague in 2013 to cover domestic politics. In Dutch, she is the author of The Butcher's Daughter (2000) about her experiences in Kosovo, and co-author with Cees Banning of Balkans on the North Sea (2005) about the Yugoslav war tribunal. *The author's own book recommendation is What's In An Apple? A a collection of six conversations between Amos Oz and Shira Hadad (Keter, 2018 - not yet published in English). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Has 'migrant' become an unshakeable identity for some people? How does this happen and what role does the media play in classifying individuals as 'migrants' rather than people? How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants (Manchester UP, 2020) challenges the idea of the 'migrant', pointing instead to the array of systems and processes that force this identity on individuals, shaping their interactions with the state and with others. Kirsten Folkert, Gargi Bhattacharyya, and Janna Graham speak to Pierre d'Alancaisez about their research carried out in the United Kingdom and Italy and examine how media representations construct global conflicts in a climate of changing media habits, widespread mistrust, and fake news. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dutch Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck, a significant voice in the development of Protestant theology, remains relevant many years after his death. His four-volume Reformed Dogmatics is one of the most important theological works of the twentieth century. James Eglinton is widely considered to be at the forefront of contemporary interest in Bavinck's life and thought. After spending considerable time in the Netherlands researching Bavinck, Eglinton brings to light a wealth of new insights and previously unpublished documents to offer a definitive biography of this renowned Reformed thinker. Bavinck: A Critical Biography (Baker Academic, 2020) follows the course of Bavinck's life in a period of dramatic social change, identifying him as an orthodox Calvinist challenged with finding his feet in late modern culture. Based on extensive archival research, this critical biography presents numerous significant and previously ignored or unknown aspects of Bavinck's person and life story. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Emmanuel Macron “has shown a genuine ability to strategize politically, determinedly and clear-sightedly [in] occupying the space of the bourgeois bloc. This is a space that France’s political crisis has left open for many years but that no one before him had been able to identify and represent effectively”. So say Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini in The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France's Political Crisis (Verso Books, 2021). For three decades, the French centre-left has tried and failed to hang on to a working-class base with socialist platforms while, at the same time, appealing to the same demographic as its leadership: metropolitan, liberal and with an unbreakable core commitment to European intregration. In 2017, Macron abandoned this effort and went straight for the “bourgeois” core of 20-25% of the electorate with the aim of building out into the traditional right in time for the April 2022 election. Bruno Amable is a professor of economics at the University of Geneva and was previously a professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, an associate member of the Paris School of Economics, and research fellow with CEPREMAP. *The author's own book recommendation is Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l'économie numérique by Cédric Durand (Éditions Zones, 2020) Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We are not short of books and commentary on the rise of the nativist right in Europe and the US but not all these movements are alike. Among the most intriguing aspects of the insurgency has been the contrasting attitudes to the role of women and gay rights in the nationalist movements in Spain and Italy compared to those in Germany, France and the US. The Dutch led the way. This style of New Right politics first appeared nearly 20 years ago in the Netherlands in the form of Pim Fortuyn - an openly gay Marxist convert to conservatism who made the then novel case that freedoms only recently won from one Abrahamic religion now needed protection from another. In The Rise of the Dutch New Right (Routledge, 2020), Merijn Oudenampsen makes the case that they are less original than they look; that Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Thierry Baudet are “part of a larger and longer conservative wave” derived from British neoliberalism and American neoconservatism and that "the conservative interest in feminism and gay rights is largely a function of their opposition to Islam”. As the Netherlands goes to the polls on March 17, he considers what the future holds for the New Right. Merijn Oudenampsen is a sociologist and political scientist at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously published The Conservative Revolt (2018) and Socialism for Beginners (2019) in Dutch. This is his first book in English. *The author's own book recommendation is Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism by Melinda Cooper(Zone Books, 2017). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is the difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? Why should we understand Trump as part of a dangerous “fourth wave” of radical right politicians? Dr. Cas Mudde’s new book The Far Right Today (Polity, 2019) argues that politicians like Le Pen represented a 20th-century marginalized populist radical right party but Trump (and others across the globe) represent a fourth wave in which the 21st-century radical right parties are normalized and mainstreamed all over the world such that three of the world’s largest democracies (India, the United States, and Brazil) have or have had radical right leaders. It is this normalization that Mudde identifies as crucial to our understanding of the radical right around the globe – and any possible responses available from liberal democracies. Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and a Professor II in the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. Mudde has written numerous scholarly books published in 23 languages (many of which focus on extremism and populism) and regularly publishes in popular outlets such as The Guardian. He hosts Radikaal, a podcast about the radical aspects politics, music, and sports. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The only surviving contemporary texts that provide insight into the life of Saint Patrick were both written by the legendary patron saint of Ireland. By Patrick's own account, his life and ministry were controversial in his day, and the myths and legends that have surrounded this enigmatic Christian leader have continued to generate speculation and curiosity to the present day. Roy Flechner (University College Dublin) brings the the best available critical tools to the task of seeking to reconstruct Saint Patrick's life and mission in Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland's Patron Saint (Princeton UP, 2019). What emerges is a vivid relief that fills in the gaps of what we can know about this characteristically guarded autobiographer from the best available scholarship of late Roman Britain. Flechner's account promises to serve as a standard text in the long tradition of Patrician scholarship for decades to come, and takes seriously Patrick's own accounts of the conflicts that surrounded his early disappearance from his native Britain and his sojourns on the emerald isle. Saint Patrick Retold won the Hagiography Society Book Prize in 2020, and is just releasing in paperback edition March of 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ranked sixth globally in the BAV Group’s 2020 “Best Countries” index and 11th in output per head, the Netherlands is renowned worldwide as a wealthy, stable, tolerant, and democratic success story. Yet, as American political scientist Robert Dahl told Dutch colleagues after the Netherlands’ complex social and political structure was explained to him: “Theoretically your country cannot exist”. As 13 million Dutch voters prepare to choose a new coalition government on March 17, Tom Louwerse discusses the new and essential fifth edition of Governance and Politics of the Netherlands (Red Globe Press, 2020) co-written with Rudy Andeweg and Galen Irwin. He explains the modern history that prompted Dahl’s remark, the post-1960s “amazing transformation” of the Netherlands from “religious and boring” to “progressive and permissive” nation, and the onset of a domestic culture war over the last two decades. Tom Louwerse is Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University, and formerly an Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin. *The author's own book recommendation is Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries by Arend Lijphart (Yale University Press, 1999) Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dr. Juan José Ponce Vázquez's new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge UP, 2020) tracks the importance of smuggling to the society, economy, and politics of the island of Hispaniola in this “long seventeenth century.” Smuggling, in his words, made people's lives on the island, an island that had suffered from imperial commercial neglect and a declining sugar industry. Concomitant with this endemic smuggling, local elites began asserting their authority over local and imperial institutions on the island, taking advantage of royal officials’ isolation from the Spanish metropole and their need for local alliances. These factors, Dr. Ponce Vásquez argues, allowed local elites to gain immense wealth and power, alter the course of European inter-imperial struggles, limit, redirect, and suppress the Spanish crown’s policies, and thus take control of the destinies of Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish Empire in the region during this period. R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. Memory and the English Reformation (Cambridge UP, 2020) shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied in texts, material objects, images, physical buildings, rituals, and bodily gestures. Attentive to the roles played by denial, amnesia, and fabrication, it also considers the retrospective processes by which the English Reformation became identified as an historic event. Examining dissident as well as official versions of this story, this richly illustrated, interdisciplinary collection traces how memory of the religious revolution evolved in the two centuries following the Henrician schism, and how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Heilbron, professor of history and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, is one of our most distinguished - and prolific - historians of science. His latest book, The Ghost of Galileo In a Forgotten Painting from the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2021), records how, during a tour of an English country house, he stumbled across what might be the earliest visual reference to Galileo outside portraiture. Heilbron's quest to understand this reference has resulted in a long and extraordinary account of debates in early modern science, religion, and medicine. Heilbron explains that there are reasons why a jobbing artist, working in the royalist base of Oxford during the first English civil war, might include in a double portrait of a tutor and his melancholy pupil this reference to recent trends in cosmology. In this lavishly illustrated and copiously argued book, Heilbron sets new agendas for our understanding of the politics of royalism, the material contexts of portraiture, and the religious significance of science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.' The words of Sir Edward Grey, looking out from the windows of the Foreign Office in early August 1914, are amongst the most famous in European history, and encapsulate the impending end of the nineteenth-century world. The man who spoke them was Britain's longest-ever serving Foreign Secretary (in a single span of office) and one of the great figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Penguin, 2020) is a magnificent portrait of an age and describes the three decades before the First World War through the prism of his biography, which is based almost entirely on archival sources and presents a detailed account of the main domestic and international events, and of the main personalities of the era. In particular, it presents a fresh understanding of the approach to war in the years and months before its outbreak, and Grey's role in the unfolding of events. Thomas Otte, Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia, one of the leading, if not the leading historian dealing with 19th and early 20th century Diplomatic and International politics has written a thoroughly splendid book which will provide both the academic and the lay educated reader with a mine of historical information and insights. By all means do read a book which has been named the New Statesman’s book of the Year for 2020 and which Martin Pugh in the TLS calls ‘a magisterial account that is unlikely to be bettered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Erik S. Herron’s Normalizing Corruption: Failures of Accountability in Ukraine (University of Michigan Press, 2020) zeroes in on the mechanisms that sustain corruption and minimize accountability: aspects that play a crucial role in the effectiveness of democratic processes. This investigation is based on rigorous analyses of data that shed light on the specificities of the accountability system in Ukraine. In Ukraine, corrupt practices seem to overwhelm political and societal life. Corruption is a ubiquitous topos that is extensively commented on by both politicians and scholars. Many connect the pervasiveness of corruption in post-Communist states with the Soviet legacy. While recognizing Soviet influences on the formation of corrupt practices in Ukraine, Herron offers to compartmentalize corruptions, which may facilitate the development of actions and activities that can help minimize corruption. While focusing on the Ukrainian case, this book also includes sections that highlight the experiences of other former Soviet countries, including Georgia, Baltic states, and Russia. Normalizing Corruption: Failures of Accountability in Ukraine contributes to the study of the development of democratic practices in the states whose political history is closely connected with totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Philip Mansel, a trustee of the Society for Court Studies and President of the Research Center of the Chateau de Versailles, has written a one-volume biography of the life and times of Louis XIV, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (The University of Chicago Press, 2019). One of the longest reigning monarchs in Europe’s history, from 1643 to 1715, Louis XIV left a mark upon France for good and ill. He expanded the country’s borders but left it in horrible financial shape. He was a valuable patron of the arts and architecture, but wreaked havoc on some of his nation’s citizens, especially French Protestants. He reaped the glory associated with imperial policy and dynastic intermarriages throughout Europe, but brought destruction to the lives, fortunes, and cities of his enemies. Mansel brings the court of Louis XIV alive, paying special attention to the daily personal life of the king and his associates. He reviews France’s effects on the politics of Europe and provides a detailed history of the key project of Louis’ life: the palace of Versailles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The meaning of being an immigrant has changed significantly in the 21st century. The internet, social media and networks, cost of travels, homeland products of food that one can find all over the world, working far from home – all bring new opportunities to the idea of living in one place, but still feel deep belonging with the homeland. Growing numbers of Israelis are living today in Europe. The book, Zion: The Israeli Diaspora in Europe (Pardes, 2019; in Hebrew), gives us a wide picture of their lives, challenges but also shows us a glimpse for a broader perspective around being an immigrant and having an hybrid identity. Some of these Israelis still work remotely in companies based in Israel, in Hebrew, visiting Israel once a month since it is cheap and takes only a few hours of travel. They speak Hebrew with their kids, meet with other Israelis who live in their European city, and use Israeli media. Many of their parents or grandparents left Europe after the Holocaust or a bit before, to create a homeland for the Jewish people in Zion. Now, their children and grandchildren are moving back to Europe and make there, their new homes. In his book, journalist David Stavrou brings us their stories, stories that invite other immigrants and scholars to rethink about the meaning of living in two homes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
David Onnekink, professor of early modern history at the University of Utrecht discusses his latest book, the delightful, The Dutch in the Early Modern World: History of a Global Power (Cambridge University Press, 2019). European audiences can shop here. Emerging at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic rose to become a powerhouse of economic growth, artistic creativity, military innovation, religious tolerance and intellectual development. This is the first textbook to present this period of early modern Dutch history in a global context. It makes an active use of illustrations, objects, personal stories and anecdotes to present a lively overview of Dutch global history that is solidly grounded in sources and literature. Focusing on themes that resonate with contemporary concerns, such as overseas exploration, war, slavery, migration, identity and racism, this volume charts the multiple ways in which the Dutch were connected with the outside world. It serves as an engaging and accessible introduction to Dutch history as well as a case study in early modern global expansion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This episode of New Books in History features an interview with Anke Gilleir, professor of Modern German Literature at KU Leuven, about her new edited volume, Strategic Imaginations: Women and the Gender of Sovereignty in European Culture (Leuven University Press, 2020). Dr. Gilleir has a longstanding interest in under appreciated female intellectuals, starting with her dissertation cum first monograph on Johanna Schopenhauer, read alongside Pierre Bourdieu, exploring particularly mechanisms of power and the symbolic importance of those mechanisms. She has also addressed similar themes with Therese Huber, Caroline Pichler, Rosa Luxemburg, and Margarete Sussman. As part of this ongoing concern with how women interact with political power, she came to edit this delightful volume. Though the cases studies represent a real breadth temporally, spatially, and even in subject and source material, all the essays work together very well to make a very tight argument. Political sovereignty has been a major theme in European thought from the very beginning of intellectual reflection on community. Philosophy and political theory, historiography, theology, and literature and the arts have, often in dialogue with one another, sought to represent or recalibrate notions of rule. Yet whatever covenant was imagined, sovereign rule has consistently been figured as a male prerogative While in-depth studies of historical women rulers have proliferated in the past decades, these have not systematically explored how all women rulers throughout the entirety of European culture have had to operate in a context that could not think power as female – except in grotesque terms. Strategic Imaginations demonstrates that this constitutive tension can only be brought out by studying women’s political rule in a comparative and longue durée manner. The book offers a collection of essays that brings together studies of female sovereignty from the Polish-Lithuanian to the British Commonwealth, and from the Middle Ages to the genesis of modern democracy. It addresses historical figures and takes stock of the rich yet unsettling imagination of female rule in philosophy, literature and art history. For all the variety of geographical, social, and historical contexts it engages, the book reveals surprising resonances between the strategies women rulers used and the images and practices they adopted in the context of an all-pervasive skepticism toward female rule. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life—yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton UP, 2019) documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter’s nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales.
By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooknetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland — pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged — tacitly or openly — that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild. Darnton's book Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses principally on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, he offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France--a vibrantly detailed inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters — lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists — this new book expands upon on Darnton's celebrated work on book-publishing in France, most recently found in Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.
In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Although physicians during World War I, and scholars since, have addressed the idea of disorders such as shell shock as inchoate flights into sickness by men unwilling to cope with war's privations, they have given little attention to the agency many soldiers actually possessed to express dissent in a system that medicalized it. In Germany, these men were called "war tremblers," for their telltale symptom of uncontrollable shaking. Based on archival research that constitutes the largest study of psychiatric patient files from 1914 to 1918, Rebecca Ayako Bennette examines the important space that wartime psychiatry provided soldiers expressing objection to the war in Diagnosing Dissent: Hysterics, Deserters, and Conscientious Objectors in Germany during World War One (Cornell University Press, 2020). Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
'Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.' Cecil Rhodes's characteristically nineteenth-century confidence rings rather hollow as England enters the twenty-first century in somewhat reduced circumstances. Jeremy Black steers his way through the labyrinthine complexities of historical narrative with elegance and clarity, providing a lively analysis of major events and personalities and important underlying themes. He deals with the highly topical issue of England's position and relationship with Europe. A New History of England (History Press, 2020) will prove a fascinating and informative guide for anyone interested in history and heritage. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Margarette Lincoln's London and the Seventeenth Century (Yale Yale University Press, 2021) explores the ups and downs of life in Stuart London through the eyes of those who lived through it. The Gunpowder Plot, the Civil Wars, Charles I's execution, the Plague, the Great Fire, the Restoration, and then the Glorious Revolution: the seventeenth century was one of the most momentous times in the history of Britain, and Londoners took center stage. In this fascinating account, Margarette Lincoln charts the impact of national events on an ever-growing citizenry with its love of pageantry, spectacle, and enterprise. Lincoln looks at how religious, political, and financial tensions were fomented by commercial ambition, expansion, and hardship. In addition to events at court and parliament, she evokes the remarkable figures of the period, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Pepys, and Newton, and draws on diaries, letters, and wills to trace the untold stories of ordinary Londoners. Through their eyes, we see how the nation emerged from a turbulent century poised to become a great maritime power with London at its heart--the greatest city of its time. The seventeenth century was a period of tumult - Civil War, the Great Fire (and many other fires), the Great Plague (and other bouts of plague every 20 years or so), and many many executions. Yet, amidst the mess, this period also saw London lay the groundwork for its rise as a maritime power and eventually as the World's Greatest City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A tale of passion and obsession from a philosophy professor who learns to play Bach on the piano as an adult. Dan Moller grew up listening to heavy metal in the Boston suburbs. But one day, something shifted when he dug out his mother's record of The Art of the Fugue, inexplicably wedged between ABBA's greatest hits and Kenny Rogers. Moller was fixated on Bach ever since. In The Way of Bach, he draws us into fresh and often improbably hilarious things about Bach and his music. Did you know the Goldberg Variations contain a song about his mom cooking too much cabbage? Just what is so special about Bach’s music? Why does it continue to resonate even today? What can modern Americans—steeped in pop culture—can learn from European craftsmanship? And, because it is Bach, why do some people see a connection between music and God? By turn witty and though-provoking, Moller infuses The Way of Bach with philosophical considerations about how music and art enable us to contemplate life's biggest questions. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and a PhD Candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sarah Schenirer is one of the unsung heroes of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism. In Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019), Naomi Seidman describes how the Bais Yaakov schools Schenirer founded in interwar Poland had an unparalleled impact on a traditional Jewish society threatened by assimilation and modernity, educating a generation of girls to take an active part in their community. The movement grew at an astonishing pace, expanding to include high schools, teacher seminaries, summer programmes, vocational schools, and youth movements, in Poland and beyond; it continues to flourish throughout the Jewish diaspora. Seidman explores the movement through the tensions that characterized it, capturing its complexity as a revolution in the name of tradition. She presents the context which led to its founding, examining the impact of socialism, feminism, Zionism, and Polish electoral politics on the process, and recounts its history, from its foundation in interwar Krakow to its near-destruction in the Holocaust, and its role in the reconstruction of Orthodoxy in subsequent decades. A vivid portrait of Schenirer shines through. The book includes selections from her writings published in English for the first time. Her pioneering, determined character remains the subject of debate in a culture that still regards innovation, female initiative, and women's Torah study with suspicion. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“The autarkic European nation-state, if it ever existed, was the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless it is the myth of the self-sufficient nation-state that lies at the heart of much scholarship on post-WWII European integration,” writes Signe Rehling Larsen in The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2021). “Instead of interpreting the EU in line with previous projects of market creation through empire and federation, the story of the post-WWII project of European integration is often interpreted as a ‘conflict’ or ‘competition’ between the Union and the Member States as the dominant forces in a zero-sum game”. Without taking sides in Europe’s proxy culture war, Larsen’s ground-breaking new book of “political jurisprudence” dispenses with the state as a template for the EU. Rather, she examines the “federal union of states” in America before the Civil War, Germany’s 19th-century experiments with confederations, and the imperial experience to understand a union that is anything but sui generis. Signe Rehling Larsen is a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford and was previously a Max Weber Fellow in Law at the European University Institute in Florence. *The author's own book recommendations are Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present by Gary Gerstle (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Cars, Trains, Ships and Planes: A Visual Encyclopedia to Every Vehicle (DK Children, 2015).
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view from Ottoman Izmir invites a different approach: what happens when Jewish difference is totally unremarkable? Drawing on previously untapped Ladino material that gives voice to both beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History (Stanford University Press, 2020) argues that it was new attitudes to poverty and class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sephardi community's encounter with the modern age. Dina Danon is an associate professor in the department of Judaic Studies at Binghamton University. Her research focuses on the eastern Sephardi diaspora during modern times. Danon is particularly interested in social history and how its tools help revise prevailing scholarship not only on the Sephardi world, but on Jewish modernity as a whole. Makena Mezistrano is the Assistant Director of the Sephardic Studies Program in the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. She holds an MA in Biblical and Talmudic studies from Yeshiva University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order (U Wisconsin Press, 2017) traces the history that led to a violent insurrection that erupted in the town of São Salvador, then capital of the Kongo Kingdom in 1913. The rebels were chiefs who sought to depose the King on account of his inability to prevent the violent means by which their followers were being recruited to work in Portuguese plantations. Jelmer Vos explains how the origins of the insurrection date back to the years that followed the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, when Portugal increased its political and economic presence in northern Angola and, to that end, sought the cooperation of the leaders of the Kongo kingdom. This was the latest iteration of an almost two-hundred year long relationship between the two states and marks the beginning of Portuguese colonial expansion in the region. The book offers a detailed and layered account of how the new relationship between the Portuguese and the Kongo elites allowed the latter to re-invigorate the economy of the Kingdom and reinforce their hold on power. The Portuguese, on their part, gained greater access to labor and other resources through the cooperation of Kongo leaders who effectively acted as intermediaries between the Portugal and the people of Kongo. The decline of the rubber trade and the creation of a plantation economy changed the nature and intensity of Portuguese demands and put increasing pressure on Kongo leaders to recruit workers for the plantations. This ultimately led to violence and the increasing discontent that erupted at the rebellion of 1913 when it was clear that the moral order that the King was charged to uphold and represent had broken. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about her new monograph, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities. Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 2016, the voters of the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. The majority for 'Leave' was small. Yet, in more than 40 years of EU membership, the British had never been wholeheartedly content. In the 1950s, governments preferred the Commonwealth to the Common Market. In the 1960s, successive Conservative and Labour administrations applied to join the European Community because it was a surprising success, whilst the UK's post-war policies had failed. But the British were turned down by the French. When the UK did join, more than 10 years after first asking, it joined a club whose rules had been made by others and which it did not much like. At one time or another, Labour and Conservative were at war with each other and internally. In 1975, the Labour government held a referendum on whether the UK should stay in. Two thirds of voters decided to do so. But the wounds did not heal. Europe remained 'them', 'not 'us'. The UK was on the front foot in proposing reform and modernisation and on the back foot as other EU members wanted to advance to 'ever closer union'. As a British diplomat from 1968, Stephen Wall observed and participated in these unfolding events and negotiations. He worked for many of the British politicians who wrestled to reconcile the UK's national interest in making a success of our membership with the skeptical, even hostile, strands of opinion in parliament, the press and public opinion. Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of a relationship rooted in a thousand years of British history, and of our sense of national identity in conflict with our political and economic need for partnership with continental Europe. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Even without the loss of the City of London from its jurisdiction, the EU has gone through a decade-long revolution in financial supervision and regulation since Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in 2008. The directives and regulations introduced in the wake of the crisis took years to negotiate, implement and stress-test against political reality in the last five years. The second wave of the crisis, which exposed the “doom loop” between fiscally weak states and their pet banks, spawned the European Banking Union but left some crucial remedial work undone. In this update of their 2015 edition of European Banking and Financial Law (Routledge, 2020), Matthias Haentjens and Pierre de Gioia Carabellese provide a comprehensive description and analysis of this growing body of new law, its origins, and policy implications. Matthias Haentjens is professor of law, director of the Hazelhoff Centre for Financial Law at the University of Leiden, and a deputy judge in the district court of Amsterdam. *His book recommendations are Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman (1952 – translated by Robert Chandler – Harvill Secker, 2019) and Made at Home by Giorgio Locatelli (Fourth Estate, 2017). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) represents a profound work of retrieval that launches and executes a stinging rebuke of an ontology of Europe that presumes its exceptionalism. The central focus of Hirschkind’s study is Andalucismo, or a discursive, aesthetic, and political tradition that seeks to disrupt the alleged cleavage between medieval and modern Spain by recovering the deep and penetrating imprints of Muslim Iberia on contemporary Spanish society. To engage Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past not as a bygone and irrelevant relic but as indelibly entwined to the present requires a form of attunement to the past that is activated by the sensoria and suspicious of historicist rigor. In the course of this poetically charged book, one meets a range of thinkers from across the political spectrum, and travels in unexpected avenues of inquiry such as the centrality of Flamenco to Andalucismo. The Feeling of History combines piercing attention to the productive importance of the sensoria in encountering the past with an astonishingly lucid critique of dominant strands of the discipline of history. What emerges from this exercise is not only a richly textured interrogation of a hugely important though often lampooned tradition of Andalucismo, but also a politically urgent reconsideration of modern secular conceptions of how the past must engage and make claims on the present. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The arrival in 1532 of a small group of Spanish conquistadores at the Andean town of Cajamarca launched one of the most dramatic – and often misunderstood – events in world history. In Inca Apocalypse: The Spanish Conquest and the Transformation of the Andean World (Oxford UP, 2020), R. Alan Covey draws upon a wealth of new archaeological and archival discoveries to detail the remarkable events that ended one empire and transformed another. From this he builds a new narrative that highlights the apocalyptic mindsets of the two empires and how these shaped the interactions between the Spanish and the Inca. As Covey explains, the Spaniards arrived at a point when the Incan empire was coping with the disruptions caused by a civil war and a devastating pandemic. To the Inca and their neighbors, the Spaniards were yet another disruptive force, one that different groups in the region sought to exploit for their own purposes. The result was twenty years of political infighting and warfare, culminating in the defeat of insurrectionary Spaniards by a force of Incans fighting on behalf of the king of Spain. Though such maneuvering helped preserve a degree of status for the Inca elite, it opened the way for the gradual absorption of the Inca into the Spanish empire in a process that played out over the following century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The debate about the origins of Enlightenment haven’t paid as much attention as they should have done to the radical religious cultures of the Dutch Republic in the mid-17th century, which are the subject of Francesco Quatrini’s new book. Adam Boreel (1602-1665): A Collegiant's Attempt to Reform Christianity (Brill, 2020) is a biographical and thematic study of one of the most enigmatic – and perhaps one of the most important – of the period’s religious and scientific thinkers. In the first major biography of this figure, and in almost two hundred thousand words, Quatrini reconstructs from complex and often ambiguous sources Boreel’s childhood in the Dutch Reformed church, the intellectual agendas and travels by which he was exposed to more radical forms of Christianity, the friendship networks in which he worked on projects that seem to have designed the conversation of the Jews, and most significantly of all the unofficial institutions that fostered the wide-ranging and open-ended conversations on religious subjects that marked the communal life of the Collegiants. Quatrini’s outstanding new book opens up new windows in our understanding of early modern religion and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Understanding how people cope with large-scale traumatic events has become more urgent as we continue to cope with the effects of the pandemic. In Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2021), Jillian Rogers examines France in the aftermath of World War I, which left its residents mourning a lost generation and many soldiers suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Through analysis of French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, as well as music and archival materials, Rogers argues that music was a significant method that French people used to manage and perform trauma. Employing innovative analytical techniques, Rogers shows that stylistic developments in post-war French music may have been responses to trauma suffered by the composers. As a consolatory practice, French performers used music to remember loved ones but also to sooth themselves through the repetitive bodily movements required to play neoclassical music. By interpreting French modernist music as a therapeutic medium Rogers demonstrates the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship. Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Anthony A. J. Williams is a political scientist who has taught at the University of Liverpool and at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Anthony is the author of an outstanding new account of Christian Socialism as Political Ideology: The Formation of the British Christian Left, 1877-1945 (I. B. Tauris, 2020) While other scholars have reconstructed the history of the Christian socialist tradition, few have investigated the ideas, and the sources of the ideas, that shaped it. Anthony shows how members of several quite different denominations came together to develop a distinct political platform, which was sometimes in tension with the values of their religious backgrounds. In a period when a great deal of media attention is being given to the religious right, Anthony's new book will remind readers that there has long been an alternative - and very influential - Christian left. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the 1980s and 1990s, Black German women began to play significant roles in challenging the discrimination in their own nation and abroad. Their grassroots organizing, writings, and political and cultural activities nurtured innovative traditions, ideas, and practices. These strategies facilitated new, often radical bonds between people from disparate backgrounds across the Black Diaspora. In Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press 2020), Tiffany N. Florvil examines the role of queer and straight women in shaping the contours of the modern Black German movement as part of the Black internationalist opposition to racial and gender oppression. Florvil shows the multifaceted contributions of women to movement making, including Audre Lorde's role in influencing their activism; the activists who inspired Afro-German women to curate their own identities and histories; and the evolution of the activist groups Initiative of Black Germans and Afro-German Women. These practices and strategies became a rallying point for isolated and marginalized women (and men) and shaped the roots of contemporary Black German activism. Richly researched and multidimensional in scope, Mobilizing Black Germany offers a rare in-depth look at the emergence of the modern Black German movement and Black feminists' politics, intellectualism, and internationalism. Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of 20th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African/Black diaspora, social movements, feminism, Black internationalism, gender and sexuality, and emotions. Follow her on Twitter @tnflorvil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As Hungary's opposition parties form themselves into an unlikely pre-electoral coalition, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán faces the first genuine challenge to his "illiberal" rule since 2010. This is the second of three interviews with authors of new books in English about Orbánism. In The Orbán Regime: Plebiscitary Leader Democracy in the Making (Routledge, 2020), András Körösényi uses Max Weber's Plebiscitary Leader Democracy model to explain how this charismatic nationalist-conservative has not only held on to power for so long but come to dominate the domestic political culture. “The Orbán regime has turned out to be a natural laboratory for studying PLD", say the authors. Körösényi is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Corvinus University in Budapest. *The author's own book recommendation is Men on Horseback: the Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution by David A. Bell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Steven Press is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. His marvelous first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017), is an incredibly well-documented monograph that follows a paper trail of questionable treaties to discover the rogues or confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s. Dr. Press shows in captivating detail how private European businessmen and firms produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. These experiments in governance quickly attracted notice in European capitals. The book portrays how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when international diplomacy embraced rogue empires as legal precedents for new colonial agendas, opening up a host of dilemmas about the nature of modern statehood and sovereignty. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white. Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom. A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2021) provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Carina Johnson is coeditor -- with David Luebke, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz -- of Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017 (Berghahn, 2019) and she is also the author of the introduction to this collected volume. Today she talks about these fifteen essays written by both German and American experts of Reformation History and how they see the towering figure of Martin Luther looming over 500 years of German history and identity. In terms of theology and confession, then later (in the nineteenth century) of nationalism, and (finally) the post-national, almost Pan-European politics of today, Martin Luther has been asked to wear many hats over time. In this discussion, Professor Johnson considers the agendas those hats have contained, while also considering the details of social history of real people who lived their lives oblivious to the political questions in the stratosphere. In the second half of this discussion, Dr. Johnson considers the changing role of ‘Great Men’ in the service of public memory, including Martin Luther King (on whose holiday we recorded) and Christopher Columbus whose quincentenary preceded Luther’s by 25 years and is still fresh in our minds. Carina Johnson is Professor of History at Pitzer College. She is the author of Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (2011). Her current research includes “cross-cultural encounters, proto-ethnography, memory, and the experience of violence in the sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire.” Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Europe, the Spanish Empire, and the Atlantic World, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Eminent medievalist Michael D. Bailey, Professor of History at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, talks about his upcoming book, Origin of the Witches’ Sabbath. The book contains nimble and enjoyable translations of five medieval treatises as well as the two witchcraft trials, as well as a critical introduction. While the perception of magic as harmful is age-old, the notion of witches gathering together in large numbers, overtly worshiping demons, and receiving instruction in how to work harmful magic as part of a conspiratorial plot against Christian society was an innovation of the early fifteenth century. The sources collected in this book reveal this concept in its formative stages. The idea that witches were members of organized heretical sects or part of a vast diabolical conspiracy crystalized most clearly in a handful of texts written in the 1430s and clustered geographically around the arc of the western Alps. Michael D. Bailey presents accessible English translations of the five oldest surviving texts describing the witches’ sabbath and of two witch trials from the period. These sources, some of which were previously unavailable in English or available only in incomplete or out-of-date translations, show how perceptions of witchcraft shifted from a general belief in harmful magic practiced by individuals to a conspiratorial and organized threat that led to the witch hunts that shook northern Europe and went on to influence conceptions of diabolical witchcraft for centuries to come. Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath makes freshly available a profoundly important group of texts that are key to understanding the cultural context of this dark chapter in Europe’s history. It will be especially valuable to those studying the history of witchcraft, medieval and early modern legal history, religion and theology, magic, and esotericism. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020) takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin's image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: "Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating in the realm of the secular, the profane." In this masterful book, Peter Gordon reflects on Adorno's statement and asks an urgent question: Can religion offer any normative resources for modern political life, or does the appeal to religious concepts stand in conflict with the idea of modern politics as a domain free from religion's influence? In answering this question, he explores the work of three of the Frankfurt School's most esteemed thinkers: Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno. His illuminating analysis offers a highly original account of the intertwined histories of religion and secular modernity. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Emma Griffin's Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (Yale UP, 2020) offers a refreshingly different take on the age of national prosperity in Britain from the 19th to early 20th centuries. Drawing from a collection of autobiographical accounts from largely-working class families, Griffin captures the forgotten stories of ordinary families who struggled to manage financially amidst the growing prosperity of the Victorian era. Her book touches on a range of important social, economic and gender issues that are equally relevant today as they were in their time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Spain has for too long been considered peripheral to the human catastrophes of World War II and the Holocaust. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary, scholarly collection to situate Spain in a position of influence in the history and culture of the Second World War. Featuring essays by international experts in the fields of history, literary studies, cultural studies, political science, sociology, and film studies, this book clarifies historical issues within Spain while also demonstrating the impact of Spain's involvement in the Second World War on historical memory of the Holocaust. Many of the contributors have done extensive archival research, bringing new information and perspectives to the table, and in many cases the essays published here analyze primary and secondary material previously unavailable in English. In Spain, World War Two and the Holocaust: History and Representation (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Brenneis and Hermann have performed a valuable service for scholars of the Holocaust, its memory, and of World War Two generally. In particular, their ability to nuance traditional emphases on Spain's (and Spaniard's) role as a rescuer of Jews is important and timely. The book will be required reading for graduate students and others for the foreseeable future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832 (Brill, 2020) explores the printscape – the mental mapping of knowledge in all its printed shapes – to chart the British networks of publishers, printers, copyright-holders, readers and authors. This transdisciplinary volume skilfully recovers innovations and practices in the book trade between 1688 and 1832. It investigates how print circulated information in a multitude of sizes and media, through an evolving framework of transactions. The authority of print is demonstrated by studies of prospectuses, blank forms, periodicals, pamphlets, globes, games and ephemera, uniquely gathered in eleven essays engaging in legal, economic, literary, and historical methodologies. The tight focus on material format reappraises a disorderly market accommodating a widening audience consumption. Louisiane Ferlier, Ph.D. (2012, Université Paris Diderot), is the Digital Resources Manager at Centre for the History of Science at the Royal Society. She has published articles on John Wallis, the Bodleian Library and cross-Atlantic circulation of books. Bénédicte Miyamoto, Ph.D. (2011, Université Paris Diderot), is Associate Professor of British History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She has published on eighteenth-century drawing manuals, sales catalogues and art markets. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In May 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of global military conflict did not cease with the German capitulation. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate refugees and attempted to repatriate them. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The Last Million would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, temporary homelands in exile, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries. The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of debate and inaction, the International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept refugees for resettlement, finally passed a displaced persons bill. With Cold War fears supplanting memories of World War II atrocities, the bill granted the vast majority of visas to those who were reliably anti-Communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators and war criminals, while severely limiting the entry of Jews, who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the controversial partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (Penguin, 2020) tells the gripping yet until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and, with profound contemporary resonance, shows us that it is our history as well. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at VanLeerIdeas@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
F. B. Chang and S. T. Rucker-Chang's Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison (Cambridge UP, 2020) tackles the movements for - and expressions of - equality for Roma in Central and Southeast Europe and African Americans from two complementary perspectives: law and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book engages with comparative law, European studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory. Its central contribution is to compare the experiences of Roma and African Americans regarding racialization, marginalization, and mobilization for equality. Deploying a novel approach, the book challenges conventional notions of civil rights and paradigms in Romani studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War II, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 (Oxford UP, 2020), begins with the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history: the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese. As in the first volume of Todman's epic account of British involvement in World War II ("Total history at its best," according to Jay Winter), he highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing on its inhabitants, its defenders, and its wartime leadership. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return. It also documents the full impact of the entrance into the war by the United States, and its ascendant stewardship of the war. Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative and research. Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences--at home and abroad--of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain and the world. Bob Wintermute is professor of history at Queens College, CUNY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The life of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country’s politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents—including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career—to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya’s likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist’s personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya’s late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the “black” paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist (Princeton UP, 2020) is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this interview, I talk with Dora Zhang, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, about her book Strange Likeness: Description in the Modernist Novel, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. While description has been “near universally devalued” in literary thinking, and particularly in Modernism, Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers. She focuses on the works of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust to investigate how modernist descriptive techniques shift from a transcription of visuals to a translation and revelation of relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. These writers maintained realism’s descriptive intentions to empirically document the world but expanded these commitments in new ways to render immaterial phenomena into language. In doing so, Zhang carries us beyond the classic dichotomies between narration and description and definition and description in order to rethink description and its place in the novel and, more broadly, literature. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I think this is the fifth time I've interviewed John K. Roth for the podcast (and the second for Carol Rittner). He has always been relentlessly realistic about the challenges, intellectual, practical and emotional, that Holocaust Studies poses. Advancing Holocaust Studies (Routledge, 2020), however, reads differently. Published in a world wracked by political and ideological conflict, the essays here struggle to reconcile the time, energy and devotion Holocaust scholars have poured into their subject with the seeming failure to change real world behavior and attitudes. The essays are personal and honest. They ask hard questions about the value of Holocaust Studies about whether or how it needs to change to confront modern challenges. Rittner and Roth have done their usual wonderful job in finding and publishing an important group of essays. It says nothing about their work to suggest that the essays provide more questions than answers. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As Donald Trump's presidency draws to a close, his opponents give thanks that he never developed a strategy or learned to use his powers and agencies efficiently. If he had, like Hungary's four-term prime minister Viktor Orbán, Trump could have created an "illiberal democracy" - a country with democratic trappings but with a charismatic, nationalist leader in charge of a hegemonic party, politicised institutions, and facing a divided and hobbled opposition. “For two decades after the fall of socialism, Hungary was heralded as a champion of liberal reforms”, says Gábor Scheiring. "The country turned from a laboratory of neoliberalism into a laboratory of illiberalism”. Orbán is a skilful politician, he argues, but his success is built on fundamental economic and political mistakes made by governments of the left in the early days of the transition. The prime minister and his party used this environment to launch a "pre-meditated, systematic and aggressive” campaign to court national rather than transnational capital and replace the socialists as the representatives of "left-behind" working class communities. This is a formidable coalition. Today I talked to Scheiring about his book The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary (Palgrave, 2020). Scheiring is a sociologist and economist, a former Green member of the Hungarian parliament from 2010-2014, and is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Bocconi University in Milan. *His own book recommendation is Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Princeton University Press, 2020) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Albert Camus, one of the most famous French philosophers and novelists, has a diverse fan base. British alternative rockers The Cure sang about The Stranger in their first big hit, “Killing an Arab”, released in 1980. George W. Bush announced that the novel was his summer reading in 2006 (considering the book’s central plot point and what he had unleashed in Iraq, this raised a few eyebrows). In 2009 there was a call to move his remains to the Pantheon. Camus’ concept of the “absurd” continues to resonant with those alienated by late capitalism and The Myth of Sisyphus is regularly invoked by faculty members dealing with university bureaucracies. But few critics properly place Camus and his work in the context of French colonialism. Born in Algeria to an impoverished pied-noir family, he was quite the outsider (dare we say “étranger”?) to the privileged world of French letters. Once a member of the Communist Party, he became a staunch critic of Stalinism and groupthink. When Camus dared to break ranks with the orthodoxy of the Latin Quarter, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Francis Jeanson, and others turned on him. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, his reputation was further tarnished as he struggled to come to terms with the Algerian war for independence. When he died an “absurd” death in a car accident in 1960, his closest associates suppressed the pro-colonial manuscript found in the wreckage. For several decades, Camus was not a central figure in French letters. Yet, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of Sartre’s influence there was a Camus revival. Now he has the posthumous stature of a fallen rock-star. Camus and his legacy are obviously complex. Fortunately, Oliver Gloag’s Albert Camus: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford UP, 2020) offer a concise yet nuanced account of his life and his work. Gloag excels at making Camus’ complicated philosophy accessible, and he successfully contextualizes the author as a settler colonist torn between justice and love of the country of his birth. Oliver Gloag is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He was educated at Columbia University, Tulane University (J.D.), and Duke University (Ph.D.); he specializes in francophone and postcolonial literature, twentieth century French literature, and cultural history. He has published on Sartre and Camus and contributed to The Sartrean Mind. He is the author of Oublier Camus, a forthcoming book on the ideological and political claiming of Camus in contemporary France. His essay “The Colonial Contradictions of Albert Camus” on Camus were featured in Jacobin. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Is Britain a part of Europe? The British have been ambivalent on this question since the Second World War, when the Western European nations sought to prevent the return of fascism by creating strong international ties throughout the Continent. Britain reluctantly joined the Common Market, the European Community, and ultimately the European Union, but its decades of membership never quite led it to accept a European orientation. In the view of the distinguished political scientist Vernon Bogdanor, the question of Britain’s relationship to Europe is rooted in “the prime conflict of our time,” the dispute between the competing faiths of liberalism and nationalism. Britain and Europe in a Troubled World (Yale UP, 2019) provides concise, expertly guided tour provides the essential background to the struggle over Brexit. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We are here today with Jesse Spohnholz, Professor of History and Director of The Roots of Contemporary Issues World History Program at Washington State University in beautiful Pullman, Washington, to talk about his penultimate book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition first published n 2017 by Cambridge University Press and out 2020 in paperback. The Convent of Wesel was long believed to be a clandestine assembly of Protestant leaders in 1568 that helped establish foundations for Reformed churches in the Dutch Republic and northwest Germany. However, Jesse Spohnholz shows that that event did not happen, but was an idea created and perpetuated by historians and record keepers since the 1600s. Appropriately, this book offers not just a fascinating snapshot of Reformation history but a reflection on the nature of historical inquiry itself. The Convent of Wesel begins with a detailed microhistory that unravels the mystery and then traces knowledge about the document at the centre of the mystery over four and a half centuries, through historical writing, archiving and centenary commemorations. Spohnholz reveals how historians can inadvertently align themselves with protagonists in the debates they study and thus replicate errors that conceal the dynamic complexity of the past. The conversation covers the book, of course, with a good discussion about how history is done. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With the coronavirus pandemic, Modern Monetary Theory met its moment. A sudden and massive loss of output globally was met with an unprecedented response by governments and central banks and at least some official regret about excessive fiscal austerity after the 2008-09 crisis. Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy found a ready audience and remains in the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller List six months after publication. Yet, one criticism of her book and of MMT generally is that its proponents, examples and policy proposals are overwhelmingly American and built on assumptions about having a sovereign and dominant global currency. Dirk Ehnts, a leading MMT proponent, seeks to address this criticism in Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2016). In 2020, he published an updated edition in German as Money and Credit: A European Perspective (Metropolis, 2020). Dirk Ehnts earned his doctorate at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg and has worked as an academic economist at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, the Free University Berlin, Bard College Berlin, the Technical University of Chemnitz and the University of Flensburg. In 2019, he organised the first European MMT conference and has scheduled the second for September 2021. *His own book recommendation is Reclaiming the State by William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi (Pluto Press, 2017). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The movement of borders and people was a remarkably common experience for mid-twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europeans. Such was the case along the border between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where territory changed hands in 1938 and again in 1945. During the intervening period and beyond, residents of the borderland were caught in a nearly continuous onslaught of ethnic cleansing - expulsion of Czech and Slovak "colonists," Jewish deportations during the Holocaust, and postwar population exchanges - that was meant to reshape the territory first in the desired image of the Hungarian state and later on in that of Czechoslovakia. Leslie Waters's book Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Forced Migration in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester Press, 2020) examines the impact of border changes and migrations on this region between 1938 and 1948. It investigates the everyday consequences of geopolitical events that are well-known from the perspective of international and national histories, but does so explicitly in the context of the borderland. Making skillful use of state and local archival sources in Hungary and Slovakia, author Leslie Waters illuminates the catastrophic effects of state action - including sweeping wealth redistribution and the expulsion of those perceived as enemies of the state - on individuals. This engagingly written and far-reaching work will be invaluable to scholars of the Holocaust and of East Central Europe as well as to those who study forced migration, population exchange, and inter-ethnic relations. Leslie Waters is assistant professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso (University of Delaware Press, 2019), Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante's Divine Comedy, Luigi Pulci's Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies. Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did the "Reign of Terror" end? In his new book, The Afterlives of Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2019), Ronen Steinberg explores the end of "the Terror" of 1793-94 as a process that included a range of legal, material, ethical, psychological, and emotional challenges. From the vocabulary and stories people used to describe the experience of revolutionary violence, to debates about accountability, redress, and commemoration, Steinberg's book traces the complicated aftermaths of a period that different observers have since characterized as either a part of or apart from the Revolution and its values. Throughout its caerful and provocative chapters, The Afterlives of Terror takes up concepts that have most often been used to think about and examine the Holocaust since the middle of the twentieth century: trauma, transitional justice, and coming to terms with the past. Not seeking to equate the violence of the Terror with the violence of the Holocaust, Steinberg nevertheless suggests that these frames can be used productively to ask questions about how people dealt with and responded to the Revolution's "difficult" past. Thinking with and through these powerful and relatively abstract ideas, each of the chapters in Afterlives remains grounded in specific historical cases and archival materials, illuminating how individuals, as well as the French state and society more broadly, experienced and negotiated the Terror's lasting impact. Adventurous in the questions it poses and the carefully researched and elucidated responses it develops, this compelling book will be of interest to readers working across multiple time periods, national contexts, and disciplines. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s interview on New Books in History is with Dr. Marta Vicente, Professor of History at the University of Kansas to talk about her 2017 Cambridge University Press release, Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Eighteenth-century debates continue to set the terms of modern-day discussions on how ‘nature and nurture’ shape sex and gender. Current dialogs – from the tension between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ bodies, to how nature and society shape sexual difference – date back to the early modern period. Debating Sex and Gender is an innovative study of the creation of a two=sex modern of human sexuality based on different genitalia within Spain, reflecting the enlightened quest to promote social reproduction and stability. Drawing on primary sources such as medical treatises and legal literature, Vicente traces the lives of individuals whose ambiguous sex and gender made them examples for physicians, legislators, and educators for how nature, family upbringing, education, and the social environment shaped an individual’s sex. This book brings together insights form the histories of sexuality, medicine, and the law to shed new light on this timely and important field of study. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we speak to Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London about her 2020 Cambridge University Press publication, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) Professor Rubin is the author of many books, among them Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews, and Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. Cities of Strangers illuminates life in European towns and cities as it was for the settled, and for the 'strangers' or newcomers who joined them between 1000 and 1500. Some city-states enjoyed considerable autonomy which allowed them to legislate on how newcomers might settle and become citizens in support of a common good. Such communities invited bankers, merchants, physicians, notaries and judges to settle and help produce good urban living. Dynastic rulers also shaped immigration, often inviting groups from afar to settle and help their cities flourish. All cities accommodated a great deal of difference - of language, religion, occupation - in shared spaces, regulated by law. But when, from around 1350, plague began regularly to occur within European cities, this benign cycle began to break down. High mortality rates led eventually to demographic crises and, as a result, less tolerant and more authoritarian attitudes emerged, resulting in violent expulsions of even long-settled groups. Tracing the development of urban institutions and using a wide range of sources from across Europe, Miri Rubin recreates a complex picture of urban life for settled and migrant communities over the course of five centuries and offers an innovative vantage point on Europe's past with insights for its present. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Wild horses still roam the mountains of Galicia, Spain. But each year, in a ritual dating to the 1500s called rapa das bestas, villagers herd these “beasts” together and shave their manes and tails. Shaving the Beasts is a firsthand account of how the horses experience this traumatic rite, producing a profound revelation about the durability of sociality in the face of violent domination. John Hartigan Jr. constructs an engrossing, day-by-day narrative chronicling the complex, nuanced social lives of wild horses and the impact of their traumatic ritual shearing every summer. His story generates intimate, individual portraits of these creatures while analyzing the social practices—like grazing and grooming—that are the building blocks of equine society. Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) culminates in a searing portrayal of the inspiring resilience these creatures display as they endure and recover from rapa das bestas. Turning away from “thick” description to “thin,” Hartigan moves toward a more observational form of study, focusing on behaviors over interpretations. This vivid approach provides new and important contributions to the study of animal behavior. Ultimately, he comes away with profound, penetrating insights into multispecies interactions and a strong alternative to humancentric ethnographic practices. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. You can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians have examined in depth the regional context which allowed this assassination to happen or the murder's ripples which quickly spread out across the Balkans, Austria-Hungary and Europe as a whole. In Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Professor Mark Cornwall, a Central European specialist at the University of Southampton, has gathered an impressive cast of contributors from a 2014 history conference to explore the causes of the Sarajevo assassination and its consequences for the Balkans in the context of the First World War. With Professor Cornwall writing a highly informative introductory essay, this volume assesses from a variety of regional perspectives how the 'South Slav Question' destabilized the empire's southern provinces, provoking violent discontent in Croatia and Bosnia, and exacerbating the empire's relations with Serbia, regarded by Austria-Hungary as a dangerous state. It then explores the ripples of the Sarajevo event, from its evolution into a European crisis to the creation of a new independent state of Yugoslavia. Bringing together fresh perspectives by historians from Austria, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia, as well as leading British historians of Austria-Hungary, this book published by Bloomsbury Academic is essential reading for anyone, either specialists or the educated lay reader, who wants to understand the Sarajevo violence and how it shaped modern Balkan history and indeed world history, Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are here with Dr. Ioanna Iordanou, a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Oxford Brookes University and an Honorary Researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick University in Coventry, to talk about her recent book, Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance, out with Oxford University Press in 2019. Venice's Secret Service is the untold and arresting story of the world's earliest centrally-organized state intelligence service. Long before the inception of SIS and the CIA, in the period of the Renaissance, the Republic of Venice had masterminded a remarkable centrally-organized state intelligence organization that played a pivotal role in the defense of the Venetian empire. Housed in the imposing Doge's Palace and under the direction of the Council of Ten, the notorious governmental committee that acted as Venice's spy chiefs, this 'proto-modern' organization served prominent intelligence functions including operations (intelligence and covert action), analysis, cryptography and steganography, cryptanalysis, and even the development of lethal substances. Official informants and amateur spies were shipped across Europe, Anatolia, and Northern Africa, conducting Venice's stealthy intelligence operations. Revealing a plethora of secrets, their keepers, and their seekers, Venice's Secret Service explores the social and managerial processes that enabled their existence and that furnished the foundation for an extraordinary intelligence organization created by one of the early modern world's most cosmopolitan states. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare (Indiana UP, 2020), prominent military historian Professor Jeremy Black offers a comprehensive global account of the history of tanks and armored warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries. First introduced onto the battlefield during the Great War, tanks represented the reconciliation of firepower and mobility and immediately seized the imagination of commanders and commentators concerned about the constraints of ordinary infantry on the western front. The developments of technology and tactics in the interwar years were realized to a degree in the German blitzkrieg in World War II and beyond. Yet the account of armor on the battlefield is a tale of limitations and defeats as well as of potential and achievements. Tank Warfare examines the traditional narrative of armored warfare while at the same time challenging it, and Black suggests that tanks were no "silver bullet" on the battlefield. Tanks very much not being a sort of deus ex machina. Instead, their success was based on their inclusion in the general mix of weaponry available to commanders and the context in which they were used by various armies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020). A clue to its crossover appeal can be found in its original subtitle: "A Critical History." Avoiding the traps of euro-'Whig' or eurosceptical histories, Patel rethinks the development of the European Communities and the European Union from first principles. He concludes that they were just one model among many postwar associations but proved the most evolutionarily fit; that they benefited from peace more than they contributed to it; and that "disintegration and dysfunctionality" were embedded in their design. Having taught at Maastricht University and at the European University Institute in Florence, Kiran Klaus Patel is now professor of European history at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. *Patel's book recommendation is The Capital by Robert Menasse (MacLehose Press, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Roland Betancourt reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, the book offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race. Weaving together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts, Betancourt investigates depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to a host of procedures used to affirm a person’s gender. Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this episode we speak to Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Professor of History at the University of Reading about her new book Medieval Meteorology: Forecasting the Weather from Aristotle to the Almanac, out this year, 2020, with Cambridge University Press. The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in its approach than earlier forms of meteorology, this new science claimed to deliver weather forecasts for months and even years ahead, on the premise that weather is caused by the atmospheric effects of the planets and stars, and mediated by local and seasonal climatic conditions. Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores how these forecasts were made and explains the growing practice of recording actual weather. These records were used to support forecasting practices, and their popularity grew from the fourteenth century onwards. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval science, Medieval Meteorology demonstrates that the roots of scientific forecasting are much deeper than is usually recognized. Professor Lawrence-Mathers is the author of The True History of Merlin the Magician and Magic and Medieval Society,(along with Carolina Escobar-Vargas) as well as a host of articles and reviews about Medieval magic and religion. With this book the author continues her examination of spiritual practice – licit and illicit, clerical and lay – as it was culturally understood in the medieval era. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Konstantina Zanou is an Assistant Professor of Italian and Mediterranean Studies at Columbia University. Her captivating book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2018) investigates the long transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states in the Ionian Adriatic. She narrates the biographies of a group of intellectuals who were born within empires but came of age surrounded by the emerging vocabulary of nationalism. Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850 follows a generation of literati from the Ionian Islands who experienced the collapse of the Republic of Venice and the dissolution of the common cultural and political space of the Adriatic, and who contributed to the creation of Italian and Greek nationalisms. By uncovering this forgotten intellectual universe, the book retrieves a world characterized by multiple cultural, intellectual, and political affiliations that have since been buried under the conventional narrative of the formation of nation-states. Ultimately, Zanou shows how modern nations emerged from an intermingling, rather than a clash, of ideas concerning empire and liberalism, Enlightenment and religion, revolution and conservatism, and East and West.r Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2018) details the life of Hernando Colón as he sailed with his father, Christopher Columbus, on Columbus’s final voyage to the New World, which was a journey of disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library to collect everything ever printed. Colon’s library was a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues—which was really the very first database for exploring a diversity of written matter. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522 set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, and such was a race against time in realizing a vision of near-impossible perfection. Dr. Edward Wilson-Lee teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, and medieval literature for University of Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On today’s New Books in History, we sit down with Dr. Nimisha Barton to discuss her new book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2020). This conversation is a perfect supplemental teaching tool to assign a class reading Reproductive Citizens as is the impressive digital appendices that Dr. Barton created to accompany her work. Building on the massive amount of primary and secondary source material that Dr. Barton examined during research, she built a digital repository and archive for students and researchers to use. Included in these appendices are statistics on foreigners in France and descriptions of sources as well as methodologies. A testament to Dr. Barton’s commitment to diversity and accessibility in education, she provides this resource free to all in the hopes that students and researchers studying women, gender, sexuality, and/or migration can benefit from them. To learn more, please visit this website. About Reproductive Citizens: In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onwards, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative occlusion in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight: the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. Barton's compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately towards a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, Reproductive Citizens shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women, mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Barton concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing—in short, through families and family-making—which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could. Julia Gossard is an Assistant Professor of History, Utah State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Every day, TARGET - Europe's cross-border payments system - processes transactions worth €2.5 trillion. Under its decentralised model, TARGET generates balances between the national central banks. These were tiny at its creation but today – after a decade spanning the financial crisis, the sovereign-debt crisis and now the pandemic recession – Germany's TARGET balance exceeds €1 trillion. In his The Economics of Target Balances: From Lehman to Corona (Palgrave Macmillan), Hans-Werner Sinn says these balances are a "fever thermometer" for the health of the financial system. The system as it is designed, he argues, is unsustainable. Hans-Werner Sinn is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich and was president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research from 1999 until 2016. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
According to legend, the Roman emperor Nero set fire to his majestic imperial capital on the night of July 19, AD 64 and fiddled while the city burned. It's a story that has been told for more than two millennia--and it's likely that almost none of it is true. In Rome Is Burning: Nero and the Fire That Ended a Dynasty (Princeton UP, 2020), distinguished Roman historian Anthony Barrett sets the record straight, providing a comprehensive and authoritative account of the Great Fire of Rome, its immediate aftermath, and its damaging longterm consequences for the Roman world. Drawing on remarkable new archaeological discoveries and sifting through all the literary evidence, he tells what is known about what actually happened--and argues that the disaster was a turning point in Roman history, one that ultimately led to the fall of Nero and the end of the dynasty that began with Julius Caesar. Rome Is Burning tells how the fire destroyed much of the city and threw the population into panic. It describes how it also destroyed Nero's golden image and provoked a financial crisis and currency devaluation that made a permanent impact on the Roman economy. Most importantly, the book surveys, and includes many photographs of, recent archaeological evidence that shows visible traces of the fire's destruction. Finally, the book describes the fire's continuing afterlife in literature, opera, ballet, and film. A richly detailed and scrupulously factual narrative of an event that has always been shrouded in myth, Rome Is Burning promises to become the standard account of the Great Fire of Rome for our time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“My aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores, and what the wider implications of this transformation are and may well be in the future.” So writes Carl Trueman in the introduction to his 2020 book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway Books, 2020) This is a book that progressives should read in order to better understand how social conservatives perceive the massive societal changes, particularly in the realm of sexual politics and identity, of the last 60 years or so. It is a book that social conservatives, particularly Christian ones, should read so as to understand the sexual revolution and, in particular, the normalization of transgenderism. Trueman argues that transgenderism cannot be properly understood without a grasp of a centuries-long transformation in how people in Western societies came to understand the nature of human selfhood. Trueman charts the rise of expressive individualism and how that worldview affects nearly every niche of our lives. He writes, “The sexual revolution does not simply represent a growth in the routine transgression of traditional sexual codes or even a modest expansion of the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior; rather, it involves the abolition of such codes in their entirety. More than that, it has come in certain areas, such as that of homosexuality, to require the positive repudiation of traditional sexual mores to the point where belief in, or maintenance of, such traditional views has come to be seen as ridiculous and even a sign of serious mental or moral deficiency.” Trueman elucidates in depth the ideas of three philosophers of the modern condition: Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre. He traces as well the impact on our own times of a range of thinkers and movements including Rousseau, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, surrealism, Hugh Hefner, Anthony Kennedy, Peter Singer, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, and LGBTQ+ activists. Whatever your political or religious views, this book will endow you with an understanding of the origins of current and future debates about free speech and religious liberty and to judge the merits of the arguments of both sides with humanity. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Visitors around the world have travelled to Europe to see the tall spires and stained glass windows of the continent’s Gothic cathedrals: in Cologne, Chartres, Milan, Florence, York and Paris. The trappings of Gothic architecture have become shorthand for “medieval Europe”. Yet in Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (Hurst: 2020), Diana Darke investigates the Islamic origins of Gothic architecture, tracing its history through pre-Islamic Syria through the Islamic empires to the tall European cathedrals between the 12th and 17th centuries. The book sold out on its first day of sale, in part due to its review in The Guardian, which called the book "an exhilarating, meticulously researched book that sheds light on centuries of borrowing." In this interivew, Diana Darke and I talk about the origins of what we consider to be “Gothic architecture”, how those styles came to Europe, how this history of cultural and intellectual exchange may have gotten lost, and what we miss when we code something as fully “European”, fully “Islamic”, or fully any kind of culture. Diana Darke is an Arabist and cultural expert who has lived and worked in the Middle East for over thirty years. Among her better-known books are The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival and My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of Stealing from the Saracens. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jane K. Wickersham (Associate Professor of History, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Amanda L. Scott (Assistant Professor, Penn State University) about her new book The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020). Neither wives nor nuns, the seroras fulfilled an essential religious role in early modern Basque communities. Amanda L. Scott explores the lives of the devout laywomen who cared for and maintained churches and shrines in the Basque country, and in so doing reconceptualizes how to frame the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women. Seroras performed essential religious work in their communities; yet they only made simple promises (rather than holy vows), rendering their religious vocations more flexible and their lifestyle more autonomous. Using a wide variety of archival sources, in over seven chapters Scott analyzes the seroras’ relationships with diocesan officials and local communities. Despite the Tridentine-era efforts to more strictly regulate the lives of religious women, Scott finds that both episcopal authorities and communities had a vested interest in negotiating and maintaining the seroras in their religious roles. They were seen as essential to the maintenance of the church, physically and spiritually, and as collaborators in furthering some aspects of Tridentine reform. Scott sensitively explores these women’s work, and the complexities, ambiguities, and conflicts engendered by their autonomous religious status. Scott, in this important book, closely examines the lived experiences of seroras to reach a new understanding of the nature of religious reform in early modern Iberia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard UP, 2020) recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver's seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a "ghost state" set adrift by the fall of the empire. D'Annunzio's ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I talked to Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales about their book Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense (Abbreviated Press, 2020). The Códice Casanatense, or Codex Casanatense 1889 as it is formally known, is a 16th-century Indo-Portuguese collection of some 76 captioned watercolours now held in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. Deposited there at the beginning of the 18th century, it resided in almost complete obscurity for two and half centuries and was not brought to scholarly attention until the 1950s. It has never been discussed in detail for the general reader. Painted by an Indian artist, and annotated in Portuguese, the Codex is a remarkable work of collaboration that portrays the peoples, costumes and customs of a region extending from Africa to China. This region, crossed by Portuguese explorers and traders, maps on what is now commonly called the Maritime Silk Road. Lively and evocative, the Códice Casanatense is a unique historical record that provides a human window into an Asia that Europeans were only just entering and a first testimony of an encounter that would transform the world. Although the painter has deep connections with Indian artistic traditions, he also drew upon the illustrations in Balthasar Sprenger's iconic 1509 Die Merfart, while the Codex itself was a source for the illustrations in Jan Huygen van Linschoten's classic end-of-the-century Itinerario. Both influenced and influencing, the Codex is unveiled as an archetypal example of East-West cultural and intellectual fusion. Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books and publisher of Chameleon Press. He was also a founder of the Man Asian Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Juan José Morales is an entrepreneur and historian who has published a variety of works ranging from poetry anthologies to works on arts and culture. Jenny Peruski is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her research focuses on ornamentation and bodily adornment in coastal eastern Africa. She can be reached by email at jperuski@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled account of a critical period of world history, the interwar years, in which the world transitioned from postwar to the prewar and saw the disintegration of collective security and international institutions created after the First World War. Drawing on international history’s methodology of multi-archival research, Jankowski constructs an elegantly written and deeply researched narrative history of this decline by looking at both high-level diplomacy and the changing popular mentalities that influenced many of the decisions of policymakers. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book Empire of Law: Nazi Germany, Exile Scholars, and the Battle for the Future of Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020), Kaius Tuori examines the inherent unity of European legal traditions that extend to ancient Rome. This book explores the invention of this tradition, tracing it to a group of legal scholars divided by the onslaught of Nazi terror and totalitarianism in Europe. As exiles in Britain and the US, its formulators worked to build bridges between the Continental and the Atlantic legal traditions, incorporating ideas such as rule of law, liberty, and equality to the European heritage. Others joined the Nazi revolution, which promoted its own idea of European unity. At the end of World War Two, natural law and human rights were incorporated into the European project. The resulting narrative of Europe, one that outlined human rights, rule of law, and equality, became consequently a unifying factor during the Cold War as the self-definition against the challenge of communism. Kaius Tuori is Professor of European Intellectual History at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on Twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 changed the lives of English republicans for good. Despite the Declaration of Breda, where Charles II promised to forgive those who had acted against his father and the monarchy during the Civil War and Interregnum, opponents of the Stuart regime felt unsafe, and many were actively persecuted. Nevertheless, their ideas lived on in the political underground of England and in the exile networks they created abroad. While much of the historiography of English republicanism has focused on the British Isles and the legacy of the English Revolution in the American colonies, this study traces the lives, ideas and networks of three seventeenth-century English republicans who left England for the European continent after the Restoration. Based on sources from a range of English and continental European archives, Gaby Mahlberg’s The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration (Cambridge University Press, 2020) explores the lived experiences of these three exiles - Edmund Ludlow in Switzerland, Henry Neville in Italy, and Algernon Sidney - for a truly transnational perspective on early modern English republicanism. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Andrea Pető's book The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) analyses the actions, background, connections and the eventual trials of Hungarian female perpetrators in the Second World War through the concept of invisibility. It examines why and how far-right women in general and among them several Second World War perpetrators were made invisible by their fellow Arrow Cross Party members in the 1930s and during the war (1939-1945), and later by the Hungarian people's tribunals responsible for the purge of those guilty of war crimes (1945-1949). It argues that because of their 'invisibilization' the legacy of these women could remain alive throughout the years of state socialism and that, furthermore, this legacy has actively contributed to the recent insurgence of far-right politics in Hungary. This book therefore analyses how the invisibility of Second World War perpetrators is connected to twenty-first century memory politics and the present-day resurgence of far-right movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges us with an extensive psychological profile of the legend here revealed as scam artist. What some analysts might argue to be a 750 page character assassination, Crews maintains is simply a recitation of facts which leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. One might wonder if the story of facts that is conveyed is not itself a counter myth. Was Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over twentieth century thought? Making use of Freud’s extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man. How can this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of the man undo the gift of his work? In this interview Crews responds to questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test” the process of healing, what’s so tempting about Freud, and what should become of psychoanalysis today. Meticulously researched, the Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he’s going in for the kill shot.
Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in NYC. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘digital humanities’, a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our ability to answer some of the ‘big questions’ that drive humanities research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways. In the book’s opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects’ institutional and intellectual histories, the techniques and methodologies they specifically developed, the sometimes-painful lessons learned in the process, future trajectories for their research, and how their findings are revising previous understandings. A second section features chapters from early career scholars working at the intersection of digital methods and Enlightenment studies, an intellectual space largely forged by the projects featured in part one. Highlighting current and future research methods and directions for digital eighteenth-century studies, the book offers a monument to the current state of digital work, an overview of current findings, and a vision statement for future research. Simon Burrows is a Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University, Australia, where he is Leader of the Digital Humanities Research Group. Glenn Roe is Professor of French Literature and Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Letters at Sorbonne University, where he teaches into the UFR of French and Comparative Literature and is attached to the Centre d’étude de la langue et des littératures françaises (CELLF UMR 8599) and the LabEx OBVIL. Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1930s Bucharest, some of the country's most brilliant young intellectuals converged to form the Criterion Association. Bound by friendship and the dream of a new, modern Romania, their members included historian Mircea Eliade, critic Petru Comarnescu, Jewish playwright Mihail Sebastian and a host of other philosophers and artists. Together, they built a vibrant cultural scene that flourished for a few short years, before fascism and scandal splintered their ranks. In Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association (Palgrave, 2019), Cristina A. Bejan asks how the far-right Iron Guard came to eclipse the appeal of liberalism for so many of Romania's intellectual elite, drawing on diaries, memoirs and other writings to examine the collision of culture and extremism in the interwar years. The first English-language study of Criterion and the most thorough to date in any language, this book grapples with the complexities of Romanian intellectual life in the moments before collapse. Cristina A. Bejan is a historian, theatre artist, and poet. A Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, she has had fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Wilson Center and Georgetown University. A playwright and spoken word artist, her creative work has appeared in the US, UK, Romania and Vanuatu. Bejan runs the arts and culture collective Bucharest Inside the Beltway (BiB), based in Denver, CO. Please visit www.cristinaabejan.com for more info. You can also follow her on social media: Cristina A. Bejan (Facebook); @CristinaABejan (Twitter); Cristina A. Bejan PhD (LinkedIn); & BiB at @BiBDenver (Facebook) and @bucharestinsidethebeltway (Instagram). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics. In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into their works, from political statements about national origin, to diagrammatic expressions of cosmological theories. The mappae mundi provided a medium for medieval Icelanders to imagine their place in relation to the wider world, and even the physical universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Awareness of the EU's undeniable past and present importance can - and has - led to complacency and hubris. There is nothing inevitable about European integration". So writes Mark Gilbert in European Integration: A Political History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), a compact, narrative history of the European Communities and the European Union pitched at both political-science students and the general reader. Sympathetic to the integration process but critical of “Whig” histories of unstoppable federal progress, Gilbert makes a case for traditional “villains” – Charles De Gaulle and Margaret Thatcher – as simply advocates of alternative models of governance. Mark Gilbert is resident professor of international history at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Bologna and Associate Editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Ara Marjian, Professor of Italian and affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at New York University about his newest book Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Paosolini, a filmmaker who created art in a variety of media, has something approaching a cult following. Merjian explores, “Pasolini’s fraught relationship to the aesthetic experiments of his own age… [and] demonstrates how Pasolini's campaign against neocapitalist culture fueled his hostility to the avant-garde. An atheist indebted to Catholic ritual; a revolutionary communist inimical to the creed of 1968; a homosexual hostile to the project of gay liberation: Pasolini refused the politics of identity in favor of a scandalously paradoxical practice, one vital to any understanding of his legacy. Against the Avant-Garde examines these paradoxes through case studies from the 1960s and 1970s, concluding with a reflection on Pasolini's far-reaching influence on post-1970s art. Merjian not only reconsiders the multifaceted work of Italy's most prominent postwar intellectual, but also the fraught politics of a European neo-avant-garde grappling with a new capitalist hegemony.” Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At the book’s center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens. Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. She reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age. Akash Ondaatje is a Research Associate at Know History. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820 Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, a 2019 Harvard University Press release. In this book, Professor Strocchia continues the work of her career: recentering the discourse to include the formative contributions of women in the Italian Renaissance. Through a discussion of Medici women, convent pharmacists, and hospital nurses, Strocchia adeptly argues that women played a leading role in the development of Renaissance medicine. Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) by Prof. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book that tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. Here, Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure – discussing how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more importantly, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. Yahaya explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. In order to ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law—even against fellow Muslims. Fluid Jurisdictions draws on lively material from multiple international archives to demonstrate the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played themselves out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a legal historian of the Indian Ocean. She is currently Assistant Professor at the History Department, National University of Singapore (NUS). She was a Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute until June 2016, NUS. She is the Editor of the World Legal History Blog on Humanities and Social Sciences Online (H-net). She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in 2012, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies in Washington University in St. Louis until June 2015. She has published journal articles in Law and History Review, Indonesia and the Malay World, and The Muslim World. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Janna Aladdin is a recent MA graduate of NYU’s Near Eastern studies program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On Good Friday, 1626, Franciscus Quaresmius delivered a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem calling on King Philip IV of Spain to undertake a crusade to 'liberate' the Holy Land. Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade (Routledge, 2019) introduces readers to this unique call to arms with the first-ever edition of the work since its publication in 1631. Aside from an annotated English translation of the sermon, this book also includes a series of introductory chapters providing historical context and textual commentary, followed by an anthology of Spanish crusading texts that testify to the persistence of the idea of crusade throughout the 17th century. Quaresmius' impassioned and thoroughly reasoned plea is expressed through the voice of Jerusalem herself, personified as a woman in bondage. The friar draws on many of the same rhetorical traditions and theological assumptions that first launched the crusading movement at Clermont in 1095, while also bending those traditions to meet the unique concerns of 17th-century geopolitics in Europe and the Mediterranean. Quaresmius depicts the rescue of the Holy City from Turkish abuse as a just and necessary cause. Perhaps more unexpectedly, he also presents Jerusalem as sovereign Spanish territory, boldly calling on Philip as King of Jerusalem and Patron of the Holy Places to embrace his royal duty and reclaim what is rightly his on behalf of the universal faithful. Quaresmius' early modern call to crusade ultimately helps us rethink the popular assumption that, like the chivalry imagined by Don Quixote, the crusades somehow died along with the middle ages. Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While it has often been recognized that counsel formed an essential part of the political discourse in early modern England, the precise role that it occupied in the development of political thinking has remained obscure. Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020) establishes the importance of the relationship between political counsel and the discourse of sovereignty. Tracing the changes and evolution of writings on political counsel during the “monarchy of counsel,” from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the end of the English Civil War, Joanne Paul examines English thought in its domestic and transnational context, providing an original account of the relationship between counsel and emerging conceptions of sovereignty. Formed at the conjunction of the history of political thought and English political history, this book grounds textual analysis within the context of court politics, intellectual and patronage networks, and diplomacy. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution (University of California Press, 2020), Niklas Frykman recounts how these two factors combined to shape the mutinies that took place throughout the era. As he explains, recruiting crews for the navies of the era was typically a coercive process, one that took sailors away from more remunerative work in the merchant marine. Crowded aboard wooden warships, these men were often discontent and receptive to the idea of a more democratic process for governing ship life. This radical vision was reflected in the demands made by sailors when they mutinied and by the alternate forms of management they adopted. Such mutinies jeopardized operations in navies throughout Europe, until the growing influence of nationalism helped to counteract the influence of the transnational “maritime republic.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Tolan’s latest book Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton UP, 2019) is a fascinating and rich survey of the complex perceptions of Muhammad as understood by Christian Europeans. Using sources that range from art to literature to history to theater to religion, Tolan shows that portrayals of Muhammad are varied and complex – indeed contradictory – and reveal more about the context in which these images appear than about Muhammad or Islam. In other words, the non-Muslim European discourse on Muhammad reflects the writers’ own preoccupations at home. Views about Muhammad are varied and complex, Tolan argues, and not always negative as is often highlighted. Sure, Muhammad is a false prophet, a heretic, a trickster, an idol, in some cases, but he’s also a role model, a hero, a great leader in others, sometimes in the same time period. For instance, while during the Crusades, Muhammad is a false prophet and the primary opponent of the Christian writers, during the Protestant Reformation, the prophet of Islam is received more positively, although not consistently: he is instrumentalized in the polemics between the various Christian groups such that each group – specifically the Protestants, the Catholics, the Unitarians – hold differing views on Muhammad, and parallels are drawn between him and the writer’s contemporary heroes or opponents. In today’s discussion, Tolan shares with us the primary contributions and arguments of the book, including specific depictions of Muhammad and the contexts that shape them, legends associated with Muhammad involving bulls and doves and floating coffins, the Christian doctrine of Immaculate Conception and its relevance to Muhammad, Jewish authors’ perception of and relationship with Muhammad, and more.
Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and interreligious marriage. She has a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy; the vlog is available at https://www.youtube.com/whatthepatriarchy. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In September 2008, Ewald Nowotny joined the governing council of the European Central Bank. Just two weeks later, Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in US history - so triggering a global financial crisis and recession. In September 2019, he retired just before the coronavirus pandemic struck. This book charts the political and literary development of a young Social Democrat economist in postwar Vienna, his education in Austria and the US, and his experience in banking in the pre-Lehman stage of the crisis. For "ECB-watchers", Geld und Leben (Braumüller Verlag, 2020) provides a fascinating insight into the contrasting presidencies of Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, into how council meetings are conducted, and the ruses used by members to influence the markets. Now a self-styled "independent economist", Ewald Nowotny was a professor of economics at Vienna and Linz universities, a member of Austria's parliament, a vice-president of the European Investment Bank, and governor of the Austrian National Bank. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are joined by Grégory Quin, maître d’enseignement et de recherche à l’Institut des sciences du sport de l’Université de Lausanne, and he is the author and editor of Des Réseaux et des Hommes: Participation et Contribution de la Suisse à l’Internationalisation du Sport (1912-1972) (Éditions Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses, 2019). Thanks to funding from the Swiss government, this volume is available as an e-livre for free. https://www.alphil.com/index.php/auteurs/vonnard-philippe/des-reseaux-et-des-hommes.html In our conversation we discussed Switzerland’s particular role in world sport, the sportification of skiing in Switzerland, and Ernst Thommen’s position as FIFA mediator, bringing Germany back into global football after World War II. In Des Réseaux et des Hommes, Quin joins nine other scholars in a critical examination of Switzerland’s sports history. While Switzerland plays host to many international sports organizations and while Swiss people have been overrepresented in the ranks of international sportocrats, there is still much to know about how Switzerland and Swiss people came to play such an important role in the sports world. This book is divided into two sections. The first part investigates the role of networks (réseau) that helped to shape Swiss sports. These networks included a range of domestic organizations: sporting, commercial (such as hoteliers), and governmental. They also included international networks, but especially with neighbouring Italy, France, and Germany. The second half of the book looks at Swiss individuals (hommes) and their role in what Barbara Keys called the international sporting community (and what Quin et al. call the communauté internationale sportive.) They uncover a host of Swiss men – inevitably men – who worked in international organizations. Their language skills and their experience negotiating the different levels of Swiss government made them ideal sports bureaucrats. They served groups like the IOC and FIFA for a variety of motives, but also predictably in the service of Swiss notions of diplomacy and soft power. Each one of these essays in this volume offers enticing insights into the growth of international sport and its ongoing and particular Swiss character. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. It will come out with Manchester University Press in 2021. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A startling look at the unexpected places where violent hate groups recruit young people. Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities across America and around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements. Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020) shows how tomorrow's far-right nationalists are being recruited in surprising places, from college campuses and mixed martial arts gyms to clothing stores, online gaming chat rooms, and YouTube cooking channels. Instead of focusing on the how and why of far-right radicalization, Cynthia Miller-Idriss seeks answers in the physical and virtual spaces where hate is cultivated. Where does the far right do its recruiting? When do young people encounter extremist messaging in their everyday lives? Miller-Idriss shows how far-right groups are swelling their ranks and developing their cultural, intellectual, and financial capacities in a variety of mainstream settings. She demonstrates how young people on the margins of our communities are targeted in these settings, and how the path to radicalization is a nuanced process of moving in and out of far-right scenes throughout adolescence and adulthood. Hate in the Homeland is essential for understanding the tactics and underlying ideas of modern far-right extremism. This eye-opening book takes readers into the mainstream places and spaces where today's far right is engaging and ensnaring young people, and reveals innovative strategies we can use to combat extremist radicalization. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Renaissance humanists and the Holy Roman Empire haven’t mixed well in most scholarship. Humanists were supposed to be learned exponents of liberty. Often employed by Italian city-states, their civic pride and positive valuation of the ancient Roman Republic meant, it was claimed, that empire was anathema to them. But in a lucidly written and penetrating study of the early Renaissance, Dr. Alexander Lee turns these narratives on their heads. Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 2018) looks at the relationship between humanists of northern Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. It finds, for example, that humanists working for both republican and autocratic cities could fit their politics onto an imperial landscape drafted on a classicizing canvass. They debated the universality of imperial dominion, the spheres of authority between pope and emperor, and much besides. Impressively, this study is grounded in the frenetic politics of the fourteenth century, and Dr. Lee demonstrates the extent to which humanist assessments of empire responded in lockstep with the shifting sands of Italian affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What are the identity conflicts that define contemporary society? In Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020) Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, professors of politics at the University of Manchester, explore the long term, structural changes in British society that underpinned the 2016 referendum on EU membership, the 2017 and 2019 general elections, as well as contemporary political debates and future questions such as voting on Scottish independence. At the heart of the book is the identification of new identity groups- both liberal and conservative- that have been shaped by changes in education and diversity, as well as by politicians’ and political parties’ behaviours. Offering historical analysis of immigration and public opinion, as well as a rich and detailed engagement with contemporary social attitudes, the book is essential reading both in the UK and in other nations seeing the rise of similar forms of social change and attitudinal conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies we speak with Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of the new book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2020) A comprehensive study of adaptation across media, form and genre, this book argues passionately for the importance of adaptation to our understanding of literary texts. For Lopez Szwydky, adaptation does not just constitute the afterlife of the adapted work, but instead it forms part of the dynamic process that brings the work to life. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century explores a range of works by authors such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, John Keats and many more. Filled with engaging case studies, this book charts the evolution of literary narratives across novels, illustrations, stage plays, chapbooks, commercial merchandise and more. Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville where she teaches courses in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Adaptation Studies, Gender Studies and Career Education. You can follow her work on her website at http://www.lissettesz.com/ Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century is now available on the Ohio State University Press website https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214237.html and other online retailers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
If the US is – in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – the "indispensible nation" then the economic, democratic and institutional alliance between the US and the EU is the “essential partnership”. So argues Tony Gardner, Barack Obama’s ambassador to the EU and advisor to Joe Biden’s campaign for president in his new book Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), The EU-US partnership has its frustrations and failings, he writes, but has quietly delivered on trade liberalization, data management, defense and law enforcement, leverage against Russia and Iran, and energy security. If Biden wins in November, these joint projects will be expanded and the fight against climate change brought to the forefront but “time will be short and pressure will be really high” to prove that working with allies achieves more than unilateralism. Tony Gardner was US ambassador to the EU from 2014-2017 and a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council in 1994-1995. He is now a managing partner at Brookfield Asset Management, a board member of Iberdrola, and senior counsel in the law firm Sidley Austin where he works on trade, data privacy and cybersecurity. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sir Noel Malcolm’s captivating new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), tells the story of Western European fascination with the Ottoman empire and Islam between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the latter half of the 18th century. This beautifully argued, erudite monograph traces a textured encounter between two civilizational complexes and exposes the dynamic role that the Ottomans played in intra-European political and cultural struggles. Useful Enemies contends that ideas about the Ottomans were active ingredients in European thought, and were used to “shake things up, to provoke, to shame, to galvanise.” Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics - power, religion, society, and war. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which significantly contributed to the development of Western political thought. Sir Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. His main research interests are in British and European early modern history. Sir Noel is one of the foremost scholars of Thomas Hobbes. His other interests concern Western knowledge of the Ottoman empire and Balkan history. Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1618, on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, the German alchemist and physician Michael Maier published Atalanta fugiens, an intriguing and complex musical alchemical emblem book designed to engage the ear, eye, and intellect. The book unfolds as a series of fifty emblems, each of which contains an accompanying "fugue" music scored for three voices. Historians of alchemy have long understood this virtuoso work as an ambitious demonstration of the art’s literary potential and of the possibilities of the early modern printed book. Atalanta fugiens lends itself unusually well to today’s digital tools. Re-rendering Maier’s multimedia alchemical project as an enhanced online publication, Furnace and Fugue allows contemporary readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate Atalanta fugiens in ways that Maier perhaps imagined but that were impossible to fully realize before now. An interactive, layered digital edition provides accessibility and flexibility, presenting all the elements of the original book along with significant enhancements that allow for deep engagement by specialists and nonspecialists alike. Three short introductory essays invite readers to get acquainted with early modern alchemy, and Michael Maier. Eight extended interpretive essays explore Atalanta fugiens and its place in the history of music, science, print, and visual culture in early modern Europe. These interdisciplinary essays also include interactive features that clarify and/or advance the authors’ arguments while positioning Furnace and Fugue as an original, uniquely engaging contribution to our understanding of early modern culture. Drs. Bilak and Nummedal are the editors of this innovative digital edition of a seventeenth-century alchemical text that combines text, image, and music. Furnace & Fugue was developed by Brown University’s Mellon-supported Digital Publications Initiative, and published by the University of Virginia Press (2020) as an open-access edition. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Social Science Research Institute at Brown University. Dr. Bilak is an academic and a goldsmith. She is the Creative Director of 12 Keys Consultancy & Design, LLC, and an Independent Scholar. She is an historian of early modern science Donna's research extends to the cross-cultural examination of jewellery, artisanal technologies, and meaning-making with materials. Dr. Nummedal is Professor of History and of Italian Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). With Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, she published John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), Martyn Rady, Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London, tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built -- and then lost -- over nearly a millennium. From modest origins in what is to-day southern Germany and Switzerland, the Habsburgs gained control first of Austria in the 12th century and then the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe, stretching from Hungary to Spain, and parts of the New World and the Far East. The Habsburgs continued to dominate Central Europe through the First World War. Historians often depict the Habsburgs as leaders of a ramshackle empire. But in this wide-ranging view of their past, Professor Rady reveals Habsburg’s enduring power, driven by the belief that they were destined to rule the world as defenders of the Roman Catholic Church, guarantors of peace, and patrons of learning. The Habsburgs is a highly interesting and readable history of a remarkable dynasty that forever changed Europe and the world. A perfect book for the lay educated reader who has heard of the dynasty but wants to know more. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Protestant Reformation looms large in our cultural imagination. In the standard telling, it’s the moment the world went modern. Casting off the shackles and superstitions of medieval Catholicism, reformers translated the Bible into the vernacular and democratized religion. In this story, it’s no wonder that Protestantism should give birth to liberalism. But this story is wrong, or so argues James Simpson in Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019). In Simpson’s account, liberalism did not flow neatly from Protestant triumph. Liberalism and Protestantism are indeed intertwined, but in a much more violent, anguished way than we’re familiar with. The logic of revolution meant that Protestants increasingly turned against themselves and their own traditions. It was from the embers of this self-destructive conflagration that liberalism actually took shape. Vaulting lyrically from Shakespeare to Milton, from hypocrisy to magic, biblical literalism, and liberty, Simpson challenges the stories we tell ourselves. The result is a much more dynamic narrative of a world, like our own, in a state of flux. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores commemorative practices as they developed in the nineteenth century. The editors of the volume, Katherine Grenier and Amanda Mushal, and its contributors invite the readers to consider memorial practices as insights into the culture of both the public and the private. Through a number of investigations that range from the explorations of music to the study of photographs, the volume emphasizes the interplay of the individual and the society on a larger scale. On the one hand, commemorative practices zero in on the individual: remembering loved ones; honoring friends and acquaintances; celebrating the accomplishments of others, as well as forgetting some events while selecting others to construct family and community stories. On the other hand, however, memorial practices almost always surpass the realm of the private. The volume demonstrates how individual instances of commemorative practices contribute to the formation of the public/national/international paradigms of collective and cultural memory. Moreover, Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration demonstrates the continuity of commemorative practices which were to some extent incepted and developed in the nineteenth century: in spite of the new technologies which this way or another shape the way we remember and forget, the commemorative consumption of the present day reflects the rudiments of the previous centuries. This memorial continuity is an essential factor in how to manage the inherent discontinuity of remembering and forgetting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Stefan Bauer has written an outstanding study of one of the most important Catholic historians in early modern Europe. Bauer, who has just taken up a new position teaching history at Warwick University, UK, has spent much of the last decade working on the life and work of Onofrio Panvinio. The result, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform (Oxford UP, 2020), updates our knowledge of Panvinio’s biography and interprets his work in both Catholic reformation and counter-reformation contexts. This exceptional new book promises to do much to shape future work on history writing in early modern Europe. Tune into today’s episode to find out more. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of Survival and Resistance in evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford UP, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
One was a teenage Jewish girl, forcibly transported from her home in Hungary to a Nazi concentration camp. The other was a British doctor, whose experiences serving in two world wars could not compare to the horrors he saw at the end of the war. In her book All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Bernice Lerner describes their lives – one of them her mother, the other one of the people who helped save her – and how they intersected when British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. For Rachel Genuth, her life began to change when Hungarian troops marched into the formerly Romanian town of Sighet in September 1940. From that point onward, her family’s lives and those of her neighbors were increasingly restricted until they were deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. While she struggled to survive, H. L. Glyn Hughes, the deputy director of medical services for the British VIII Corps, participated in the Allied liberation of western Europe, an experience that brought him to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where Rachel had been marched ahead of the Soviet advance to the east. Hughes spent the next several months organizing an unprecedented relief operation, trying desperately to save lives of thousands suffering from starvation and disease. Among them was Rachel, who was subsequently evacuated to Sweden, where she began the slow process of restarting her live after having survived so much death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Since its 2017 publication, Ben Vinson III's book Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Cambridge University Press) has opened new dimensions on race in Latin America by examining the extreme caste groups of colonial Mexico. In tracing their experiences, a broader understanding of the connection between mestizaje (Latin America's modern ideology of racial mixture) and the colonial caste system is rendered. However, before this term, mestizaje, emerged as a primary concept in Latin America, an earlier precursor existed. This colonial form of racial hybridity, encased in an elastic caste system, allowed some people to live through multiple racial lives. Hence, the great fusion of races that swept Latin America and defined its modernity, carries an important corollary. Mestizaje, when viewed at its roots, is not just about mixture, but also about dissecting and reconnecting lives. Such experiences may have carved a special ability for some Latin American populations to reach across racial groups to relate with and understand multiple racial perspectives. This overlooked, deep history of mestizaje is a legacy that can be built upon in modern times. Ben Vinson III is Provost and Executive Vice President at Case Western Reserve University. He was awarded Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History for Before Mestizaje. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Young women and men sought out each other’s company in the workshops, cabarets, and streets of Old Regime Lyon, and evidence of these relationships lingers in documents and material objects conserved in Lyon’s municipal and departmental archives. How did young workers spend time together? When would they initiate sexual relationships outside of marriage? What resources did they marshal to manage pregnancy and childbirth, and what kind of support might they expect from their neighbors, employers, and families? In paternity suits, young women provided direct answers to these questions, and left an incomparable archive testifying to their desires, hopes, loss, and often, grief resulting from “courtships gone awry.” Today I spoke with Julie Hardwick about her new book Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789 (Oxford UP, 2020). Hardwick is the John E. Green Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Hardwick’s previous books include Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economy of Everyday Life in Early Modern France (2009) and The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (1998). Jennifer J. Davis is Co-Editor, Journal of Women’s History and Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Charles F. Walker’s Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru, 2020, is part of Oxford University Press’ Graphic History Series, which takes serious archival research and puts it into a comic format. For this volume, the brilliant Liz Clarke illustrated Dr. Walker’s biography of a ½ brother of José Gabriel Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru, the leader of the 1780-1783 Tupac Amaru Rebellion. Juan Bautista was a relatively minor figure in the revolt who was arrested with scores of others in the Spanish repression of the rebellion but was not executed. Instead he spent decades in brutal confinement on three different continents. His life interacts with several phases of the Age of Revolution and offers a subaltern perspective on the era. Listeners should find the Latin American angle on the Age of Revolution particularly enlightening. Witness to the Age of Revolution does a stunning job at literally illustrating the sprawling Spanish empire from Peru to Argentina and Cadiz and on to North Africa. Liz Clarke’s gorgeous artwork bring images of Iberian colonialism to life in vivid color. We also get a solid introduction to maritime history as Juan Bautista is transported halfway around the world. Witness to the Age of Revolution is a fascinating story, comparable to the tales of the Man in the Iron mask as told by Alexandre Dumas. Walker’s account of Juan Bautista’s suffering, the friendship between the Andean prisoner and an Augustinian priest, and the rebel finally achieved his freedom will engross readers. Charles Walker is Professor of History and the Director of the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California, Davis, who has held a MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair in International Human Rights. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her book, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020), Mira L. Siegelberg traces the history of the concept of statelessness in the years following the First and Second World Wars. At its core, this thoughtful monograph is an intellectual history of an idea that jurists in the United States and Europe struggled to agree upon after the fall of traditional imperial ways of structuring belonging. Siegelberg’s book examines how debates regarding statelessness redefined many of the core concepts that structured modern politics, such as sovereignty, citizenship, and the broad spectrum of terms in English, French, and German that described the state of not having a national affiliation. The book’s methodologically pluralist approach also brings many other aspects of the problem of statelessness into focus, such its implications on the global humanitarian crisis that followed these two conflicts, its resonance in particular ethnic communities, and the way it redefined many ideas about citizenship. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of empire and law, international history, the history of migration, and a range of other topics in global history. Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In January 2020, the UK became the first country to leave the European Union after a troubled 47-year membership. What was at the core of the country’s semi-detachment to the EU? Was the UK’s eventual inevitable or was it a tragedy of errors and misunderstandings borne of divergent political cultures? What does the future hold for the relationship? In his new book Reluctant European: Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit (Oxford UP, 2020), Stephen Wall provides unique insight with this narrative political history, having served in the foreign office from 1968, worked for two prime ministers, and ended his career as the UK’s Permanent Representative to the EU in Brussels then as head of the European policy for Tony Blair. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP 2020), Jill Richards radically rewrites our understanding of first-wave feminism by demonstrating its proximity to international avant-garde movements including surrealism, Dada, and futurism. Using case studies including the movement for a proletarian birth strike, the anti-Nazi pranks of Claude Cahun, and the theatre of Ina Cesaire, Richards shows that our understanding of early 20th-century women activists as stodgy and conservative is woefully inadequate. While some among the turn of the century feminist movement saw suffrage as the primary goal, others dreamed of revolution, decolonization, and a world where art was life and life was art. Richards also shows how these forgotten feminisms sharply depart from the liberal understandings of human rights taking shape alongside them. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The event that is commonly labeled as the ‘Holocaust’, was one of the most horrific of the Twentieth Century. It is also one of the most popularly discussed events of both the past and the current century. And like many popular events it is filled with mis-understandings and mis-interpretations. Here to explicate and clarify this most important of events is master-historian and polymath, Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, CMG in his book, The Holocaust: History and Memory (Indiana University Press). The most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world to-day, Professor Black is precisely the type of historian to bring some light and clarity to this darkest of events. Black’s book takes the reader from the 19th century to the present day, all the while endeavoring to explicate for the lay educated reader and the academic one, his take on the causation of the Holocaust. A book which without a doubt should be on the bookshelf of anyone who is seriously interested in this most fraught of topics. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For readers – including non-economists – who want to get to grips with the nature and scale of the last financial crisis, how it was managed and mismanaged, and its particular impact on a small, open economy, Patrick Honohan's book Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (Cambridge UP, 2020) This is, in part, because it covers complex issues yet is written for a non-specialist audience. But mostly it’s because, as Olivier Blanchard says, this is “financial crisis, seen from the driver’s seat". Honohan is not just an accomplished monetary economist with a lot to say but he was also, from 2009 to 2015, the governor of the Central Bank of Ireland and a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank. His book combines a monetary and financial history of Ireland since independence, theory and history around the formation of the Euro Area, an assessment of lessons learned from the crisis, and a behind-the-scenes memoir of how the crisis was fought. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At the end of the twentieth century, many believed the story of European political development had come to an end. Modern democracy began in Europe, but for hundreds of years it competed with various forms of dictatorship. Now, though, the entire continent was in the democratic camp for the first time in history. But within a decade, this story had already begun to unravel. Some of the continent's newer democracies slid back towards dictatorship, while citizens in many of its older democracies began questioning democracy's functioning and even its legitimacy. And of course it is not merely in Europe where democracy is under siege. Across the globe the immense optimism accompanying the post-Cold War democratic wave has been replaced by pessimism. Many new democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia began "backsliding," while the Arab Spring quickly turned into the Arab winter. The victory of Donald Trump led many to wonder if it represented a threat to the future of liberal democracy in the United States. Indeed, it is increasingly common today for leaders, intellectuals, commentators and others to claim that rather than democracy, some form dictatorship or illiberal democracy is the wave of the future. In Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day (Oxford University Press, 2019), author and Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Sheri Berman, traces the long history of democracy in its cradle, Europe. She explains that in fact, just about every democratic wave in Europe initially failed, either collapsing in upon itself or succumbing to the forces of reaction. Yet even when democratic waves failed, there were always some achievements that lasted. Even the most virulently reactionary regimes could not suppress every element of democratic progress. Wide in scope, Berman takes readers through three centuries of turmoil: revolution, fascism, civil war, and - -finally -- the emergence of liberal democratic Europe in the postwar era. An enjoyable retelling of modern European political history, Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe not only explains how democracy actually develops, but how we should interpret the current wave of illiberalism sweeping Europe and the rest of the world. And while not everyone will be convinced by Berman's narrative, anyone who is interested in the growth of democracy in Europe in the past three-hundred plus years, will find this book to be ultra-interesting. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Cory C. Brock has published an exciting new book on one of the most important Dutch Reformed theologians from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Herman Bavinck negotiated his conservative background through life-long engagement with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Brock’s new work, Orthodox Yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Lexham Press, 2020), complicates the existing discussion of the relationship between these thinkers and shows how Bavinck refused to choose between the demands of confessional theology and the catholic ambition to do theological work in conversation with the church. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rogers M. Smith, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a new book on the connection between our understanding of peoplehood and community, and the contemporary growth of populism around the world. This book and the meditation on these issues of populism and nationalism come out of the presentations Smith gave as the 2018 Castle Lecture Series on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University. Thus, That Is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood (Yale UP, 2020) comes out of Smith’s long engagement with this concept of peoplehood and how that idea—which also helps us to understand the modern structure and engagement of community— encounters populism, which also connects people to community and to the nation-state as a defined entity. Smith notes that he has been quite concerned with the rise of authoritarianism, particularly as it has been connected to populism in a number of different countries. The tension between those groups that are culturally traditionalists and those groups that are more cosmopolitan in perspective is at the heart of what That Is Not Who We Are! explores and seeks to understand, particularly in this period of economic globalization and technological innovation. Smith approaches these research questions from a comparative perspective, bringing together an analysis of a host of different nation states and regions to examine populism’s appeal and how these concepts have been connected to questions of national identity and this umbrella understanding of peoplehood. In order to understand peoplehood, we must think in terms of narratives, and Smith explains that it is these narratives that help us see ourselves as particular communities and as members of a state or nation. These narratives are also used by political leaders to define what it is that we all share as a “people”—and these narratives may also define who is not a member of, or is excluded from the nation, the state, the people. Smith notes that, as humans, we understand the world in which we live through this narrative lens, they give meaning to our experiences. We are fundamentally social creatures who fulfill our needs, as humans, in societies and communities. Populist leaders make extensive use of these narratives of peoplehood and this is one of the animating issues in That is Not Who We Are!: Populism and Peoplehood. Because of the need for narratives to help us understand ourselves as humans, it becomes problematic to shift away from this aspect of populism that can also lead to authoritarianism. But Smith urges the reader to turn towards these narratives of peoplehood, in part because they are important in understanding the demos within democracies. But also because stories or narratives are not sufficient in politics. Citizens expect that politics produces some kind of results, some kinds of policies. And while stories can be engaging, citizens also generally want to see the policies enacted. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Adriaan Neele, who is director of the doctoral programme and Professor of Historical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, has edited an outstanding collection of essays on Petrus van Mastricht. This new book, Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Text, Context, and Interpretation (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2020), combines work by new and well-established scholars to examine the ways in which the achievements of this eminent protestant scholastic theologian have impacted upon theology and philosophy. The book contains ground-breaking arguments, challenges an emerging consensus about the nature of religious and political thinking in the period, and provides a road-map for new directions in the burgeoning field of early modern historical theology. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Connelly’s new book – From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) – is an encyclopedic but lively narrative that captivates both those familiar with old stories about the region and novices who are seeking introduction to this vast laboratory of European modernity. Passionate, erudite, and insightful, the book pursues answers to the central question of Eastern European history: why does nationalism persist as the organizing principle of political life in a region where it has produced such tragedies? Connelly traces the rise of nationalism in Polish, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman lands; the creation of new states after the First World War and their later absorption by the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Bloc; the reemergence of democracy and separatist movements after the collapse of communism; and the recent surge of populist politics throughout the region. John Connelly is a Professor of History at the University of California Berkley who works in the fields of modern Eastern European social and political history, the history of education, nationalism studies, and the history of Catholicism. Vladislav Lilić is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the place and persistence of quasi-sovereignty in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Southeastern Europe. Vladislav’s other fields of interest include the socio-legal history of empire, global history of statehood, and the history of international thought. You can reach him at vladislav.lilic@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For the people of the Dawnland, they were floating islands. The sails resembled clouds, and the men gathered on deck looked like bears. When Europeans came ashore, whether Danes in what would become Newfoundland, English settlers in the land they named ‘Virginia’, their mastery of the oceans did not translate into supremacy on land. Small conflicts in colonial enslaves evolved into trans-Atlantic wars that transformed the political and social worlds of millions. Europeans were people of the oceans, fanning out across the globe in vessels that pursued and extracted natural resources while doubling as weapons of war. For some time now, historians have approached the Atlantic as an integrated and connected world, defined by the movement of people, goods, and ideas. In Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution (Oxford UP, 2020), Geoffrey Plank uses war as a lens to examine the interactions of peoples who forged shared experiences amid endemic conflict. The result is a sweeping synthesis of the intermingling of European, Indigenous and African histories, which connects the Atlantic with Continental, Pacific, and Oceanic perspectives. Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia (UK). Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typically considered to be a period of Chinese history driven by consumerism, Gerth’s beautifully researched book shows how, in the early People’s Republic, the Communist Party expanded consumerism and built ‘state capitalism’, and the ferocity of consumer impulses and behaviors that followed. Challenging, provocative, and precisely written, Unending Capitalism is sure to appeal to anyone interested in modern Chinese history and histories of capitalism, as well as any readers looking for a book that uses some really fascinating sources to complicate the dominant narrative of China’s ‘socialist’ history. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She works on Manchu language books and book history and loves anything with a good kesike in it. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
My Lai, Wounded Knee, Sandy Hook: the place names evoke grief and horror, each the site of a massacre. Massacres-the mass slaughter of people-might seem as old as time, but the word itself is not. It worked its way into the English language in the late sixteenth century, and ultimately came to signify a specific type of death, one characterized by cruelty, intimacy, and treachery. How that happened is the story of yet another place, Amboyna, an island in the Indonesian archipelago where English and Dutch merchants fought over the spice trade. There a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese plotters took place in 1623 and led to the beheading of more than a dozen men in a public execution. In her new book Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Alison Games shows how the English East India Company transformed that conspiracy into a massacre through printed works, both books and images, which ensured the story's tenacity over four centuries. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone and a term that needed no further explanation. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre's position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. Drawing on archival documents in Dutch, French, and English, Games masterfully recovers the history, ramifications, and afterlives of this event, which shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence and made intimacy, treachery, and cruelty indelibly connected with massacres. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The European Union is arguably facing the greatest existential threat in its history. One of its big four member states has left and the main opposition parties in France and Italy flirt with leaving, while Hungary and Poland drift away from liberal democracy, and the Russian and US presidents openly seek the union’s destruction. In The Tribalization of Europe: A Defence of our Liberal Values (Polity), Professor Wind identifies a common theme: tribalization, and a common remedy: an end to defeatism among liberal democrats. The majority isn’t always right, she says, and minorities need protection. Europeans – people as well as politicians – should stop taking the peace, prosperity and freedom they enjoy for granted and fight back against the populists. Marlene Wind is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Centre for European Politics at Copenhagen University, and is currently advising the European Commission of rule-of-law issues. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Next year, Germany goes to the polls. For the first time in 15 years, Angela Merkel will not be a candidate for chancellor. Although a leadership election is underway inside Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, all eyes are on the CDU’s Bavarian sister party and its leader Markus Söder as her likely successor. A “shameless” self-publicist and political chameleon, Söder first rose to national prominence in 2015-17 as a conservative opponent of Merkel’s refugee policy. Yet, three years on, he has redefined himself as a Green-friendly moderate whose national popularity has soared in response to his sound pandemic management. Who is the 53-year-old Bavarian first minister and, if he does succeed Merkel next year, what should Germany’s geopolitical partners expect? In Markus Söder: The Shadow Chancellor (Droemer Knauer, 2020) Roman Deininger explains. Few people know better than Deininger, a longtime political reporter for Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich who has been stalking this wily politician for two decades. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (Vanderbilt UP, 2018), Edgardo Pérez Morales investigates the hemispheric connections between the Spanish American colony of New Granada (or Colombia) and the greater Caribbean in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Residents in the port city of Cartagena enjoyed independence from Spain creating a radically egalitarian revolutionary state in the years 1812 to 1815. Seeking to maintain their tenuous liberty while building diplomatic contact with the Republic of Haiti, the port attracted hundreds of Haitians, men of full or partial African ancestry, where they enlisted as privateers and obtained citizenship. Joined by other masterless crew from ports throughout the Atlantic world, these privateers traversed the Caribbean, attacking Spanish ships outside of Cuba to weaken Spanish power. In doing so, these men helped to construct a radical vision of the revolutionary Atlantic where mostly Afro-Caribbean privateers established supranational networks and communities, which supported and disrupted elite political visions. This work offers a perspective of the maritime dimensions of Latin American sovereignty in the age of revolutions. Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kenneth Austin, who teaches history at the University of Bristol, UK, is well-known for his work on Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. His new book, The Jews and the Reformation (Yale University Press, 2020), offers the most thorough description and analysis of its subject to date. Austin describes the long and complex history of the two traditions, shows how both religions defined themselves in opposition to each other, and how competing confessional communities that emerged out of the European reformations adopted quite different attitudes to their Jewish neighbors. This outstanding work promises to revolutionize the ways in which future scholars will approach this complex and demanding subject. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen (Crossway, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The essays in Rights at the Margins: Historical, Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Brill) explore the ways rights were available to those in the margins of society. By tracing pivotal judicial concepts such as ‘right of necessity’ and ‘subjective rights’ back to their medieval versions, and by situating them in unexpected contexts such as the Franciscans’ theory of poverty and colonization or today’s immigration and border control, this volume invites its readers to consider whether individual rights were in fact, or at least in theory, available to the marginalized. By focusing not only on the economically impoverished but also those who were disenfranchised because of disability, gender, race, religion or infidelity, this book also sheds light on the relationship between the early history of individual rights and social justice at the margins. Jonathan Robinson, Ph.D. (2010) in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. He currently acts as a lawyer and is the author of William of Ockham’s Theory of Property Rights in Context (Brill, 2012). Virpi Mäkinen is Senior Lecturer in Theological and Social Ethics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Pamela Slotte is Associate Professor of Minority Studies at the Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Heikki Haara is Senior Lecturer of Political History at the University of Helsinki. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (Princeton University Press, 2020), Despina Stratigakos investigates the Nazi occupation of Norway. Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model “Aryan” society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler’s Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire—one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings. Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler’s Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway’s Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme—a German cultural capital and naval base—remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance. A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler’s Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been—a world colonized under the swastika. Despina Stratigakos is vice provost and professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kris Alexanderson offers a revealing portrait of the Dutch Empire repositions our understanding of modern empires from the terrestrial to the oceanic. It highlights the importance of shipping, port cities, and maritime culture to the political struggles of the 1920s and 30s. Port cities such as Jeddah, Shanghai, and Batavia were hotbeds for the spread of nationalism, communism, pan-Islamism, and pan-Asianism, and became important centers of opposition to Dutch imperialism through the circulation of passengers, laborers, and religious pilgrims. In response to growing maritime threats, the Dutch government and shipping companies attempted to secure oceanic spaces and maintain hegemony abroad through a web of control. Techniques included maritime policing networks, close collaboration with British and French surveillance entities ashore, and maintaining segregation on ships, which was meant to 'teach' those on board their position within imperial hierarchies. This innovative study exposes how anti-colonialism was shaped not only within the terrestrial confines of metropole and colony, but across the transoceanic spaces in between. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
According to the influential French commentator and scholar, Raymond Aron, one the great un-answered questions of the post-1945 period is how and why the British went from being ‘Romans to Italians’. In an endeavor to answer this question and much more is Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s book A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit (Indiana UP, 2017) Spanning the period from Attlee’s surprise victory over Winston Churchill in 1945, to the equally surprising decision to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum, Black’s book is a masterpiece of informed scholarly analysis and opinion. Coming from one of the historical profession’s great polymath. Black’s book is a treasure to behold for both the professional historian and the lay educated reader. Black not only deals expertly with the high politics of the period but also with the social changes, economic strains, and cultural and political upheavals that brought Britain to Brexit. This sweeping and engaging book traces Britain's path through the destruction left behind by World War II, Thatcherism, the threats of the IRA, the Scottish referendum, and on to the impact of waves of immigration from the European Union. Black overturns many conventional interpretations of significant historical events, provides context for current developments, and encourages the reader to question why we think the way we do about Britain's past. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s―covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his groundbreaking 500-year history entitled Germany: A Nation in its Time (Liveright, 2020), Helmut Walser Smith challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than many twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were largely pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation’s history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, the book is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany from the age of the Reformation to the Berlin Republic. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south. In The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge (Routledge, 2015), Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand the racialized imaginary inscribed in the scholarly texts that presented the peoples of the south as objects of an inquiring gaze from the north. Through maps, images and even textual formatting, equivalences were established between ’new’ worlds, many of them long known to European explorers, she argues, in terms that made explicit the divide between ’north’ and ’south.’ This book takes seriously the role of form in shaping meaning and its ideological consequences. Young examines, in turn, the representational methodologies, or ’artes,’ deployed in mapping the ’whole’ world: illustrating, creating charts for navigation, noting down observations, collecting and cataloguing curiosities, reporting events, formatting materials, and editing and translating old sources. By tracking these methodologies in the lines of beauty and evidence on the page, we can see how early modern producers of knowledge were able to attribute alterity to the ’southern climes’ of an increasingly complex world, while securing their own place within it. Sandra Young is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press), Rachel Mesch reads the biographies and work of three writers who did not conform to the gender norms of the period. In different ways, Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912) lived and wrote gender stories that challenged prevailing notions of masculinity and femininity, claiming and writing identities that complicated existing binaries and conventions. All three of the writers Mesch examines pushed boundaries in their private and public ways of being and in their self-presentation. An archaeologist, Dieulafoy fought in the Franco-Prussian War and traveled to Persia to study the ancient city of Susa. Rachilde wrote erotic novels including the ‘scandalous’ Monsieur Vénus. An art critic, Montifaud published erotic literature that shocked the sensibilities of the time. Thinking about these figures individually and together, Before Trans considers their non-conformity at a moment that held limited possibilities for the expression of a diversity of gender and sexual identities. The book offers so much, as a history of these important figures of nineteenth-century French literary and cultural life, and as a contribution to the exciting and growing field of trans scholarship. Rachel Mesch is Professor of French and English at Yeshiva University. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The UK’s transition from legally withdrawing from the EU to leaving the union’s single market will come to an end at midnight on December 31 with no successor trade agreement yet in place. For the UK’s financial sector, which accounts for 7% of the country’s economy and a million of its jobs, whether there is such an agreement and what shape it takes really matters. In Brexit and Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-editors Jonathan Herbst and Simon Lovegrove have corralled 26 lawyers from 12 leading firms and chambers to explain why. Between them, they cover the history of the withdrawal process, the likely impact of Brexit on regulations of everything from how bankers are rewarded for success to how insolvent banks are wound up, and what could happen next in the negotiations. Jonathan Herbst is Global Head of Financial Services Regulation at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The protection of African wildlife enjoys the support of large numbers of individuals and institutions throughout the world. In Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth Century Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Jeff Schauer explains how this global attention to African wildlife evolved from late nineteenth century to the present. By tracing a complex web of ideas, organizations and practices that developed in East and Central Africa during the era of British colonialism; Schauer shows that the history of modern conservationist movements is entangled with the development of administrative systems, increased militarization and violence, nationalist and anti-nationalist agendas and the evolution of science. In other words, “wildlife is never neutral.” The book makes a compelling argument for a more critical and deliberate engagement with ideas about wildlife and conservation. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published A Brief History of the Mediterranean (Little Brown, 2020), to offer readers an overview of this sphere from pre-history to the present day. Taking in the importance of geography, civilizational change and cultural representations, Black moves between disciplines to offer readers a compelling handbook to a region rich in historical significance. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this week episode of “New Books in History,” we’ll discuss Gender and the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2017) with editors Sue Grayzel and Tammy Proctor, focusing on ideas about how to teach using their edited collection. The centenary of the First World War from 2014 to 2018 offered an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood. The negotiation regarding concepts of gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative. Given the vast literature on the war itself, scholarship on gender provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume. Susan R. Grayzel is Professor of History at Utah State University, where she researches and teaches the history of modern Europe, gender, and the world wars. Tammy M. Proctor is Distinguished Professor of History and Department Head at Utah State University. Julia M. Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University where she teaches early modern and modern European history. Her book, Young Subjects, is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Walking the Highwire: Rebalancing the European Economy in Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) tells the story of the Eurozone’s crisis from the perspective of an insider who now sits on the European Central Bank’s governing council. Part-policy proposal, part-autobiography, and part-political memoir, at the heart of Walking The Highwire are the four critical years from 2010 to 2014 when Olli Rehn served as European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs. The book tells us what took a football-mad boy from Southern Savonia to Brussels – via Oxford and Minnesota – and reveals the behind-the-scenes fights and compromises that shaped the crisis and pulled the euro from the brink. Olli Rehn has been governor of the Bank of Finland since 2018, was Finnish minister of economic affairs (2015-2016), European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs (2010-2014), and commissioner for enlargement (2004-2010). He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford in international political economy. Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into the subject we know today. David Bressoud explains why calculus is credited to seventeenth-century figures Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and how its current structure is based on developments that arose in the nineteenth century. Bressoud argues that a pedagogy informed by the historical development of calculus represents a sounder way for students to learn this fascinating area of mathematics. Delving into calculus’s birth in the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean—particularly in Syracuse, Sicily and Alexandria, Egypt—as well as India and the Islamic Middle East, Bressoud considers how calculus developed in response to essential questions emerging from engineering and astronomy. He looks at how Newton and Leibniz built their work on a flurry of activity that occurred throughout Europe, and how Italian philosophers such as Galileo Galilei played a particularly important role. In describing calculus’s evolution, Bressoud reveals problems with the standard ordering of its curriculum: limits, differentiation, integration, and series. He contends that the historical order—integration as accumulation, then differentiation as ratios of change, series as sequences of partial sums, and finally limits as they arise from the algebra of inequalities—makes more sense in the classroom environment. Exploring the motivations behind calculus’s discovery, Calculus Reordered highlights how this essential tool of mathematics came to be. David M. Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. His many books include Second Year Calculus and A Radical Approach to Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge UP, 2020) addresses one of the big questions in economics and economic history: why did the modern economy emerge in northwestern Europe at some point in the 17th or 18th century but not in the Middle East? After all, for centuries following the spread of Islam, the Middle East was far ahead of Europe – on both technological and economic terms. Jared Rubin argues that the religion itself is not to blame; the importance of religious legitimacy in Middle Eastern politics was the primary factor. In much of the Muslim world, religious authorities were given an important seat at the political bargaining table, which they used to block important advancements such as the printing press and usury. In Europe, however, the Church played a weaker role in legitimizing rule, especially where Protestantism spread (indeed, the Reformation was successful due to the spread of printing, which was blocked in the Middle East). It was precisely in those Protestant nations, especially England and the Dutch Republic, where the modern economy was born. In this interview, Jared shares with us his opinions on a wide range of topics – from the work of Jared Diamond and the theories of Max Weber, to his serendipitous journey in academia that led him to write his first book. Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic turn" in historiography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Colin Rose, Assistant Professor of History at Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Canada, about his new book, A Renaissance of Violence: Homicide in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Seventeenth-century Bologna saw a severe uptick of homicide, the result of several factors that we discuss here. Beyond just a discussion of the book and its impact on our understanding of early modern Italy, Colin talks about his source material in detail, providing a small primer on the workings of an early modern criminal court. This makes for a lively conversation between two very happy historians about the joys of archival work. Jana Byars is the academic director of SIT Amsterdam’s study abroad program, Gender and Sexuality in an International Perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Pamila Gupta’s Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020), takes a unique approach to examining decolonization processes across Lusophone India and Southern Africa, focusing on Goa, Mozambique, Angola and South Africa, weaving together case studies using five interconnected themes. Gupta considers decolonization through the twined lenses of history and ethnography, accessed through written, oral, visual and eyewitness accounts of how people experienced the transfer of state power. She looks at the materiality of decolonization as a movement of peoples across vast oceanic spaces, demonstrating how it was a process of dispossession for both the Portuguese formerly in power and ordinary colonial citizens and subjects. She then discusses the production of race and class anxieties during decolonization, which took on a variety of forms but were often articulated through material objects. The book aims to move beyond linear histories of colonial independence by connecting its various regions using the theme of decolonization, offering a productive and new approach to writing post-national histories and ethnographies. Finally, Gupta demonstrates the value of using different source materials to access narratives of decolonization, analyzing the work of Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel, and including lyrical prose and ethnographical observations. Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World provides a nuanced understanding of Lusophone decolonization, revealing the perspectives of people who experienced it. This book will be highly valuable for historians of the Indian Ocean world and decolonization, but also those interested in ethnography, diaspora studies and material culture. Pamila Gupta is Associate Professor at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (2010) and the author of The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (2014). Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Marion Kaplan's riveting book, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale University Press) describes the dramatic experiences of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler’s regime and then lived in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals these refugees experienced, Marion Kaplan also highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories, while having to beg strangers for kindness. Portugal’s dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, admitted the largest number of Jews fleeing westward—tens of thousands of them—but then set his secret police on those who did not move along quickly enough. Yet Portugal’s people left a lasting impression on refugees for their caring and generosity. Most refugees in Portugal showed strength and stamina as they faced unimagined challenges. An emotional history of fleeing, this book probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation. Marion Kaplan is Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is the author of Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany and a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Robin Buller is a Doctoral Candidate in History at UNC Chapel Hill and is a 2020-2021 dissertation fellow with the Association for Jewish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
First published in 1992 before the creation of the euro, Paul De Grauwe’s Economics of Monetary Union (Oxford University Press, 2020) has become a standard text for undergraduates seeking to understand this remarkable but “fragile” project. Updated every two years and now in its 13th edition, the book can hardly keep up with economic and policy developments in the 19-nation Euro Area. But De Grauwe, who is still teaching at the London School of Economics after retiring from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, can always be relied upon to plug the gaps with policy ideas. In the latest of these, he made the case for the European Central Bank to monetize governments’ pandemic-related deficits. Paul De Grauwe is the John Paulson Chair in European Political Economy at the LSE’s European Institute. Tim G. Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
One of France’s most famous historians compares and contrasts the two most famous French exemplars of political and military leadership of the past two-hundred and fifty years to make the case that individuals, for better and worse, matter in history. Historians have tried to teach us that the historical past is not just a narrative of heroes and wars. The anonymous millions they like to argue also matter and are active agents of change. But in erroneously democratizing history, we – they have lost track of the outsized, indeed stupendous role that individuals can and play in shaping world historical events. In his new book Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History (Harvard University Press, 2020), Professor Patrice Gueniffey provides us with a compelling reminder of the importance of heroes in history, in this powerful dual biography of two transformative leaders, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle. Both became national figures at times of crisis and war. They were hailed as saviors and were eager to embrace the label. They were also animated by quests for personal and national greatness, by the desire to raise France above itself and lead it on a mission to enlighten the world. Both united an embattled nation, returned it to dignity, and left a permanent political legacy—in Napoleon’s case, a form of administration and a body of civil law; in de Gaulle’s case, new political institutions. Professor Gueniffey compares Napoleon’s and de Gaulle’s journeys to power; their methods; their ideas and writings, notably about war; and their postmortem reputations. He also contrasts their weaknesses: Napoleon’s limitless ambitions and appetite for war and de Gaulle’s capacity for cruelty and cynicism, manifested most clearly in relations to the end of the war in Algeria. They were men of genuine talent and achievement, with flaws almost as pronounced as their strengths. As many nations, not least France, struggle to find their soul in a rapidly changing world, Gueniffey shows us what a difference an extraordinary leader can make. Patrice Gueniffey is Director of the Raymond Aron Center for Political Research at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. One of France’s leading historians of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic ages, he is the author of Bonaparte, the monumental first volume of the definitive modern French biography of Napoleon. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ananya Chakravarti’s The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and The Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India (Oxford University Press), recovers the religious roots of Europe's first global order, by tracing the evolution of a religious vision of empire through the lives of Jesuits working in the missions of early modern Brazil and India. These missionaries struggled to unite three commitments: to their local missionary space; to the universal Church; and to the global Portuguese empire. Through their attempts to inscribe their actions within these three scales of meaning--local, global, universal--a religious imaginaire of empire emerged. This book places cultural encounter in Brazil and India at the heart of an intellectual genealogy of imperial thinking, considering both indigenous and European experiences. Thus, this book offers a unique sustained study of the foundational moment of early modern European engagement in both South Asia and Latin America. In doing so, it highlights the difference between the messy realities of power in colonial spaces and the grandiose discursive productions of empire that attended these activities. This is the central puzzle of the book: how European accommodation to local peoples and their cultures, the experience of give-and-take in the non-European world and their numerous failures, could lead to a consolidation of an enduring vision of cultural and political dominion. Ananya Chakravarti is Associate Professor, South Asian and Indian Ocean history at Georgetown University. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is turning twenty-five. One of the first academic journals focused on the study of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies, it has been one of a few journals that led the field in new directions. So it seemed appropriate to mark the moment by talking with Richard Breitman, its long-time editor. Breitman is professor emeritus at American University and the author of several books on German history and the Holocaust. We talk in the interview about the origins of the Journal, about what it means to be the editor of an academic journal, and about how the field of Holocaust studies has evolved over the years. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. In The Left Case Against the EU (Polity, 2018), he contends that the EU's response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas's powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe. Costas Lapavitsas is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research during the last few years has focused on the Eurozone and the financialization of capitalism. He has published widely in the academic field and writes frequently for the international and the Greek press. In January 2015 he was elected in the Greek Parliament with the incoming SYRIZA party, but left in August 2015 when the third bail-out of Greece was signed. His most recent books include Capitalism in the Ottoman Balkans, with P. Cakiroglu, I.B.Tauris, 2019, The Left Case Against the EU, Polity Press, 2018, Against the Troika: Crisis and Austerity in the Eurozone, with H. Flassbeck, Verso, 2015, and Profiting Without Producing, Verso, 2013. Daniel Lucas is a student at the University of Groningen, studying European and International law. Please contact through daniellucas2001@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), historian of science Joshua Nall shows us that a blurry boundary between science and journalism was a key feature—not a bug—of the emergence of modern astronomy. Focusing on objects and media, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, cigarette cards, and globes, Nall offers a history of how astronomers’ cultivation of a mass public shaped their discipline as it managed controversies over the possibility of canals on Mars, and even interplanetary communication. This book is strongly recommended for historians of science and communication, as well as those with an eye for material culture. Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and num- bers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Professor David Tavárez’s edited volume, Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017), is a collection of eleven essays from historians and anthropologists grappling with the big questions of the Christianization of Mexico after the Spanish Conquest and using sources in several indigenous languages. The collaborators explore the “quilt” of “vibrant and definitely local Christianities” (in the plural) formed by the dialogue of cultures in each place and in each soul. The philological inquiry into indigenous-language primary sources illuminates the interwoven threads of that quilt. Taken together, the essays also show how the field of Mesoamerican and Colonial Mexican history has blossomed since Robert Ricard’s foundational Spiritual Conquest of Mexico a hundred years ago and James Lockhart’s New Philology fifty years ago. This florescence is the first subject of today’s interview. Dr. Tavárez also summarizes the first century of Franciscan and Dominican forays into Mexico. Then, he gives several examples of religious hybridization, simultaneously functional and concealed, and how he and his colleagues were able to find these out. For example, certain Zapotecs turned the images of Catholic saints around (face to the wall) while performing the sacrifice of a deer, and even those who practiced “ancestor worship and child sacrifice counted themselves as Christian” (52). Finally, Professor Tavárez discusses the last essay in the volume, written by anthopologist Abelardo de la Cruz, who recounts hybrid practices that he observed first-hand in the present-day Huasteca Region of Veracruz. David Tavárez is a historian and linguistic anthropologist; he is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Vassar College. He is a specialist in Nahuatl and Zapotec texts, the study of Mesoamerican religions and rituals, Catholic campaigns against idolatry, Indigenous intellectuals, and native Christianities. He is the author or co-author of several books and dozens of articles and chapters. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Spanish Empire, specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel. He has also written about missionary efforts in Early Modern Colonial Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Russell J. A. Kilbourn’s The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style (Wallflower Press, 2020) is the first comprehensive study published in the English-speaking world on one of the most compelling figures in twenty-first centry European film, Italian 2014 Academy Award recipient Paolo Sorrentino. Kilbourn’s book offers close readings of Sorrentino’s cinema in eight dense and elegantly written chapters and one coda: from the filmmaker’s first feature One Man Up, to The Consequences of Love, The Family Friend, Il Divo, This Must Be the Place, The Great Beauty, Youth, and the TV series The Young Pope, produced by HBO. The coda discusses the biopic on Silvio Berlusconi Loro (Them), which came out in 2018. While contextualizing Sorrentino within the legacy of Italian cinema tradition, Kilbourn establishes meaningful connections with international filmmakers (from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to Mary’s Harron’s American Psycho, among many others), literary texts (such as Primo Levi’s If This is a Man), and artistic works (such as Magritte’s surrealist paintings), showing how Sorrentino is “an exemplary twenty-first-century transnational filmmaker” and “an emergent auteur for the twenty-first century.” His definition of Sorrentino’s cinema as “commitment to style” summarizes his critical perspective on a filmmaker, who, Kilbourn argues, brings to life Godard’s famous statement that “the problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.” Russell J. A. Kilbourn is Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Lauriel University. His books include Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (2010) and W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator (2018) Nicoletta Marini-Maio is co-founder and editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/italy. Recent scholarly publications center on Italian cinema, particularly the intersections between politics, gender power relations, and collective memory; and auteur cinema. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Ellen Nerenberg (forthcoming, Rubbettino, Italy). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Politics of Disease Control. Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920 (Ohio University Press, 2019), Mari K. Webel tells a history of colonial interventions among three communities of the Great Lakes region of East Africa. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Eastern African societies faced a range of social, political and economic challenges, many of which were connected to the establishment of British and German colonial regimes. In the midst of these, African societies experienced an epidemic outbreak of human African Trypanosomiasis, commonly known as “sleeping sickness.” The epidemic posed a serious threat to the economic prospects of colonial regimes who felt it necessary to authorize and fund large scale campaigns aimed at researching a treatment that could cure and stop the spread of the disease. Dr. Webel locates these colonial interventions in the context of the rich intellectual worlds that Great Lakes’ communities used to make sense of experiences of misfortune and illness. She argues that only by understanding the concepts and strategies that Africans had historically used to navigate challenging times, can we explain how and whether they chose to interact with the health efforts promoted by colonial authorities. The book highlights the long, largely neglected, and mostly unsuccessful, quest to eradicate or treat human African trypanosomiasis. It explains the impact that early campaigns to contain the disease had on the rationale and design of subsequent public health interventions in other parts of Africa, and how colonial narratives continue to affect modern research agendas into tropical diseases. Moreover, the book underscores the importance of paying attention to local, cultural and historical factors in the design of any public health campaign. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the long eighteenth century the moral and socio-political dimensions of family life and gender were hotly debated by intellectuals across Europe. John Millar, a Scottish law professor and philosopher, was a pioneer in making gendered and familial practice a critical parameter of cultural difference. His work was widely disseminated at home and abroad, translated into French and German and closely read by philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Johann Gottfried Herder. Taking Millar’s writings as his basis, Nicholas B. Miller explores the role of the family in Scottish Enlightenment political thought and traces its wider resonances across the Enlightenment world. John Millar’s organisation of cultural, gendered and social difference into a progressive narrative of authority relations provided the first extended world history of the family. In John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Voltaire Foundation, 2017), Nicholas B. Miller examines contemporary responses and Enlightenment-era debates on polygamy, matriarchy, the Amazon legend, changes in national character and the possible futures of the family in commercial society. He traces how Enlightenment thinkers developed new standards of evidence and crafted new understandings of historical time in order to tackle the global diversity of family life and gender practice. By reconstituting these theories and discussions, Miller uncovers hitherto unexplored aspects of the Scottish contribution to European debates on the role of the family in history, society and politics. Nicholas B. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at Flagler College. Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy (UVA Press, 2020), Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy. While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process. Dr. Ann Tucker is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Georgia. Her research focuses on the U.S. South from an international perspective. Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
James Renshaw modestly describes his interactive textbook, In Search of the Romans (Bloomsbury, 2019) as an attempt to bring his high school readers to a “base camp on Mount Everest and then hand them off to the Sherpas.” Renshaw explains that the “Sherpas” are historians who delve into a particular aspect of Roman history in greater detail. But what a delightful base camp In Search of Romans is! Following on the success of the book’s companion piece, In Search of the Greeks (both published in their second edition by Bloomsbury Academic), Renshaw has created an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the history, politics, culture and everyday life of the Romans from their mythical beginnings to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476. In clear and cogent prose, Renshaw leads us masterfully from the era of the Roman kings through the foundation of the Res Publica, Rome’s brutal civil wars, and the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. The reign of Emperor Augustus with its sweeping reforms of religion and politics is discussed in detail, as are the reigns of the "good,” and “bad” emperors who follow Augustus, including the infamous Nero, and Constantine, who gifted Christianity to Europe. Finally, Renshaw unpacks the role of the barbarian tribes who brought the Western Empire to its end in the 5th century. James Renshaw approaches his subject with zeal and infectious enthusiasm, which no doubt resonates with his students at London’s Godolphin and Latymer secondary school. “In Search of the Romans” provides a broad overview of Rome’s history with plenty of recommendations for further reading by authors as diverse as Mary Beard and Tacitus. The book is filled with clear maps and photos, which bring the ancient world to life in vivid color and detail. In Search of the Romans goes beyond the “I came, I saw, I conquered,” Tick-Tock of Roman history. With detailed chapters on everyday life, culture, and religion, and individual chapters on Pompeii and Herculaneum, the reader emerges with a well-rounded sense of the world of the ancients. Renshaw is particularly good on the cultural touchstones of Ancient Rome, including the enduring obsession with Greek culture and the ever-present yearning for “the good old days.” For the past few months during the global pandemic, Renshaw has been teaching his students via Google Meet, which he believes the Romans — those masters of innovation — would have applauded. In Search of the Romans makes a compelling case that the classics are still very relevant for any curious about the march of civilization and humanity’s drive to innovate. Though designed for high school seniors, In Search of the Romans is an excellent choice for college students looking for an easily digestible overview of Roman history, and, indeed for anyone embarking on a voyage of discovery of Ancient Rome by land, sea, or from an armchair. James Renshaw was educated at the University of Oxford and has held teaching positions at St. Paul’s School and Westminster Under School. He currently teaches classics at London’s Godolphin and Latymer. He is the author of many manuals on Ancient History, and “In Search of the Greeks.” Find out more about James Renshaw by following him on Twitter or LinkedIn. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which is shaped and conditioned by the already post-postmodern condition. This perspective opens up the exploration of modernist projects and allows a discussion that goes beyond a specific time-period and invites us to locate the conversation about Kraus, as well as about the modernist discourse, in the context of the present moment. In his book, Linden outlines the most salient features of Kraus’s writing and establishes an ethic and aesthetic matrix to explore the variations and renditions that the modernist projects may promote and welcome. The book specifies Kraus’s aesthetic engagement with satire, as well as with the exploration of the language limitations (if any) and with intellectual conversations, which serve as responses to political and historical events. The latter makes Linden’s project particularly relevant and up-to-date for the contemporary moment: Kraus’s oeuvre helps further disclose how writing can be engaged as a key instrument not only for the construction of the individual’s perception of the self and others, but also for the construction of ideological paradigms, encapsulating power and control on both individual and public levels. Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity brings modernity and modernism to the forefront of the post-postmodernist concerns and offers an insightful perspective on how a writer responds to history and politics while interrupting the discourse with their aesthetic renditions. Ari Linden is an assistant professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Kansas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Book, 2020). Although the German invasion was the cause of the outbreak of World War II, oddly there has not been much by way of English language treatments of this pivotal historical episode. With this fine and highly readable narrative history, Moorhouse more than makes up for this omission. Combing English, German and crucially Polish language sources, Moorhouse reveals to the reader the German campaign from start to finish. Along the way showing that stereotypical Western images of the Polish army: cavalry charging tanks, are mythological in nature and inaccurate. Moorhouse also details for the reader the shameful refusal of the British and French governments to assist their Polish ally. Equally well illustrated is the Soviet Union’s invasion of Eastern Poland. With the Soviet mythology that the invasion was mostly ‘peaceful’ and well-received, just that: a myth. In short, Roger Moorhouse presents to the reader a highly interesting narrative history of an important historical episode. All from the author of Berlin at War and The Devil’s Alliance. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evident. In A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia (Harvard UP, 2019), Tamar Herzog offers a new road map that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By identifying what European law was, where its iterations could be found, who was allowed to make and implement it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances, and allows readers to grasp their malleability and fragility. Herzog describes how successive European legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the establishment and growth of the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was understood, used, and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition. Expanding the definition of Europe to include its colonial domains, Herzog explains that British and Spanish empires in the New World were not only recipients of European legal traditions but also incubators of new ideas. Their experiences, as well as the constant tension between overreaching ideas and naive localism, explain how European law refashioned itself as the epitome of reason and as a system with potentially global applications. Tamar Herzog is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the History Department at Harvard University, and Affiliated Faculty Member at Harvard Law School. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States 1750–1850 (Palgrave MacMillian, 2019) offers a pioneering study of slavery in the Italian states. Documenting previously unstudied cases of slavery in six Italian cities—Naples, Caserta, Rome, Palermo, Livorno and Genoa—Giulia Bonazza investigates why slavery survived into the middle of the nineteenth century, even as the abolitionist debate raged internationally and most states had abolished it. She contextualizes these cases of residual slavery from 1750–1850, focusing on two juridical and political watersheds: after the Napoleonic period, when the Italian states (with the exception of the Papal States) adopted constitutions outlawing slavery; and after the Congress of Vienna, when diplomatic relations between the Italian states, France and Great Britain intensified and slavery was condemned in terms that covered only the Atlantic slave trade. By excavating the lives of men and women who remained in slavery after abolition, this book sheds new light on the broader Mediterranean and transatlantic dimensions of slavery in the Italian states. Giulia Bonazza is currently a post-doctoral researcher on the international project Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (CIRESC-CNRS Paris). Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Amanda L. Scott’s book, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2020), focuses on the Basque seroras, a category of uncloistered religious women that were employed by parishes to perform a wide variety of functions. Somewhat like other religious laywomen like Belgian beguines, Italian tertiaries, or Castilian beatas, they occupied an intermediate zone of honorable possibility for women between marriage and the convent. Unlike women in those other categories, however, the serora enjoyed financial security and respectability in her community in part because of her protection by local communities and church authorities. By situating the seroras within these social dynamics, The Basque Seroras broadens the way we conceive of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also crucially revises our understanding of reform and consumption of legal resources at the local level. Following the Council of Trent, uncloistered religious women were broadly condemned and forced to join established religious orders; these directives notwithstanding, the seroras managed to survive well into the eighteenth century. Scott contends that even though the Counter Reformation program of centralization and standardization is often characterized as an immediate – and repressive – success, the seroras demonstrate the variability of local enforcement and the ways parishes could successfully press for leniency or reach tacit compromise with authorities. These devout laywomen, who straddled secular and religious spheres, were instrumental in this process of negotiated reform. Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge University Press) Erik Grimmer-Solem examines the process of German globalization that began in the 1870s, well before Germany acquired a colonial empire or extensive overseas commercial interests. Structured around the figures of five influential economists who shaped the German political landscape, Learning Empire explores how their overseas experiences shaped public perceptions of the world and Germany's place in it. These men helped define a German liberal imperialism that came to influence the 'world policy' (Weltpolitik) of Kaiser Wilhelm, Chancellor Bülow, and Admiral Tirpitz. They devised naval propaganda, reshaped Reichstag politics, were involved in colonial and financial reforms, and helped define the debate over war aims in the First World War. Looking closely at German worldwide entanglements, Learning Empire recasts how we interpret German imperialism, the origins of the First World War, and the rise of Nazism, inviting reflection on the challenges of globalization in the current century. Erik Grimmer-Solem is Professor in the Departments of History and German Studies at Wesleyan University Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
War in Europe: 1450 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) is a masterful overview of war and military development in Europe since 1450, bringing together the work of a renowned historian of modern European and military history in a single authoritative volume. Beginning with the impact of the Reformation and continuing up to the present day, Professor Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black discusses the following key theme in this truly splendid book:long-term military developments, notably in the way war is waged and battle conducted; the relationship between war and transformations in the European international system; the linkage between military requirements and state developments, the consequences of these requirements, and of the experience of war, for the nature of society Adopting a clear chronological approach, Professor Black weaves a rich and detailed narrative of the development of war in relation to transformations in the European international system, demonstrating the links between its causes and consequences in the military, political and social spheres. Assimilating decades of important research as well as bringing new perspectives to the topic, War in Europe is a key text for students taking courses in European history, international relations and war studies and the lay educated public interested in early-modern and modern European history and military history. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did an authoritarian regime help lay the cornerstones of human rights and international law? Soviet Judgement at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that Anglo-American dominated histories capture the moment while missing the story. Drawing upon secret archives open for a few brief years during Russia’s liberalization, Francine Hirsch takes readers behind the scenes to private parties and late-night deliberations where the Nuremberg Principles took shape. A vital corrective told through the messy and all too human negotiations behind a trial that changed everything and almost never happened. Francine Hirsch is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2005) received the Herbert Baxter Adams, Wayne S. Vucinich, and Council for European Studies book prizes. She specializes in Russian and Soviet History, Modern European History, Comparative Empires, Russian-American Engagement, and the History of Human Rights. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In History of Europe: From Prehistory to the 21st Century, Jeremy Black presents a learned and yet entertaining exploration of the history: political, cultural and social of Europe from its prehistory to the 21st century. Beautifully illustrated and written, the book provides the lay reader as well as the academic one Jeremy Black's deep reading of European history. A book to read and enjoy. The perfect gift for that educated and intelligent friend or family member who wishes to embark upon that life-long relationship which is known as being enamored of history. Most especially European history. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Exeter. And a Senior Associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge with a First, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.” Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, and the University of Rouen’s online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Was Weimar doomed from the outset? In November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020), Robert Gerwarth argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Forget 1929 and 1933, the collapse of Imperial Germany began as a velvet revolution where optimism was as common as pessimism. A masterful synthesis told through diaries and memories, Gerwarth reminds us that contemporaries live events before we have them act out history. Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at UCD and Director of the Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Bismarck Myth (Oxford UP, 2005) and a biography of Reinhard Heydrich (Yale UP, 2011). His third monograph, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End was published by Penguin (UK) and FSG (US) in the autumn of 2016. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler’s Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies (Penn State University Press), Christian Kleinbub challenges the notion that Michelangelo, renowned for his magnificent portrayals of the human body, was merely concerned with “superficial” anatomy—that is, the parts of the body that can be seen from the outside. Providing a fresh perspective on the artist’s portrayals of the human figure, Kleinbub investigates what he calls the artist’s “inner anatomical poetics,” revealing the Michelangelo’s beautiful bodies as objects of profound intellectual and spiritual significance. In so doing, Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies illuminates how Renaissance discourses on anatomical organs and organ systems informed the artist’s figures, linking the interior experiences of his subjects to physiological processes associated with sex, love, devotion, and contemplation, among other thoughts and feelings. The book’s case studies cover the full range of Michelangelo’s prodigious output—including such iconic works as the Sistine Ceiling, Dying Slave, and Last Judgment—and reconstructs what the artist knew of internal anatomy and how he projected that knowledge into his most important works. Drawing upon theological, poetic, philosophical, and scientific texts, the book shows how Michelangelo created a context-dependent, adaptable practice that could be adjusted according to the needs of an individual situation or commission and manipulated to embody, literally and figuratively, a variety of meanings. Deeply researched and convincingly argued, this study heralds a significant shift in thinking about the Italian Renaissance body as it pertains not only to the work of Michelangelo but also to the era as a whole. Christian K. Kleinbub is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at The Ohio State University and CoDirector of the New Foundation of Art History. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Historians of Latin America have long appreciated the central role of mining and metallurgy in the region. The Spanish Empire in particular was created for and founded upon the mining and coining of silver ore from its colonies. Our knowledge about this vital industry, however, remains invariably tethered to the elite sources and perspectives that were preserved in the written record. In Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (UNC Press 2020), Allison Bigelow provides an important historiographical contribution by demonstrating how we can revisit these sources to trace the transmission of metallurgical knowledge from the colonized indigenous laborers who worked the ore to the metropolitan authors who codified practices and knowledge. Rather than European science diffusing to colonial outposts, Bigelow’s studies of gold, silver, copper, and iron illustrate that the technologies that sustained Iberian imperialism were amalgamations like the ores themselves. From prospecting to refining, the making of imperial wealth required learning from indigenous ways of knowing and working the earth and its resources. Moreover, Mining Language goes beyond finding hybridity in the archive by teasing out how Europeans systematically (and sometimes not so systematically) erased the indigenous roots of knowledge and practices. Bigelow shows how as information traveled from American soils to European academies through translations and retranslations, identities became reified, fantasies were confirmed, meanings were lost and occasionally pure nonsense got into the mix. Overall, Mining Language demonstrates the possibilities opened when we reconsider the history of technology to no longer center eye-popping inventions but instead the more quotidian practices that sustain life, create wealth, and enforce power. Seen thusly, the history of technology, power, and imperialism is not a story of implementation and adaptation, but rather one of syncretism and erasure. Scholars and readers interested in the social politics of knowledge production will find Mining Language a compelling and thought-provoking work that provides essential historical background to related issues in the 21st century. Allison Bigelow is the Tom Scully Discovery Chair Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Hope M. Harrison examines the history and meaning of the Berlin Wall, Drawing on an extensive range of archival sources and interviews, this book profiles key memory activists who have fought to commemorate the history of the Berlin Wall and examines their role in the creation of a new German national narrative. With victims, perpetrators and heroes, the Berlin Wall has joined the Holocaust as an essential part of German collective memory. Key Wall anniversaries have become signposts marking German views of the past, its relevance to the present, and the complicated project of defining German national identity. Considering multiple German approaches to remembering the Wall via memorials, trials, public ceremonies, films, and music, this revelatory work also traces how global memory of the Wall has impacted German memory policy. It depicts the power and fragility of state-backed memory projects, and the potential of such projects to reconcile or divide. For more information on the history of the Berlin Wall check out these video clips with Dr. Harrison: Inside the Chapel of Reconciliation and Outside the Former Death Strip. And listeners might be interested in Harrison's Blog Post about arriving in Berlin a few hours after the Berlin Wall fell. Hope M. Harrison is a Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Mexico of five centuries ago was witness to one of the most momentous encounters between human societies, when a group of Spaniards led by Hernando Cortés joined forces with tens of thousands of Mesoamerican allies to topple the mighty Aztec Empire. It served as a template for the forging of much of Latin America and initiated the globalized world we inhabit today. The violent clash that culminated in the Aztec-Spanish war of 1519-21 and the new colonial order it created were millennia in the making, entwining the previously independent cultural developments of both sides of the Atlantic. Collision of Worlds: A Deep History of the Fall of Aztec Mexico and the Forging of New Spain (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides a deep history of this encounter, one that considers temporal depth in the richly layered cultures of Mexico and Spain, from their prehistories to the urban and imperial societies they built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Leading Mesoamerican archaeologist David M. Carballo offers a unique perspective on these fabled events with a focus on the physical world of places and things, their similarities and differences in trans-Atlantic perspective, and their interweaving in an encounter characterized by conquest and colonialism, but also resilience on the part of Native peoples. An engrossing and sweeping account, Collision of Worlds debunks long-held myths and contextualizes the deep roots and enduring consequences of the Aztec-Spanish conflict as never before. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This fascinating book by Richard Carswell looks at how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within French society. The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) argues that explanations of the 'debacle' have usually revolved around the four main themes of decadence, failure, constraint and contingency. It shows that the dominant explanation claimed for many years that the fall was the inevitable consequence of a society grown rotten in the inter-war period. This view has been largely replaced among academic historians by a sizable consensus that distinguishes between the military defeat and the political demise of the Third Republic. It emphasizes the various contingent factors that led to the military defeat of French forces by the Germans. At the same time seeks to understand the constraints within which France’s policy-makers were required to act and the reasons for their policy-making failures in economics, defence and diplomacy. This book makes for most interesting reading for both the academic world and for the lay-educated reader and university student. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Harvard University Press, 2019), Alec Ryrie, the award-winning author of Protestants offers a new vision of the birth of the secular age, looking to the feelings of ordinary men and women―so often left out of the history of atheism. Why have societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? We think we know the answer, but in this lively and startlingly original reconsideration, Alec Ryrie argues that people embraced unbelief much as they have always chosen their worldviews: through their hearts more than their minds. Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age. Alec Ryrie is Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, specializing in the history of Protestant Christianity, England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School.His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew) and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga (Oxford University Press, 2020), Anya Foxen traces several disparate yet entangled roots of modern yoga practice to show that much of what we call yoga in the West stems not only from pre-modern Indian yoga traditions, but also from Hellenistic theories of the subtle body, Western esotericism and magic, pre-modern European medicine, and late-nineteenth-century women's wellness programs. As such, this book richly contributes to the discussion of cultural appropriation as pertains to modern Western yoga. Anya Foxen is Assistant Professor, California Polytechnic State University. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this episode Jana Byars speaks with Elizabeth Horodowich, Professor of History at New Mexico State University, about her new book, The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters. We explore her primary argument, that Venetians used their knowledge, and their ability to employ that knowledge, to write Venetians into the story. Along the way, we talk about grand historical narratives, the Venetian archives, and what leads an historian to her topics. We end up with a quick preview of her newest work, Amerasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At Newman I co-teach a class titled "The Holocaust and its Legacies." I teach the course with a Professor of Theology and it's designed to help students understand the ways in which the Holocaust shaped the world they live in. It is, in a sense, designed to help students gain insight. John K. Roth's new book Sources of Holocaust Insight: Learning and Teaching about the Genocide (Cascade Books, 2020) may become a required text in this course. His book is different than, I think, any other books I’ve discussed on the show. It is a reflection, a tribute, and perhaps a kind of valedictory all at once. John reflects on the people who have taught him, in all the different ways teaching can happen, and the lessons that he’s learned over decades of thinking and writing about the Holocaust. In doing so, he offers the reader an insight both into his own development and into the way historians, theologians, philosophers and artists have responded to the Holocaust over time. It's a revealing book, sober, reflective and occasionally inspiring. Roth offers us an intellectual biography that puts his other work into context. But he also challenges his readers to be better scholars and better people while recognizing the world is far too big for one person to change. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Fascination with the Viking Age seems to be at an all-time high, though it has never really gone out of fashion. There is something irresistible about the Vikings, a civilization dedicated to exploring the edges of the known world, forging an empire from north America to Kiev, which dominated the political and economic landscape from the Fall of Rome to the First Crusade. Writers, artists and musicians such as Richard Wagner and J. R. R. Tolkien have found inspiration in the stories, legends, and sagas of the Vikings, and modern culture too has successfully mined the canon for the inspiration behind blockbusters as “Vikings,” “Game of Thrones” and the Marvel films. But few scholars have delved-exclusively into the world of Viking women until now. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s recent book, Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a deeply satisfying exploration of the lives of Viking women. Valkyrie is skillfully arranged around the skeleton of the life cycle of a woman—from birth through childhood, adolescence, marriage, and old age. But this skeleton is expertly fleshed out with cogent examples drawn from archaeology, contemporary accounts, and the rich literary vein of the Old Norse sagas. The result is a gripping read, which plunges us into the world of the Viking women as they grapple with the emotional rollercoaster that is adolescence, weather transactional marriages, and navigate old age. The Viking Age (793-1100 CE) was a time of exceptional opportunity for social mobility. Viking raiding and trading had the potential to create substantial wealth for those of comparatively humble origins. “Valkyrie” looks at this phenomenon, too: charting the role women played in running successful enterprises, and sometimes even ruling countries. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttiralso explores the emotional lives of Viking women, and their capacity for protecting their loved ones as fiercely as they exact vengeance for wrongs done to them. “Valkyrie” is that rare academic book that reads like an action-packed thriller and is sure to appeal to serious scholars of early Scandinavian history as much as it will to those who are eager to learn more about the women behind the great men of the Viking age. This is a book that gives the hitherto unseen Vikingwomen a chance to take centre stage and emerge as powerful agents for change in their own right. Friðriksdóttir earned attained her PhD from the University of Oxford and has held teaching and research positions at Yale, The Árni MagnússonInstitute for Icelandic Studies, and Harvard. She is currently based at the National Library of Norway in Oslo. She is the author of Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words and Power, The New Middle Ages. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Find out more about Johanna at her website, vikingwomen.org. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Great War was perhaps the greatest single upheaval of the 20th century. While World War II saw more lives lost, in terms of the shock to European/Western civilization, the Great War was a more horrendous event. Perhaps nothing was as unexpected in this conflict as the sudden termination of the same in November 1918. From that time to this, historians have been considering why Germany and its allies decided to terminate the conflict when they did. Here to consider the matter once again, in this newest episode of Arguing History is Professor of History Emeritus Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Exeter. And a Senior Associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge with a First, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.” Dr. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While the concept of "type" has been present in architectural discourse since its formal introduction at the end of the eighteenth century, its role in the development of architectural projects has not been comprehensively analyzed. This book proposes a reassessment of architectural type throughout history and its impact on the development of architectural theory and practice. Beginning with Laugier's 1753 Essay on Architecture, Pablo Meninato's Unexpected Affinities: The History of Type from Laugier to Duchamp (Routledge, 2018) traces type through nineteenth- and twentiethth-century architectural movements and thoeries, culminating in a discussion of the affinities between architectural type and Duchamp's concept of the readymade. Includes over sixty black and white images. Pablo Meninato, PhD is an architect, architectural critic, and educator whose research focuses on the conception and development of the architectural project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The “Mongol turn” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forged new political, commercial, and religious circumstances in Eurasia. This legacy can be found in the “sudden appearances” of common themes, styles, motifs, and even pigments that circulated across the continents. Drawing on visual as well as textual sources from eight unique locations that spanned between Siena in Italy and Quanzhou in China, Roxann Prazniak maps out in Sudden Appearances an elaborate thirteenth-century network of cultural and commercial exchanges that “produced an ascendant materialism and intervisuality that emphasized human agency.” Join me as I discuss Sudden Appearances: The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art (University of Hawaii Press 2019) with Dr. Prazniak. Daigengna Duoer is a PhD student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation researches on transnational/transregional networks of Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria that connected to the Republic of China, Tibet, and the Empire of Japan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As historical topics, political revolutions come in and out of fashion. At the moment the American Revolution as an ideological struggle engages the public, but historians are less sure. Books that used to have the Revolution at their centre now approach it from the edges and peripheries, integrating the experiences of people and communities excluded by studies of ideological origins. In the United Kingdom, still mired in BREXIT, the civil war past inflects present politics even if the conflict itself has been nudged off the school curriculum. In the 1990s, historians of England re-fought the civil wars in battles of footnotes. It took entire books to summarise the scholarship on events that were sometimes civil wars, at others revolutions, here wars of religion, there the wars of the three kingdoms. Michael Braddick is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield, and is a leading voice in the study of England’s revolutionary past. In The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), he takes a fresh look at the turmoil that gripped England for three decades in the middle of the seventeenth century. His focus is one man’s path through these years, a path that was one of stark public suffering, personal conviction, principled argument, and an unwavering dedication to the idea that common liberties were the highest political goods. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The culture of insurgents in early modern Europe was primarily an oral one; memories of social conflicts in the communities affected were passed on through oral forms such as songs and legends. This popular history continued to influence political choices and actions through and after the early modern period. The chapters in Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture (Routledge, 2018), edited by Éva Guillorel, David Hopkin, and William G. Pooley, examine numerous examples from across Europe of how memories of revolt were perpetuated in oral cultures, and they analyse how traditions were used. From the German Peasants’ War of 1525 to the counter-revolutionary guerrillas of the 1790s, oral traditions can offer radically different interpretations of familiar events. This is a ‘history from below’, and a history from song, which challenges existing historiographies of early modern revolts. Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kevin Duong, a political theorist in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia, has written a fascinating analysis of the way that violence has been used, in a sense, to create or promote solidarity during the course of the “long nineteenth century” in France. Duong explores four separate periods and experiences in France, starting with the French Revolution and the trial of Louis XVI, moving to the long military engagement in Algeria, then to the Paris Commune in later half of the century, and finally to the preparations and the run up to World War I. And while The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2020) is about the French engagement with violence, it is a much broader analysis of the role that violence plays, particularly the concept of redemptive violence, in constructing democracy and establishing a cohesive social body among the citizenry. Duong makes a complex and important argument that the establishment of democracy is built on an often-violent overthrow of an old order, and instead of the move from the state of nature that social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke argue for in their texts, the democratic state comes into existence not in the welcome transition from the cruelty of the state of nature, but in the violent convulsions of bloody revolution more like the French experience. In order to create a democratic people, violence is often implemented as the means to pulling people together, and it is a kind of collective violence. Duong’s analysis posits that modern society is held together by social cohesion, which comes out of unifying violent experiences that bring people together. While mass violence is often associated with anarchy and disorder, The Virtue of Violence makes a different case, compelling us to consider how violence solves a kind of social solidarity problem, and is a means of knitting together potentially disparate members of society. While this is a book that explores the French experience, France provides the case studies to consider how violence works constructively within democratic thought, and, how redemptive violence has a kind of revitalizing power in these political contexts. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The life of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a stern moralist yet possessed of deep, and at times dark, passions? And why did scores of thousands of Jews, many of them from traditional, observant backgrounds, embrace Herzl as their leader? In his new book Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale UP, 2020), historian Derek Penslar shows that Herzl’s path to Zionism had as much to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism. Once Herzl devoted himself to Zionism, Penslar shows, he distinguished himself as a consummate leader—possessed of indefatigable energy, organizational ability, and electrifying charisma. Herzl became a screen onto which Jews of his era could project their deepest needs and longings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colonial societies of Mexico and Colombia, in a historical moment characterized by corporate patriarchy and enlightened punishment. Focusing on crimes of spousal murders, Uribe-Urán asks intriguing questions: who were the men and women that committed these crimes, and what were their reasons for doing so? How did the law, both royal and ecclesiastical, responded to such murders? In which instances did the monarch decide to forgive or show leniency, and when did justice opt for harsher punishment? In answering these questions, Uribe-Urán challenges some traditional notions of how honor is supposed to work in Iberian societies. Also, he contributes to a growing scholarship that demonstrates that far from being secluded in their homes, women in colonial Spanish America had active public lives. This book is a fascinating read for those interested in Atlantic history, and also, for those who want to understand the long history of domestic and gender violence. As Uribe-Urán tells us by the end, domestic violence is the most widespread human right’s violations today; histories of this phenomenon, widespread and pervasive, are necessary for our contemporary quest for truly making domestic violence the serious crime that it really is. Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Matthew Miller explores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post–World War II Germany. Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the second half of the twentieth century: Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), Johnson’s Jahrestage (Anniversaries), and Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings). In them, he traces the epic’s unlikely reemergence after the catastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and its continuity across the historical watershed of 1989–91, defined by German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Building on Franco Moretti’s codification of the literary form of the modern epic, Miller demonstrates the epic’s ability to understand the past; to come to terms with ethical, social, and political challenges in the second half of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe and beyond; and to debate and envision possible futures. Matthew D. Miller is associate professor of German at Colgate University. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"The intellectual historian has to start with the words." – Richard Whatmore, What is Intellectual History? When political theorists write about the principle of popular power, that is, who are the people and what kind of power do they have – the language of ‘constituent power’ is a key concept in this regard. In her new book, Constituent Power: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Lucia Rubinelli, a researcher in the history of political thought at Robinson College, Cambridge, retraces a history of the language of constituent power. Her book examines five key moments from Sieyes and the French Revolution, Schmitt over the Weimar Republic era, Arendt’s thought into the 1960s as well as less recognizable European jurists of the 19th and 20th centuries – all theorizing through these two words an understanding of popular power as an alternative notion to sovereignty as understood in their own contingent historical moments. This is the latest book in Cambridge University Press’s renowned ‘Ideas in Context’ series, as this well-researched thesis illuminates the history of key institutions of modern democracy from representation, electoral systems and constitutional courts among others in relation to the language of constituent power. Professor Rubinelli’s analysis brings to life what amounts to an intellectual history of the pivotal reinterpretations of Sieyes’s political thought and confirming with a flourish what Whatmore made clear in his book on intellectual history – "…it has to start with the words." Lucia Rubinelli is a junior research fellow in Robinson College at the University of Cambridge. Keith Krueger lectures at the SHU-UTS Business School in Shanghai. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, has written a vivacious and insightful survey of Portuguese history, designed for travellers to the country. A Brief History of Portugal (Robinson, 2020) does exactly what it says on the tin. Beginning with the arrival of the first humans, the book describes the legacies of Roman culture, the Islamic conquest and the Reconquista that followed, before exploring Portugal’s rise as an imperial power during early modernity. The book discusses the crises of the nineteenth century, the character of the Salazar regime, and the liberalisation of culture and society from the 1970s to the present day. Filled with facts, this short account offers tips for travellers, and a few hours of happy escape for those for whom travel – during the pandemic – is impossible. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for transit, you cannot help but notice that the city’s landscape would be dramatically altered without the mosques of the city. In Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019), Ünver Rüstem takes a stab of a slice of that history, arguing that we should see the eighteenth-century Baroque period in Ottoman mosque architecture as innovative and not derivative in how Ottoman mosque architecture integrated Baroque elements. By doing so, he pushes back effectively against notions of Ottoman decline and demonstrates that such architecture, praised in the contemporary writings of both Ottoman and Western viewers, successfully rebranded the Ottoman capital for a changing world. He also draws our eyes to the complex social process by which mosque design develops, bringing in a cast of characters that includes non-Muslims as much as non-Muslims. On this New Books interview, we walk you through the book, Rüstem’s process, what Baroque means in different contexts and mosque architecture in Istanbul today. Ünver Rüstem is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Johns Hopkins University. Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The opening sentence of 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Roussau's The Social Contract poses a central question for all of us. Why do we live under conditions of inequality, violence, dependency and general unhappiness (just look on twitter!) if society is made by us and for us? Why does it seem that modern human beings are not liberated but in fact subjugate themselves voluntarily to a system that robs them off their freedom? Rousseau's thought has informed much of modern political theory and philosophy and inspired people everywhere to think about the balance between individual liberty and collective existence. In order to understand better the lasting influence of Rousseau and his current significance, I spoke with Melissa Schwartzberg, who is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a specialist in political theory. Melissa's research is in the historical origins and normative logic of democratic institutions. This means she examines the principles underlying democracies and also the way democratic practices, from constitutions to elections, work out today. Professor Schwartzberg is the author of several books: Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule, and Democracy and Change (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We live in an interconnected world. People, goods, and services leap across borders like never before. Terrorist organizations, like al-Qaida, and digital platforms, like Facebook, have gone global. But, if problems straddle different national jurisdictions, how do regulation and enforcement even happen? Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security (Princeton University Press, 2019) is a timely and wise analysis of globalization and how it has fundamentally transformed governance. Digging into transatlantic relations, Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell show how American and European businesses, activists and policymakers have fought over and decided security and data policy. The book is also a call to action for their fellow IR scholars to study, what Newman and Farrell call, “the international politics of information.” Given the significance of data politics and misinformation campaigns to our present moment, I hope they listen. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2018) is Professor Eric Dursteler’s translation of two final diplomatic reports (relazione) that Venetian ambassadors delivered upon their return to that Most Serene Republic at the turn of the seventeenth century—Lorenzo Bernardo in 1590 and Ottaviano Bon in 1609. These were polished and summative works performed before the assembled government of Venice detailing the politics and culture of the Ottoman Empire and its dealings with other powers. They offer insight about the work—and sometimes game—of early modern diplomacy; they aspire to a explain the character and spirit of the Sultan and his empire, in the process revealing even more about Venice and her agents. In this discussion, Professor Dursteler describes the early modern Mediterranean world, its arrangement and political issues, and its changes in the wake of the Battle of Lepanto (1571). He also talks about slavery, corsairs and piracy, and the Ottoman devşirme system (“blood tax” or “child levy”) that enslaved children from tributary states into its imperial administration, military, and harem. At the same time, this integration of cultures contributed to the multi-national and cosmopolitan empire (or ‘composite state’) unlike any other in the Mediterranean. Dursteler discusses gender and sex in the imagination of Early Modern Venice and in the cultural memory of both the West and East, and how it has changed. Finally, Dr. Dursteler invites us to think comparatively about early modern fears of the plague, and our current crisis—this was recorded in April of 2020—of pandemic. Eric Dursteler is Professor of History at Brigham Young University. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The myth of Jews killing Christian children emerged in 1144 CE, with the death of a boy named William in Norwich, England. Over the course of several centuries, this myth gained traction and became firmly rooted throughout medieval and early modern Europe. In Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020), Magda Teter traces the history of this myth and analyzes how accusations of ritual murder have followed Jews from the 12th century to the contemporary period. Magda Teter is Professor of History and Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Karl Qualls' new book Stalin’s Niños: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951 (University of Toronto Press, 2020) examines how the Soviet Union raised and educated nearly 3,000 child refugees of the Spanish Civil War. An analysis of the archival record and numerous letters, oral histories, and memoirs reveals that this little-known story exemplifies the Soviet transformation of children into future builders of communism and illuminates the educational techniques shared with other modern states. Classroom education taught patriotism for the two homelands and the importance of emulating Spanish and Soviet heroes, scientists, soldiers, and artists. Extra-curricular clubs and activities reinforced classroom experiences and helped discipline the mind, body, and behaviors. Adult mentors, like the heroes studied in the classroom, provided models to emulate and became the tangible expression of the ideal Spaniard and Soviet. The Basque and Spanish children thus were transformed into hybrid Hispano-Soviets fully engaged with their native language, culture, and traditions while also imbued with Russian language and culture and Soviet ideals of hard work, camaraderie, internationalism, and sacrifice for ideals and others. Even during their horrific evacuation to the Soviet interior during World War II, the twenty-two Soviet boarding schools designed specifically for the Spanish refugee children – and better provisioned than those for Soviet children – served these displaced niños for fourteen years and transformed them into Red Army heroes, award-winning Soviet athletes and artists, successful educators and workers, and aids to Fidel Castro in building Cuba after his revolution. Stalin’s Niños also sheds new light on the education of non-Russian Soviet and international students and the process of constructing a supranational Soviet identity. Karl Qualls is Professor of History and the John B. Parsons Chair in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Another heavenly day” is the opening line of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days (1961), where Winnie sits buried to her waist in sand, with her husband Willie stuck a few feet away from her … but language, memory, and consciousness are not all she has. Beckett’s plays, novels, poetry, radio plays, and prose reveal our deepest humanity by stripping language to its bare essentials. Beckett wrote much of his work after 1945 in French, a language he learned mostly as an adult, and then translated it back into his native English to purge it of clichés and stock phrases. In the resulting works he reveals how our bodies moving through space are far more than vessels for a roving consciousness. They contain a hint of transcendence which manifests itself as the human need for self-expression through which we locate ourselves — in time, in relation to others, and in relation to ourselves. I spoke with Beckett expert, scholar, and theater director Nicholas Johnson at the Samuel Beckett Theatre at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where Beckett taught for a short time in the 1920s before giving up on academia, moving to Paris, and becoming a writer next to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and others. Our conversation shows how Beckett’s work is surprisingly optimistic about the power of art and language to give us meaning. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is the final line of Beckett’s 1953 novel The Unnamable. Johnson explained how these words show Beckett’s relentless commitment to strip our existence down to the basics (who we are, what we have, what we want) and then move deeper from there. Instead of adding more words and complexity, Beckett shows that our searching may be our life’s meaning and that not knowing what we want is, in fact, the key to knowing ourselves. “You have to pay attention and be as informed as possible; you have to try to understand things; and you have to speak out!” is Johnson’s summary of what Beckett’s works mean for him. In a time of historic and political turmoil, it’s an urgent imperative and we would do well to heed it. Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics. Gavriel Rosenfeld is Professor of History in Judaic Studies at Fairfield University. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We've grown to understand in the past few weeks how worlds can change in just a few days. Peter Fritzsche's new book Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books, 2020) is an extraordinary examination of how, in just a few months, Germans got used to living around, among, and, mostly, in unity with, Nazis. Fritzsche's argument is sophisticated and nuanced. But it's the details of everyday life he provides that make this book stand out. Fritzsche uses diaries, newspaper articles, letters and other sources to provide a journalistic (in the best sense of the world) sense of how people lived through and in a revolution. He highlights moments of collective experience--the anti-jewish boycott, national celebrations, elections. But he also tells us about an influenza outbreak that closed school in a small town shortly after Hitler became chancellor, reminding us that many live through moments of high drama in very ordinary ways. Historians and genocide scholars routinely try to understand how societies grow to support authoritarian. oppressive or racist governments. Fritzsche's books is a significant contribution to this scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the battles most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous warfare affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread from France as a result, overshadow the profound repercussions that the Napoleonic Wars had throughout the world. In his new book The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), Professor Alexander Mikaberidze of the department of History at Louisiana State University, argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood with an international context in mind. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Professor Mikaberidze discusses major political-military events around the world and situates geopolitical decision-making within its long- and short-term contexts. From the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa to the Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, the effects of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would shape international affairs well into the next century. Skillfully narrated and deeply researched, here at last is the complete global history of the period, one that expands our contemporary view of the Napoleonic Wars and their role in laying the foundations of the modern world. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In We Don't Believe You: Why Populists and the Establishment See the World Differently (Bite-Sized Book, 2019), Sir John Redwood gives us fresh insights into why the populist movements and parties have been winning elections. He looks at how the experts and narrative pushed out by the established elites on both sides of the Atlantic have met with disbelief as well as with strong opposition. He shows how great parties have been all but destroyed as election winning forces as new movements and people sweep them aside. From the establishment himself as an expert and a member of one of the traditional parties, he seeks to show how the sensible elites adjust and respond to new moods and new ideas instead of confronting or denying them. In too many cases a rigid and unhappy elite just keeps shouting back the same things people do not want to hear. One of the worst features of what is happening is the inability of the two sides to understand each other or to work together. The establishment shows scorn for the populists and keeps reasserting the same policies and attitudes as if nothing had happened. The populists show they do not believe the analysis let alone the prescription of established institutions and governments, and seek to sweep them all away. Can the main institutions of the western world adapt in time to the new mood? Sir John Redwood is Conservative MP for Wokingham in the UK, first elected in 1987. He was formerly Secretary of State for Wales in John Major's Cabinet, and twice a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party in the 1990s. He is also a Distinguished fellow of All Souls, Oxford and the author of 23 books on a wide range of subjects, from atheism in early modern British history, to 21st century economics, to politics and government. He always has very insightful and often bold things to say on all these topics. Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally, please check out his free training at becomeapublicintellectual.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
So what is Western Civilization, anyway? The term itself is under assault from progressives, as if the very notion is somehow passé and is not inclusive enough in a globalized world. But, the fact is, our daily lives in the U.S and throughout much of the world are governed by core values and concepts that grow out of two inextricably linked aspects of the human condition: faith and reason. You don’t have to be a religious person to benefit from gaining an understanding of how the pairing of reason and faith is one of the hallmarks of Western Civilization and is unique to it. In his illuminating 2019 work of intellectual history, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (Gateway, 2019), Samuel Gregg demonstrates that key features of what we call the West--from the market economy to scientific advancement and the quest for human freedom and justice--are rooted in the relationship between faith and reason. He shows, for example, that the Enlightenment has been misleadingly portrayed as almost wholly anti-religious in nature whereas many of its leading figures were in fact deeply devout and welcomed the development of new fields of study and were, indeed, often pioneers in them. Gregg examines key historical events such as the Regensburg Lecture delivered in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI (and which led to mass demonstrations and riots in parts of the Muslim world) and the origins of the idea of a reasoning, reasonable God in ancient Judaism and early Christianity in order to argue that Western Civilization is worth preserving in an era of Jihadism and other mortal threats to values we all cherish such as religious freedom, freedom of speech, and human rights and dignity. In his book, Gregg compellingly argues that a renewed commitment to the foundational linkage of faith and reason is not only possible but imperative for everyone on the planet who does not wish to live under tyranny. Give a listen. Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford University Press, 2019), Maurice Finocchiaro shows that there were (and are) really two Galileo “affairs.” Galileo’s original trial and condemnation forms the first affair, the cultural history of controversies about the meaning of the original trial, forms the second. With scrupulous attention to evidence and the argumentation employed by various participants, Dr. Finocchiaro’s book is at once an accessible primer on a key event in the 16th- and 17th-century Scientific Revolution, and a thought provoking look at how the subsequent controversies resonate down to the present day. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Crusader World (Routledge, 2015), edited by Adrian J. Boas, is a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the field of crusader studies, an area of study which has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this volume Adrian Boas draws together an impressive range of academics, including work from renowned scholars as well as a number of though-provoking pieces from emerging researchers, in order to provide broad coverage of the major aspects of the period. This authoritative work will play an important role in the future direction of crusading studies. This volume enriches present knowledge of the crusades, addressing such wide-ranging subjects as: intelligence and espionage, gender issues, religious celebrations in crusader Jerusalem, political struggles in crusader Antioch, the archaeological study of battle sites and fortifications, diseases suffered by the crusaders, crusading in northern Europe and Spain and the impact of Crusader art. The relationship between Crusaders and Muslims, two distinct and in many way opposing cultures, is also examined in depth, including a discussion of how the Franks perceived their enemies. Arranged into eight thematic sections, The Crusader World considers many central issues as well as a large number of less familiar topics of the crusades, crusader society, history and culture. With over 100 photographs, line drawings and maps, this impressive collection of essays is a key resource for students and scholars alike. Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show.. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map making which is written through and by individual geographers/cartographers/map men. The book focuses primarily on four countries: Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. When guiding his reader through the entanglements of transnational endeavors of making maps, Seegel zeroes in on personal stories of five, what he calls, characters/protagonists: Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pal Teleki. An individual story is an archive of biographical data and statistics, but it also opens up an entire world of history and geography that provides an insight into geopolitical decisions which eventually change and impact lives of those who happen to be part of this map journey. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Map Men offers a personalized version of how maps are drawn and made. At first glance, maps may seem stable and crystalized. However, as Seegel insightfully shows, this is an illusion: maps are fantasies, as he puts it in this interview. This understanding of maps does not in any way minimize the science that lies behind the map creating. However, what Map Men does is show the making of maps in their multiple and at times complex and intertwined processes: maps are points of references, but maps are also texts which invite a diversity of stories and interpretations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
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. In Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation (Central European University Press, 2019), Jessie Labov 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 post-communist landscape. She explores how the current use of transnational, web-based media follows the logic and practice of an earlier, 'dissident' generation of writers. Jessie Labov is the Director of Academic and Institutional Development at McDaniel College Budapest, and a Resident Fellow in the Center for Media, Data and Society, at Central European University. Steven Seegel is a professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her recently published Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame (Indiana University Press, 2019), Áine O'Healy explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompanying the country’s shift from an emigrant nation to a destination point for over five million immigrants over the course of three decades. Migrant Anxieties traces a phenomenology of anxiety that is not only present at the sociopolitical level but also interwoven into the narrative strategies of over 30 films produced since 1990, throwing into sharp relief the interface between the local and the global in this transnational era. Starting with the representation of post-communist migrations to Italy from Eastern Europe and subsequent arrivals from Africa through the controversial frontier of Lampedusa, O’Healy explores topics as diverse as the configuration of migrant labor, affective surrogacy, Italian whiteness, and the legacy of Italy’s colonial history. Showing how contemporary filmmaking practices in Italy are linked to changes in the broader media landscape, O’Healy analyzes the ways in which both Italian and migrant filmmakers are reimagining Italian society and remapping the nation’s borderscape. Giancarlo Lombardi is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published widely on European and North American serial drama, on Italian Film and Cultural Studies, and on cultural representations of Italian terrorism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nicholas R. Jones’s book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performance of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019), analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, when performing habla de negros—how Africanized Castilian was commonly referred to—was in fashion. Jones problematizes long-held beliefs among literary critics and linguists that habla de negros as represented in dominant Spanish literature was exclusively racist stereotypes, and instead seeks to theorize habla de negros as a radical performance that “allow[s] black expression and black sensibilities to emerge whether there are black bodies present or not.” This elegant book demonstrates that black voices, speakers, bodies, subjects, were visible, present, and constitutive parts of the early modern Castilian soundscape and society and succeeds in drawing modern readers’ attention to their importance. By centering black historical and literary figures, Jones shows how black populations of early modern Spain participated in the formation of Black experience beyond Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States. Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Karima Moyer-Nocchi is a professor of modern languages at the University of Siena and a lecturer for the Master in Culinary Studies program at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. Her first book, Chewing the Fat – An Oral History of Italian Food from Fascism to Dolce Vita (Medea, 2015) explored the folklore and foodways of Italy in the twentieth century through the first-hand accounts of women who lived through the twenty-year fascist regime. Moyer-Nocchi’s new book, The Eternal Table: A Cultural History of Food in Rome (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), covers the entirety of Roman (or romanesco) food history from pre-Roman times to the present day. According to Moyer-Nocchi, the cucina romanesca is multi-layered from the papal court to the flow of pilgrims and Grand Tourists, from the House of Savoy and the Kingdom of Italy to Fascism and the rise of the middle classes. It is not a cuisine frozen in time, but a cuisine that’s as fluid and changeable as the city’s inhabitants. Indeed, human, plant, and animal migration is one of the recurring themes of this book that places food in a rich social history. “Rome enthusiasts will revel in this well-researched retrospective of a dynamic, ever-evolving city” - Publisher’s Weekly Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jonathan Scott is one of the most original interpreters of the early modern world. How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800 (Yale University Press, 2019) is a deft and cogent synthesis in which Scott returns to the turbulent seventeenth century in Britain, and examines how a period of political upheaval in its middle decade laid the foundations for a process of state-formation across the Anglo-Dutch-American world. While it tracks across the familiar ground of revolution, empire, commerce, and republicanism, this is a book with broad horizons. It is about movement, water, the interchange of ideas, peoples, and cultures. At its centre is the Anglo-Dutch relationship and, at its many peripheries, Scott reveals the transformative effects of this unique republican pulse. Jonathan Scott is Professor of History at the University of Auckland, and the author of seminal studies of the early modern British world, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (2004), and When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500-1800 (2011). Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (Duke University Press, 2014), Christopher J. Lee recovers the forgotten experiences of multiracial peoples in the British colonies of Nyasaland, Southern and Northern Rhodesia. By carefully reading fragmented correspondence, colonial reports, periodicals and oral testimonies, the author traces the development of Anglo-African, Euro-African and Eurafrican identities that complicated colonial concepts of native and non-native. In light of their ambiguous status, multiracial individuals were generally marginalized and lived in a legal limbo. This led them to redefine kinship ties and political allegiances with the goal of improving their economic and social prospects. Ultimately, the book questions the analytical categories inherited both from colonial and nationalist historiographies and argues that they obscure the social, cultural and intellectual diversity that informs what it means to be African. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018), Paul Hanebrink, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, traces the complex history of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Hanebrink shows how Fascists, Conservatives and Nazis imagined Jewish Bolsheviks as enemies who crossed borders to subvert order from within and bring destructive ideas from abroad. This is a hundred years history that traces how this myth transformed through the Cold War period and continues to this day in new forms. Hanebrink's book breaks new ground, is based on brilliant research and is highly readable. Dr Max Kaiser teaches at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiserm@unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who or what originated and/or caused the Great War from breaking out in July 1914? Was it Serbia with its expansionist and aggressive designs on Austria-Hungary? Was it Austria-Hungary itself, unnecessarily plunging itself and the rest of Europe in a futile effort to keep together its tottering Monarchy? Was it Tsarist Russia? Attempting to both expand its influence in the Balkans at the expense of both Austria and Germany and at the very same time, seeking to bolster its own tottering monarchy by showing its aggrieved public that Mother Russia was backing the cause of its down-trodden, Slavic brothers. Was it Kaiserreich Germany? Aiming in the famous thesis of 20th-century German historian Fritz Fischer, to launch a Great War to establish itself as the hegemonic power on the European continent? A war which its military leaders stated repeatedly, Germany could only win if war occurred in the next few years. Was it France? Aiming in conjunction with its Russian ally to start a war with the aim of regaining the two lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Was it Liberal England? Hoping for the final success of the policy of ‘encirclement’ of Germany, commenced by Edward VII? The origins of the Great War is one of the most fascinating and enthralling subjects in modern History. Which oceans of ink, almost (but not quite) matching the oceans of blood spilled during the war itself, have been devoted to the subject. From the immediate outbreak of the war to the centenary anniversary in 2014, master historians have researched and written on it. Now to bring the topic to the audience of New Books Network, are Jeremy Black, Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University, without a doubt, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world and Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society. Please listen to this most interesting of podcast. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Limning – the painting of miniature portraits – was an important art form in 16th-century Europe. Among its greatest practitioners was Nicholas Hilliard, who enjoyed an international reputation for his skill in crafting the finely wrought images. In Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist (Yale University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Goldring explains how a young man from a family of Exeter goldsmiths became one of the premier artists of his age. Timing was a key factor, as the ascent of the Catholic Queen Mary to the throne in 1553 led the Protestant Hilliard family to decamp for the continent. Exposure to the art styles there influenced the young Hilliard, who after returning to England and completing his apprenticeship as a goldsmith quickly established himself as the foremost miniature portraitist in England. Goldring shows how both Hilliard’s technical skills and his court connections played equal roles in his prominence, over a career that led to a period at the court of the French king Henri III and lasted through Elizabeth’s death to his final years working as an artist for King James I. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen (Yale University Press, 2019), acclaimed historian of 18th-century French history and the biographer of Louis XVI, John Hardman redresses the balance, corrects and tears away the smears and calumny and sheds fresh light and understanding on Marie-Antoinette’s story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the last years of the ancien regime. Drawing on new and or rarely used sources, he describes how, from the outset, Marie-Antoinette refused to prioritize the foreign policy of her mother, the Queen-Empress Maria-Theresa, bravely took over the helm from Louis XVI after the collapse of his morale, and, when revolution broke out, listened to the Third Estate and worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it. In short Hardman, whose biography is only the second by an academic in the past one-hundred years, provides the reader with a valuable insight into the world and the thought of Marie-Antoinette. Accordingly to historian, Monroe Price, writing in the Literary Review, Hardman has written a "fascinating biography", which is "major contribution to the subject." In short, Hardman's book is one that any serious scholar or student of 18th-century French History cannot go without. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Shanghai’s role in shaping modern China and indeed the very idea of what modernity is in China can hardly be overstated. Much of this long-lasting influence can be seen in how the city itself came into being as a complex product of Chinese and colonial forces, and as Cole Roskam shows us in Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937 (University of Washington Press, 2019), it is in the very material actions of architects and town planners that this is most obvious. Accompanied by a rich array of archival photos, maps and designs, Roskam’s book takes us down to street level, showing up close how the competing influences of Chinese, British, French, American and other governance and architectural regimes interacted and shaped the urban landscape. As Shanghai has again become an arena where global markets and design innovations collide, appreciating this tangled legacy is key to understanding this metropolis and indeed China as a whole. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's influence on the remapping of borders was profound. But it was his impact on the modern political structuring of Eastern Europe that would be perhaps his most enduring international legacy: neither Czechoslovakia nor Yugoslavia exist today, but their geopolitical presence persisted across the twentieth century from the end of World War I to the end of the Cold War. They were created in large part thanks to Wilson's advocacy, and in particular, his Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, which hinged in large part on the concept of national self-determination. But despite his deep involvement in the region's geopolitical transformation, President Wilson never set eyes on Eastern Europe, and never traveled to a single one of the eastern lands whose political destiny he so decisively influenced. Eastern Europe, invented in the age of Enlightenment by the travelers and philosophies of Western Europe, was reinvented on the map of the early twentieth century with the crucial intervention of an American president who deeply invested his political and emotional energies in lands that he would never visit. Larry Wolff's new book Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (Stanford University Press, 2020) traces how Wilson's emerging definition of national self-determination and his practical application of the principle changed over time as negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference unfolded. Larry Wolff exposes the contradictions between Wilson's principles and their implementation in the peace settlement for Eastern Europe, and sheds light on how his decisions were influenced by both personal relationships and his growing awareness of the history of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Steven Seegel is a professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Should we understand the rise of Trump or the success of Brexit in terms of populism? Culture? Xenophobia? Do the same political forces produce Sanders and Trump? In his new book Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Jonathan Hopkin provides case studies of Spain, Italy, Greece, the US, and UK to argue that the election results in rich Western democracies are not the result of populism or hostility to migration – but opposition to the inequalities brought on by the economic policy of neo-liberalism. Hopkin’s finely grained qualitative study emphasizes the ways in which economics fuels movements from both left and right. Anti-systems candidates attack the ways in which neo-liberal institutions and politics distribute benefits and risks. For Hopkin, the greater the impact of economic inequality and hardship, the higher the vote share for anti-systems candidates and policies. Hopkin looks back to look forward. As nations abandoned the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s, they triggered an erosion of democratic process in favor of technocratic government that left little room for voters – or their leaders – to influence policy. After the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, voters rejected candidates associated with an economic system that favored bailing out banks yet imposed austerity on citizens. Anti-Systems Politics provides clear and compelling case studies that provide insights on contemporary politics from Europe to the US. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Learning, innovation and adaptation are not concepts that we necessarily associate with the British Army of the First World War. Yet the need to learn from mistakes, to exploit new opportunities and to adapt to complex and novel situations are always necessary. Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), by Dr. Aimée Fox, Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London, grapples with this most intriguing of topic, particular for academics with their generally less than positive views of the mental capacities of the armed forces. Dr. Fox's book is the first institutional examination of the army's process for learning during the First World War. Drawing on organizational and management theories. Dr. Fox critiques existing approaches to military learning in wartime. Focused on a series of case studies, the book ranges across multiple theatres and positions the army within a broader context in terms of relationships with allies and civilians to reveal that learning was more complex than initially thought. The book also grapples with the army's failings and shortcomings, explores and acknowledges the inherent difficulties in a desperate and lethally competitive environment. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It's possible to organize a 20th-century German history course around the date 9 November. In 1918, Phillipp Schedemann proclaimed the creation of a new German Republic. In 1989, 9 November saw the opening of the Berlin Wall. In between, in 1938, Krystallnacht began on the night of 9 November. Krystallnacht, as most students of the Holocaust know, was a short, intense period of state-sponsored terror against those Germans identified as Jewish. It marked a dramatic escalation in the persecution of Jews in Germany. We often assume we know everything there is to know about such a well-studied event. But the contributions to Steven Ross and Wolf Gruner's excellent new volume of essays demonstrate how wrong this assumption is. In New Perspectives on Krystallnacht: After 80 years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison (Purdue University Press, 2019), authors examine media coverage of Krystallnacht, new understanding of the scope and location of the violence, the way in which Krystallnacht has been used in contemporary politics and several other subjects. The essays are uniformly insightful and interesting. As both Gruner and Ross point out in the interview, perhaps the most important result of the project is the identification of a number of new questions historians can ask about Krystallnacht and its meaning. This is perhaps the highest praise one can offer such a volume. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There is far more to a map than meets the eye. Such is the case in historian Alex Hidalgo’s Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019), which focuses on the complex lives of dozens of Oaxacan maps created by Indigenous mapmakers. Tracing the legal, social, cultural, and political history of these maps, Hidalgo sheds new light on the purpose, production, and preservation of maps as well as the lives of Indigenous peoples and Spaniards alike involved in their production. The result is a vivid re-orientation of Oaxacan history that speaks to the historical power of collaboration, adaptation, and cartography. Trail of Footprints provides a deep dive into the production and use of maps, focusing specifically on the roles of patrons, painters, and notaries as well as the complex material dimension of mapmaking. Hidalgo lends equal attention to both the broader historical context of mapmaking and the smallest details of each cartographic creation, emphasizing how maps both recorded and created spatial relationships. In tracing the long lives of these maps, Hidalgo demonstrates, among other important interventions, the potency of Indigenous skills, ideas, and ways of knowing in creating and charting Oaxacan history. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While armies have seized enemy records and rare texts as booty throughout history, it was only during World War II that an unlikely band of librarians, archivists, and scholars traveled abroad to collect books and documents to aid the military cause. Galvanized by the events of war into acquiring and preserving the written word, as well as providing critical information for intelligence purposes, these American civilians set off on missions to gather foreign publications and information across Europe. They journeyed to neutral cities in search of enemy texts, followed a step behind advancing armies to capture records, and seized Nazi works from bookstores and schools. When the war ended, they found looted collections hidden in cellars and caves. Their mission was to document, exploit, preserve, and restitute these works, and even, in the case of Nazi literature, to destroy them. In The Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe (Oxford University Press, 2019), cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front. These collecting missions also boosted the postwar ambitions of American research libraries, offering a chance for them to become great international repositories of scientific reports, literature, and historical sources. Not only did their wartime work have lasting implications for academic institutions, foreign-policy making, and national security, it also led to the development of today's essential information science tools. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Olivier Roy, who is professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, is one of the most influential analysts of religion and secularisation in late modernity. Today he joins us to talk about his new book, Is Europe Christian?, which was published by Hurst in 2019 and Oxford University Press in 2020. Roy wrote the book to intervene in contemporary debates among European populists who lay claim to the Christian heritage of Europe without often embracing its values. This important new book is some ways a meditation on the success of the countercultural values of the 1960s, which have become so embedded in the legal and political cultures of late modernity as to be virtually unassailable, even by conservative forces that campaign against them. What does the success of 1960s values mean for the reiteration of religious identities? And how have the European churches responded to the appropriation of their heritage by political forces who may not adopt or even approve of the moral values they espouse? Professor Roy’s new book is an important contribution to a very difficult discussion. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who built Africa’s cities? Going beyond the colonial archive and the planner’s gaze, David Morton’s Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique (Ohio University Press, 2019) describes the incremental process through which Maputo’s suburbios – popular neighborhoods outside the formally planned city – were built and occupied. Through key episode’s in Mozambique’s urban history – from colonial responses to migrant labor to independence-era responses to flooding, he interprets the routine forms of house construction as critical political acts through which ordinary residents of the city have inserted themselves into the city and concretized urban belonging. The materiality of different building materials are central this story. The risks and obstacles of constructing permanent, concrete, housing in the face of politically enforced urban impermanence an d ambiguous legal status kept the popular suburbios in suspension. David Morton talks to host Jacob Doherty about the ways that the built environment both reflects and shapes the changing aspirations and achievements of the city’s residents. Offering a critical contribution to the process of decolonization in African cities, Morton examines the racial and spatial effects of colonial Portugal’s officially race-blind ideology as well as the ambivalent anti-urban bias of the early FRELIMO regime. David Morton is an assistant professor of African History at the University of British Colombia. He has written about architectural and planning histories, Portuguese colonialism, informal settlements, housing, and citizenship, and decolonization. Jacob Doherty is a lecturer in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Baltics are about to be thrust onto the world stage. With a 'belligerent' Vladimir Putin to their east (and 'expansionist' NATO to their west), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are increasingly the subject of unsettling headlines in both Western and Russian media. But how real are these fears, subject as they are to media embellishment, qualification and denial by both Russia and the West? What do they mean for those living in the Baltics - and for the world? In The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Aliide Naylor takes us inside the geopoltitics of the region. Travelling to the heart of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania she explores modernity in the region that birthed Skype, investigates smuggling and reports of troop movements in the borderlands, and explains the countries' unique cultural identities. Naylor tells us why the Baltics matter, arguing persuasively that this region is about to become the new frontline in the political struggle between East and West. Aliide Naylor is a freelance journalist focusing on Russia and eastern Europe, her writing has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman, POLITICO Europe, frieze, Vice, among others. Naylor has travelled to all corners of the Baltic states and has also lived in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, where she served as Arts Editor at The Moscow Times. Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Murad Idris, a political theorist in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, explores the concept of peace, the term itself and the way that it has been considered and analyzed in western and Islamic political thought. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2018) traces the concept of peace, and the way it is often insinuated with other words and concepts, over more than 2000 years of political thought. Idris begins with Plato’s Laws as one of the early sources to consider the tension that seems to be constant in terms of the pursuit of violence in order to attain peace. War for Peace provides some important framing in thinking about peace, in large measure because the research indicates how rare it is for peace itself to be solitary, it is almost always lassoed to other words and concepts, and functions either as a binary opposition (e.g.: war and peace) or as part of a dyad combination (e.g.: peace and justice). We are urged to think about peace and the valence that is given to the word and the ideal—since the moral and the political understandings of peace are often entangled and part of what Idris is doing in his careful and thoughtful research is to tease out the political concept, apart from the often religious and moral ideal. This rich and complex analysis integrates a broad group of theorists—Plato, al-Farabi, Aquinas, Erasmus, Gentili, Grotius, Ibn Khaldun, Hobbes, Kant, and Sayyid Qutb)—all of whom were examining the role of peace within politics and political thought. And Idris structures these thinkers into chronological and theoretical groupings, to explore the ways in which they were responding to each other, across time, but also to understand how different thinkers were connecting peace to other concepts. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought may leave the reader anxious but also enlightened in considering this idea and its perplexing place within the history of political thought. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Calvin continues to be the focus of a huge amount of scholarly attention. An annual bibliography records the thousands of items that are published every year on this most seminal of early modern religious thinkers. But how should readers navigate this constantly expanding field? Today we catch up with John W. Tweeddale, academic dean and professor of theology at Reformation Bible College, FL, who is one of the editors (with Derek Thomas) of an important new volume, John Calvin: For a New Reformation (Crossway, 2019). This volume introduces principal themes in its subject’s life, thought and literary achievements – a volume that is set to become a handbook for many readers as they discover one of the greatest protestant theologians. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018), Abigail Shinn, who teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, opens up a broader range of conversion narratives than literary or historical scholars have previously discussed. By expanding the chronological and geographical range of her sources, and so expanding their religious affiliation of her authors and drawing into discussion larger numbers of women, she shows how the representation of conversion changed from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and how disparate narratives relating experiences of Protestant, Catholic and Islamic conversion nevertheless continued to show similar rhetorical characteristics. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Robin Pickering-Iazzi’s Dead Silent: Life Stories of Girls and Women Killed by the Italian Mafias, 1878-2018 is the first history of its kind in English. An open access ebook, this study literally “unburies” the identities of over two-hundred girls and women who lived in Italy between 1878 and 2018, and were killed by members of the organized crime from different regions of Italy, including the camorra (Naples), Cosa Nostra (Sicily), ’ndrangheta (Calabria), and the United Sacred Crown (Puglia). By providing their background, the circumstances of their deaths, and the often unsatisfactory (if any) legal conclusions of their stories, this impressive counter-archive of the past raises several related questions on the women of Dead Silent. Some played a role within the clan, others were simply mafiosis’ daughters or wives, many had no relationship at all with the mafia and were killed accidentally, others were kidnapped for a ransom, and, finally, some were well known antimafia judges or journalists. How are the women’s individual stories related, as a whole, to the collective issue of the mafia in their communities? How do they become “bodies of evidence” and connect with the “history of the Italian nation”? In which ways does the form of the catalog, which Dead Silent adopts, replace the lack of commemoration and justice? But the most important issue that emerges concerns the study’s open access format: In addition to the broader circulation and availability (and the resulting security issues), what are the other positive effects that open-access can inherently produce? How does this format assert the scholar’s freedom and responsibility in the larger society? Nicoletta Marini-Maio is co-founder and editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/italy. Recent scholarly publications center on Italian cinema, particularly the intersections between politics, gender power relations, and collective memory; and auteur cinema. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Ellen Nerenberg (forthcoming, Rubbettino, Italy). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How should we understand humanitarian NGOs? In Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Shai M. Dromi, a lecturer in sociology at Harvard University, uses insights from cultural sociology to reframe the history of the Red Cross. The book blends a detailed historical analysis with field theory and the strong programme in cultural sociology to show the longstanding influence of key individuals and texts, as well as accounting for influences of nationalism and Christianity. The historical analysis of the Red Cross presents crucial lessons for our current context, as well as providing the basis for comparisons with other approaches to humanitarian interventions. The book is both an excellent example of the strengths of the strong programme, along with a fascinating analysis of a key element of our modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University, USA. F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. Professor Boettke correctly argues that: ‘There is certainly little doubt that Hayek was among the most prodigious classical liberal scholars of the twentieth century. Though his 1974 Nobel Prize was in Economic Science, his scholarly endeavors extended well beyond economics.' Peter argued that his political influence (Thatcher, Reagan...) is overemphasized because '...his relationships with those in political power was remote at best as Hayek was never a political consultant to any leader in power; he was always a critical scholar who tried to speak truth to power from the outside.' Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The passage of the 1831 Truck Act was intended to end throughout the United Kingdom the practice of paying employees in truck, or goods, rather than in money. As Christopher Frank reveals in Workers, Unions and Payments in Kind: The Fight for Real Wages in Britain, 1820-1914 (Routledge, 2019), though, this merely redefined a struggle that continued through the Victorian era into the early 20th century. As Frank demonstrates, employers soon developed ways to work around the ban in the law, which proved difficult to enforce. While as early as the 1850s governments considered new legislation to clamp down further on truck, efforts to do so ran into both laissez-faire and paternalistic arguments that together successfully frustrated passage of new measures. It was only with the increasing influence of the New Model Unions and the growing enfranchisement of workers from the 1860s onward that the issue became more of an electoral priority. While this pressure led to new legislation in 1887 and again in 1896 that improved enforcement of the ban on truck as well as introducing restrictions on fines and other pay deductions, concerns about wage theft persisted for workers up to the start of the First World War, when Britain’s entry into the conflict disrupted further pursuit of legislative amelioration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In today’s episode, we catch up with Paul Lay, editor of the leading journal History Today, and a senior research fellow in early modern history at the University of Buckingham. Paul is the author of a brilliant new account of the British republic. Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate (Head of Zeus, 2020) is the most up to date and accessible narrative of the crucial period in which, after a string of military victories and the invasions of Ireland and Scotland, the revolutionary regime over-reached itself in the failed conquest of Spanish South America, with dramatic consequences for the stability and integrity of government at home. The failed expedition dealt a crushing blow to the confidence of the regime, which believed that God was on its side, and exposed the weaknesses of those improvised systems of government that depended too much upon the security and ability of the single individual at its head. Providence Lost is a compelling and exciting account of a critical period in early modern British history. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Abraham Kuyper was one of the most important theologians in the Dutch Reformed tradition – and a newspaper editor, university founder and Prime Minister to boot. Lexham Press are publishing his "Collected Works in Public Theology," in editions that bring together his writings on business, economics, the arts and other cultural spheres. In today’s episode, we talk to Wendy Naylor, editor of the volume On Education (2019), about what makes Kuyper interesting, and why his educational theories continue to matter. What did Kuyper achieve as a politician, minister of religion and educational theorist? And how did his emphatic Calvinism work contribute to his commitment to educational pluralism? Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Emily Colbert Cairns’ book, Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), traces the biblical figure of Esther, the secret Jewish Queen, as she is reinvented as the patron saint for the early modern Sephardic community. This hybrid globetrotter emerges repeatedly in dramatic texts, poetry, and even visual representation in the global Sephardic diaspora on the Iberian Peninsula, Amsterdam, and New Spain. Colbert Cairns argues that Esther’s female body emerges as a site for power struggles and symbolic territory for drawing constantly moving communal boundaries. While certain early modern representations of Esther mobilize this queen promote traditional values for proper female behavior (obedience, deference to male authority, beauty), Colbert Cairns shows that Esther’s identity exceeds facile notions of national, ethnic, or racial identity and instead opens out a sense of Sephardic difference beyond geographical boundaries. Elizabeth Spragins is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. Her current book project is on corpses in early modern Mediterranean narrative. You can follow her on Twitter @elspragins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did the Iron Curtain shape the Federal Republic of Germany? How did the internal border become a proving ground for rival ideologies? West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands (Oxford University Press 2019) explores these battles in the most sensitive geographic spaces of the Federal Republic. Join us for a conversation with Astrid M. Eckert illuminating how the border reflected Cold War debates back to society in ways that continue to shape German history. In a fascinating exploration of economic dislocation, border tourism, and the first environmental history of the wall, Eckert shows how borders become actors in their own right. Astrid M. Eckert is an Associate Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta where she teaches 19th- and 20th-century German and European history. Her research has contributed to the Historical Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office, while her book on The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War received the Waldo Gifford Leland Award. You can listen to an interview with Eckert about The Struggle for the Files here. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His forthcoming book Enemies of the People: Hitler's Critics and the Gestapo explores enforcement practices toward different social groups under Nazism. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ariel Mae Lambe’s new book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) is a history of transnational Cuban activists who mobilized in the mid-1930s to fight fascism both in Cuba and beyond. A wide variety of civic and political groups, including Communists, anarchists, Freemasons, and Afro-Cubans, mobilized to support the Spanish Republican cause, which they connected to their efforts at home to fight persisting colonial structures and strongman politics. Lambe emphasizes the human side of antifascist activism through biographical studies of both well-known and overlooked Cuban figures. Her book shows that the 1930s, often dismissed as an apolitical period in Cuban history, were in fact characterized by vibrant efforts to raise funds, send combat troops, and provide other kinds of aid to Spanish Republicans. Lambe argues that important changes on the island in 1940 – the holding of free elections and the promulgation of a progressive constitution – suggest that Cuban antifascist efforts, though unable to turn the tide of the Spanish Civil War, did have an impact on Cuban domestic politics. In the interview, Lambe reflects on how her work is relevant to the Antifa movement of today. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about elite migration, education, transnationalism, and youth in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final nine and a half-hour 1985 film with which listeners and readers might be familiar. Well known around the world as one of the greatest documentary films ever made, and certainly one of the most important works/artifacts of Holocaust history and memory, Lanzmann’s eventual finished film emerged from an astonishing 230 hours of interview footage shot in various locations. Commissioned originally by the State of Israel to make a film about the catastrophe, Lanzmann collected these testimonies over a period of several years before beginning the epic task of editing the film. He saved the outtakes as a vital repository of accounts of those who had lived through the Shoah. The footage has since been acquired, preserved, and digitized as an archive by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The chapters of Cazenave’s book explore the film’s conceptualization and production, reframing the final film in terms of all that it left out, to think about what was included in relationship to those stories and scenes excluded for different reasons. Over years from an initial dissertation project to this volume, Cazenave pursued the story of the film and its outtakes through archival research, detective work, and close technical, aesthetic and theoretical consideration. The resulting analysis takes author and reader from consideration of the film/archive in relationship to Holocaust trials (and especially the Eichmann trial of 1961), to issues of gender and the feminine, to the question of rescue and refugees, as well as debates about representation, witnessing, and testimony. The book is a wonderful and complex study that will be of great interest to readers in Holocaust and cinema studies. The magnum opus of a French filmmaker working with a largely French crew, and produced with funding provided in part by the French government, the film also illuminates, in its own ways (including its silences) the difficult French past and politics of Holocaust history and memory. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Moments before his death at the hands of Spanish colonial officials on November 15, 1781, Aymaran leader Túpac Katari assured his apostles as well as his adversaries that he would “return as millions.” As promised, Katari’s presence in Bolivia did not end with his life. In the centuries since his historic siege of La Paz, Katari has returned often, and remains a cornerstone of the five-hundred-year-long rebellion to reclaim and restore an Indigenous world that long predated the formation of Bolivia. Such a rebellion is the topic of Benjamin Dangl’s latest book, The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia (AK Press, 2019), a deep dive into the historical roots and contemporary relevancy of Indigenous-led movements in modern Bolivia. Drawing on fifteen years of journalistic experience in Bolivia, Dangl demonstrates the ways that Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní intellectuals, activists, and communities use history as a means of resistance. Dangl shows how the Indigenous campesino union, the Andean Oral History Workshop, caciques apoderados, and other Indigenous activists seized historical knowledge and symbolism as their own, reminding the world of their role as agents of historical change. Over the last several decades, such efforts have led to monumental shifts in Bolivian politics that have permanently transformed the past, present, and future of the country. Benjamin Dangl teaches journalism at the University of Vermont where he is Lecturer of Public Communication in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics. As a specialist of Bolivian politics, Dangl provides New Books listeners with insightful commentary on the historical context and immediate impact of the recent coup that removed Indigenous president Evo Morales from power. Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The New Battle for the Atlantic: Emerging Naval Competition with Russia in the Far North (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Magnus Nordenman explores the emerging competition between the United States and its NATO allies and the resurgent Russian navy in the North Atlantic. This maritime region played a key role in the two world wars and the Cold War, serving as the strategic link between the United States and Europe that enabled the flow of reinforcements and supplies to the European Allies. Nordenman shows that while a conflict in Europe has never been won in the North Atlantic, it surely could have been lost there. With Vladimir Putin’s Russia threatening the peace in Europe following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the North Atlantic and other maritime domains around Europe are once again vitally important. But this battle will in many ways be different, Nordenman demonstrates, due to an overstretched U.S. Navy, the rise of disruptive technologies, a beleaguered NATO that woke up to the Russian challenge unprepared for high-end warfighting in the maritime domain, and a Russia commanding a smaller, but more sophisticated, navy equipped with long-range cruise missiles. Nordenman also provides a set of recommendations for what the United States and NATO must do now in order to secure the North Atlantic in this new age of great power competition. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Imagination is one of the most important elements of being human, but is most often assumed we know what it is, while rarely being analyzed. Here with me today is Jonathan Erickson to discuss his recent book Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience (Routledge, 2019). The book looks at various theories of imagination through history, and then looks at what neuroscience can tell us about the functioning of imagination, as well as looking at what the functioning of imagination can tell us about neuroscience. Jonathan Erickson is a writer and educator, and holds a BA in English literature from UC Berkeley and a PhD in depth psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection presents thirty-nine essays from distinguished scholars in philosophy, religion, literature, intellectual history, and other fields who consider the work of the eighteenth-century British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. A political and moral thinker and a forerunner to modern feminism she has not received attention on par with the wide breath of her ideas. The collection gives the reader insight into to her life, major works of philosophy and novels, debates with Edmund Burke and Rousseau, and enduring legacy. She commented on religion, liberalism, republicanism, moral virtue, education, women’s place in society and much more. Her ideas were known to women such as Lucretia Mott, Virginia Woolf, and Simone de Beauvoir who found in her a source for building a modern feminist philosophy. Timely and fruitful, The Wollstone-craftian Mind provides a board survey of an erudite thinker and a source for understanding the politics of the modern era. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Cornell University Press, 2019), Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted. Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism's existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World War I, when Mann was first translated into English, to 1952, the year in which he left an America increasingly disfigured by McCarthyism, Boes establishes Mann as a significant figure in the wartime global republic of letters. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Dr. Gonzalo Lamana carefully investigates the writings of Indigenous intellectuals of the Andean region during Spanish colonialism. By delving into and reinterpreting the work of Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, Lamana effectively articulates the development of critical race theory from its outset in colonial Latin America. By sharing these centuries old texts, Lamana gives important context to today's social climate while reinvigorating voices from the past. As Lamana points out, “Indians” lived in an upside down world - a world of lies that Indigenous intellectuals were unable to expose. Through the work of Lamana and others, that lie is finally being exposed. Gonzalo Lamana is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and research explores themes of subalternity and indigeneity, race and theology, and meaning-making in the colonial period through a comparative, cross-area and time study of colonial and postcolonial dynamics. Some of his previous publications include Domination without Dominance. Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru and Pensamiento colonial crítico. Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and an MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Given the overwhelming amount of books printed in the past ten years on various (usually rather obscure) aspects of Sir Winston Churchill’s glorious career, it is of great interest that so little has been written about his activity during the Phoney War phase of the Second World War (1 September 1939-10 May 1940). It is this dearth of scholarship on Churchill and the Phoney War, that Australian scholar Dr. Graham T. Clews, author of a previous study on Churchill and the Dardanelle campaign, aims to remedy in his book: Churchill’s Phoney War: A study in Folly and Frustration (Naval Institute Press, 2019). In a truly interesting and well-written book, Dr. Clews examines the early months of World War II when Winston Churchill’s ability to lead Britain in the fight against the Nazis was being tested. Dr. Clews explores how Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed to fight the war against Hitler, with particular attention given to his attempts to impel the Royal Navy, the British War Cabinet, and the French, toward a more aggressive prosecution of the conflict. This is no mere retelling of events but a deep analysis of the decision-making process and Churchill’s involvement in it. This book shares extensive new insights into well-trodden territory and original analysis of the unexplored, with each chapter offering material which challenges to some degree the conventional wisdom on Churchill during this phase of his career. Dr. Clews reassesses several important issues of the Phoney War period including: Churchill’s involvement in the anti-U-boat campaign; his responsibility for the failures of the Norwegian Campaign; his attitude to Britain’s aerial bombing campaign and the notion of his unfettered “bulldog” spirit; his relationship with Neville Chamberlain; and his succession to the premiership. A man of considerable strengths and many shortcomings, the Churchill that emerges in Dr. Clews’ portrayal is dynamic and complicated personality. Churchill’s Phoney War adds a well-balanced and much-needed history of the Phoney War while scrupulously examining both Churchill’s successes and his manifold failures. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? To what extent did their new lives remain explicitly Jewish? In Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in 20th-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford University Press, 2018), Sarah Wobick-Segev tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s―such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp―fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened. Sarah Wobick-Segev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Yaacob Dweck's new book Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who, alone among Jewish leadership, challenged Sabbetai Zevi’s improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers. The story of a lone voice against the crowd, the story of a lonely man of faith who insisted on reason in the face of mass passion, Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty. It is a revealing examination of how Sasportas’ life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers. Although his name may not be widely known, Sasportas’ impact continues in Jewish life today. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, and Middle East commentator for the nationally syndicated TV program, The Armstrong Williams Show. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Every generation returns to the titanic heroes and villains of the 20th century. And every generation produces a new set of biographies--often immense--in an effort to understand the role of that eras main figures. In the past three years, three important new books have reassessed Hitler's life, beliefs and actions. Two of the authors, Volker Ulrich and Peter Longerich, are historians of Germany who are German. The third, our guest for today's interview, is British. In his new book Hitler: A Global Biography (Basic Books, 2019), Brendan Simms offers us a different Hitler, one much more focused on global capitalism and on the Anglo-American world than either Ulrich of Longerich. Simms argues that fears that Germany would lose the economic and demographic competition with Britain and especially the US sat at the heart of Hitler's world view. Anti-Semitism, fears of German particularism, scientific understandings of race, all of these appear in Simms' portrait of Hitler. But they are joined by a constant fear that the American system was simultaneously seductive and corrupting, and that Germans and Germany would not be able to resist. This, Simms argues, drove many of Hitler's decisions, especially in the 1920s and 30s. We had some technological problems getting connected for the interview and had only 30 minutes to talk. But Simms does a marvelous job using that time to lay out the broad outlines of his argument and to sketch in some of his main lines of defense. It's a fascinating interview. Not everyone will agree with his conclusions. But at the least the book will prompt a stimulating debate about the role of the west in HItler's thinking. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Many centuries before the emergence of the scientific consensus on climate change, people began to imagine the existence of a global environment: a natural system capable of changing humans and of being changed by them. In After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), Lydia Barnett traces the history of this idea back to the early modern period, when the Scientific Revolution, the Reformations, the Little Ice Age, and the overseas expansion of European empire, religion, and commerce gave rise to new ideas about nature and humanity, and their intersecting histories. Recovering a forgotten episode in the history of environmental thought, Barnett brings to light the crucial role of religious faith and conflict in fostering new ways of thinking about the capacity of humans and nature to change each other on a planetary scale. In the hands of Protestant and Catholic writers from across Europe and its American colonies, the biblical story of Noah's Flood became a vehicle for imagining the power of sin to wreck the world, the dangers of overpopulation, the transformative effects of shifting landforms on the course of human history, and the impact of a changing climate on human bodies, health, and lives. Following Noah's Flood as a popular topic of debate through long-distance networks of knowledge from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Barnett reveals how early modern earth and environmental sciences were shaped by gender, evangelism, empire, race, and nation. After the Flood illuminates the hidden role and complicated legacy of religion in the emergence of a global environmental consciousness. Interviewed by Lukas Rieppel. Visit my personal website here, or find me on twitter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Barbara Spackman’s riveting study identifies a strand of what it calls “Accidental Orientalism” in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Relocated, or “de-toured” by historical accident, these travelers wrote about their experiences in Italian, English, and French. Crossing class, gender, dress, and religious boundaries as they move about the Mediterranean basin, the travelers’ accounts variously reconfigure, reconsolidate, and often destabilize the imagined East-West divide. Ranging widely on an affective spectrum from Islamophobia to Islamophilia, their narratives are the occasion for the book’s reflection on the practices of cultural cross-dressing, conversion to Islam, and passing and posing as Muslim on the part of Italians who had themselves the object of an Orientalization on the part of Northern Europeans, and whose language had long been the lingua franca of the Mediterranean. Listen in as we discuss Spackman's new book Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands (Liverpool UP, 2017). Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la futura consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Latin America – especially colonial Latin America – is not particularly known for futurism. For popular audiences, the region’s history likely evokes images of book burning, the Inquisition, and other symbols of orthodoxy and fatalism. Specialists too tend to associate Latin America with a deep sense of historicism: the weight of memory – conquest, genocide, state violence – deeply marks the region’s politics and culture. On the other hand, in traditional historical narratives, a cognitive orientation towards the future is the province of northern Europe, the scientific revolution, liberalism, capitalism – in a word, modernity. In The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018), however, Matthew O’Hara uncovers a vast array of social practices in colonial Mexico that force us to reconsider who owns the future. Noted intellectuals were not the only ones planning ahead; instead, common people managed overlapping temporalities as they negotiated personal finance, heavenly salvation, health, and the climate. In addition to detailing the subjectivities such structures and practices produced, O’Hara also traces a long arc of change over three centuries of Spanish rule. Improvised financial mechanisms, revised modes of discerning natural truths, and personalized notions of spiritual self-improvement transformed the colonial experience of time. But rather than tracking these to European philosophes, O’Hara finds them emerging from the fabric of colonial experience and developing into a unique temporality in which tradition and change were mutually constructive. For any readers interested in time and temporality, The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico will give you much to think with. Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. More at http://empiresprogeny.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the late 1500s, the mines of Potosí –a mountain in southern Bolivia — produced 60% of the world’s silver. It was a place of great wealth and terrible suffering. It is also a place, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra argues, that challenges the very idea of the Scientific Revolution. Canizares-Esguerra discusses Potosí and how its peoples and technologies shaped 16th century science. He is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been honored by awards from the American Historical Association and the History of Science Society. Canizares-Esguerra is the author of (among other books) of Nature, Empire, And Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press, 2006). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.
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During Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, more than a hundred thousand asylum seekers from the western Balkans sought refuge in Germany. This was nothing new, however; immigrants from the Balkans have streamed into West Germany in massive numbers throughout the long postwar era. In his book Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany (Indiana University Press, 2018), Christopher A. Molnar tells the story of how Germans received the many thousands of Yugoslavs who migrated as political emigres, labor migrants, asylum seekers, and war refugees from 1945 to the mid-1990s. While Yugoslavs made up the second largest immigrant group in the country, their impact has received little critical attention until now. With a particular focus on German policies and attitudes toward immigrants, Molnar argues that considerations of race played only a marginal role in German attitudes and policies towards Yugoslavs. Rather, the history of Yugoslavs in postwar Germany was most profoundly shaped by the memory of World War II and the shifting Cold War context. The book shows how immigration was a key way in which Germany negotiated the meaning and legacy of the war. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his provocative new book, Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Temple University Press, 2019), Dr. Andrew Israel Ross maps out the intersection between histories of sexualities and the urban history of Paris in the 1800s. He examines how the regulation of public sex created new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the spaces they inhabited. In this interview, he discusses the policing of prostitution through government-sanctioned brothels, efforts to regulate male same-sex sexual activity at the city’s public urinals, Haussmannization and the creation of new sites for public sex, and the emergence of new sexual identities in the Third Republic. Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Italy's current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Stephanie Malia Hom's new book Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell University Press, 2019) investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state's historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today's refugee crisis. What is at stake in Empire's Mobius Strip is a deeper understanding of the forces driving those who move by choice and those who are moved. Hom focuses on Libya, considered Italy's most valuable colony, both politically and economically. Often perceived as the least of the great powers, Italian imperialism has been framed as something of "colonialism lite." But Italian colonizers carried out genocide between 1929–33, targeting nomadic Bedouin and marching almost 100,000 of them across the desert, incarcerating them in camps where more than half who entered died, simply because the Italians considered their way of life suspect. There are uncanny echoes with the situation of the Roma and migrants today. Hom explores three sites, in novella-like essays, where Italy's colonial past touches down in the present: the island, the camp, and the village. Empire's Mobius Strip brings into relief Italy's shifting constellations of mobility and empire, giving them space to surface, submerge, stretch out across time, and fold back on themselves like a Mobius strip. It deftly shows that mobility forges lasting connections between colonial imperialism and neoliberal empire, establishing Italy as a key site for the study of imperial formations in Europe and the Mediterranean. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Gillian Glaes’s African Political Activism in Postcolonial France: State Surveillance and Social Welfare (Routledge, 2018) examines the experiences and agency of African immigrants in France from 1960 through the 1970s. Focused on the Africans who migrated to work and live in France during the post-decolonization period, the book tracks continuities with the colonial past while remaining attentive to changes in the French and wider global economies, the politics of the Cold War, and the emergence of new social movements. Sensitive to the challenges faced by individual Africans and their communities in France, including struggles with employment and working conditions, racism, housing, and health, the book highlights the relationship between the state and these immigrants, arguing that immigrants played meaningful roles in shaping public and social welfare policies during this period. In its six chapters, the book moves from an analysis of the work of the Union générale de Travailleurs sénégalais en France (UGTSF) to rent strikes, protests, and other forms of political activity and community building within the African immigrant population concentrated in Paris and its surrounding banlieues. While the first part of the book is focused on African and their responses to immigrant life, the latter chapters zoom in on issues of state surveillance and policy, including various efforts to police African activisms, bodies, movement, and settlement. While the book will certainly fascinate those interested in issues of immigration and race in postcolonial France, it also holds broader implications for how we think about the history and power of vulnerable populations during this period and in its wake. As the author indicates in the book’s concluding pages, this history can help us to think more carefully and critically about the politics of immigration and refugees within and beyond France in our current moment of crisis including the displacement and precarity of millions of people around the world. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are joined by Seán Crosson, leader of the Sport and Exercise Research Group at NUI Galway, co-director of the MA in Sports Journalism and Communication, and Professor at the Huston School of Film and Digital Media. He is also the author of Gaelic Games on Film: From Silent Films to Hollywood Hurling, Horror, and the Emergence of Irish Cinema (Cork University Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the first depictions of Gaelic Games on film; American and British portrayals of hurling and Gaelic football that popularized and subverted Irish stereotypes; the role of the Gaelic Games in promoting Irish Nationalism, and the contemporary subversion of conservative notions of Irishness through representations of the games since the 1960s. Along the way, we discussed numerous popular films such as Knocknagow (1918), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). In Gaelic Games on Film, Crosson traces out the use of Irish sports in Irish, American, and British cinema. His analysis engages with different kinds of cinema, including dramas, silent and horror films, as well as non-fiction accounts in documentaries and newsreels. Many of these accounts challenged the normative description of hurling and Gaelic football presented by the Gaelic Athletic Association. Depictions of Gaelic games in American and British films relied upon and subverted stereotypes about the Irish, especially their supposed propensity to violence, to both situate Irish nationhood within its international context with its closest neighbours and to manage the integration of Irish migrants leaving the country in great numbers in the middle of the twentieth century. Their Irish cinema counterparts, who with few exceptions took to cinema work a little later, following the redevelopment of the Irish film industry after independence, used hurling and Gaelic football to both articulate and critique notions of Irish masculinity, religiosity, and conservativism. Here Crosson points out that the popularity and legibility of sports contributed to the development of Irish cultural institutions such as the National Film Institute of Ireland and Gael Linn, who both produced newsreels of the Gaelic Games to sell to cinemas around the country and benefitted from the popularity of those movies. Listeners interested in seeing some clips of the films in question can watch another interview with Crosson here. Crosson’s work offers innovative perspectives on the interplay between histories of sport and cinema. This book will appeal to readers interested in Irish, sports, and film studies. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outbreak of the Great War or the Russian Revolution, the Versailles Treaty, notwithstanding its importance as perhaps the most important of the twentieth-century, has not seen the same level of interest? Is this relatively indifference due to the fact that it is still regarded by some (in the words of John Maynard Keynes) as a 'Carthaginian Peace', which lead inevitably to the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War? To discuss this and other aspects of the Treaty, in the podcast channel, 'Arguing History', are Professor of History at the University of Exeter, Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho, of the Royal Historical Society. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement". Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-brother Sir Charles Stewart has received far less attention despite his own prominent part in the politics and diplomacy of those years. In War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era: Sir Charles Stewart, Castlereagh and the Balance of Power in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Reider Payne describes the adventurous life of the third Marquess of Londonderry and the roles he played in the events of his time. As a young man Charles Stewart initially pursued a career in the military rather than one in politics, and served in the cavalry during Great Britain’s war against revolutionary France in the 1790s. After a brief period in the War Office he resumed his military career and served with the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsular War. His record as an officer and his relationship with his half-brother led to his appointment as an ambassador – first to Prussia, then to Austria – in which roles he represented Britain at the courts of her most prominent allies during the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars. Though Charles was often better known for his social escapades, he served ably as Britain’s ambassador to Austria until his brother’s suicide in 1822, during which time he was active in both post-Napoleonic diplomacy and the efforts to collect incriminating evidence against Princess Caroline of Brunswick in aid of the Prince Regent’s effort to divorce her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Benjamin Breen's The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), we are transported back to a time when there was no such thing as "recreational" and "medicinal" drugs. People ate Egyptian mummies. Tobacco apparently cured cancer. And the book has many more fascinating stories. Focusing in on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen deftly explores the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. And Breen demonstrates that drugs have been entwined with science and empire from the very beginning. Just like today. Benjamin Breen is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There are a handful of pieces from the Medieval and Renaissance periods that most music students learn about in their introductory history courses; among them are Guillaume Du Fay’s, Ave regina celorum III and Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum. Some of these foundational compositions have been studied by musicologists for over one hundred years, but generally they have been examined in isolation as masterworks by great composers. In her new book Composing Community in Late Medieval Music: Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jane D. Hatter effectively contextualizes these pieces within a larger repertory of motets and masses written between 1450 and 1550 that mention other musicians or explore complex theoretical topics. She sees these works as evidence of an international community of musicians that might have been separated geographically and isolated by their itinerant lifestyles, but who were connected through a shared attitude towards art and their own sense of themselves as composers and musicians. Connecting her insights to a similar phenomenon in the visual arts, Hatter shows that the repertory she studies reflects a musical culture that valued intergenerational connections between artists and compositional virtuosity based upon theoretical and pedagogical concepts that stretched back to antiquity, but that also permeated the musical training these composers received. Jane D. Hatter is a musicologist on faculty at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Jane has published on musical time in early sixteenth-century Italian paintings (Early Music, 2011) and also on intersections between popular devotions and ecclesiastical liturgy in Renaissance motets that include or quote the Ave Maria prayer (2012). More recently she has examined the persistence and conversion of music for women's churching ceremonies in both Catholic and Protestant contexts in the early Reformation period. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Growing up as an American, you’re bound to be all-but-suffused with triumphalist histories of the American Revolution. Those histories might have a tough of the Hegelian to them, asserting that the Revolutionary War was part of the inevitable development of freedom worldwide. More academic histories have focused more critically on the war itself and what it meant for American society, such as the fact that a war allegedly fought for freedom also involved the ongoing oppression of slaves. The war’s global dimensions have similarly been discussed, dating back at this point to Samuel Flagg Bemis’ The Diplomacy of the American Revolution. Matthew Lockwood’s To Begin The World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (Yale University Press, 2019) pushes this analysis farther, looking at the global consequences of the American Revolution. Lockwood shows that the war, whatever its debatable effects for the residents of the thirteen colonies, unleashed a whole host of catastrophes for people elsewhere. Those living under British rule found their relationship with their government dramatically revised. British distraction allowed some European powers to undertake conquests of their own, while the United Kingdom in turn sought new commercial opportunities. Meanwhile, the effects of the war spilled into India and South America, setting off a new wave of global unrest. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Giuliana Chamedes' new book A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019) explores how World War I galvanized the central government of the Catholic Church to craft its own variety of internationalism, which was intended to rival both liberal and communist internationalism. From 1918 up through the mid-1960s, the Vatican’s ‘Catholic International’ made novel use of international law, public diplomacy, and new forms of communications to deepen the ties between the Catholic Church and different countries and weaken perceived ideological and geopolitical rivals. Drawing on new archival research conducted in eight countries, the book aims to show how the Vatican’s internationalist activities decisively shaped European reconstruction after both the Great War and World War II, and left a lasting mark on global politics, culture, and society. A Twentieth Century Crusade is an avowedly revisionist interpretation of the existing literature on the Holy See in the 20th century. Not all scholars by any means will agree with some or indeed much of what Professor Chamedes has to say. However, no one can gainsay her attempt to re-envisage the politics and diplomacy of the Vatican in the period covered by her book. Henceforth, no one will be able to examine the history of the Holy See in the 1914 to 1965 period without dealing with her new and challenging interpretation. Giuliana Chamedes is Assistant Professor of History and a faculty affiliate of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Fran Altvater talks about the Medieval Pilgrimage, a practice that became central to Christian Europe in the early Middle Ages and evolved into the military pilgrimages of the Crusades in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Altvater is a professor of art history at the University of Hartford. Her book, Sacramental Theology and the Decoration of Baptismal Fonts, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2017. Baptismal fonts were necessary to the liturgical life of the medieval Christian. Baptism marked the entrance of the faithful into the right relation, with the Catholic Church representing the main cultural institution of medieval society. In the period between ca. 1050 and ca. 1220, the decoration of the font often had an important function: to underscore the theology of baptism in the context of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. This period witnessed a surge of concern about sacraments. Just as religious thinkers attempted to delineate the sacraments and define their function in sermons and Sentence collections, sculptural programs visualized the teaching of orthodox ideas for the lay audience. This book looks at three areas of primary concern around baptism as a sacrament incarnation, initiation, and the practice of baptism within the institution of the Church and the images that embody that religious discussion. Baptismal fonts have been recognized as part of the stylistic production of the Romanesque period, and their iconography has been generally explored as moral and didactic. Here, the message of these fonts is set within a very specific history of medieval Catholic sacramental theology, connecting erudite thinkers and lay users through their decoration and use. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.
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In her new book Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, 2019) Jelena Subotić asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled―ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated―throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism. Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"―insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world. Jelena Subotić is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia State University (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007). Steven Seegel is professor of history at University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1798, members of the United Irishmen were massacred by the British amid the crumbling walls of a half-built town near Waterford in Ireland. Many of the Irish were republicans inspired by the French Revolution, and the site of their demise was known as Genevan Barracks. The Barracks were the remnants of an experimental community called New Geneva, a settlement of Calvinist republican rebels who fled the continent in 1782. The British believed that the rectitude and industriousness of these imported revolutionaries would have a positive effect on the Irish populace. The experiment was abandoned, however, after the Calvinists demanded greater independence and more state money for their project. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2019) tells the story of a utopian city inspired by a spirit of liberty and republican values being turned into a place where republicans who had fought for liberty were extinguished by the might of empire. Richard Whatmore brings to life a violent age in which powerful states like Britain and France intervened in the affairs of smaller, weaker countries, justifying their actions on the grounds that they were stopping anarchists and terrorists from destroying society, religion and government. The Genevans and the Irish rebels, in turn, saw themselves as advocates of republican virtue, willing to sacrifice themselves for liberty, rights and the public good. Terrorists, Anarchists, and Republicans shows how the massacre at Genevan Barracks marked an end to the old Europe of diverse political forms, and the ascendancy of powerful states seeking empire and markets—in many respects the end of enlightenment itself. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From pre-contact, to first-contact, to colonization and beyond, Key to the New World: A History of Early Colonial Cuba (University of Florida Press, 2018) by Luis Martínez-Fernández is an easy-to-read, yet incredibly fascinating and informative book on the history of early Cuba. In this interview, Martínez-Fernández talks about his Latin American upbringing, the history of pre-contact Cuba, the historical context of Western Europe in 1492, the deep connection between sugar production and slavery, and so much more. Key to the New World manages to effortlessly combine multiple elements of Cuban history, people, cultures, and stories with an objective tone and appealing style. As we continue to learn more about the truths of the “discovery” of the Americas, Martínez-Fernández’s book is an essential read toward a further understanding of those truths. Dr. Luis Martínez-Fernández is a professor of history at the University of Central Florida. Born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Lima, Peru and San Juan, Puerto Rico, he holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in History from the University of Puerto Rico and a Ph.D. in History from Duke University. He is recognized as one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field of Caribbean Studies. He is the author of numerous publications and his new book, Key to the New World, is the winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards' Bronze Medal for Nonfiction. Colin Mustful is the author of four historical novels about Minnesota’s settlement and Native history. He holds an MA in history and an MFA in creative writing. He is the founder and editor of a small independent press called History Through Fiction. You can learn more about Colin and his work at colinmustful.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Winston Black's new book The Middle Ages: Facts and Fictions (ABC-CLIO, 2019) guides readers through 10 pervasive fictions about medieval history, provides them with the sources and analytical tools to critique those fictions, and identifies what really happened in the Middle Ages. Aven McMaster and Mark Sundaram are historians and the hosts of the excellent podcast The Endless Knot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
After the Rushdie affair in 1989 there was an important shift in the public life of British Muslims. Their image came under closer scrutiny which led to new social policies and self-perceptions. This moment also served as a significant pivot in the narrative and representational patterns in British Muslim literature. Claire Chambers, Senior Lecturer at the University of York, examines these new paradigms in Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (Palgrave, 2019). She outlines Muslim cultural production during this period through a literary analysis of the senses, especially those beyond the visual. Overall, Chambers provides a rich portrait of the non-visual senses in British Muslim fiction over the past three decades. This book also continues the work of her previous one, Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780-1988 (Palgrave, 2015). In our conversation we discussed the Rushdie affair and its consequences, how to approach touch, smell, taste, and hearing in literature, the role of Islam in contemporary literary representation, the senses in a digital age of advanced technologies, the construction of religious practice or gendered norms, radicalization, and authors such as Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Mohsin Hamid, among many others. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Chet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important masterpieces of Renaissance cartography. By transcribing, translating into English, and detailing the sources of all of the descriptive texts on the map, as well as the sources of many of the images, the book makes the map available to scholars in a wholly unprecedented way. In addition, the book provides revealing insights into how Waldseemüller went about making the map -- information that can’t be found in any other source. The Carta marina is the result of Waldseemüller’s radical re-evaluation of what a world map should be; he essentially started from scratch when he created it, rejecting the Ptolemaic model and other sources he had used in creating his 1507 map, and added more descriptive texts and a wealth of illustrations. Given its content, the book offers an essential reference work not only on this map, but also for anyone working in sixteenth-century European cartography. This book is available open access here. Steven Seegel is a professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For all of their prominence in the popular imagination today, the historical record of the Viking presence in England is limited, with much of what we know about them dependent upon the literary accounts attached to it. In Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Eleanor Parker deconstructs these accounts to ascertain what they reveal both about the Vikings and their legacy for medieval England. Focusing on the narratives of Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons, Siward, Guy of Warwick, and Havelok, she draws out similarities that deepen our understanding of who they were. By analyzing these stories, she shows how the interpretations of the Danes changed over time, as their evolution into a more hostile and alien presence gave them a more adversarial role in shaping England’s national identity than was the case. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development (ADEF-Ukraine LTD, 2018) offers a program that includes complex strategies for the economic development of Ukraine. This program was developed on the basis of data that were collected and analyzed by leading economists and researchers of Ukraine. When designing strategies that will help improve the current economic situation in the country, the authors of the project evaluate both domestic and international conditions that can create a positive context for Ukraine’s economic growth. According to the contributors to Ukraine 2030, one of the strategic and fundamental components for a positive economic change is the individual: Ukraine has a remarkable potential for joining a cohort of countries with strong economies. To embrace this potential, however, the country has to deal with a number of challenges which are connected not only with the present moment (war in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea) and which aggravate the economic stability, but also with a number of problems whose roots go back to the Soviet times. As the authors of the book note, Ukraine, in spite of the fact that she has been independent for almost thirty years, is still coping with the Soviet heritage. Ukraine 2030: The Doctrine of Sustainable Development offers an insightful overview of the present economic situation and a profound program for the economic improvement in Ukraine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The decades following the end of World War II witnessed the establishment of a large and diverse German-American scholarly community studying modern German history. As West Germany's formerly deeply nationalist academic establishment began to reconcile itself with postwar liberalism, American historians played a crucial role, both assisting and learning from their German counterparts' efforts to make sense of the Nazi past—and to reconstruct how German society viewed it. In History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Philipp Stelzel puts this story center stage for the first time, positioning the dialogue between German and American historians as a key part of the intellectual history of the Federal Republic and of Cold War transatlantic relations. This monograph explores how these historians participated as public intellectuals in debates about how to cope with the Nazi past, believing that the historical awareness of West German citizens would bolster the Federal Republic's democratization. Stelzel corrects simplistic arguments regarding the supposed "Westernization" of the Federal Republic, emphasizing that American scholars, too, benefited from the transatlantic conversation. History After Hitler makes the case that, together, German and American historians contributed to the development of postwar German culture, intellectual life, and national self-understanding. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together art, philosophy, history, and literature, this book investigates the landscapes and buildings of Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund. Through critical essays and beautiful illustrations focusing on four projects, the Woodland Cemetery, the Stockholm Public Library, the Stockholm Exhibition and Asplund’s own house at Stennäs, it addresses the topic of buildings accompanied by landscapes. It proposes that themes related to landscape are central to Asplund’s distinctive work, with these particular sites forming a collection that documents an evolution in his design thinking from 1915 to 1940. The architect himself wrote comparatively little about his design intentions. However, through close reading and analysis of the selected projects as landscapes with architecture, Malcolm Woollen argues that reflections of the history of Swedish landscape architecture and the intellectual climate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are evident in his work and help to explain the architect’s intentions. Erik Gunnar Asplund: Landscapes and Buildings (Routledge, 2018) is a must-have for academics, advanced students and researchers in landscape architecture and design who are interested in Nordic Classicism and the works of Erik Gunnar Asplund. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nineteenth-century composer Fanny Hensel is the subject of more published research than any other woman of the period, with the possible exception of Clara Schumann. A prolific composer, salon hostess, and a member of a well-connected and prominent family, she was one of the first women composers that musicologists studied in depth. Yet, in some ways, the historiography of Hensel scholarship is as fascinating as her life and music. As musicological priorities and historical understandings of women’s roles in nineteenth-century Europe shifted, so too did the analysis of Hensel’s life and cultural significance. In Fanny Hensel: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2019), Laura Stokes provides a comprehensive bibliography of Hensel scholarship but also confronts the ethical issues presented by the sometimes fraught scholarly work on Hensel through her annotations, the work she decided to include in the Guide, and the organizational structure she employed. In this interview, Dr. Stokes discusses Hensel’s life and music, and then the ethical issues she considered and the challenges she faced in writing the guide. Laura Stokes is the Performing Arts Librarian at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Indiana University. Her scholarly work examines music and cultural politics in nineteenth-century Germany. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Raul Hilberg was a giant in the field of Genocide and Holocaust Studies. Frequently cited as the founder of the field in the United States, Hilberg wrote, taught, and mentored for decades. In a series of influential books, he scouted out the terrain, mapped events, people and personalities, and offered lenses through which to view our field of study. His students and mentees embarked on their own journeys and, in their own ways, set an agenda we continue to pursue today. In German Railroads, Jewish Souls: The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution (Berghahn Books, 2019), Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes offer an assessment and appreciation of Hilberg’s work. The book explains some of Hilberg’s most influential ideas by focusing on his research on the German Railroad system. Browning and Hayes reprints Hilberg’s work, show how his interpretations shaped the field, and assess how recent research has followed on and nuanced Hilberg’s conclusions. And they reprint a variety of documents that illustrate Hilberg’s analysis. Students will find it immensely valuable. But everyone will benefit from revisiting some of the most important early work in Holocaust studies. It is a fitting tribute to a great scholar. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Liverpool University Press, 2019) is the first scholarly monograph devoted to the comprehensive analysis of the letters of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (r. 1762-1796), as well as the first to examine the conventions of letter-writing by an 18th-century monarch after Louis XIV. Presenting a rich history of Catherine’s personal development as a letter writer in the context of 18th-century elite epistolary practice and drawing on contemporary epistolary theory, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Southern California) makes a significant contribution to the study of the Russian Enlightenment by re-evaluating the place that Catherine sought to occupy in the intellectual and cultural landscape of her time and detailing the central role that the letter played in her self-fashioning as an Enlightenment monarch. Rubin-Detlev argues that, contrary to the dominant scholarly tradition which argues that Catherine rejected Enlightenment ideals in the wake of the French Revolution, her epistolary corpus presents a much more complex image of a ruler whose own self-image remained unaltered to the end of her life. Mentioned in the podcast: CatCor, the digital correspondence of Catherine the Great. Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Roman Republic was one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of civilization. Beginning as a small city-state in central Italy, Rome gradually expanded into a wider world filled with petty tyrants, barbarian chieftains, and despotic kings. Through the centuries, Rome's model of cooperative and participatory government remained remarkably durable and unmatched in the history of the ancient world. In 146 BC, Rome finally emerged as the strongest power in the Mediterranean. But the very success of the Republic proved to be its undoing. The republican system was unable to cope with the vast empire Rome now ruled: rising economic inequality disrupted traditional ways of life, endemic social and ethnic prejudice led to clashes over citizenship and voting rights, and rampant corruption and ruthless ambition sparked violent political clashes that cracked the once indestructible foundations of the Republic. Chronicling the years 146-78 BC, Mike Duncan's book The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (PublicAffairs, 2017) dives headlong into the first generation to face this treacherous new political environment. Abandoning the ancient principles of their forbearers, men like Marius, Sulla, and the Gracchi brothers set dangerous new precedents that would start the Republic on the road to destruction and provide a stark warning about what can happen to a civilization that has lost its way. Aven McMaster and Mark Sundaram are historians and the hosts of the excellent podcast The Endless Knot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The word “ghetto” has taken on different meanings since its coinage in the 16th century. The uses of this term have varied considerably, from its original understanding as a compulsory Jewish quarter in Venice to its appropriation by black Americans to describe racial segregation in the United States. Daniel Schwartz traces this fascinating history in Ghetto: The History of a Word (Harvard University Press, 2019) and examines how “ghetto” has come to occupy different meanings to different people in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. Daniel Schwartz is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at George Washington University. Lindsey Jackson is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
David Wheat’s fantastic book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) argues that the extensive participation of Luso-Africans, Latinized Africans, and free people of color made possible Spain’s colonization of the Caribbean. For Wheat, the history of the region is entangled with older and deeper histories of Atlantic Africa and the Iberian world. Particularly, Wheat focuses on events and precedents that took place in Upper Guinea and West Central Africa, two regions that experienced very different patterns of exchange, conquest, and enslavement. Such emphasis on connection and entanglement pushes our listeners to move away from narratives that have argued that Africans and their descendants were brought to the New World simply to “replace” the labor of extinguishing indigenous communities. Instead, Wheat asks us to focus on the specific roles that these forced migrants had in the colonization of important Caribbean ports such as Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Panama City, Santo Domingo and their semirural hinterlands. We thus learn about the existence of Nharas and Morenas Horras, black women that held social power and prestige. We also hear about black peasants, men and women that were the basis of agricultural production, and that occasionally found ways to move up the social ladder, even managing to become property owners. This is then a nuanced story that complicates seemingly straightforward concepts such as “settler” and “colonialist,” and that asks us to re-conceptualize this period as one of social mobility, in which racial hierarchies were less stark and somewhat more flexible. As Wheat tell us by the end of the interview, this deep past teaches us that identities can, and have been in the past, flexible and prone to transformation. This is of course an important lesson for the present for questions about identity are ever more pressing in contemporary political debates. Lisette Varón Caravajal is a doctoral student in history at Rutgers University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of justice or other principles”. Of course when one employs this term in a historical context, it is usually taken to refer to the ‘Appeasement’ by Great Britain of the Fascist powers during the 1930s. In this latest edition of ‘Arguing History’, Professor of History Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society, discuss the historical nature of appeasement and endeavor to go beyond the reductionist and ahistorical picture so popular with some historians and much of the reading public. Going beyond the sloganeering that originated with Michael Foot’s The Guilty Men, and more recent tomes like Tim Bouverie’s Appeasement, this discussion of the topic endeavors to examine at length the underlying variables which factored into British policy in the 1930s. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the “Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Lifetime Achievement.” Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science. In Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a richly illustrated comparative study of this transformative period, Margaret E. Schotte charts more than two hundred years of navigational history as she investigates how mariners solved the challenges of navigating beyond sight of land. She begins by outlining the influential sixteenth-century Iberian model for training and certifying nautical practitioners. She takes us into a Dutch bookshop stocked with maritime manuals and a French trigonometry lesson devoted to the idea that "navigation is nothing more than a right triangle." The story culminates at the close of the eighteenth century with a young British naval officer who managed to keep his damaged vessel afloat for two long months, thanks largely to lessons he learned as a keen student. This is the first study to trace the importance, for the navigator's art, of the world of print. Schotte interrogates a wide variety of archival records from six countries, including hundreds of published textbooks and never-before-studied manuscripts crafted by practitioners themselves. Ultimately, Sailing School helps us to rethink the relationship among maritime history, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of print culture during a period of unparalleled innovation and global expansion. Lukas Rieppel teaches at Brown University. You can find more about him here, or find him on twitter here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is it about ancient monsters that popular culture still finds so enthralling? Why do the monsters of antiquity continue to stride across the modern world? In Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), the first in-depth study of how post-classical societies use the creatures from ancient myth, Liz Gloyn reveals the trends behind how we have used monsters since the 1950s to the present day, and considers why they have remained such a powerful presence in our shared cultural imagination. She presents a new model for interpreting the extraordinary vitality that classical monsters have shown, and their enormous adaptability in finding places to dwell in popular culture without sacrificing their connection to the ancient world. Her argument takes her readers through a comprehensive tour of monsters on film and television, from the much-loved creations of Ray Harryhausen in Clash of the Titans to the monster of the week in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before looking in detail at the afterlives of the Medusa and the Minotaur. She develops a broad theory of the ancient monster and its life after antiquity, investigating its relation to gender, genre and space to offer a bold and novel exploration of what keeps drawing us back to these mythical beasts. From the siren to the centaur, all monster lovers will find something to enjoy in this stimulating and accessible book. Aven McMaster and Mark Sundaram are historians and the hosts of the excellent podcast The Endless Knot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Winner of the 2017 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 2015; paperback edition, 2018), delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology’s academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the “natural history of man.” Han F. Vermeulen, alumnus of Leiden University and research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how “ethnography” originated as field research by German-speaking historians and naturalists in Siberia (Russia) during the 1730s and 1740s, was generalized as “ethnology” by scholars in Göttingen (Germany) and Vienna (Austria) during the 1770s and 1780s, and was subsequently adopted by researchers in other countries. Before Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on “other” cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Following G. W. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Launer's Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein (Henry N. Abrams, 2017) manages to supplant (and given the power of the visual image, this is no mean feat) the picture you may have in your mind of Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender in flagrante delicto. If this reference does not ring a bell, perhaps you can just consider yourself lucky. What follows are some head spinning facts: Sabina Spielrein was the first female member of Freudʼs inner circle. As a young Russian woman from a prominent, educated and chaotic Jewish family, she fell ill and was treated at the Burghozli Hospital for psychiatric illnesses in Zurich. There she began to recover and to do research into the psyche. On regaining her emotional balance, she attended medical school. She wrote a paper that argued for the existence of a death instinct in 1912, pre-empting Freudʼs work in that area by 8 years. She developed ways of working with children that also preceded the thinking of Anna Freud or Melanie Klein. Her dissertation was on the language of schizophrenia. She comingled evolutionary ideas with psychoanalytic ideas. She was interested in sex and sexuality. She treated Jean Piaget. She worked with Vygotsky. She was involved with the project under Trotsky to link communism with psychoanalysis. She endeavored to mend the rift between Freud and Jung. She was killed by the Nazi regime. Her life resembles a nodal point; she stood at the crossroads of extraordinary changes in world politics and psychoanalysis. She was not necessarily happy. She wrote in ways that could hide her strong points of view. She was on the scene yet left almost no footprint. She was a person with breakdown knowledge who became an analyst. She was with people, working, and yet she comes off as solitary. I have written all of this and not mentioned she had a youthful affair and fascination with Carl Jung. Why do I not lead with this story you may ask? After all that is the story we all know if we know anything about her. But given what has been detailed above, a life with many contours, doesnʼt the young adult dalliance with Jung seem more or less a footnote? Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and first host of NBIP. A psychoanalyst, practicing in NYC and Rome, she serves on the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies. Trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Write to her at tracedoris@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There is perhaps no more iconic symbol of the Cold War than the Berlin Wall, the 96-mile-long barrier erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees from Eastern Europe. In Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth (Scribner, 2019), Iain MacGregor draws upon interviews with a wide range of people to recount the history of the wall and how it affected the lives of the people on either side of it. Through their firsthand experiences he recounts the tension-filled hours when East German workers began constructing the first elements of what became an elaborate series of obstacles that restricted access to the two sides of the partitioned city. As Berliners gradually adapted to the presence of the wall, thousands of people on the eastern side risked their lives in their search for ways around, above, and below the barriers to gain their freedom in the West. As MacGregor explains, underlying much of this was the assumption by nearly all sides of the permanence of the wall, a belief that was proven false by the dramatic events of November 1989 which resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reuniting of the two sides of the German city. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As Dr. Sara Lorenzini points out in her new book Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton UP, 2019), the idea of economic development was a relatively novel one even as late as the 1940s. Much of the language of development was still being invented or refined by experts and policymakers. And yet, within a few decades, the idea of foreign aid for development had become a critical soft power tool for the United States, the Soviet Union, and the European powers during the Cold War. Newly independent states, meanwhile, articulated a need for development aid to help them overcome the impoverishing legacy of colonialism. Dr. Lorenzini’s book charts the development of this idea beginning in the early middle of the twentieth century until the late 1980s, when the end of the Cold War took some of the impetus away from demands for development aid. In addition to showing how the superpowers and Europeans participated in development schemes, she pays close attention to the role of multinational organizations in trying to facilitate and coordinate these demands while granting a voice to those in the Global South seeking development. The book is a useful reminder to those that development as an idea is never uncomplicated, and that the support for development had powerful domestic roots in addition to its international connections. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Carlo Bonomi's two-volume set dreams the foundation of psychoanalysis as it writes its history. The work animates the reader's imagination, inviting them to journey the interwoven paths of Sigmund Freud's associations, anxieties and conflicts. These books tackle what has often remained hidden both in the historical writing about psychoanalysis and in Freud's explicit account of castration: the practice of female genital mutilation, pervasive in major European cities as treatment for hysteria in the end of 19th century. In this interview we discussed the first volume of work, The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud and Emma Eckstein (Routledge, 2017). We talked about Freud's reaction to the practices of medical castration of women and children, as well as his attempts to cope with the demands of his father that Sigmund, following the orthodox Jewish custom, circumcise his own sons. We begin to introduce the complex imagistic structure of Bonomi's analysis: the dreams that form the backbone of this study, particularly the dream of Irma's Injection. In the next part, we will speak about the relationship between Freud, his trauma, and Sándor Ferenczi, and discuss Ferenczi's legacy in the history of psychoanalysis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Annabel Kim tangles with the question of difference so central to French feminism, theory, and writing. In a series of literary and historical contextualizations and close readings of authors Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta, Kim tracks the work and thinking of women who wrote against difference across generations, from the 1930s to the present. Along the way, Unbecoming Language is a study of politics and poetics, an interrogation of the impossibility and possibility of subjectivities in language and literature, and a challenge to stereotypical notions of what French feminism and theory might be. Over the course of its four chapters, the book explores the work of each author while also considering these writers in relationship to one another. Rather than reading literary texts and authors through an external body of French or other “theory,” Unbecoming Language considers the theoretical work that literature does, work we can understand if we read and listen to the writing with sufficient and careful attention. And while these writers resist and shut down certain groundings of being and identity, there is a set of non-identitarian openings created in their work, and in Kim’s own study, openings that bring the corpus together. A different kind of radical politics becomes apparent through unbecoming, a revolutionary hopefulness generated by imaginary worlds without feminine/feminist difference, bodies, subjects, and identities. Unbecoming Lanuguage is a smart and complicated book that will be of interest to readers of each one and all three of these authors, to anyone interested in French literary and feminist history, and to a wider field of those for whom difference remains an open and troubling theoretical and political question. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars(2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. In this fresh, authoritative version―the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman―this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer’s sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer’s music. Wilson’s Odyssey (W. W. Norton, 2017) captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, from the cunning goddess Athena, whose interventions guide and protect the hero, to the awkward teenage son, Telemachus, who struggles to achieve adulthood and find his father; from the cautious, clever, and miserable Penelope, who somehow keeps clamoring suitors at bay during her husband’s long absence, to the “complicated” hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this translation as a more fully rounded human being than ever before. A fascinating introduction provides an informative overview of the Bronze Age milieu that produced the epic, the major themes of the poem, the controversies about its origins, and the unparalleled scope of its impact and influence. Maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, and extensive notes and summaries of each book make this an Odyssey that will be treasured by a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers alike. Aven McMaster and Mark Sundaram are historians and the hosts of the excellent podcast The Endless Knot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair globalization, standardized employment and decent work for women in the developing world. In Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Eileen Boris illuminates the ILO's transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice. Boris analyzes three ways in which the ILO has classified the division of labor: between women and men from 1919 to 1958; between women in the global south and the west from 1955 to 1996; and between the earning and care needs of all workers from 1990s to today. Before 1945, the ILO focused on distinguishing feminized labor from male workers, whom the organization prioritized. But when the world needed more women workers, the ILO (a UN agency after WWII) highlighted the global differences in women's work, began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women's labor participation. Today, the ILO enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking. Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice. Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While monarchs throughout history used their power to make laws as a tool for governing their realms, rarely did they undertake the long and detailed work of drawing up an entire legal code. One of the few who did so was the Castilian king Alfonso X, and as Joseph F. O'Callaghan explains in his book Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age: Law and Justice in Thirteenth-Century Castile (Cornell University Press, 2019) this legal code provides insights into both his reign and the larger issues facing his kingdom in the Middle Ages. As O’Callaghan details, many of its provisions were drawn up in response to the problems Alfonso dealt with as king, and the laws that formed the code reflected his means for addressing them. Yet this was just one factor shaping a comprehensive civil and criminal code that covered everything for the responsibilities of the crown to the legal processes available to his subjects. While the code reflected the many concerns of Alfonso’s age O’Callaghan demonstrates how its legacy is still felt today, as jurists and legal scholars on three continents continue to draw upon its precedents in shaping their analyses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Revolutionary Thought after the Paris Commune, 1871-1885 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), is the first comprehensive account of French revolutionary thought in the years between the crushing of France's last nineteenth-century revolution and the re-emergence of socialism as a meaningful electoral force, offering new interpretations of the French revolutionary tradition. Drawing together material from Europe, North America, and the South Pacific, Julia Nicholls, Lecturer in French and European Studies at King’s College, London, pieces together the nature and content of French revolutionary thought in this often overlooked era. She shows that this was an important and creative period, in which activists drew upon fresh ideas they encountered in exile across the world to rebuild a revolutionary movement that was both united and politically viable in the changed circumstances of France's new Third Republic. The relative success of these efforts, moreover, has significant implications for the ways in which we understand the founding years of the Third Republic, the nature of the modern revolutionary tradition, and the origins of European Marxism. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Much has been written about the Crusades, the religiously-inspired wars that pockmarked the later centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet for all of the many books on the subject there has been surprisingly little focus on the men and the women who were entangled in these conflicts. In his book Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands (Viking, 2019), Dan Jones addresses this by detailing the role of key individuals played in these events. By drawing from a variety of perspectives, he shows how the Crusades was a different event depending upon one’s perspective, be that of a Norman ruler, a Byzantine princess, or a Muslim chronicler. Moreover, by expensing the scope of coverage beyond such traditional figures to include people such as the Norwegian king Sigurd I, Jones demonstrates the wide impact of the wars and the ways in which they drew in people from throughout Europe. From their stories, Jones shows how the purpose of the Crusades changed over time, as they reflected more the motivations of the individuals involved rather than the goals traditionally associated with them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich’s new aristocracy. They utilized the science of eugenics to convince SS men to marry suitable wives and have many children. In her new book entitled Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Amy Carney assesses the role of SS men as husbands and fathers during the Third Reich. The family community, and the place of men in this community, started with one simple order issued by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. He and other SS leaders continued to develop the family community throughout the 1930s, and not even the Second World War deterred them from pursuing their racial ambitions. Carney’s insight into the eugenic-based measures used to encourage SS men to marry and to establish families sheds new light on their responsibilities not only as soldiers, but as husbands and fathers as well. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dag Hammarskjold was such a dynamic secretary-general that for years, the motto about him was simply “Leave it to Dag.” Only the second person to hold that post when he was elected, Hammarskjold did a great deal to shape perceptions of the UN. Consequently, evaluations of his legacy have tended to run the gamut, from extremely positive to bitingly critical. Hammarskjold’s defenders see him as a paragon of virtue, one who did his utmost to defuse international conflict at a time when the Cold War and decolonization threatened to ignite wars at any given moment. Hammarskjold’s critics accused of him meddling in international politics, or worse, being a tool of western imperialists as they tried to maintain control over the decolonizing world. Henning Melber’s Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Decolonisation of Africa (Hurst, 2019( looks at Hammarskjold’s legacy. Melber offers no apology when he states that he deeply admires Hammarskjold, though he does also clarify that Hammarskjold was imperfect. Moreover, while Hammarskjold was a person of deep integrity, his life nevertheless reveals many of the shortcomings of the UN and the difficulty of forcing the great powers to accept justice for the Global South. This books offers a succinct and informative overview of the influences that shaped Hammarskjold, his work in relation to Africa, and the legacies he bequeathed to the UN. Long after his untimely death, Hammarskjold continues to illuminate much of the UN’s history, and its complicated relationship with Africa. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.
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What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present and past, figuring profoundly in the representation and documentation of change over time in the French capital. In this beautifully illustrated and fascinating book, Clark recounts and analyzes the story of the collection, mobilization, and recollection of photographs as historical documents, a visual archive of urban transformation and memory. From the inauguration of the city’s first photo archives at the Musée Carnavalet, to the illustrated “photohistory” books that used images as documentary evidence, to the photographic museum exhibits, commemoration, and even a citywide contest, in which past and pictures were imbricated, the book looks at how photographs work, and takes seriously their biographies long after moments of capture. Moving beyond the work of key photographers, Clark examines how publishers, historians, public servants, and a range of other actors all participated in making Paris the quintessential capital of photography from the nineteenth century up to the 1970s. The book will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of the city, of photography, of how the past is conceived and made in a field at once visual, technological, material, and affective. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. She argues that this conception of interpreters as a universal community established biblical readers as a coherent collective. In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in Enlightenment Germany. In order for the political community to cohere, certain religious practices were restricted to the private sphere––while textual interpretation, which previously belonged to religious contexts, became the foundation of the public sphere. As interpretive practices were secularized and taken to be universal, they were meant to overcome religious difference. Turning to literature and the early nineteenth century in the second part of the book, Almog demonstrates the ways in which the new literary genres of realism and lyric poetry disrupted these interpretive reading practices. Literary techniques such as irony and intertextuality disturbed the notion of a stable, universal reader's position and highlighted interpretation as grounded in religious belonging. Yael Almog is an Assistant Professor of German Studies at Durham University. Her research focuses on the interdependence of literary theory, literary production, and theology––more specifically, she looks at secularism, Jewish-Christian encounters, the German-Jewish tradition, and Hebrew literature. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City.
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Wonderfully concise and very readable, A Brief History of Spain (Robinson, 2019), is perfect for travelers as well as the discerning reader. Professor of History at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s book is a ‘must read’. This is an extraordinary tale of Spain, from early tribalism and Roman rule to the Moorish conquest in the 8th century, Spain's eighteenth-century revival under the Bourbons, the Peninsular War and revolution in Spanish America right up to the horrendous civil war and Generalissimo Francisco Franco's regime. A leitmotif running from Columbus's first voyage in 1492 was Spain's trans-oceanic empire which was central to the country's global impact and to a degree self-understanding. And the story continues with a look at contemporary Spain, not least Catalonia, and its future. Professor Black excels in covering not only political and military history, but also environmental and cultural factors. He looks, too, at what makes Spain's regions distinct, and how the history of the Iberian peninsula, could, at various points, have taken very different turns. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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Since Marcel Mauss published his foundational essay "The Gift" in 1925, many anthropologists and specialists of international relations have seen in the exchange of gifts, debts, loans, concessions or reparations the sources of international solidarity and international law. Still, Mauss's reflections were deeply tied to the context of interwar Europe and the French colonial expansion. Their normative dimension has been profoundly questioned after the age of decolonization. A century after Mauss, Grégoire Mallard, Professor Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, asks: what is the relevance of his ideas on gift exchanges and international solidarity? By tracing how Mauss's theoretical and normative ideas inspired prominent thinkers and government officials in France and Algeria, from Pierre Bourdieu to Mohammed Bedjaoui, Mallard's Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea (Cambridge University Press, 2019), adds a building block to our comprehension of the role that anthropology, international law, and economics have played in shaping international economic governance from the age of European colonization to the latest European debt crisis. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
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Gerry Milligan’s Moral Combat: Women, Gender and War in Italian Renaissance Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2018) takes as its subject the woman warrior in early modern Italy as she was and as she was represented across varied types of texts, both literary and historical. What emerges is a discursive construction of the role gender played in the concept of warfare during this time period. How are women depicted in relation to warfare? Are they non-combatant innocents protected by male warriors? If this is not (only) the case, how does the representation of the woman warrior illuminate men and masculinity in the Italian Renaissance? How are gender roles rewritten, challenged, and reaffirmed in the texts under consideration? How do the figures of the virago and the woman warrior resonate with 21st century gender norms? These are some of Milligan’s questions, as well as some of the topics, we consider in this podcast. Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la future consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies.
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In her new book, Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1945-1992 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Brittany Lehman examines the right to education for migrant children in Europe between 1949 and 1992. Using West Germany as a case study to explore European trends, the book analyzes how the Council of Europe and European Community’s ideological goals were implemented for specific national groups. The book starts with education for displaced persons and exiles in the 1950s. Then it compares schooling for Italian, Greek, and Turkish labor migrants. Finally, the monograph circles back to asylum seekers and returning ethnic Germans. For each group, the state entries involved tried to balance equal education opportunities with the right to personhood, an effort which became particularly convoluted due to implicit biases. When the European Union was founded in 1993, children’s access to education depended on a complicated mix of legal status and perception of cultural compatibility. Despite claims that all children should have equal opportunities, children’s access was limited by citizenship and ethnic identity. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued many scholars of early modern Europe. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale UP, 2019), Professor Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of the period, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes. A worthy successor to Karl Brandi's work of the 20th century. The Financial Times raves that “Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed, and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.” In short this is a book that any serious scholar of the period as well as the lay educated reader must have in his library. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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After emerging victorious from their revolution against the British Empire, many North Americans associated commercial freedom with independence and republicanism. Optimistic about the liberation movements sweeping Latin America, they were particularly eager to disrupt the Portuguese Empire. Anticipating the establishment of a Brazilian republic that they assumed would give them commercial preference, they aimed to aid Brazilian independence through contraband, plunder, and revolution. In contrast to the British Empire's reaction to the American Revolution, Lisbon officials liberalized imperial trade when revolutionary fervor threatened the Portuguese Empire in the 1780s and 1790s. In 1808, to save the empire from Napoleon's army, the Portuguese court relocated to Rio de Janeiro and opened Brazilian ports to foreign commerce. By 1822, the year Brazil declared independence, it had become the undisputed center of U.S. trade with the Portuguese Empire. However, by that point, Brazilians tended to associate freer trade with the consolidation of monarchical power and imperial strength, and, by the end of the 1820s, it was clear that Brazilians would retain a monarchy despite their independence. Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult. It reveals how those differences led to turbulent transnational exchanges between the United States and Brazil as merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates sought to trade outside legal confines. Tyson Reeder, an editor with the Papers of James Madison and Affiliated Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, argues that although U.S. traders had forged their commerce with Brazil convinced that they could secure republican trade partners there, they were instead forced to reconcile their vision of the Americas as a haven for republics with the reality of a monarchy residing in the hemisphere. He shows that as twilight fell on the Age of Revolution, Brazil and the United States became fellow slave powers rather than fellow republics. Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
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Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) is rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the most comprehensive collection of Sámi oral tradition available in English to date. Collected by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen in the 1880s from nearly two dozen storytellers from the arctic Aanaar (Inari) region of northeast Finland, the material reveals a complex web of social relations that existed both inside and far beyond the community. First published in 1918 only in the Aanaar Sámi language and in Finnish, this anthology is now available in a centennial English-language edition for a global readership. Translator Tim Frandy has added biographies of the storytellers, maps and period photos, annotations, and a glossary. In headnotes that contextualize the stories, he explains such underlying themes as Aanaar conflicts with neighboring Sámi and Finnish communities, the collapse of the wild reindeer populations less than a century before, and the pre-Christian past in Aanaar. He introduces us to the bawdy humor of Antti Kitti, the didacticism of Iisakki Mannermaa, and the feminist leanings of Juho Petteri Lusmaniemi, emphasizing that folktales and proverbs are rooted in the experiences of individuals who are links in a living tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Despite the Roman Empire's 500-year reign over Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East, Italy does not have the same long national history as states such as France or England. Divided for much of its history, Italy's regions have been, at various times, parts of bigger, often antagonistic empires, notably those of Spain and Austria. In addition, its challenging and varied terrain made consolidation of political control all the more difficult. This concise history covers, in very readable fashion, the formative events in Italy's past from the Etruscans all through a unified country in thrall to fascism in the first half of the twentieth century right up to Silvio Berlusconi and beyond. The birthplace of the Renaissance and the place where the Baroque was born, Italy has always been a hotbed of culture. Within modern Italy there is fierce regional pride in the cultures and identities that mark out Tuscany, Rome, Sicily and Venice to name just a few of Italy's many famous regions. Professor Jeremy Black, of the History department of Exeter University, the most prolific historian writing in the English Language today, draws on the diaries, memoirs and letters of historic travelers to Italy to gain insight into the passions of its people, first chronologically then regionally. In telling Italy's story, Professor Black examines what it is that has given Italians such cultural clout - from food and drink, music and fashion, to art and architecture - and explores the causes and effects of political events, and the divisions that still exist today. In short,A Brief History of Italy (Robinson, 2019) is an outstanding introduction to bella Italia, past and present. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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What makes some people aid the persecuted while others just stand by? Questions about rescue and resistance have been fundamental to the field of genocide studies since its inception. Mark Roseman offers a sophisticated and deeply human exploration of this question in his new book Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2019). The book is a careful examination of a small organization called “League: Community for Socialist Life.” Generally referred to by its German shorthand, the Bund was founded in the 1920s to inspire Germans to create a new, more ethical and more communal world. But the emergence of Nazi rule forced the Bund to consider how it could achieve its goals and even survive in a much different political climate than it faced originally. As they did so, its members strove to discern what living their ideals meant in a Nazi world and how to do so safely. Members of the Bund responded in a complicated, contingent ways. Prominent among them were a variety of attempts to help those suffering around them. These ranged from moments of kindness (offering flowers to Jews whose houses had been wrecked) to efforts to hide Jews from police and deportation for months or years at a time. It’s an extraordinary story that reads like a novel. From it, Roseman draws from it lessons about human behavior and decisions that are rooted in the particular context of the holocaust but ring true in a wide variety of moments and conflicts. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.
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How does civil war shape state building and national identity over the long term? What do the underlying conflicts between Hanoverians and the Prussian state reveal about the course of German history from 1866 up to the rise of Hitler? In his new book Making Prussians, Raising Germans: A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935(Cambridge University Press, 2017), Jasper Heinzen analyzes these questions over the long durée with transnational points of comparison. By examining key areas of patriotic activity, Jasper unearths long-term trends in emerging nations forged through civil war. Indeed, Heinzen reveals how political violence was either contained or expressed through centre-periphery interactions with implications for the rise of Nazism. Jasper Heinzen is a Lecturer in Modern History at University of York where he specialises in the history of modern European nationalism, the Napoleonic Wars, and prisoners of war. His research on these topics has been supported by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and the European Commission’s Marie Curie Actions among others. Before coming to York in September 2014, he taught as an Intra-European Fellow at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Since publishing Making Prussians, Raising Germans in 2017, his research has focused on concepts of honour among European prisoners of war. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His book exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.
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How did minorities fit into the new Greek state during the country’s transition from imperial rule to national sovereignty? How did the relationship between Greece and its Jewish minorities, in particular, shift as definitions of national belonging expanded, shrunk, and transformed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? These are the questions that Dr. Evdoxios Doxiadis, Associate Professor in History at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, seeks to answer in his new book, State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Grounding his arguments in Greek political and popular sources, as well as material from the local and international Jewish press, Doxiadis shows that the Greek state’s treatment of their Jewish minorities was anything but predictable. Rather, he paints a notably ambivalent picture of a state whose policies did not necessarily conform to the desires of the popular majority, and that treated Jews and other minorities differently depending on their perceived ability to conform to national goals of Hellenization and homogenization. Geographically centered in the Balkans, Doxiadis’ book has broader significance, and speaks to the larger issues surrounding statehood, identity, and the age of nationalism that historians are commonly grappling with today. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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As the wife of a Macedonian king and the mother of three sons who would succeed him, Eurydice played an important role in Macedonia at an important moment in the kingdom’s history. In Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power(Oxford University Press, 2019), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney draws upon recent archaeological findings and other sources to reconstruct her role as queen and queen mother during this time. As Carney notes, many of the surviving materials of Eurydice conflict in their portrayal of her personality and actions. With her eldest son Alexander II barely old enough to rule when his father Amyntas III died in 370 BCE, Eurydice was bound to exert considerable influence on the throne, an influence that likely continued after Alexander’s succession by his brother Perdiccas III and even into the reign of Philip II as well. By analyzing the surviving works and detailing the available contemporary materials about Eurydice’s life, Connelly reveals the key role the queen played both in the reign of her sons and in developing the image of the Macedonian monarchy on the eve of its remarkable era of world conquest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago, 2017). Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.
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The king’s guards became increasingly nervous as they watched nearly 7,000 individuals march on Versailles on October 5, 1789. The crowd approaching the king’s chateau was overwhelmingly composed of women who were determined to make their grievances known. Furious at the ever rising price and scarcity of bread, Parisian market women, known as Dames des Halles, joined with other revolutionaries to demand King Louis XVI distribute bread, address the suffering of his subjects, and approve revolutionary reforms. The king ultimately conceded to the market women’s demands. The success of the march symbolized commoners’ new power in politics, including their ability to influence the monarch himself. Although this was certainly watershed moment for the French Revolution, the impact of Dames des Halles went far beyond October 5. As Dr. Katie Jarvis, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, argues in her new book, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (Oxford University Press, 2019) the Dames drew on their patriotic work as activists and their gendered work as republican mothers to compel the French state to provide practical solutions to the many economic, social, and political issues that children, families, and their customers faced in the marketplace daily. The Dames’ notion of citizenship portrayed their useful work, rather than gender, as a cornerstone of civic legitimacy. Although the Revolution has been told as a primarily masculine trajectory of citizenship, Politics in the Marketplace challenges this assumption and reexamines work, gender, and citizenship at the cusp of modern democracy. Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia is finishing her manuscript, Coercing Children, that examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website.
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From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the new Russian challenge to the existing world order. Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Chatham House, 2019), by Chatham House Senior Russian expert, Keir Giles provides the sophisticated and curious reader a primer to help explain Putin’s Russia. As per Giles, Russia and the West are like neighbors who never seem able to understand each other. A major reason, this book argues, is that Western leaders tend to think that Russia should act as a “rational” Western nation—even though Russian leaders, Tsars, Commissars and Presidents alike for centuries have thought and acted based on their country’s much different history and traditions. Russia, through Western eyes, is unpredictable and irrational, when in fact its leaders from the Tsars to Putin almost always act in their own very predictable and rational ways. For Western leaders to try to engage with Russia without attempting to understand how Russians look at the world is a recipe for repeated disappointment and frequent crises. Keir Giles, describes how Russian leaders have used consistent doctrinal and strategic approaches to the rest of the world. These approaches may seem deeply alien in the Western world, but understanding them is essential for successful engagement with contemporary Russia. Giles argues that understanding how Moscow’s leaders think and act—not just Vladimir Putin but his predecessors and eventual successors—will help their counterparts in the West develop a less crisis-prone and more productive relationship with Russia. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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Bianca Premo’s award-winning book The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, makes a powerful yet seemingly simple claim: during the eighteenth century, illiterate ordinary litigants in colonial Spanish America created enlightened ideas and practices by suing their social superiors in higher numbers and with novel claims. By focusing on civil suits undertaken by women, indigenous groups, and the enslaved, Premo demonstrates a gradual shift from a justice-oriented system—focused on extralegal outcomes and casuistic jurisprudence—to a Enlightened law-oriented system—where ordinary litigants based their claims on natural rights, merit, and freedom. Such a transformation expanded through varied and diverse geographies; from metropolitan cities such as Mexico City and Lima, to rural indigenous regions of Oaxaca, and smaller, ethnically diverse, provincial cities such as Trujillo in Peru. As listeners will hear, The Enlightenment on Trial not only challenges traditional histories that have placed the origin of the Enlightenment solely in Western Europe, and in the minds of a few and select group of European men, but it also asks us to situate Latin America in a global conversation— one in which the ideas of ordinary citizens are the matter of intellectual history, and where our commonalities as humans are more important than our differences. This last point, as professor Premo reminds us at the end of the conversation, is an important lesson for our present, a moment in which arguments about radical alterity are used as a basis for exclusion. Instead, for Premo, it is important to highlight the histories that we share, the stories in which we all partake, and that we all need to recover from historical erasure. Lisette Varon-Carvjal is a graduate student in history at Rutger's University.
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Historians in the English-speaking world have long studied how European and American travelers and diplomats conceptualized China, but, especially in recent years, few scholars have attempted to thoroughly understand the reverse—how Qing envoys conceptualized the West. This is the starting point for Dr. Jenny Huangfu Day (Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College) in her new book, Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China. By studying the lives, careers, and writings of six Qing diplomat-travelers (Binchun, Zhigang, Zhang Deyi, Guo Songtao, Zeng Jize, Xue Fucheng) during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, she explores their heterogeneous efforts to understand and represent the West. Drawing from communication studies and literary analysis, Day offers a fresh take on Qing diplomacy that traces significant changes such as the establishment of the Zongli Yamen, permanent legations in Europe, and the use of the telegraph for diplomatic communications. In this interview, she provides a clear, accessible introduction to this new work. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth-century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer).
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From 1667 to 1676, a pivotal controversy played out among several mathematical luminaries of the time, partly in the proceedings of the Royal Society but partly in private correspondence. The controversy concerned whether an infamous problem of Ancient Greek geometry, the quadrature of the central conic sections (better known as squaring the circle), could be solved using the classical tools of straightedge and compass. While its impossibility would not be rigorously proven for two more centuries, the theoretical and philosophical implications of these attempts to settle the issue were constitutive of the contemporaneous development of calculus. Dr. Davide Crippa's book The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century (Birkhäuser, 2019) is a deep dive into this little-covered episode in the modern European history of mathematics. He examines the advances of Gregory and Leibniz in full mathematical detail, clarifying in current notation and elegant figures the steps and missteps of their constructions and arguments, and in some cases through the lens of critical and often fierce exchanges with their peers, including recently-published correspondence that traces the former's influence on the latter's efforts. The book reveals The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century to have been a sensation of its time, and deserving of a treatment of its own. Cory Brunson (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn Health.
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Chocolate – nothing is more irresistible for a decadent treat or a rich drink to warm you on a cold winter’s evening. In eighteenth-century Venezuela, cacao became a life source for the colony. Neglected by the Spanish fleet system, Venezuelan colonists struggled to obtain European foods and goods. But, they found a solution in trading the highly coveted luxury good, cacao, for the necessities of life with contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. Establishing an intricate contraband network, an intricate contraband network, Venezuelans normalized their subversions to imperial law. Today, we’re pleased to welcome Jesse Cromwell to discuss his new book, The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela (published in 2018 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press). This incredibly well researched and beautifully written book explores how smuggling in the Spanish Atlantic became more than an economic transaction or imperial worry. Persistent local need elevated smuggling to a communal ethos and Venezuelans defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures as well as violent protests when the Spanish state enacted the Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century. Exchanges over smuggling between the Spanish empire and its colonial subjects formed a key part of empire making and maintenance in the eighteenth century. Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia is finishing her manuscript, Coercing Children, that examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website.
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I must’ve been a kid when I first heard the palindrome “Able I was ere I saw Elba”. Napoleon didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. “Elba” meant even less. Decades later, I had learned a little more about Napoleon and his time there, but not that all that much it turns out. And then came Mark Braude’s The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Empire to Exile (Penguin Press, 2018)… This unexpected and absorbing book delves into the story of Napoleon’s exile on the island of Elba following his abdication in 1814. After his escape and return to France for the “100 Days,” Napoleon was, of course, finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. The Invisible Emperor explores a period in between the “bigger-ticket” events with which readers may be more familiar, a time and space in which Napoleon at once out of sight and more in contact with everyday people than perhaps at any other point in his career. Written in multiple short chapters comprising four parts that follow the seasons of Bonaparte’s ten-month stay on Elba, The Invisible Emperor reconsiders the Napoleonic legend from the point of view of a moment of relative quiet in a modest setting. Carefully researched and a pleasure to read, it challenges aspects of the towering historical figure’s mythology. The space, timeline, and scale of this history may be small, but this is a Napoleon we don’t typically hear about. Presented in a narrative rich with curious details and a surprising intimacy, The Invisible Emperor manages to humanize an epic history and life about which so much has been written over the past two centuries. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From his accession to the Spanish throne in 1516 until his abdication in 1556, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V dominated Europe in a way that no ruler had since Charlemagne. In Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019), Geoffrey Parker draws upon an enormous array of documentation to provide readers with a better understanding of Charles and the many challenges he faced over the course of his decades-long reign. A member of the Habsburg dynasty, Charles stared assuming his inheritance at an early age due to the premature death of his father Philip the Fair. With his election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1520, Charles was sovereign over a realm stretching across central and northwestern Europe to Spain and her rapidly expanding empire in the Americas. The nature of his domains and the challenges he faced, from the persistent military clashes with his French counterpart Francis I to the rise of Lutheranism in Germany, forced Charles to adopt a peripatetic existence, spending much of his reign on horseback crisscrossing Europe to manage his scattered territories. As Parker shows, most of these problems defied his best efforts to resolve them, which fueled his decision to retire to a monastery in Spain two years before his death in 1558. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her book, The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire (Pegasus Books, 2018), Susan Jaques offers up a richly detailed and researched account of Napoleon’s fascination with ancient Rome, and how this obsession shaped not only France in the early part of the nineteenth century, but also the city of Paris we know today. In this interview, she traces the cultural history and legacy of the Napoleonic era, discussing topics such as the looting of artworks from conquered states, the creation of the Empire style by architects Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, the Roman inspirations for the Arc de Triomphe, the Arc du Carrousel, and the Vendôme column, and the politics of art repatriation after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Susan Jaques is a Los Angeles-based author and journalist with a consuming interest in history and art. Her biography, The Empress of Art: Catherine the Great and the Transformation of Russia explores the tsarina’s bold, unprecedented use of art and architecture to legitimize her reign and transform Russia into a European superpower. Her new cultural history, The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession that Shaped an Empire examines Napoleon’s fascination with antiquity and its impact on the urban landscape of Paris (Pegasus Books, April 2016 & December 2018). Susan’s articles, profiles, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Fine Arts Connoisseur, The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Toronto Globe and Mail, and NY Review of Books. Susan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Stanford University and an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a member of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture and the Napoleon Historical Society. Susan is a docent at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris.
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Can there be a political science of the Holocaust? Evgeny Finkel, in his new book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust(Princeton University Press, 2017), answers Charles King's question with a resounding yes. Finkel is interested in a very specific question: What made individual Jews choose from a variety of different strategies in responding to the threat posed by German violence. He lays out several possible strategies for survival, ranging from cooperation and collaboration to coping and compliance to evasion and resistance. Each of these strategies offered very real possibilities and risked very real dangers. Jews in every location adopted some combination of these strategies. But the mix of strategies adopted varied widely from place to place. Finkel's research helps us understand why specific communities tended to employ a distinctive mix of strategies. He argues that the nature of the prewar environment in which Jews lived--the way local governments treated Jews, the degree of assimilation and interaction between Jews and non-Jews, the historical experiences of violence and oppression, all shaped wartime choices. By doing so, he argues, we remember that Jews had choices (even though ones with significant constraints and with limited possible outcomes) and it is important for us to understand how individuals made these choices. Beyond this, though, FInkel hopes to show that a political science of the Holocaust is not simply possible, but that it offers new and important answers. It's a important and persuasive claim, one that all researchers should wrestle with and respond to. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press.
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In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a profound and complete examination of the plots to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. A riveting narrative of the organization, conspiracy, and sacrifices made by those who led the resistance against Hitler. Orbach deftly analyzes the mixed motives, moral ambiguities and organizational vulnerability that marked their work, while reminding us forcefully of their essential bravery and rightness. And he challenges us to ask whether we would have summoned the same courage. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.comor on twitter @craig_sorvillo.
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Did the early Christians believe their myths? Like most ancient—and modern—people, early Christians made efforts to present their myths in the most believable ways. In How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (Yale University Press, 2019), M. David Litwa explores how and why what later became the four canonical gospels take on a historical cast that remains vitally important for many Christians today. Offering an in-depth comparison with other Greco-Roman stories that have been shaped to seem like history, Litwa shows how the evangelists responded to the pressures of Greco-Roman literary culture by using well-known historiographical tropes such as the mention of famous rulers and kings, geographical notices, the introduction of eyewitnesses, vivid presentation, alternative reports, and so on. In this way, the evangelists deliberately shaped myths about Jesus into historical discourse to maximize their believability for ancient audiences. Dr. M. David Litwa is a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions and Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. His most recent books include Desiring Divinity: Self-deification in Ancient Jewish and Christian Mythmaking and Hermetica II: The Excerpts of Stobaeus, Papyrus Fragments, and Ancient Testimonies. Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com.
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May ’68 marked a watershed moment in French society, culture, and political life. The feminist movement was no exception. Women took to the streets and meeting halls around the country, challenging outdated sexual standards, fighting for reproductive freedom, and articulating women’s oppression in radically new ways. In Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Dr. Lisa Greenwald offers a refreshingly new perspective on the history of French feminism, beginning with the liberation of France in 1944--when women were granted the right to vote--to 1981 and the election of a Socialist president who promised to transform women’s status in French society. Greenwald examines the endless challenges of collective organizing, along with the fractious ideological divisions and strategic differences among the various feminist groups that emerged after the events of May. In this interview, she discusses influential figures in the movement such as Gisèle Halimi and Simone Veil and the fight to legalize abortion, Simone de Beauvoir and the influence of The Second Sex on feminists after May ’68, and Antoinette Fouque and the tensions surrounding the Psych-et-Po group. She concludes the interview with an insightful analysis of current debates surrounding the #MeToo movement in France. Lisa Greenwald, Ph.D. spent almost a decade working in and researching the women’s movement in France, supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and grants from the French government. She has worked as a consultant and in-house historian for a variety of nonprofits and foundations in France, Chicago, and New York. She teaches history at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris.
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Why was a Crusade that was initially meant for Syria end up in Tunis? How did the aspirations of the King of France and the Mamluk Sultan, the King of Sicily and the Hafsid Emir of Tunis, get entangled in the years following the Mongol invasion of the Middle East? More broadly, how should we approach the Crusades, a series of events that have traditionally focused on either the European or the Near Eastern perspectives, and can these perspectives become integrated into a more wholistic, Mediterranean approach? In The Tunis Crusade of 1270: a Mediterranean History (Oxford University Press, 2018), Dr. Michael Lower, professor of History at the University of Minnesota, offers a broad and deep dive into the Tunis Crusade, an unlikely but impactful moment of Mediterranean History. In our conversation, Michael and I touch upon traditional and new methodological approaches to the Crusades, the important roles played by Mediterranean rulers and the political, religious, and economic pressures that shaped their decisions, and the reasons behind the strange detour the so-called eighth Crusade, originally bound for Syria, took 1500 miles to the West, to Tunis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In a new podcast of the series ‘Arguing History’, Professor Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world, if not on the entire planet, and renowned Ecclesiastical Historian Professor William Gibson discuss the question: ‘is the idea of the Enlightenment one which is no longer useful for historians’? Be prepared for forty-plus minutes of intense but ultra-interesting discussion. Professor Jeremy Black MBE, Is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. A graduate of Queens College, Cambridge, he is the author of well over one-hundred books. In 2008 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison award for lifetime achievement. Professor William Gibson, is Professor at Oxford Brookes University. He is a specialist in 17th to 19th century English Ecclesiastical History. Among his other books are The Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord, and Religion and the Enlightenment 1600-1800: Conflict and the Rise of Civic Humanism in Taunton. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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In Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 (Cornell University Press, 2019), Dr. Erin-Marie Legacey, Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University, explores the transformation of burial practices in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Public health concerns under the Old Regime prompted reforms in how the French buried their dead, with millions of bones carted away from church graveyards to the deserted mining tunnels underneath the city. After the Revolution, the Catacombs, as well as newly established cemeteries such as Père Lachaise, became more than simply places for the disposal of the deceased. Amidst the turmoil and upheaval wrought by the Revolution, these burial sites became public spaces for Parisians to, as Dr. Legacey writes, “assert and assess their radical break with the past, to reconsider a new set of moeurs in the wake of that break, to reconnect with their fellow Parisians, both alive and dead, and to reimagine their past and its relationship to the present.” Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris.
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Few decades have given rise to such potent mythologies as the 1930s. Popular impressions of those years prior to the Second World War were shaped by the single outstanding personality of that conflict, Winston Spencer Churchill. Churchill depicted himself as a political prophet, exiled into the wilderness prior to 1939 by those who did not want to hear of the growing threats to peace in Europe. Although it is a familiar story, it is one we need to unlearn as the truth is somewhat murkier. Robert Crowcroft's The End is Nigh: British Politics, Power, and the Road to the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a tale of relentless intrigue, burning ambition, and the bitter rivalry in British politics during the years preceding the Second World War. Building on both the revisionist and the post-revisionist scholarship of the last forty-years, Crowcroft’s narrative goes from the corridors of Whitehall to the smoking rooms of Parliament, and from aircraft factories to summit meetings with Hitler, the book offers a fresh and provocative interpretation of one of the most crucial moments of British history. It assembles a cast of iconic characters--Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin, and more--to explore the dangerous interaction between high politics at Westminster and the formulation of national strategy in a world primed to explode. In the twenty-first century we are accustomed to being cynical about politicians, mistrusting what they say and wondering about their real motives, but Crowcroft, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh and Associate Fellow at the War Studies Department at University College London, argues that this was always the character of democratic politics. In The End is Nigh he challenges some of the most resilient public myths of recent decades--myths that, even now, remain an important component of Britain's self-image. Described by Christopher Montgomery in Standpoint as brilliant and a ‘savage and subtle critique of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, The End is Nigh is by any stretch of the imagination a book that the serious student of history should have on his desk for his summer reading. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com
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In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo about her forthcoming work, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019). The MIT press release appropriately notes that Otto “liberates Bauhaus history” with this work, drawing the focus from the handful of male artists like Klee and Breuer outward as she considers the other 1200 odd Bauhäusler. Otto discusses spiritism, gender constructions, and the nature of queer before turning her attention to the unavoidable political landscape of the 1930s. Our conversation was wide ranging and as edifying as it was fun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, Sisters in Arms: Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968 (Berghahn, 2017), Katharina Karcher Lecturer in German at the University of Birmingham, examines a critical time in the history and development of the feminist movement in Germany. Sisters in Arms gives a bracing account of how feminist ideas were enacted by West German leftist organizations from the infamous Red Army Faction to less well-known groups such as the Red Zora. It analyzes their confrontational and violent tactics in challenging the abortion ban, opposing violence against women, and campaigning for solidarity with Third World women workers. Though these groups often diverged ideologically and tactically, they all demonstrated the potency of militant feminism within postwar protest movements. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.
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Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Doubleday, 2019), Moller traces the histories of migration of three ancient authors, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen, from ancient Alexandria in 500 to Syria and Constantinople, to Baghdad in 800, and then to Renaissance Venice in the 15th century. Moller demonstrates how tenuous were the chances of such ancient works’ survival, from the depredations of invading armies to the hazards of fire and flooding, to the problems of translation through multiple languages over the centuries. The migration of ancient texts from Greece to the Middle East and back to medieval Europe is a fascinating story of how knowledge was preserved when certain conditions were met, such as political stability, the willingness of itinerant scholarly “manuscript hunters” to risk life and limb to find obscure, ancient texts, and the openness to tolerate and embrace knowledge derived from other cultures and civilizations. Moller’s book is the story of how the texts upon which the modern world was built were acquired through fortuitous accident and scholarly diligence. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory.
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harles Caspers and Peter Jan Margry's The Miracle of Amsterdam: Biography of a Contested Devotion (University of Notre Dame, 2019) presents a “cultural biography” of a Dutch devotional manifestation. According to tradition, on the night of March 15, 1345, a Eucharistic host thrown into a burning fireplace was found intact hours later. A chapel was erected over the spot, and the citizens of Amsterdam became devoted to their “Holy Stead." From the original Eucharistic processions evolved the custom of individual devotees walking around the chapel while praying in silence, and the growing international pilgrimage site contributed to the rise and prosperity of Amsterdam. With the arrival of the Reformation, the Amsterdam Miracle became a point of contention between Catholics and Protestants, and the changing fortunes of this devotion provide us a front-row seat to the challenges facing religion in the world today. Caspers and Margry trace these transformations and their significance through the centuries, from the Catholic medieval period through the Reformation to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The story of Morocco’s independence struggle against France and Spain is a complicated one. Because it occurred around the same time of the long-running war for independence in Algeria, it has received greater scholarly attention. Moreover, Morocco’s continuing alignment with both the United States and France after 1956 has deemphasized Morocco’s importance, compared to more radical anti-colonial states such as Ghana, Guinea, or Tanzania. Lastly, the sultan’s own popularity within his country and the survival of the monarchy today meant that the independence struggle has often been understood through his personality specifically. David Stenner’s Globalizing Morocco: Transnational Activism and the Postcolonial State (Stanford University Press, 2019) enriches our understanding of Morocco’s nationalist movement. Stenner examines a collection of previously poorly-studied activists whose work began in the international zone in Morocco and then filtered out into the Arab world, France, and to the United States. Stenner shows how this was accomplished, namely via a decentralized system of activists who worked to win over sympathizers and transform them into allies. One consequence of this was that it was highly effective: Morocco became a global issue for a time, even amidst the competing issues of the early Cold War. At the same time, this approach had a number of weaknesses. The fact that it was decentralized and had no hierarchies also made it relatively easy to co-opt, and many important activists found themselves sidelined in the period after independence. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.
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Jamie Aroosi has written an important book that brings together the theoretical work of Karl Marx and Soren Kierkegaard in a kind of intellectual encounter. Noting the common historical context for both authors, and how they both came to their philosophical approaches from and the through the work by G. W. F. Hegel, Aroosi explores the connected theoretical and historical connections of Marx and Kierkegaard. The book is structured around the concept of freedom and selfhood, as both Marx and Kierkegaard are concerned about the alienation of the self and unfreedom. The book traces these ideas from bondage, through emancipation, freedom, and finally putting this freedom into action, in the book’s final section, praxis. The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) argues that these two theorists were writing and analyzing the complicated political, religious, economic, and spiritual times in which they lived, and that their work, especially as it is focused towards the future, may be particularly important for contemporary readers and scholars to consider. Aroosi also makes the case that this intellectual pairing, crossing disciplinary boundaries and silos, is both novel and logical, that Marx and Kierkegaard are complimentary thinkers and should be put into this intellectual dialogue. Lilly J. Goren is professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She co-edited the award-winning Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Elizabeth Danto and Alexandra Steiner-Strauss’ edited book, Freud/Tiffany: Anna Freud, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham and The Best Possible School (Routledge, 2018), stands to alter what has become practically an idee fixe about Anna Freud. Whereas she can seem to exist only in a dyad with her father, she comes to life in this collection, outside of his purview. We meet the wealthy Dorothy Tiffany (as in stained glass) Burlingham from NYC who settles in Vienna with her children, fleeing a hard marriage, seeking analytic treatment for herself and her family. In short order, Anna Freud becomes the most important person in her life. Anna returns Dorothy’s affections and together they embark on many marvelous and groundbreaking psychoanalytic projects. They create the Hietzing School in Red Vienna wherein the seeds for some of the most important psychoanalytic theorizing about children and adolescents are planted. Anna analyzes Dorothy’s son. Sigmund Freud analyzes Dorothy who he accepts as a daughter-in-law. Together these two women form an over 40 year love and professional relationship that included buying a country cottage for weekend sojourns away from it all to creating the Hampstead war nurseries. Anna helped raise Dorothy’s three kids and Dorothy trained to become an analyst. Thanks to the wonderful essays in this book, Anna Freud begins to take a new and exciting shape. The book reads like a psychoanalytic who’s who: Erik Erikson, Peter Blos, August Aichorn are all on the scene teaching and advising at Heitzing. Almost all the students have analytic sessions. The Dewey method is applied. We meet Blos before he decides to enter analysis, having fallen into this position. We meet Erikson before he left his career as an artist to pursue analysis as well. This collection tells the story of a school, the lives it impacted, the intellectual and clinical legacy it generated, but most especially it highlights the libidinous legacy of Freud and Burlingham, who, in finding and loving each other, created new modes of research, innovative forms of clinical education and a variety of radical institutions that have forever changed the way we understand the lives of children. And I have not even mentioned all the gorgeous photographs sprinkled throughout the text. Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as a historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Holocaust was and remains a central trauma in Israel’s national consciousness. It has found ample expressions in Israeli documentary cinema from 1945 until the present. Third-generation Holocaust survivors were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. They grew up in a society which acts out the trauma and since the 1990s they have related to the Holocaust in a range of cultural fields. Remaking Holocaust Memory aims to paint the first comprehensive portrait of third-generation Holocaust documentaries phenomenon. It takes a cinematic, cultural, and sociohistorical comparative approach to examine how third-generation filmmakers have responded to previous narratives and representations. Liat Steir-Livny analyzes 19 prominent films that reflect the key tendencies of third-generation Holocaust documentaries. These films are compared to 16 Holocaust documentaries by second-generation survivors. The book explores how third-generation filmmakers are both affected by and deviate from earlier Holocaust representations. They create a new layer of commemoration that coexists with the former, while constructing new thematic, moral, and aesthetic recollections of the trauma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the summer of 1973, Donald Reid was an undergraduate student who had traveled to France for the first time to work on his Honors thesis in History. It was the “summer of Lip”. Don’s new book, Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968-1981 (Verso Books, 2018) revisits the years leading up to that momentous summer, the drama of events as they unfolded, and their legacies over the years that followed. The result is an in-depth history of the labor activism of workers at the famous Besançon watch factory, workers who took matters into their own hands in various ways over close to a decade. Beginning with the Lip workers’ opposition to attempts to downsize their factory in 1973, the book tracks the vicissitudes of their struggle up to the year the Socialist/Mitterrand government came to power in France. Throughout the book, Don plays close attention the interplay between the local story of Lip and the broader national and international contexts of the era. Understanding the “Lip Affair” in relationship to the upheavals of 1968 and a range of other forms of political activity and resistance through the 1970s, the book moves between the workers, their supporters, and a wider world of economic, social, cultural, and political change. Along the way, the story highlights the roles of leaders like Charles Piaget, the female workers of Lip who figured centrally in what happened at and beyond the factory gates, and a range of observers who saw in Lip the possibilities of a participatory democratic and anti-authoritarian future. If you already knew something about Lip, you’ll learn so much more from this engaged and carefully researched book. If you’re new to this episode from postwar France, you’ll be grateful to have Opening the Gates as your thorough and fascinating introduction. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
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Robert Louis Wilken, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has written an intellectual history of the ideas surrounding freedom of religion. Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (Yale University Press, 2019) offers a revisionist history of how the ideas of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion originated in the writings of the Christian fathers of the early Church, such as Tertullian and Lactantius, during the period when Christians were a persecuted sect of the Roman Empire. Wilken argues that it was not the political theorists of the Enlightenment who invented religious freedom in response to the wars of the Reformation, but rather the participants of the Reformation itself, including both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, who recovered ideas from the Roman-era Church fathers and used them to develop arguments about religious liberty for both individuals and faith communities. Wilken demonstrates that the concerns about whether faith could ever be enforced by the sword were present from the beginnings of Christianity. Wilken’s book helps inform our understanding of the origins of religious liberty, which is a concept of great import in contemporary debates about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The story of the littoral nations of the Baltic Sea is like a saga, that genre perfected by those tenacious inhabitants of the rocky shores of this ancient trading corridor. In it, we meet pirates, princes, and prelates; and while much divides the Slavs, Balts, Saxons, Poles, and Scandinavian peoples, much also unites them: rugged individualism and a desire to expand the boundaries of their known world. Caroline Boggis-Rolfe’s new book, The Baltic Story: A Thousand Year History of Its Lands, Sea, and Peoples(Amberley, 2019) is a deep dive into this engrossing history. It which opens with the prosperity of the Hanseatic League, that commercial confederation, which ruled the Baltic between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and closes with the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Unlike other studies of the region which focus on subsets of the Baltic region: Scandinavia, Northern Germany, the Baltic States, Russia, and Poland, Boggis-Rolfe has undertaken the somewhat daunting task of examining 1000 years of the region’s history as one unified history. Boggis-Rolfe’s approach makes The Baltic Story eminently readable: rather than placing her material in strict silos, she weaves the stories of separate nations into a cogent chronological narrative, examining each nation at the zenith of its power, but through the lens of its relationship to its neighbors. That being said, each chapter is an excellent stand-alone study, and in them we get the privilege of spending time with the bold Swedish monarchs who forged empires, the erudite Kings of Poland, the patrons of Copernicus; Peter the Great who hewed for Russia a “window on the West,” and the visionary Frederick II of Prussia, and a host of other equally fascinating personalities. The Baltic Story was born of Boggis-Rolfe’s two passions: her academic work on Voltaire and the Enlightenment and her many years of visiting Eastern Europe and the Baltic region. She has a natural gift for story-telling, which makes the history of this region leap off the page. Her tenacity and commitment to creating what did not previously exist — a complete study of the Baltic — is a boon for both amateur and seasoned historians, and anyone embarking on a voyage of discovery around the Baltic Sea. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.
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Earlier histories of the Cold War haven’t exactly been charitable toward the peace activists and pacifists who led peace initiatives. Pacifists in the United States were either simplistic and naïve, or they were fellow travelers of the Soviet Union. Peace proposals coming from the Soviet Union were nothing more than propaganda. Activists in Europe, meanwhile, were treated as a kind of curiosity in the broader Cold War, but their role was to highlight the growing tensions between the superpowers. This left an important question unanswered: what exactly was the significance of this peace activism that emerged after 1945? Did it amount to anything? Petra Goedde’s The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 2019) fills in the important history of peace movements during the Cold War. Goedde discusses the different movements that existed in the United States and Europe from 1945 until the early 1970s. She looks at different facets of these peace movements. Much of it is centered on opposition to nuclear weapons, but Goedde’s analysis extends into the realm of decolonization, environmentalism, and gender. She concludes by noting some of the long-term impacts of peace activism, including the formation of the Green Party in Germany and the adoption of certain policies by foreign policy realists such as Richard Nixon. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.
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Today we are joined by Stephen Hardy, retired professor of kinesiology and affiliate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, and Andrew Holman, professor of history at and the director of Canadian studies at Bridgewater State University. Hardy and Holman are the co-authors of Hockey: A Global History (University of Illinois Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the popularization of the Montreal game in the 19th; the rise of divergent styles of hockey in Canada, the USA, and Europe; and the increasing commercialization of hockey. In Hockey, Hardy and Holman offer a comprehensive and engaging history of the fastest game from it’s origins in a series of stick based contests, including early hockey, bandy, and polo through to the development of our contemporary commercial hockey best exhibited by the NHL and KHL. Their work offers an innovative periodization that gives order to the tensions and contradictions inherent in the disorderly expansion and contraction of the global game. They chose to concentrate on the convergences and divergences of the hockey world beginning with the codification and spread of the Montreal game in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their second section addresses the expansion of hockey beyond Montreal throughout the rest of Canada, the northern US, and Europe. The third part of Hockey covers 1920 until 1972, a period of divergence in which American, Canadian, and European hockey leagues developed unique cultural characteristic expressed through national rules and styles. The final section of the book analyses the convergence hockey through the lens of globalization and commercialization. Hardy and Holman’s work will appeal to scholars interested in the spread of hockey but more broadly to people interested in how different cultural products diffuse through the creation of global networks. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au.
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Black German Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has experienced significant growth over the past three decades, integrating subjects such as gender studies, diaspora studies, history, and media and performance studies. The field’s contextual roots as well as historical backdrop, nevertheless, span centuries. Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions, and Histories (Peter Lang, 2018), edited by Tiffany Florvil and Vanessa Plumly, assesses where the field is now by exploring the nuances of how the past – colonial, Weimar, National Socialist, post-1945, and post-Wende – informs the present and future of Black German Studies; how present generations of Black Germans look to those of the past for direction and empowerment; how discourses shift due to the diversification of power structures and the questioning of identity-based categories; and how Black Germans affirm their agency and cultural identity through cultural productions that engender both counter-discourses and counter-narratives. Examining Black German Studies as a critical, hermeneutic field of inquiry, the contributions are organized around three thematically conceptualized sections: German and Austrian literature and history; pedagogy and theory; and art and performance. Presenting critical works in the fields of performance studies, communication and rhetoric, and musicology, the volume complicates traditional historical narratives, interrogates interdisciplinary methods, and introduces theoretical approaches that help to advance the field. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.
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In 1349 the City-Republic of Florence had just endured a horrific epidemic of bubonic plague, that contagion that became known as the Black Death. Nevertheless, despite the effects upon both their population and treasury, they marshaled their resources to fight the Ubaldini clan who dominated the mountain passes through the Appenines to the north of the city. This event my guest Bill Caferro refers to as “Petrarch’s War,” since the Florentine humanist Petrarch–normally regarded as a promoter of peace in Italy–had urged Florence to attack the Ubaldini after they had waylaid and killed a friend of his. Caferro examines this little war to find out its institutional and economic effects–to see what it says about wages of soldiers, and to answer such curious questions as why Florence sent a cook on an embassy to the court of Hungary. Bill’s arguments in his new book Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context(Cambridge University Press, 2018) aren’t just about Florence. Ultimately, he is suggesting that context matters a great deal to historical thinking, and that pleas to ignore the short term in favor of the long term ignore the fact that understanding the short term is always at the heart of the historian’s task. Long-term wage studies, he argues, have cut corners both in terms of evidence and through epistemological jumps. “The current long-term methodological construct,” Caferro writes, “is as stubborn as it is pernicious.” Ultimately, Caferro believes, “a proper understanding of context lies at the core of the historians’ task.” Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.
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In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooperated. Gibraltar entered European politics in the Middle Ages, and became a symbol of the Atlantic Empire in the Early Modern period (the Pillars of Hercules of Emperor Charles V are featured on the Spanish flag to this day), but Pack’s study focuses on the nineteenth century. Europe’s new imperialism, Britannic naval supremacy, the age of steam, the ever-present danger of cholera, all mark the change of a Spanish-Moorish border into a multilateral one. So too does the multicultural mix of Europeans and North Africans, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants who brought a spirit of convivencia (mutual toleration) into the region, unlike the nineteenth- and twentieth- century homogenizing nationalism that was at play elsewhere. In the middle of this theater, Dr. Pack follows the careers of adventuresome entrepreneurs, who manipulated the weak enforcement of conflicting laws in overlapping jurisdictions for their own gain. He calls these characters “slipstream potentates” because they maneuvered creatively in the wakes of great ships of state on their courses in the seas of international politics. (Other historians have called them “the last Barbary pirates.”) They bring color and detail to this already gripping narrative of international politics in Spain and North Africa in the century between Napoleon and Franco. Sasha D. Pack is Associate Professor of History at the University of Buffalo. He studies Modern Europe, Spain and Portugal, and the Mediterranean, focusing on transnational and political history. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program.
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Where in the world do working moms have it best? In her new book, Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press, 2019), Caitlyn Collins explores how women balance motherhood and work across the globe. Using interviews with middle class working mothers in Sweden, East and Western Germany, Italy, and the United States, Collins digs deep into how policies and cultural values shape these women’s lives. This book will be of interest to any working parent and would be a great addition to any sociology of family or sociology of work course. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch
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The social history of Turkey across the twentieth century has produced a tension between state governance and religion. This history informs and shapes modern subjects as they try to live out an authentic vision of the present. In Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jeremy F. Walton, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, explores how members of three contemporary Muslim groups, the Nur community, the Gülen movement, and Alevis, articulate religiosity within the Turkish public sphere. His rich ethnographic account takes the reader through Istanbul and Ankara to see how Islam is negotiated through religious classes, public conferences, charitable services, museum spaces, and the recollection of history. In our conversation we discuss twentieth century Turkish history, Muslim non-governmental organizations, religious gatherings, museum exhibits, Rumi, the Turkish state’s relationship to Islam and secularism, interreligious tolerance and pluralism, nostalgia for Ottoman heritage, the ideal of “religious freedom,” and the recent shift in political and religious practices. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.
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Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, race as well became naturalized. Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities. The challenges of de-racializing these often unnoticed foundations require a deep understanding of how race became so imbricated with technological environments. Through Nemser’s case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.
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Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War(Tim Duggan Books, 2019) is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infighting that help to make Hitler’s domination of Europe possible. Drawing on the available archival research, Oxford graduate, professional writer and one-time Channel 4 news journalist, Tim Bouverie has created a highly interesting portrait of the ministers, aristocrats, and amateur diplomats who, through their actions and inaction, shaped their country’s policy and determined the fate of Europe. Among other historical figures who appear in this tale are Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden and Baldwin. Beginning with the advent of Hitler in 1933, we embark on a fascinating journey from the early days of the Third Reich to the beaches of Dunkirk and the downfall of Chamberlain’s premiership. Bouverie takes us not only into the backrooms of Parliament and 10 Downing Street but also into the drawing rooms and dining clubs of imperial Britain, where Hitler enjoyed support among the ruling class and even some members of the royal family. Both sweeping and detail laden, Tim Bouverie provides both the first-time reader of this historical tale and the more experienced one, with a highly interesting and involved narrative of one of the most important periods in world history. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jeanette M. Fregulia about the movements of coffee beans, coffee drinking, and coffee houses from Ethiopia and Yemen, across the Mediterranean region, through Western Europe, and to the Americas. In A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World (University of Arkansas Press, 2019), Fregulia examines the geographic movements of coffee beans through global trade as well as the social and cultural movements of coffee drinking from a medicine to an aid in religious ritual to an elite domestic drink to a public event in the coffee house. Covering a wide ranging chronology from the sixth century to today, the story of coffee as it moves East to West shares much in common with the movements of other foods like chocolate, sugar, tea, and olives, but Fregulia argues that coffee is unique among global foodstuffs for the way it transformed social structures and social behaviors to become part of the pubic sphere. Fregulia’s history decenters the European perspective of global market and cultural exchanges by drawing on archives of primary sources from Islamic histories as well as European travel narratives. For early modern Europeans, Fregulia argues, consuming coffee was a product of imperialism and Orientalism, arising from the general acquisitiveness of early modern Europeans who “consumed the East in new forms of art and architecture, in the pages of travel narratives, with the collection of artifacts, and in luxurious adornments for the body” (99). Fregulia brings a new perspective to a familiar drink by intertwining cultural, political, economic, religious, and legal histories altogether through the story of one rich and tantalizing brew. Jeanette M. Fregulia is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. Jeanette’s research focuses on merchants and material, cultural, and social exchanges between early modern Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as on the role of gender in the history of Mediterranean exchanges. In addition to PhD in Renaissance Italian History, she holds a Master’s Degree in Middle East Area Studies from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and continues to actively pursue research in the history of the Middle East and Islam. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.
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Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access to knowledge unimpeded by any religious authority. But how would the history of freedom change if these conceptions were false? In Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Jeffrey T. Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression. Catholic readers disobeyed the book rules of their church in a vast apostasy that raised personal desire and conscience over communal responsibility and doctrine. This disobedience sparked a dramatic contest between lay readers and their priests over proper book behavior that played out in homes, schools, libraries, parish meeting halls, even church confessionals. The clergy lost this contest in a fundamental reordering of cultural power that helped usher in contemporary Catholicism. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018.
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People value loyalty. We prize it in our dogs. We loyally carry loyalty cards to claim discounts at our favourite stores and coffee shops. We follow sports teams, even when they lose. Loyalty is also deeply political. It is signified in oaths of office, in pledges of allegiance, and in the machinations of party politics. Loyalty, like justice, is taken to be an unalloyed good. As Don Corleone taught us: ‘Blood makes you related, loyalty makes you family’. It is not surprising that loyalty has a deep and complex history in Anglophone political thought. The seventeenth century in Britain was a period in which political loyalties were shaped, tested, and sometimes fractured. Edward Vallance is Professor of History at the University of Roehampton. He was written widely on the politics of early modern Britain, and on topics such as oaths and covenants, the Revolution of 1688, and the radical history of Britain. In a range of essays, he has explored topics in political thought from the Renaissance to Thomas Paine. His new book Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658-1727 (Manchester University Press, 2019), examines ‘loyal addresses’ as mechanisms for the expression of public opinion, and as links between the local and national contexts of politics. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.
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Carolyn J. Dean’s The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the cultural history of the idea of the “witness to genocide” in Western Europe and the United States. She portrays the witness in non-traditional genocide court trials as the moral compass. In fact, many of these “moral witnesses” were not utilized for their testimony to identify perpetrators or mass murder, but rather a symbolic voice for survivor’s that would not normally be admissible in traditional legal proceedings. Dr. Dean is the Charles J. Still Professor of History and French at Yale University and is the author of several other books focused on morality and genocide. The Moral Witness is part of the Cornell University Press’s series Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The year 1453 marked the end of an intermittent yet seemingly endless series of wars between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England that, some four hundred years later, was dubbed the Hundred Years War. Depending on how you count even the most conservative estimate of its beginnings would make it longer than that. This conflict led to numerous changes in the life of not only Kings, but in those of men and women; of warriors, priests and peasants; landowners, great and small; ladies, nuns, and housewives; and prisoners of war, and the poor in their infinite variety. Writing in the midst of this turmoil, after the defeat and capture of the King Jean II of France at the Battle of Poitier, a chronicler wrote: "From that time on all went wrong with the Kingdom and the state was undone. Thieves and robbers rose up everywhere in the land. The nobles despised and hated all others and took no thought for the mutual usefulness and profit of lord and men. They subjected and despoiled the peasants and the men of the villages. In no wise did they defend their country from enemies. Rather did they trample it underfoot, robbing and pillaging the peasants’ goods…" With me to explain this dreadful period, and its many consequences is David Green, author of The Hundred Years War: A People’s History, published by Yale University Press (2014). A Senior Lecturer in British Studies and History at Harlaxton College, he has published several earlier studies on other aspects of the Hundred Years War. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.
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Though commonly used today to identify a polity that lasted for over a millennium, the label “Byzantine empire” is an anachronism imposed by more recent generations. As Anthony Kaldellis explains in Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Harvard University Press, 2019), this has contributed to the denial of the ethnic identity that most denizens of the empire had of themselves as Romans. Kaldellis traces the origins of this process of denial to the 8th century CE, with the papacy’s turn to the Franks as their protectors. The efforts by the Catholic Church to de-legitimize the Eastern Empire as the legatee of ancient Rome denied the self-identification of its residents as Romans, one that is reflected in much of the surviving literature from this era. This identity was so widely embraced by the residents of the empire as to make it a largely homogenous state ethnically throughout much of its existence, one that absorbed many of the bands of people from other ethnic groups who migrated to the empire over the centuries of its existence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Madagascar lies so close to the African coast--and so near the predictable wind system of the Indian Ocean--that it’s easy to overlook the island, the fourth largest in the world, when talking about oceanic trade and exploration. But there is a lot to tell. Jane Hooper talks about Madagascar and its importance to the history of Indian Ocean trade and exploration. Hooper is the author of Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600-1800, recently published by Ohio University Press (2017). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.
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In 1647, the French author Étienne Cleirac asserted in his book Les us, et coustumes de la mer that the credit instruments known as bills of exchange had been invented by Jews. In The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019), Francesca Trivellato draws upon the economic, cultural, intellectual, and business history of the period to trace the origin of this myth and what its usage in early modern Europe reveals about contemporary views of both commerce and Judaism. Trivellato begins by explaining the development of bills of exchange in the Middle Ages as a means of transferring funds across long distances, ones which helped the expansion of international trade. Though used by both Christians and Jews, concerns about crypto-Judaism among converted Christians in the town of Bordeaux where Cleirac lived may have been key to his belief in their association with the bills. From Cheirac’s book the myth then spread throughout much of western and central Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, where it was used both to support anti-Semitic views and as examples by philo-Semitic writers such as Montesquieu of the superior commercial ability of Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war. The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing the illusion of "short-war thinking," the hope that victory might be swift and conflict brief. Such as almost never been the case. Even one-sided battles have mainly contributed to victory or defeat by accelerating erosion of the other side's defenses, resources, and will. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For hundreds of years, people living on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea enslaved one another. Moslems from North Africa captured Italians, French, and Spaniards; and North African Moslems were in turn enslaved by those nations. As prisoners, their ransom and redemption became a form of commerce, which in a curious way created communication networks that brought together these different peoples. Captivity integrated the Mediterranean. That is in part the argument of today’s guest on Historically Thinking, Daniel Hershenzon, an Assistant Professor in the Literature, Cultures, and Languages Department at the University of Connecticut. His new book is The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). It’s a book that is the best possible kind of historical revisionism, challenging us to revise the way that we think about an “accepted past.” Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.
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Demetra Kasimis’s new book, The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the role and unstable place of the metics (metoikoi) in Athenian society. The book focuses on three different presentations and discussions of the metics, in Euripides’ Ion, in Plato’s Republic, and in Demosthenes’ Against Euboulides. The metic, as Kasimis explores, is a classification of individuals within Athenian democracy for those who do not have Athenian blood—they are neither insiders nor outsiders. This whole class of people, who were free and enjoyed certain rights within the society, were, nonetheless, in a kind of liminal space, on the border between citizenship and those excluded from citizenship, like slaves, children, and others. The Perpetual Immigrant, which is the kind of position that metics found themselves in, since neither they nor their offspring could become citizens, exposes the “fraught and shifting meaning of the democratic citizen itself.” Kasimis deep research and theorizing about the metics, as discussed in these three classical texts, is not limited to ancient Athens, and the questions she considers are as important to pose to contemporary democracies as they were to Athenian democracy. Her work here, in this Cambridge University Press series, "Classics After Antiquity," is vital in a number of ways, since the arguments are not only about the substance of the text, but also about how and why we read texts. Thus, we learn a great deal from The Perpetual Immigrant in terms of the substance of classical texts, and our understanding who is or is not a citizen within a democracy, and how that contributes to the way that the democracy understands itself and those who live within it. We are also to consider, as readers and scholars, the way in which we read and why we read certain texts, what we hope to learn from them, and what makes them important to consider. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj
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As we’ve previously discussed, there are a lot of books about democracy filling book store and library shelves right now. Norman Eisen could have written a book in the vein of Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky’s How Democracies Die or David Frum’s Trumpocracy, but chose to go in a different direction. In The Last Palace: Europe's Turbulent Century in Five Lives and One Legendary House (Crown, 2018), he tells the story of the Petschek Palace, where he lived while serving as U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The palace and its residents sought to defend liberal democracy throughout both world wars and the Cold War. The book, which one review calls a “love letter to liberal democracy,” also shows the ways in which ambassadors do the hard work of democracy abroad. Eisen describes the cycles of democracy that occurred as public support waxed and waned over the years. He says that we are now an inflection point that will determine support for liberal democracy moving forward. Ever the optimist, he’s confident that democracy will come through this seemingly dark period to triumph once again. Eisen is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings and chair of Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. Prior to becoming ambassador, he advised the Obama administration on ethics — a job that earned him the unofficial title “ethics czar.” Democracy Works is created by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and recorded at WPSU Penn State, central Pennsylvania’s NPR station.
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote the attention that the organization’s history merits. Timothy A. Sayle, an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Toronto, attempts to correct this. His fascinating new book, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Cornell University Press, 2019), examines the history of NATO from its founding in the late 1940s through to its expansion in the post-Cold War era. Sayle shows how NATO wasn’t just any organization; it was, he writes, “an instrument of great-power politics and the basis for a Pax Atlantica.” Taking his readers deep into the decision-making of NATO and its member states from the 1940s to the 1990s, Sayle provides a new, innovative international history of the second half of the twentieth century. Enduring Alliance should interest historians and scholars from across subfields—military history, U.S. foreign policy history, Cold War history, and global governance studies. Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.
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It was the passionate amateur painter, Winston Churchill, who introduced one of the Cold War’s key metaphors: The Iron Curtain. As John J. Curley argues in Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishers, 2019), this provocative image defined the binary logic of the Cold War and speaks to the larger importance of visuals in both the deployment of contemporary propaganda and in political resistance. A meticulously-researched and accessible monograph, Global Art and the Cold War demonstrates the crucial role of art in the greatest geopolitical conflict of the 20th century. Presenting a nuanced investigation of how the Cold War shaped major art movements including Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Conceptualism in the West and Socialism realism in the Eastern Bloc, Curley also challenging the traditional history of American Abstract painting in opposition to Soviet Socialist Realism by integrating other regions including Asia, Africa, and Latin America in to the study. Art from the “Cold War peripheries”, writes Curley in his introduction, reveals that the dominant narrative of modernism was a Western construction, simultaneously expressing transnational modernity and nationalism to counter American and Soviet imperialism. Positioning all 20th century art as engaged in an inevitable conflict between two opposed models for modernity, Curley makes a compelling case for broadening the narrative of artistic creation in the period of the Cold War and its aftermath. John J. Curley is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University, where he teaches classes on modern and contemporary art history, as well as photographic history. Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch.
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Beginning in the mid-1850s, a number of people in Europe and the United States undertook a range of efforts in response to the horrors of war. In his book War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury, 2018) James Crossland describes the emergence of various movements in the second half of the 19th century designed to address the suffering caused by military conflict. Though such suffering has been a part of warfare since time immemorial, as Crossland explains the emergence of the popular press in the early 19th century brought awareness of the battlefield experience to a greater part of the population. In response, several motivated volunteers embarked upon a variety of activities to address the effects of war, from providing better treatment for wounded soldiers to spearheading efforts to establish mutually-agreed-upon limits on the conduct of warfare. Within a decade, organizations such as the United States Sanitary Commission and the Red Cross emerged to coordinate and regularize these efforts, often with official support from warring governments. Yet these attempts to moderate misery were opposed by another product of the reaction to the warfare of the era – the peacemakers who wanted to end war altogether and who viewed the efforts to regulate it as an enabling of inter-state conflict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Stretching across the north of England, from coast to coast, are the 73-mile long remnants of a fortification built by the Roman Army during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. It is, as our guest Adrian Goldsworthy has written, “the largest of the many monuments left by the Roman Empire and one of the most famous.” For centuries the purpose of Hadrian’s Wall, and the life of those who built it and lived near it, were shrouded in archaeological mystery. In Adrian Goldsworthy’s new book Hadrian's Wall (Basic Books, 2018) illuminates the subject by synthesizing the latest research, and bringing to bear his powerful historical imagination on the subject. And, speaking of historical imagination, in the United States he has simultaneously published a novel set along the border of Roman Britain—the second of a series—with his study of the wall itself. Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.
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In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. Professor Black, offers a comprehensive survey of both wars, comparing continuities and differences. He traces the causes of each war and assesses land, sea, and air warfare as separate dimension in each period. A must read for anyone interested in this time period of military and indeed global history. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military commander and strategist. That Hitler saw World War II as the only way to retrieve Germany’s fortunes and build an expansionist Thousand-Year Reich is uncontroversial. But while his generals did sometimes object to Hitler’s tactics and operational direction, they often made the same errors in judgment and were in agreement regarding larger strategic and political goals. A necessary volume for understanding the influence of World War I on Hitler’s thinking, this work is also an eye-opening reappraisal of major events like the invasion of Russia and the battle for Normandy. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.
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In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World(University of California Press, 2019), is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the 16th century to its collapse in the 19th. Kris Lane, France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University, provides an invigorating narrative and rare details of this thriving city as well as its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
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All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Harold J. Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War out this year with University of Chicago Press (2018). Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.
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Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her newest book, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Houri Berberian uses a transnational or transimperial approach to examine the interconnectedness of 1905 Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution and the Young Turk Revolution and the role that Armenian revolutionaries played in each. Dr. Berberian’s unique approach allows readers to see the linkages between these events that are often viewed as separate and encapsulated and see how the Armenians who lived at the epicenter of these events participated. She examines how Armenian revolutionary intellectuals were able to utilize another revolution, the technological revolution, to facilitate the spread of information, revolutionary literature, people and arms between these three empires and the widespread Armenian diaspora using steam ship, telegraphs and increased access to printing technology. She also examines how the revolutionaries indigenized and interpreted the various liberal and socialist ideas they now had greater access to in a way that fit the Armenian context: split between three empires and facing increased persecution and ethnic conflict. Listen in as we discuss the successes and failures of this understudied revolutionary movement and the lives and struggles of individual Armenian revolutionaries navigating the complex realties of living at the confluence of three empires in the throes of collapse and revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Coursing through a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi(Harvard University Press, 2019), Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley. Lee, an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans. Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike. Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
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From its humble beginnings as a crossing point over the river Thames Londinium grew into the largest city in Roman Britain. In Londinium: A Biography (Routledge, 2018), Richard Hingley draws upon the latest archaeological discoveries to provide a look at the growth and development of London over the first centuries of its existence. Though typically thought of as a community established by Roman conquerors, Hingley describes the recently discovered artifacts that point to an Iron Age prehistory of human activity in the area. This may have recommended the location to the Romans, who established a town there which thrived until it was burned to the ground by Boudica’s forces in 60 CE. Its rapid recovery from both this and another destructive conflagration a few decades later demonstrated the importance of the site to the Romans, who by the second century CE made Londinium into the preeminent center for administration and commerce on the island. Hingley shows how recent archaeological evidence has helped us better understand life in the city in the two centuries that followed, as well as how it is changing our understanding of the timeline for its decline and abandonment with the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Secular Enlightenment by Professor Margaret C. Jacob, has been called a major new history on how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives. It’s a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures share places with voices that have remained largely unheard until now, from freethinkers and freemasons to French materialists, anticlerical Catholics, pantheists, pornographers, readers, and travelers. Jacob, one of our most esteemed historians of the Enlightenment, reveals how this newly secular outlook was not a wholesale rejection of Christianity but rather a new mental space in which to encounter the world on its own terms. She takes readers from London and Amsterdam to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Naples, drawing on rare archival materials to show how ideas central to the emergence of secular democracy touched all facets of daily life. Human frailties once attributed to sin were now viewed through the lens of the newly conceived social sciences. People entered churches not to pray but to admire the architecture, and some began to spend their Sunday mornings reading a newspaper or even a risqué book. The secular-minded pursued their own temporal and commercial well-being without concern for the life hereafter, regarding their successes as the rewards for their actions and their failures as the result of blind economic forces. A wonderful work of intellectual and cultural history, The Secular Enlightenment demonstrates how secular values and pursuits took hold of eighteenth-century Europe, spilled into the American colonies, and left their lasting imprint on the Western world for generations to come. Margaret Jacob is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans and The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City
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Audrey Hepburn was justly known for her long acting career, yet her early life is largely unknown. In his book, Robert Matzen describes how she lived during the World War II period in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Based on many interviews and other primary sources, Robert shows how she was affected by the war. Listen in as we talk about his new book Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II (GoodKnight Books, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the late second century BCE, a series of trading route developed between China in the east and Rome’s empire in the west. Craig Benjamin’s Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE-250 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2018) describes the emergence of these routes and the roles the empires of the era played in their development. Benjamin credits the pastoral nomadic tribes of the Xiongnu and the Yuezhi, with playing a key role in catalyzing the Silk Road, as their presence led the Chinese to undertake expeditions westward that brought them into direct contact with the peoples of the region. As both a commodity and a currency silk played an important role in the process of developing these links, and the fabric gradually made its way westward until the Romans in western Asia came into contact with it. Their fascination with silk ensured a continuous flow of commerce and ideas across Eurasia, until the problems faced by the Parthians and Kushan empires disrupted the trade in ways that brought the first Silk Roads era to an end in the 3rd century CE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Eighteenth-century England was a place of both the enlightenment and progress: new ideas abounded in science, politics, transportation, commerce, philosophy, religion, and the arts. But even as England propelled itself into the future, it was preoccupied with notions of its past, both its immediate past and its far distant past. Professor of History Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian (more than one-hundred books written) in the Anglophone world, considers the interaction of history with knowledge and culture in eighteenth-century England and shows how this engagement with the past influenced English historical writing in his new book, Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-Century England (Indiana University Press, 2018). The past was used as a tool to illustrate the contemporary religious, social, and political debates that shaped the advances and changes of the era. Professor Black reveals this type of "present-centered" historical writing to be so valued and influential in the eighteenth-century that its importance is greatly underappreciated in our current considerations of the period. In his customarily magisterial approach, Professor Black takes readers from print shops to church pews, courtrooms to painter's studios to show how historical writing influenced 18th century England, which in turn gave birth to the modern world which we now live. Charles Coutinho has a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written recently for the Journal of Intelligence History and Chatham House’s International Affairs. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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In one of history’s largest migrations, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians immigrated to North American during the 1800s and early 1900s. In addition to letters sent home, Norwegian-Americans often included photographs showcasing their new American lives. In her book, Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Dr. Sigrid Lien keenly evaluates the photographs Norwegian immigrants sent home—including one of her own grandfather. Throughout the book, Lien delves into the lives of everyday people seeking a new and prosperous life in America. Using talented writing and skillful research Sigrid Lien brings the past to life without overlooking the important historical context in which the Norwegian-American migration took place. A new edition translated by Barbara Sjoholm, Pictures of Longing is an endlessly fascinating account of real people who, through photographs, sought to share their experience during a time of hope and change. Sigrid Lien is professor of art history and photography studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a leading authority on Norwegian photography. She has published extensively on modern and contemporary visual culture and is the author of the first extensive history of photography in Norway. Colin Mustful has an M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com.
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In his new book, Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance (Yale University Press, 2018), Christian Goeschel, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester, examines the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini and how their relationship developed and affected both countries. In this highly readable book, Goeschel, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler’s key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi relationship that still resonates with the general public. The first comprehensive study of the Mussolini-Hitler relationship, this book is a must-read for scholars and anyone interested in the history of European fascism, World War II, or political leadership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why did creative writers in early modern England write so forcefully about the relationship between aesthetics and morality? How did they imagine creative work to reflect religious categories and moral expectations? In his new book, Sinister Aesthetics: The Appeal of Evil in Early Modern Literature (Palgrave, 2017), Joel Elliot Slotkin, a professor of English at Towson University, explores how Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton considered the appeal of evil, and why their writing moralized about aesthetics only to create characters or contexts in which that moral purpose seemed to be undermined. In this ground-breaking study, Slotkin explains how these writers created a “sinister aesthetics,” in which to test their readers, and to persuade their readers that the fall of humanity into sin had aesthetic as well as moral and noetic consequences. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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That the Roman leader Gaius Julius Caesar is so well remembered today for his achievements as a general is largely due to his skills as a writer. In The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (Pantheon, 2017), the distinguished classics scholar Kurt Raaflaub provides readers with a new translation of the collection of writings known as the Corpus Caesarianum, which he supplements with footnotes, maps, and images designed to make Caesar’s writings accessible for the modern-day reader. Raaflaub situates the books within the context of Caesar’s life, explaining how the first and most famous of them, the Gallic War, was a political tool designed to bolster Caesar’s stature back in Rome. In the aftermath of the civil wars that followed his crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE, Caesar wrote his follow-up Civil War, which was largely complete when he was assassinated five years later. Though Caesar died before writing the later works attributed to his authorship, Raaflaub presents them as extensions of Caesar’s labors, with the Alexandrian War written from his notes and early materials he drafted, and the African War and the Spanish War authored by men who served in both campaigns and who were firsthand witnesses to them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From the cassoulet that won a war to the crêpe that doomed Napoleon, from the rebellions sparked by bread and salt to the new cuisines forged by empire, the history of France is intimately entwined with its gastronomic pursuits. A witty exploration of the facts and legends surrounding some of the most popular French foods and wines by a French cheesemonger and an American academic, A Bite-Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment(The New Press, 2018) tells the compelling and often surprising story of France from the Roman era to modern times. Traversing the cuisines of France’s most famous cities as well as its underexplored regions, this innovative social history explores the impact of war and imperialism, the age-old tension between tradition and innovation, and the enduring use of food to prop up social and political identities. The origins of the most legendary French foods and wines—from Roquefort and cognac to croissants and Calvados, from absinthe and oysters to Camembert and champagne—also reveal the social and political trends that propelled France’s rise upon the world stage. They help explain France’s dark history of war and conquest, as well as its most enlightened cultural achievements and the political and scientific innovations that transformed human history. These gastronomic tales will edify even the most seasoned lovers of food, history, and all things French. Stéphane Henaut grew up in Frankfurt and Nantes, before moving to London and embarking on a wide-ranging career in food, including working in the Harrods fromagerie and cooking for the Lord Mayor of London's banquets. He later returned to Nantes with his family, selling obscure vegetables in a French fruiterie,before joining one of Berlin's finest fromageries. Jeni Mitchell spent most of her adult life in Washington, DC, working as a researcher and editor in foreign affairs, before moving to London to begin graduate school. She met Stephane on her first day in London; four years later, they married. She has a PhD in war studies from King's College London, where she is a teaching fellow specializing in civil war, insurgency and rebellion. Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris.
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In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Seleucid kings ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia to Anatolia, Armenia to the Persian Gulf. In a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, this Graeco-Macedonian imperial power introduced a linear and transcendent conception of time. Under Seleucid rule, time no longer restarted with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years, identical to the system we use today—continuous, irreversible, accumulating—became the de facto measure of historical duration. This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire, changed how people did business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger world. Challenging this order, however, were rebellious subjects who resurrected their pre-Hellenistic pasts and created apocalyptic time frames that predicted the total end of history. The interaction of these complex and competing temporalities led to far-reaching religious, intellectual, and political developments. Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Harvard University Press, 2018) by Paul J. Kosmin, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, opens a new window onto empire, resistance, and the meaning of history in the ancient world. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct faculty member in history at Southern New Hampshire University.
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Guilds were prominent in medieval and early modern Europe, but their economic role has seldom been studied. In The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2019), Sheilagh Ogilvie offers a wide-ranging examination of what guilds did and how they affected pre-modern economies. As Ogilvie explains, guilds were particularized institutions which created and enforced privileges for their members while denying them to outsiders. This authority was granted to them by rulers and governments, and depended on their intricate relationship with the public authorities. Their privileges entitled guilds to determine who could participate in a profession, the quality of the items their members produced, and the technological innovations their members could adopt. Ogilvie looks at all aspects of guild activities to show their wide-ranging impact on the economies of their time, and the ways they pursued their members’ interests even when it stifled growth for the rest of society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Mary Magdalene’s story of conversion from sinner to saint is one of Christianity’s most compelling and controversial stories. The identity of this woman, but more likely women, has been disputed since the early days of the Church, but her role as the first person to witness the resurrection of Christ makes her an astoundingly important figure in ways I was never privy to growing up. The Magdalene’s interpretation changes throughout history, from medieval times to the Reformation, where the interpretation under Martin Luther takes on different meaning, which is the topic conversation today with Dr. Margaret Arnold. Her new book, The Magdalene in the Reformation is out now from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2018). Margaret Arnold is the Associate Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Medford, Massachusetts. She received her PhD in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University. Greg Soden is the host "Classical Ideas," a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here.
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In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.
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Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedented in form and extent, and new socioeconomic structures, including slavery, coinage, and market-exchange. These physical and historical developments were closely linked: building the Republican city was expensive, and meeting such costs had significant implications for urban society. Building Mid-Republican Rome brings both architectural and socioeconomic developments into a single account of urban change. Seth Bernard, an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, assembles a wide array of evidence, from literary sources to coins, epigraphy, and especially archaeological remains, revealing the period's importance for the decline of the Roman state's reliance on obligation and dependency and the rise of slavery and an urban labor market. This narrative is told through an investigation of the evolving institutional frameworks shaping the organization of public construction. A quantitative model of the costs of the Republican city walls reconstructs their economic impact. A new account of building technology in the period allows for a better understanding of the social and demographic profile of the city's builders. Building Mid-Republican Rome thus provides an innovative synthesis of a major Western city's spatial and historical aspects, shedding much-needed light on a seminal period in Rome's development. Ryan Tripp teaches history in California.
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The Indian caste system is an ancient, pervasive institution of social organization within the subcontinent – or is it? Join me as I speak with Dr. Prakash Shah (Reader in Culture and Law at the Queen Mary University of London, UK) about his co-edited work, Western Foundations of the Caste System(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Ranging from ancient Indian history to modern British law, the contributions to this book advance a provocative thesis, namely, that what we refer to as Indian caste is more a function of Western Christian encounters with India than anything historically occurring on Indian soil. Could this be the case? Could the caste system constitute a projection born of Western interpretive bias rather than an ancient Indian indigenous social institution? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Lied is one of the most important genres of nineteenth-century Romantic music, and one of the most intriguing. Balanced between public and private performance, an expression of both poetic and musical meaning, musicologists have tended to study Lieder by analyzing the connections between the music and text. In her new book Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century published by Indiana University Press in 2018, Dr. Jennifer Ronyak studies a set of Lieder with texts she identifies as “intimate lyric poetry” through the lens of performance using methodologies culled from literary studies, philosophy, and musicology. Delving deeply into German Romantic ideas about interiority and the self, Ronyak considers Lieder as an intimate expression of meaning for composer, lyricist, singer, and audience. She contextualizes this act of performance within the salon culture of several important German cities. By centering a philosophical inquiry into the paradox of the Lieder as the outward expression of inwardly facing ideas, Ronyak is able to de-emphasize the most famous Lieder composers of the period and bring in the voices and contributions of marginalized figures including women who functioned in a variety of roles: performers, intellectuals, salon hostesses, and writers. Jennifer Ronyak is currently Senior Scientist in Musicology at the Institute for Musical Aesthetics at the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria (Kunstuniversität Graz). Her work has been published in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, The Journal of Musicology, and the Jahrbuch Musik und Gender; additional research is forthcoming in collections from Boydell & Brewer and Oxford University Press. She has also explored the implications of her research into song for current performing practices as a guest faculty member of the Vancouver International Song Institute and at the Kunstuniversität Graz. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.
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Alexander Langlands is a British archaeologist, historian, writer, and broadcaster. His most recent book, Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, was published by Norton to great acclaim in 2017 and has just been reissued as a paperback. Cræft is an antiquated spelling of “craft” and in the book, Langlands explores what the word meant when it first appeared in English over a thousand years ago. Our modern understanding of the term, Langlands argues, is at some remove from its original meaning. When it first began to appear in the writings of Anglo-Saxons, the term referred to “power or skill in the context of knowledge, ability, and a kind of learning” (17). In Cræft, Langlands combines scholarly research with personal anecdotes as he discusses a range of pursuits which he himself has undertaken, including hay-making, hedgerow planting, dry wall building, and roof thatching. Folklorist Millie Rahn describes Cræft as follows: “This beautifully-written book is basically a cautionary tale about the loss of knowledge, wisdom, power, and skill embedded in tradition, and our ignoring that knowledge at our peril. It's not a treatise; more a paean to the human condition. Not the first to lament our intellectual, spiritual, and physical disconnect with the modern world, or acknowledge the periodic arts and crafts revivals, the writer says we have the power to transform our world and ourselves if we go back to our roots as humans, as ‘makers’. That's where he distinguishes ‘craeft’ from the art and connoisseurship of ‘craft’-- the whole cycle of ‘making’ rooted (all puns intended) in our agricultural processes.” Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.
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Chet Van Duzer, an accomplished historian of cartography, trains his sight in this book on one uniquely important map produced in early modern Europe. The 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus has long been deemed “an essentially unstudiable object,” its legends and descriptions illegible to the unaugmented eye. Now, aided by multispectral imaging technology — and a dogged team of technicians — Van Duzer has rendered Martellus legible and reproduced the map in vivid form, both in the pages of this book and, still more systematically, in an online space that accompanies the text. Van Duzer’s new book Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence (Springer, 2019) is both an example of and an articulate argument for the possibilities of multispectral imaging. In tracing the circuits by which Martellus came to inform subsequent geographic knowledge — as manifest in Martin Behaim’s 1492 globe, in Christopher Columbus’s own wager that the “New World” might become accessible to European eyes, and most profoundly in Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507, which first applied the name “America” in its modern sense — Van Duzer argues for a radically new understanding of this period in cartographic representation. Moreover, in considering Martellus’s own influences, which included inter alia African traditions of mapping the lands south of Egypt, he adds critical complexity to our understanding of how — and for how long — European and non-European geographic practices have been entwined. In its sources, its methodology, and its ultimate revisions to received narratives of cartographic priority, the book has the flavor of an early modern detective tale. It will reward scrutiny by a wide readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History (Oxford University Press, 2019) is a sweeping examination of the key ideas that have infused American society. Moving across borders, time, and within American culture the author gives a well-written and spirited account of why ideas matter. Beginning with how the name “America” came to be in the mind of European empires in the sixteenth century, to the end of the twentieth century when globalization, another form of empire, was on the minds of Americans. Along the way Ratner-Rosenhagen, offers a tour through early European contact with native people, the American Enlightenment, the romance with the new republic, the remaking of the nation through the transcendentalist movement, scientific discoveries, pragmatism and modernism to the intellectual, social and political ruptures of the late twentieth centuries that owe a great deal to what came before. This bird’s eye view captures the significance of attending to ideas that motivated Americans to different forms of action and engagement— A great book for those unfamiliar with the intellectual history of America and for those wanting to connect different streams of that history. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti Associate Professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.
Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her recent book is The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018).
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In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race. Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before the dominance of biological discourses. Race has always been about strategically creating a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. By exploring race in the European middle ages, Heng lays bare the skeleton of racial thinking as a sorting mechanism, a structural relationship for the management of human differences. In Heng's hands, the tools of critical race studies make it possible to name the systems and atrocities of the Middle Ages for what they were, revealing race-making before the modern vocabulary of race coalesced. Bringing together a group of specialized archives that aren't usually in conversation, Heng in many cases allows the medieval past to powerfully testify to the pre-modern history of race-formation, racial administration, and racist exploitation and oppression. Beginning with the violent and sweeping anti-Semitism of thirteenth century England, showing the ways that Jews became the template by which other races were measured, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages launches a careful exposure of the way that minority groups were (and are) manipulated to create the sense of a national majority. A short but potent comparison to the English treatment of Irish subjects drives the analysis home. A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast and as research lead for Unobscured Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him chasing the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States.
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Matthew Bingham, who teaches theology and church history at Oak Hill College, London, has written what must be one of the most startling accounts of religion in mid-seventeenth-century England. His new book, Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2019), argues against several centuries of historical interpretation of the new religious movement that emerged in London in the late 1630s and now numbers around 35 million adherents worldwide. Matt’s argument is that – during the English revolution, at least – there was no such thing as “Baptists,” and that historians who have used that term as a tool to investigate religion within this period unwittingly replicate the assumptions of later denominational polemicists. Orthodox radicals is a bold and compelling argument about the power of labels, and the necessity of our understanding our subjects on their own terms. The churches that became known as Baptists existed for three generations without any denominational label. Matt’s powerful new book shows how little we understand the new religious movements of early modern England when we rush towards classification. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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Daniel Unowsky's book isn't about a genocide or other incident of mass violence. Instead, The Plunder examines a series of riots against Jews in Habsburg Galicia in the year 1898. Unowsky tries to understand how, in an Empire built around the idea of the rule of law, anti-Jewish violence could erupt so quickly and then fade away almost as rapidly. Unowsky examines the riots in detail, exploring their background, the personalities and the background of the perpetrators, and the responses of the victims and the state. His research is careful and thorough and his narrative captivating. In particular, his examination of the trials that followed the violence and the light they shed on the Habsburg state and world view is fascinating. But saying his book isn't about a genocide isn't the same as saying it isn't about genocide. The question he lays out, why 'normal' people commit racialized violence, is at the core of the discipline. Unowsky's book has important implications for the way violence erupted again in the region after World War One. And it adds another case study to the growing body of literature examining the microcauses of mass violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It was a pleasure, earlier today, to speak to Jeremy Black, professor of history at the University of Exeter, about his new book, Britain and Europe: A Short History (Hurst, 2018). Jeremy is one of the best-known and certainly the most prolific of British historians, and his new book demonstrates both his extraordinary range and his compelling arguments. Beginning in the iron age and concluding in the present, Britain and Europe traces relationships between territories and cultures that change and conflict even as they participate in the construction of each other. The current debate about Brexit has shown how important historical arguments can be in public discourse, as well as how frequently these historical arguments can be abused. Grand in scope, and always accessible, Britain and Europe challenges lazy political appropriations of a difficult and rewarding past. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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What does it mean to do a “microhistory” of a concept? Stefanos Geroulanos pursues just such a project in the 22 chapters of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford University Press, 2017). A rich and complex history of France in the decades after 1945, the book is as intellectually packed as it is methodologically adventurous. Organized roughly chronologically from the end of the war to the 1980s, the book follows numerous objects, themes, and paths, coming together as a web of thinkers, metaphors, and values that referred and responded to transparency in distinctive ways in the French context. In France as nowhere else, transparency was a particular type of problem, a notion regarded with deep skepticism, suspicion even, for much of the postwar period. An intellectual history that considers the work of anthropology, political and economic theory, scientific, literary and cinematic texts, Transparency chases the concept well beyond the kinds of philosophical discourses that so often dominate the history of ideas. Divided into five sections, the book begins with the history of the concept of transparency and its uses in the immediate postwar years. It continues with a discussion of state, society, and utopia across a range of sites and figures, from the black market to gangsters, to maladapted adolescents. The third part of the book moves from the 1950s to the early 1960s, exploring norms, structuralism, self and other, face and mask. Part four turns to the question of radicalization and modernity and moves toward May ’68. The final part of the book tracks questions about the agent of history from the late 1960s to the middle of the 1980s. A wild and formidable book that overwhelms in a good way, Transparency is a challenging and impressive project. Speaking with Stef was a pleasure and I hope listeners will enjoy our conversation! Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Music lovers and researchers alike have long been fascinated by the story of Ludwig van Beethoven who became profoundly deaf as an adult and could not hear some of his most famous compositions including the Ninth Symphony. Many people have written about Beethoven’s deafness and speculated how he might have been able to compose despite his disability. Robin Wallace, however, is the first musicologist to write about Beethoven’s life and music who has had an intimate experience with deafness. Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery published by University of Chicago Press in 2018 pairs a new consideration of the effects of Beethoven’s deafness on his life and music with a loving memoir of the last years of Wallace’s first marriage after his wife, Barbara, suddenly lost her hearing. Written for a general audience as well as musicologists, in Hearing Beethoven, Wallace applies what he learned from Barbara’s experiences to Beethoven’s life. Wallace focuses on three main areas: Beethoven’s social life, the technology he used to help him hear speaking voices and music, and his compositional method and music. While providing new insights into Beethoven’s biography and compositions, Wallace also undermines some of the most enduring myths about Beethoven. He reminds us that neither Beethoven nor his wife Barbara overcame the challenges presented by their deafness, instead they strove to find “wholeness by learning to live within them.” Robin Wallace is a Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at Baylor University. He has published widely on the critical reception of Beethoven’s music including his first book, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions During the Composer’s Lifetime (University of Cambridge Press, 1986). In addition to his scholarly publications, Wallace is the author of an introductory music textbook from Oxford University Press titled Take Note: An Introduction to Music through Active Listening. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.
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It was a delight to catch up with Kevin Ingram, professor of history at Saint Louis University, Madrid, to discuss his very impressive new book. Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain: Bad Blood and Faith from Alonso de Cartagena to Diego Velázquez (Palgrave, 2018) sets out to account for the experience of those Spanish Jews, perhaps one-third of the total Spanish Jewish population, who converted to Catholicism after the Reconquista. Professor Ingram’s work shows how these converts struggled to assimilate into mainstream Spanish society, and how laws were passed to ensure that only those who could demonstrate “pure blood” could enter the highest echelons of Spanish life. But conversos found other ways to participate in community, identifying with the cause of virtue that was popularised in Renaissance humanism, developing new mystical strains of religious practice, and participating in the many competing agendas for religious reform. Conversos exercised a much greater influence on the Spanish golden age than a great deal of historical writing has noticed. An outstanding study of its subject, Converso Non-Conformism in Early Modern Spain looks to be advancing an agenda-setting argument. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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In Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke University Press, 2018), Zeb Tortorici analyzes a vast corpus of documents in order to understand how sex acts that were considered out of the norm were understood for over three centuries of Spanish control. Men and women often engaged in ‘unnatural’ sexual acts that not only revealed the relations of power in colonial society, but also the close interaction that archivists and historians have had with their stories. Sodomy, bestiality, priests soliciting during confession, as well as masturbation induced by erotic fantasies with saints and other religious characters, all disclose the role that religious and ecclesiastical institutions, archives, and historical analysis have had in erasing subjects, misclassifying them, or openly discounting their importance. Tortorici’s analysis proves that in order to reconstruct the past it is central to understand how documents were kept and categorized. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department-NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who gets in to top professions? In The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged (Policy Press, 2019), Drs Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explore the dominance of social elites in top professions. The book draws on theories of social mobility and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explain how top professions are highly exclusive, with under representations of women, ethnic minorities, and those from working class backgrounds. Moreover, even when individuals from these demographics do enter top jobs such as law, medicine, and accountancy, along with media occupations and acting, they suffer gaps in pay because of their class, race, and gender. The intersection of these demographics is crucial to the analysis, and the book uses detailed qualitative research to explain this 'class ceiling', showing how economic, cultural, and social capital play out to account for how inequality is replicated in the workplace and beyond. The book is essential reading for everyone interested in contemporary social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book The Stalinist Era(Cambridge University Press, 2018), David L. Hoffmann focuses on the myriad ways in which Stalinist practices had their origins in World War I (1914-1918) and Russian Civil War era (1918-1920). These periods saw mass mobilizations of the population take place not just in Russia and the early Bolshevik state, but in many other nations, too. In order to place Stalinism in this more comparative context, Hoffmann draws on a variety of primary archival sources. The Stalinist Era also provides a broad synthesis of recent work on Stalinism, and so interested readers will be able to follow his bibliography to much of the key historical work on the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. Following its treatment of the Russian Civil War, The Stalinist Era takes readers through the NEP (New Economic Policy) period, the “building socialism” era of crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, the Purges of the late 1930’s, the Second World War, and the final postwar Stalin years. Finally, Hoffmann suggests, there are important ways in which Stalinism did not die with Stalin himself. The Stalinist Era combines an effective synthesis of the entire Stalin period, while at the same time, putting forth a specific and engaging argument that Stalinism mirrors many broader trends in modern nations. Historical writing should encourage comparative thinking, and Hoffmann’s book does exactly that. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism.
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Jodi Campbell is Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She has written extensively on Spanish drama, royal history and women’s history. Her first book was published by Ashgate in 2006 and is titled Monarchy, Political Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation. She also co-edited Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2012). Dr. Campbell’s new book, At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) focuses on food as a mechanism for the performance of social identity in early modern Spain. According to Dr. Campbell, early modern Spaniards adhered to strict regulations about food consumption based on their place in the social hierarchy as well as defined categories of gender, age, occupation and religion. The particular foods one ate as well as how they ate them were part of a display of identity and collective belonging. This enticingly-written book fills a need in food scholarship to understand Spanish customs in the broader context of early modern European food culture. Spain followed some of the general European trends for adopting New World foods, such as sugar, but its Jewish and Muslim roots inflected Spain with its own particular food heritage. “A phenomenal book… beautifully written and organized, and meticulously researched with a broad range of primary and secondary sources. There is nothing like it in English.”--Ken Albala, professor of history and the director of the Food Studies Program at the University of the Pacific and the author of Food in Early Modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The creation of the postwar welfare state in Great Britain did not represent the logical progression of governmental policy over a period of generations. As George R. Boyer details in The Winding Road to the Welfare State: Economic Insecurity and Social Welfare Policy in Britain (Princeton University Press, 2019), it only emerged after decades of different legislative responses to the problems of poverty that reflected shifting societal attitudes on the subject. As Boyer explains, welfare policy in the early 19th century primarily consisted of cash or in-kind payments provided for people living in their homes. This changed with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which replaced it with the infamous workhouse system. Though this brought down expenditures on the poor, the expectation that poverty was being reduced was belied by a series of reports at the end of the century which exposed the extent of urban poverty to a shocked nation. In response, the Liberal governments of the early 20th century passed a series of laws that established unemployment insurance and pensions for the elderly. While these expanded considerably the role of the state in providing for the poor, Boyer demonstrates that they fell well short of a comprehensive system, one which William Beveridge detailed in a famous 1942 report that served as the blueprint for the legislation passed by the Labour government after the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive rights and disability rights in contemporary European history. In a study that appeared in the George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History, Herzog uncovers much that is unexpected. She analyzes Protestant and Catholic theologians that were pro-choice in the 1960s and 1970s; the ways in which some advocates of liberalized abortion access displayed hostility to the disabled; the current backlash against women’s reproductive rights in Europe fueled in part by activists presenting themselves as anti-eugenics and pro-disability; and the impressive advances in disability rights inspired by submerged, contrapuntal strands within psychoanalysis and Christianity alike. An outstanding contribution to the histories of religion, sexuality, and disability rights, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in post-1945 Europe. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Andrew Lambert, Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, author of eighteen books, and winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal—turns his attention in a book that historian Felipe Fernandez Armesto describes as full of ‘ambition’, ‘verve’ and at times ‘brilliance’ - to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain. In Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (Yale UP, 2018), Professor Lambert, examines how each of these polities identities as “seapowers” informed and determined their individual histories and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size. Lambert by delving into the intricacies of each of these seapowers is able to show how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these states begin to decline. Recognizing that the United States and China are modern naval powers—rather than seapowers—is essential to understanding current affairs, as well as the long-term trends in world history. This volume is a highly original “big think” analysis of five states whose success—and eventual failure—is a subject of enduring interest, by a someone who is perhaps the leading naval scholar in the Anglophone world to-day. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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Elizabeth A. Fraser's Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839 (Penn State University Press, 2017) takes its readers on a journey through six illustrated travel albums covering territories held by the Ottomans in the Mediterranean basin and produced between 1774-1839. By decentring the importance of Europe, Elisabeth Fraser instead highlights the entangled histories and intercultural nature of the Ottoman Empire. Through six intertextual although very distinct travel albums, the book challenges its readers to look very closely at and engage with images in the works of Choiseul, Cassas, Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Melling, Louis Dupré and Delacroix, underscoring multidirectional viewing. In this podcast, we talk about the six travel albums and their imagery, about the markedness of translating ‘foreign’ images and about how viewing is culturally determined; we also discuss the notion of a single master author and the collaborative enterprise of producing travel books, as well as many other fascinating aspects the book covers. Ricarda Brosch is a curatorial trainee at the Asian Art Museum Berlin (Museum fur Asiatische Kunst Berlin – Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), which is due to reopen as part of the Humboldt Forum in 2019. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @RicardaBeatrix.
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What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as "internal emigrants"? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their government and publishers? Volker Berghahn examines the lives and careers of three media giants with his latest book Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany(Princeton University Press, 2019). In it, Berghan's exploration of German journalists' compromises and moral vision for their country illuminates perennial issues around press freedom and the place of media in modern societies. Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. His numerous contributions to the field have covered the social and cultural history of modern Germany and Euro-American relations. He taught in England and Germany before coming to Brown University in 1988 and going on to Columbia ten years later. A selected list of Berghahn's books includes America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (2001), Imperial Germany (1995), The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945-1973 (1986), Modern Germany (1982), The Tirpitz Plan (1971), Europe in the Era of Two World Wars (2006), and Industrial Society and Cultural Transfer (2010). Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.
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Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his compatriots back home. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle insisted he and his Free French movement were the true embodiment of France. Through sheer force of his personality and the grandeur of his vision of France, he inspired French men and women to risk their lives to resist the Nazi occupation. Usually proud and aloof, but almost always confident in his own leadership, he quarreled violently with Churchill, Roosevelt and many of his own countrymen. Yet they knew they would need his help to rebuild a shattered France. Thanks to de Gaulle, France was recognized as one of the victorious Allies when Germany was finally defeated. Then, as President of the Fifth Republic, he brought France back from the brink of a civil war over the war in Algeria. And, made the difficult decision to end the self-same war. Thereafter he challenged American hegemony, took France out of NATO, and twice vetoed British entry into the European Community in his pursuit of what he called “a certain idea of France.” Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary College, University of London, past winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the winner in 2018 of the Paris Book Award for his book on De Gaulle--De Gaulle (Harvard University Press, 2018)--has written a magnificent biography, the first major reconsideration in over twenty years. Drawing on the extensive resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archives, Jackson reveals the conservative roots of de Gaulle’s intellectual formation and upbringing, sheds new light on his relationship with Churchill, and shows how de Gaulle confronted riots at home and violent independence movements abroad from the Middle East to Vietnam. No previous biography has so vividly depicted this towering figure whose legacy remains evident in present-day France. In short Professor Jackson has written a superb book, which in every way possible is a glittering ornament in the biographical art. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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John Witte, Jr.'s The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an extensively researched book showcasing the author's deep knowledge and experience in the field of family and religious law. It traces the legal origins of European monogamy from the classical period to the present. Originally conceived as a brief for an advisory opinion to a Canadian court, Witte transformed this assignment into a work that not only explores the history of European marital law, but argues that monogamy is positive for society. It considers not just the legal, but also the moral and religious arguments for this institution. He joins us from Atlanta. Jeffrey Bristol is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Boston University and a JD candidate at the University of Michigan Law School.
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By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the preeminent power of the region? In The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars(Harvard University Press, 2018), the Durham University historian and archaeologist Kathryn Lomas reconstructs diplomatic ploys, political stratagems, and cultural exchanges whereby Rome established itself as a dominant player in a region already brimming with competitors. The Latin world, she argues, was not so much subjugated by Rome as unified by it. This new type of society that emerged from Rome’s conquest and unification of Italy would serve as a political model for centuries to come. Archaic Italy was home to a vast range of ethnic communities, each with its own language and customs. Some such as the Etruscans, and later the Samnites, were major rivals of Rome. From the late Iron Age onward, these groups interacted in increasingly dynamic ways within Italy and beyond, expanding trade and influencing religion, dress, architecture, weaponry, and government throughout the region. Rome manipulated preexisting social and political structures in the conquered territories with great care, extending strategic invitations to citizenship and thereby allowing a degree of local independence while also fostering a sense of imperial belonging. In the story of Rome’s rise, Lomas identifies nascent political structures that unified the empire’s diverse populations, and finds the beginnings of Italian peoplehood. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University.
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After years of being overlooked, there has been a growing interest among academic historians in the history of Turkish Guest Workers in West Germany. In her new book, Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Sarah Thomsen Vierra examines the experience of Turkish immigrants in Berlin. Focused on social history, she synthesized evidence from oral histories, archives, memoirs, and newspapers. Building upon research from a dissertation that won the German Historical Institute’s Fritz Stern Prize, the book analyzes how the first and second generations of Turkish Germans created local spaces where they belonged despite feelings of disillusionment with nationalist xenophobia. It also includes much analysis about the role of women in the guest worker program and its aftermath. Thomsen’s book is essential for anyone interested in the modern history of European migration. Sarah Thomsen Vierra teaches at New England College. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, while in Greece and Macedonia a fragile balance of power repeatedly dissolved into war. Then, from the late third century BCE to the end of the first, Rome’s military and diplomatic might successively dismantled these post-Alexandrian political structures, one by one. During the Hellenistic period (c. 323–30 BCE), small polities struggled to retain the illusion of their identity and independence, in the face of violent antagonism among large states. With time, trade growth resumed and centers of intellectual and artistic achievement sprang up across a vast network, from Italy to Afghanistan and Russia to Ethiopia. But the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close—or so the story goes. In Angelos Chaniotis’s view, however, the Hellenistic world continued to Hadrian’s death in 138 CE. Not only did Hellenistic social structures survive the coming of Rome, Chaniotis shows, but social, economic, and cultural trends that were set in motion between the deaths of Alexander and Cleopatra intensified during this extended period. Age of Conquests provides a compelling narrative of the main events that shaped ancient civilization during five crucial centuries. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Lumbering late Tsarist Russia and international finance? Is there anything there? The Bolsheviks and finance? How can there be anything there? It turns out that the answer to both questions is yes. In Dr. Hassan Malik's meticulously researched new book, Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018), the Tsarist government's relationship to foreign investors, mostly French bondholders, becomes a lens to judge the efficacy of Sergei Witte, Russia's reformist finance minister and, briefly, prime minister, in the early 20th century. The same approach is applied on the eve of World War I where the state of international investment in Russia provides a perspective on the existing debate as to whether Russia was on the road to recovery or revolution when World War I broke out. During the war and in 1917, Western bankers generally seem indifferent to the risks that are emerging from Russia. Indeed, an American bank, the forerunner to Citibank, was opening up branches in Russia in late 1917 as the Bolsheviks were taking power. Soviet Russia's repudiation of its Western debts now seems like an obvious and inevitable outcome, but Malik documents how it came about and the debates among the Bolsheviks as to how to handle Russia's government debt. Beyond students of Russian history, readers interested in how governments can fail, and how risk can appear in a financial system thought stable and safe will find this book of great interest. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com
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Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Michael Cotey Morgan to tell you that you are profoundly wrong. Based upon voluminous archival research in eight countries and in five languages, his book, The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War(Princeton University Press, 2018) provides the reader with the first in-depth account of the historic diplomatic agreement that served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War. The Helsinki Final Act was a watershed of the Cold War. Signed by thirty-five European and North American leaders at a summit in Finland in the summer of 1975, the agreement presented a vision for peace based on common principles and cooperation on both sides of the the Iron Curtain. This gripping book explains the Final Act’s emergence from the parallel crises of the Soviet bloc and the West during the 1960s, the strategies of the major figures, and the conflicting designs for international order that animated the negotiations. The definitive history of the origins and legacy of this important agreement, The Final Act shows how it served as a blueprint for ending the Cold War, and how, when that conflict finally came to a close, the great powers established a new international order based on Helsinki’s enduring principles. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.
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At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from those which dominate the present. This was especially evident during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western countries and Japan employed a mix of coercive and collaborative mechanisms to foist their wares and business priorities on China, dominating the country’s trade and customs. Anne Reinhardt’s new book Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) focuses on these very dynamics and specifically the place of steam shipping as ‘a means of interrogating China’s experience of Euro-American and Japanese colonialism’ (p.2). Reinhardt's book reveals how trade in China’s coastal and inland waters, and the very vessels via which this was conducted, were sites where myriad grander processes crystallized in physical space. From the closer quarters of boardrooms, government departments and cabins below deck, Reinhardt also takes us to higher levels of elevation, revealing the place of steam shipping within global developments in trade, transport and technology during this crucial period. As well as being a captivating read, the book's fresh and nuanced presentation of China's ‘semi-colonial’ experience is vital for better understanding a history which to this day informs relations between China and the world at large. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Irmak Karademir Hazir and her co-authors, explore this important question by looking at newspaper coverage of culture across Europe over the last 50 years. The book has an incredibly rich and detailed dataset of newspaper articles from Spain, UK, France, Turkey, Sweden and Finland, and covers a range of cultural forms. The book grapples with the classic tensions in the study of culture, between aesthetics and commercialisation, hierarchies, and globalisation, along with changes in the format, style, and production conditions for cultural journalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in culture in Europe, and you can find out more about the project and read some of the papers here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Apocalypse and Reform from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2018) is a rich, comparative study, drawing on the scholarship of eleven authors who discuss topics in medieval cultural, intellectual, and ecclesial history. Matthew Gabriele is co-editor of and contributor to this volume; he joins the podcast today to talk about everything from medieval apocalyptic thought—theology and teleology—to zombie movies, to present-day race politics and how history is pressed into the service of polemics. Professor Gabriele also talks about how much—and how little—has changed in a thousand years in the way we think about history and human agency. Matthew Gabriele is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He has written The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, and An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages (which won the best first book award from the Southeastern Medieval Association) and edited a half-dozen volumes and many articles on medieval history, especially cultural, intellectual, and imperial, including prophecy and apocalypse. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing in culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar and a Fellow in the Berkeley Connect in History program.
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I had the opportunity to catch up with Harry O. Maier, professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the Vancouver School of Theology, to discuss his new book, New Testament Christianity in the Roman World(Oxford University Press, 2018) which is one of the first titles to appear in Oxford University Press’s new series, Essentials of Biblical Studies. Maier’s study steps away from debates about the formation of early Christian belief to reconstruct the social world in which the new religious movement emerged and began to take shape. Drawing on some recent interventions in cultural geographical theory, he moves in six chapters to consider contexts from Roman cosmology to the individual person. Who were the first followers of Jesus? How did they relate to the social worlds of the empire in which they lived? And how is that experience reflected in the writings that became the New Testament? Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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It has long been assumed that stability was imposed on Germany after World War II; that the United States in particular taught Germans, among other things, how to be “good democrats” and to value cultural pluralism. In his latest book,Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2017), Noah Benezra Strote challenges this idea, arguing that it was Germans themselves who rebuilt the country after 1945. Focusing particularly on the country’s famed post-war consensus, Strote contends that its roots can be traced back to the very issues that divided the country before 1933 and thus helped Hitler into power. As the Nazi period wore on, however, the book shows how previously warring factions began to work together, ironing out the differences that divided them during the Weimar Republic and developing a vision for a post-Nazi Germany. Indeed, as centenary of the Weimar Republic gets under way, Lions and Lambs deftly illustrates how the successes of Germany’s second democracy are directly linked to the failures of its first. Darren O’Byrne is a historian of twentieth-century Germany living in Berlin, Germany. He can be contacted at obyrne.darren@gmail.com or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1.
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Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment. As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit. Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion. As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress. Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.
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McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens, professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive history of the SA, from the early 1920s until Nazi Germany’s total defeat in 1945. Siemens demonstrates how the SA evolved from a small organization to a massive and potent force that directly impacted the Nazi rise to power, and how that organization shaped German society during the Nazi period. He tackles the long-held view that the SA had become largely irreverent after the 1934 purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” and shows how the SA had significant impact in the military, the management of conquered territories and the Holocaust.
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What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eric D. Weitz challenges the belief that the fledgling democracy was doomed to fail. In an encompassing examination of the short-lived republic’s political, economic, intellectual, and cultural life, Eric skillfully weaves vivid stories into a overarching narrative. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and Weimar Germany has much to say that echoes in the here and now.
Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished Professor of History and the former Dean of Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York (CCNY). He has been the recipient of many fellowships and awards including the German Academic Exchange Service, the Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Weitz’s academic work and public engagement covers the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and the genocide of the Herero and Nama.
Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Although bluegrass music is typically associated with the bluegrass state of Kentucky and Appalachia, the genre is actually played in many pockets all around the world. In Czech Bluegrass: Notes from the Heart of Europe (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Lee Bidgood explores the popularity of bluegrass in the Czech Republic. Bidgood is an associate professor of bluegrass, old-time, and country music studies in the Department of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University and an accomplished musician himself. He begins his study with a description of the development of the cultural landscape within this central European nation and explains how a confluence of factors within that landscape – not least a fascination with American pop culture and the appeal of the rural – led to the popularity of bluegrass music within certain circles, and also discusses how the genre was able to survive under Communism. In addition, Bidgood’s investigation includes his exploration of some of the identity issues facing these central Europeans who have chosen to play a music more commonly associated with a foreign and distant land.
In a recent review of the book in the Journal of Folklore Research, Philip Nusbaum noted that Bidgood’s music-world credentials include “fiddling with the Steep Canyon Rangers, a leading group from North Carolina; and touring the Czech Republic and other European countries with European bluegrass bands.” Nusbaum goes on to write that in “Czech Bluegrass, Lee combines experience playing bluegrass professionally with his ethnographic abilities and detail-oriented library research. The outcome is a model of reportage on a contemporary musical idiom, bluegrass music in the Czech Republic”.
In Czech Bluegrass, Lee combines experience playing bluegrass professionally with his ethnographic abilities and detail-oriented library research. The outcome is a model of reportage on a contemporary musical idiom, bluegrass music in the Czech Republic.
Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society (Indiana University Press, 2018), edited by Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich and Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at the American University in Washington DC, has assembled a number of scholars to give a comprehensive account of German Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st century. This volume will be the essential text on the topic for many years to come.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Despite enduring for nearly five centuries, the Roman Republic ended in a series of crises and wars that discredited the idea of republics in the West for centuries. In Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (Basic Books, 2018), Edward J. Watts examines why Romans traded the liberty of political autonomy for the security of autocracy. As he explains, for all of its longevity the Roman Republic contained a number of inherent weaknesses. These emerged as Rome found itself in a series of wars in the 3rd century BC, which posed an unprecedented strain on republican institutions. In response, a new group of political outsiders emerged in response to the increasing demands of military service and the growing problem of economic inequality. Longstanding political norms eroded in the face of these challenges, with the men who did so rewarded rather than punished for their actions. Though successive leaders endeavored to maintain the Republic in some form, the longevity of both Octavian’s rule as emperor as well as that of his successor Tiberius ensured that when Octavian’s arrangements were first tested the Republic was by then gone from the living memory of most Romans, who appreciated the stability Octavian had brought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How was Jewish life affected by the First World War? How did Jews around the world understand, engage with, and influence the Great War and surrounding events? And why has the impact of World War I so often overlooked Jewish historical narratives? In this fascinating and important new edited volume, World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (Berghahn Books, 2017), Marsha L. Rozenblit, the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, and Jonathan Karp, Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Binghamton University, have assembled a diverse collection of impressive studies by junior and senior scholars that, taken together, answer these crucial questions. The essays in this volume work against past scholarship that has either glossed past the First World War as unimportant to understanding Jewish history, or teleologically characterized it as a precursor to the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust. Examining the conflict from a long chronological perspective and broad, global lens, the authors successfully argue that the Great War and the events surrounding it speak to deeply researched trends in Jewish Studies in new and exciting ways. Thematic threads like belonging, identity, citizenship, and transnational connections weave together case studies examining the Jewish experience in New York, Paris, Salonika, Baghdad, and beyond. This very welcome addition to Jewish historiography, and literature on the global experience of the First World War more generally, is not to be missed.
Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Exactly five centuries after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, Christians continue to debate the best approach to the reading of their sacred book. The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor University Press, 2017) the latest book by Iain Provan, who is the Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College, Vancouver, advises readers on how to balance the competing claims of tradition and modernity. Provan’s work proposes a “seriously literal” reading of Scripture. But what does that mean, and how can it be defended?
Provan is leading a study tour called “Walking Where Luther Walked” from 29 April to 8 May, 2019. For more information, click here.
Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Marriage Plot, Or, How Jews Fell In Love With Love, And With Literature (Stanford University Press, 2016), Naomi Seidman, Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts at the University of Toronto, considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage through the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education. She highlights a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. The Marriage Plot is a brilliant and provocative work which will be referenced for many years to come.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient attention. With Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Shannon Fogg, Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Missouri S&T, fills this void. Drawing from government archives, Jewish associational files, as well as victim accounts and testimonies, Fogg pulls the reader into complex and dynamic history of destruction, dispossession and recovery. She reveals the great extent to which French authorities and civilians participated in looting and spoliation. Moreover, Fogg works against the commonly accepted narrative that Jews were passive victims to destruction who silently returned to the remaining tatters of their prewar lives, arguing that survivors were active participants in the restitution process who engaged French and international Jewish organizations to assist with rebuilding. Engaging, skillfully researched, and deftly written, Fogg’s new book will make a valuable addition to both undergraduate syllabi and the bookshelves of seasoned historians of the Second World War and France.
Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Following a 2011 meeting of the annual Mediterranean Workshop at the University of Minnesota, Patricia Lorcin (a co-convener) approached Todd Shepard (one of the workshop participants that year) about editing a volume focused on the Mediterranean in the modern period. From the beginning, these two editors of French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) envisioned a collection that would bring together authors whose work pushes against the boundaries of French and European history (from outside of and within these regional fields). Analyzing the history of the Mediterranean as geographic, social, cultural, political, intellectual, and discursive space from the nineteenth century to the era of decolonization, the book offers a critical history of the region understood in its transnational and imperial complexity.
The volume is organized in three parts. Focused on maps and mapping, the first includes essays by Ali Yaycioglu, Ian Coller, Andrew Arsan, and Spencer Segalla. Examining frameworks of migration, the next section features essays by Edhem Eldem, Marc Aymes, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Mary Dewhurst Lewis. In the third part of the collection, authors Sarah Stein, Susan Miller, Ellen Amster, and Emma Kuby interrogate the margins of Mediterranean religious identity, medicine, and the legacies of the Holocaust. Through the analysis of a range of historical actors, events, and the mobilization of different methods and sources, the essays all think carefully through how forms of difference have shaped and divided the region over centuries: nations and borders, language, ethnicity, race, religion, class, and gender. Diverse in their objects of study and approaches, the essays in the volume share a preoccupation with the study of French Mediterraneans plural in their imaginations, populations, and politics throughout the era of modern imperialism.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we spoke with with Dirk H. Ehnts to talk about his new book Modern Monetary Theory and European Macroeconomics (Routledge, 2017). This is a very accessible text for those interested in discovering how monetary policy works and those interested in approaching the debate on the challenges of the Euro area. We talked about the notions of endogenous and exogenous money and how central banks and commercial banks contribute to the creation of monetary aggregates. We discussed the difficulties of the European common currency project and its future of reform or dissolution. The book introduces the reader to the many relationships between money and other economic variables. In our conversation we also discussed how contemporary politics might affect the reform of the Euro area institutions. This is a very interesting and timely book. It was published in 2016 and there might be soon need for a newer edition in both cases of success or failure of the Euro.
Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of economics at Sapienza University of Rome, and is editor of the open access economics journals PSLQuarterly Review and ‘Moneta e Credito’. His recent publications include the ‘Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Classical Political Economy Today’ (Anthem, 2018), both as co-editor.
Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Michael G. Hanchard’s new book The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracies (Princeton University Press, 2018) is a rich and complex examination of the question of discrimination in general, and racial discrimination specifically, within the study of comparative politics as a discipline, but more broadly how this particular issue, discrimination—of a variety of kinds—has generally shaped the structures and institutions of western democracies. This book brings together a number of threads that are not often considered together, specifically the question of the theoretical underpinnings of slavery, racial and ethnonational subordination, and the question of democracy in comparative analysis. A key component of the book is to analyze the question of slavery—which comes to the west through the classical experience in Athens—examining what slavery looked like, how it operated, and why it was implemented as it was in Athens. The defining characteristics that Hanchard unpacks in the classical analysis, in regard to those who are considered full members of a polity, or citizens, and those who exist in the society but are not integrated as citizens of the polity, frames the ongoing exploration of comparative politics and, especially, more modern democracies. Hanchard’s book is animated by these fundamental tensions, especially in regard to the way that the egalitarian ideals of democracy are complicated by the problematic dominance of ethno-national groups, religions, or races that have laid claim to the right to rule. Hanchard’s book also explains why race is vitally important to understanding comparative politics. This is an engaging and important study, and will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, racial politics, identity politics, American politics, political theory, and political & comparative history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book Soviet Influences on Postwar Yugoslav Gender Policies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Ivan Simic explores how Yugoslav communists learned, adapted, and applied Soviet gender policies in their efforts to build their own egalitarian society after World War II. Attending to the gap between ideas and practices, he discusses how the deeply entrenched patriarchal norms within Yugoslav society created numerous obstacles when it came to changing gender norms and policies. Tracing how considerations of gender affected wide-ranging arenas from labour policies, to the collectivization of agriculture, to policies concerning youth sexuality, to the law banning the veil for Muslim women, Simic demonstrates how Soviet models continued to inform Yugoslav policies long after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948.
Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successful—at least to the extent that France became one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar documents, this transformation was not without considerable resistance: plenty of farmers were unable or unwilling to change, and the transformation of the French countryside generated intense debates about the nature of quality in food and agriculture, and its relationship to the people and land of France.
Venus Bivar is Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, where she pursues research and teaching in three broad fields: European, economic, and environmental history. Her interests include the history of capitalism, agriculture and international trade, and the human history of climate change. Following her book Organic Resistance, she is currently developing two new projects. The first studies the emergence of economic growth as both an economic category of analysis and a political objective, while the second examines the social consequences of port development and urban planning in Marseille.
David Fouser is an adjunct faculty member at Santa Monica College, Chapman University, and American Jewish University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of California, Irvine, and studies the cultural and environmental history of wheat, flour, and bread in Britain and the British Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on the shelves of anyone working on the history of anatomy, early modern medicine, and/or the history of the book. This volume pays special attention to the Fabrica as material object, tracing how owners used and reacted to it by carefully tracing 475 years of its reading history through annotations, hand-coloring, binding, circulation, and other evidence left from the global movement of copies of the 1543 and 1555 editions. Dániel Margócsy and I talked about the process by which he and his co-authors (Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe) accomplished this massive task, and what the resulting volume can help us understand about the reception history of the Fabrica and its larger consequences for how we work with books as objects.
Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen.
That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post. But it reflects a real gap in the literature about the Holocaust, one that Sara J. Brenneis identifies and fills in her new book Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015 (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Brenneis is interested in the ways Spanish prisoners (most of whom had fled Spain the aftermath of the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War) experienced the camp. She writes movingly about the efforts of the Spaniards to use their position as privileged prisoners to preserve records of their experience, records that give us great insight into their lives.
But she’s especially concerned with the way this experience was remembered. As she points out, that memory reflected the distinctive political and historical context of Spain. Some accounts by survivors and researchers did appear, particularly in the period immediately after Franco’s death. But Franco and his legacy ensured that public accounts would be both rare and circumspect. Only recently has there been a resurgence of interest in Spain, one that brings with it both historical and methodological experimentation and investigation.
It’s a fascinating book, one that sheds new light on an experience most scholars have passed over.
Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The failure of democracy during the Weimar Republic is currently at the center of public discussion due to the global populist wave of the last few years. In his new book, Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Larry Eugene Jones examines how the republic’s final presidential election contributed to its dissolution. He synthesizes evidence from a vast number of German archives as well as a career spent as an internationally recognized specialist of Weimar political history. Assessing both Hitler, Hindenburg, and other prominent figures from the era, such as Heinrich Brüning and Alfred Hugenberg, Jones illustrates the fragmentation of the non-Nazi right wing and the triumph of personal charisma over issue-based politics in 1930s Germany. Jones’s new book is essential for anyone interested in Germany’s transformation from democracy to dictatorship. Larry Jones recently retired as Professor of History at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY.
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the Fall of 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Among the many personages associated with the Peloponnesian War, none are as colorful as the Athenian general Alcibiades. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (Harvard University Press, 2018), David Stuttard recounts the dramatic life of this controversial figure. A scion of a wealthy family, Alcibiades was adopted by the statesman Pericles after his father died in battle. Growing up he demonstrated a flair for the dramatic, which in combination with his fortune made him a prominent figure at a young age. Yet Alcibiades desired more, and sabotaged the peace agreement with the Spartans orchestrated by Nicias in an effort to prolong the war so as to gain new opportunities for glory. The Sicilian Expedition presented him with just such an opportunity, though controversial actions attributed to Alcibiades and his friends undermined his standing. Faced with mounting opposition, Alcibiades defected, first to Sparta, then to Persia before being recalled and reinstated as an Athenian general. Though Alcibiades subsequently led the Athenians to victory in battle, he fled his home city again after his defeat at Notium, only to be assassinated at Phrygia in the final year of the war.
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Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York University Press, 2018), edited by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, examines the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World.
As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and natives to learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp something of each other’s legal ideas and conceptions of justice.
This ambitious volume advances our understanding of how natives and settlers in both the British and Iberian New World empires struggled to use the other’s ideas of law and justice as a political, strategic, and moral resource. In so doing, indigenous people and settlers alike changed their own practices of law and dialogue about justice. Europeans and natives appealed to imperfect understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of right. Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’ legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their attempts to employ each other’s law.
Natives and settlers construed and misconstrued each other’s legal commitments while learning about them, never quite sure whether they were on solid ground. Chapters explore the problem of “legal intelligibility”: How and to what extent did settler law and its associated notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically and morally—to natives, and vice versa? To address this question, the volume offers a critical comparison between English and Iberian New World empires. Chapters probe such topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of indigenous peoples. Ultimately, Justice in a New World offers both a deeper understanding of the transformation of notions of justice and law among settlers and indigenous people, and a dual comparative study of what it means for laws and moral codes to be legally intelligible.
Ryan Tripp teaches a variety of History courses at Los Medanos Community College. He also teaches History courses for two universities. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, with a double minor that includes Native American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How do social movements remember the past? How do collective memories affect their current strategic choices? In his book Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and Spanish Student Movements (Palgrave, 2018), Lorenzo Zamponi provides an answer to these questions by analyzing the representations of specific episodes related to the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the recollection of those events by current student activists.
By bridging the disciplines of memory studies and social movement studies, Lorenzo makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how cultural factors shape political action. Collective memories can serve as a way of legitimation and mobilization to social movements, but they can also limit their strategic choices by imposing certain past identities and contentious repertoires.
Researchers from all disciplines interested in the intersect between memory and social movement studies are encouraged to answer to the Call for Papers for a special issue to be published in Mobilization, edited by the author.
Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of California Irvine. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central state had the power to make demands, those demands were most often satisfied in cooperation with local forces, rather than in competition. Local elites benefitted from the contracts to provision fortresses or supply saltpeter, for example, and so did not resist state directives as a matter of course.
This detailed economic history will expand your horizons and your understanding of early modern military history.
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Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, one of the premier historians writing in English on Spanish and European History in the Early Modern period, has now delighted his many ardent readers and admirers by writing a superb book dealing with the comparative histories of Scottish and Catalan nationalism. Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion (Yale University Press, 2018) is by turns both erudite and easily informative. Sir John’s book entrances the reader and provides a way for the lay educated public as well as the academic audience to make sense of these two differing and yet at crucial times similar nationalist movements. Another splendid book by the prize-winning author of The Revolt of the Catalans, Richelieu & Olivares, The Count-Duke Olivares and The Empires of the Atlantic. The podcast was done from Sir John’s quarters at Oriel College at Oxford.
Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The relationship between neoliberals and the state is one that has been endlessly debated. Are neoliberals anti-statist? Or are they advocates of a strong state? The seeming vagueness of neoliberalism has led some to even call for the word’s abolition. However, Quinn Slobodian, in his new book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018) shakes this debate up and reconceptualizes the history of neoliberalism in the process. The neoliberals that he tracks weren’t opposed to the state per se, but rather, to the nation-state. European neoliberals, such as Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek, instead sought to scale up governance beyond the nation-state and establish supranational institutions and laws that would hem in the power of democratic majorities around the world.
Slobodian, an associate professor of European and the world history at Wellesley College, also situates the history of neoliberalism in a forgotten yet critically important global context: decolonization. He also shows how neoliberal thinking shaped how the economy was and continues to be governed. The book will interest historians of ideas, of global politics, and of capitalism, along with anyone wanting a more textured idea of what neoliberalism has looked like historically.
Dexter Fergie is a first-year PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th-century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Joseph Ben Prestel talks with us about Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2017), blending together history of emotions, urban history, global history, and comparative history to produce a monograph on the similar effects urban change had on Cairo and Berlin: ordinary citizens, between 1860 and 1910, negotiated between how the city was changing and how that affected how they saw love, honor, and trust. We talk about what we can gain from urban history, how to talk about gender in histories of emotion, what role modernity has in Middle Eastern studies, and the body in Middle Eastern history. As always, we also check in with the field of Middle Eastern history and talk about what the archives look like and what the next generation of scholars needs to be thinking of as they head into the changing landscape of Middle Eastern archives.
Joseph Ben Prestel is assistant professor of history at the Free University (FU) of Berlin, where he teaches global, European, and Middle Eastern history. He also was a postdoctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut for the 2017-2018 academic year winter term and will be a Fung Global fellow at Princeton University for the 2018-19 academic year. He received his PhD in modern history from FU Berlin in April 2015. Before joining FU’s history department, he held a position as pre-doctoral researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions within Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He is a co-founder and editor of the Global Urban History Blog.
Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The downfall of the Weimar Republic in Germany has long fascinated historians, but this catastrophe gained increasing prominence as a touchstone for contemporary political commentators in recent years. In his new book, The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (Henry Holt, 2018), Benjamin Carter Hett provides a new narrative about end of the first German democratic experiment and the rise of National Socialism. He synthesizes much of the new research on this era from the last twenty years while also subtly pointing out connections between the 1920s and the present political environment. Utilizing captivating anecdotes, a deep understanding for the state of the field, and an immersive grasp of the most important political personalities of the era, Hett’s new book is essential for anyone interested in modern German history.
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the fall of 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the 6th century CE, the Roman emperor Justinian embarked upon a series of wars that seemed to herald the restoration of the Roman empire in the western Mediterranean. In his book Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Heather recounts the campaigns of Justinian’s armies and the factors that made them possible. As Heather explains, the Roman imperial state in the 6th century was one focused mainly upon the waging of war, though for all of the revenue expended upon its armies the eastern Romans had experienced a series of defeats at the hands of their Sassanian Persian rivals to their east. Soon after Justinian took the throne, however, the eastern Roman armies enjoyed a series of successes thanks to the leadership of his most successful commander, Belisarius. While these victories helped define Justinian’s stature as emperor, maintaining them ultimately proved the greater challenge, one that Justinian’s successors were unable to accomplish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Artificial intelligence and Victorian literature: these two notions seem incompatible. AI brings us to the age of information and technology, whereas Victorian literature invites us to the world of lengthy novels, to the world of the written word. In spite of seeming incongruity the AI and Victorian literature evoke, the two notions do establish a contact zone: the mind. AI and characters created by Victorian writers are connected by the individual’s attempt and desire to project their imaginative creations into the space outside the mind. In Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Megan Ward takes into consideration the development of technologies and outlines methods for the analysis of Victorian realist characters that can be presented as constructs that establish connections between the mind and technologies. Ward invites her readers to approach novels as information systems generating multiple meanings, which can be re-organized and re-assembled. Seeming Human challenges the chronological presentation of literature and searches for the ways to further develop textual interpretation, surpassing spatial and temporal limitations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the government: “Who nominated you to tell the people that God does not exist anymore? What do you hope to gain by persuading Man…that his soul is nothing but a puff of wind, blown away at the gates of the tomb?” He then proceeded to lay out his vision for a national moral code rooted in a belief in the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. To introduce this civic religion to the people, Robespierre, with the help of Jacques-Louis David, created the Festival of the Supreme Being which would be celebrated across the whole of France. In his book, Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality (Manchester University Press, 2016), Dr. Jonathan Smyth examines Robespierre’s desire to establish a national morality as the foundation for his utopian Republic of Virtue. Drawing from his extensive research in departmental and local archives, Dr. Smyth offers a fascinating look at the festival from the planning stage to its execution in both Paris and the provinces.
Dr. Jonathan Smyth is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. After retirement from his previous profession in 1998, he was awarded a First-Class Honours B.A. in Humanities from the Open University in 2003, and a Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Pamela Pilbeam at Royal Holloway in 2010. He has presented papers on various political, religious, and cultural aspects of the French Revolution, especially revolutionary festivals, at the George Rudé Conference, Society for the Study of French History conferences, various symposia and colloquia in France, and the Society for French Historical Studies Conference in the United States.
Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Simon Levis Sullam, associate professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, examines how ordinary Italians became willing perpetrators and actively participated in the deportation of Italian Jews between 1943 and 1945. Levis Sullam challenges long held notions that Italians were largely resistant to deportations and protective of their Jewish neighbors. Through detailing the actions of ordinary Italians as they participated in arrests, looting and betrayals he dismantles the myth of italiani brava gente- the “good Italians.” This concise book does much to correct a tremendous blind spot in the history of the Holocaust in Italy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Beginning in the mid-1800s, Paris experienced an unprecedented growth in the development of parks, squares, and gardens. This greenspace was part of Napoleon III’s plan for a new, modern Paris and a France restored to glory on the international stage. Adolphe Alphand, as director of the newly established park service, brought his own democratic and egalitarian vision to urban planning. In Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), Dr. Richard S. Hopkins examines the urban landscape of Paris from the Second Empire through the Third Republic as an expression of France’s revolutionary past in which disparate groups—from planners, reformers, and engineers to neighborhood residents and park visitors—came together to create, define, and negotiate this new public space.
Richard S. Hopkins is an Assistant Professor of History at Widener University. He teaches courses in European, urban, environmental, and gender history. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of modern France, urban space, and the relationship between the individual and state authority. He is co-editor of the book Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, University of Nebraska Press (forthcoming January, 2019).
Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A sharply observed study of the representations of education found in Anglo-Saxon texts, Irina Dumitrescu’s The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge University Press 2018) invites readers to recognize just how often educational encounters crop up throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus. By attending to the ways that violence, deceit, suspicion, sexual desire, concealed identities, and various temptations modulate the relationship between teacher and student, and the ways that shocking and moving stories fix knowledge in the mind and demonstrate relationships—even grammatical relations—in unforgettable ways, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature offers readers interested in the history of pedagogy an exploration of the relationships between Anglo-Saxon students and teachers that tangles with both scholarly and popular expectations of the medieval mind.
Addressing Anglo-Saxon uses of the culture of late antiquity, especially the form of the dialogue, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature reveals scenes heavily invested in the tensions between teacher and student, portrayals of engagement between parties that complicate relations of power and creation of knowledge. In the texts under consideration, the lesson for the reader (or hearer) grows from the conflict, rather than concord, between student and teacher. Focused on spiritual education and literacy, often closely linked in Anglo-Saxon texts, Dr. Dumitrescu’s work considers the Anglo-Saxon interest in negative emotions like fear, curiosity, erotic longing, and mistrust; and the potential cognitive uses of these emotions as they emerge in the faceoffs, desert journeys, revenants, riddles, letter battles, sea voyages, and challenges to memory that provide the narrative substance of Anglo-Saxon writing.
Rereading the standard texts of the Anglo-Saxon corpus, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature demonstrates the ways in which texts like The Life of St. Mary of Egypt speak to broader medieval interests in learning, and drives toward a grasp of Anglo-Saxon beliefs about the purposes of teaching. Chapters on Solomon and Saturn I, Aelfric Bata’s Colloquies, and Andreas follow an approach to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History which suggests that the common focus on Caedmon’s Hymn draws attention away from the John of Beverly miracle: a story at the crossroads between miraculous Latin learning and English poetry in a mode of vernacular liberation.
Treating urges and passions as sparks that give the learning process a necessary heat, even as they threaten to scorch it beyond utility, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature sketches a subtle and sophisticated approach to human emotion and cognition in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England.
A researcher, writer, editor, and educator, Carl Nellis digs in archives and academic libraries for the critically-acclaimed Lore Podcast. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic left him with a taste for the tangled colonial history that threads the culture of the Middle Ages into today’s United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the making of Europe through the stories and perspectives of the young people who moved across the continent’s borders. A history of European integration from the end of the Second World War to the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, the book emphasizes the roles that young people played in postwar recovery and reconciliation efforts, their participation in Europeanization, the upheavals of 1968, and the ways that young people’s movements were circumscribed by the Cold War and transformed by its end.
Backpack Ambassadors examines the emergence of a “community of practice” defined by young people themselves, a community complicated by gender, class, race, and other differences. While youth are the key agents in this history, the book also considers the policies, programs, and regulations of the states that sought to encourage and manage the movement of young travelers across Europe in various ways. Transnational in subject and method, the chapters of the book draw on multiple archives and sources from several countries, including interviews with former backpackers and the experiences of the author himself. Absorbing in its myriad stories and compelling in its analysis, Backpack Ambassadors is a must-read for anyone interested in research and writing that connects culture and politics while pushing past the limits of national history. Highly readable and human in its approach, the book is also a fantastic resource for those teaching European integration at the undergraduate or graduate levels.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Werner Scholem: A German Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Mirjam Zadoff, Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, presents a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. This biography suggests that the ‘non-Jewish’ Communist Jew was not as irreconcilably opposed to the ‘Jewish’ Jew as has previously been thought. It is an extraordinary work that will be referenced for many years to come.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority and contemporary thinking—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. This unique book by dynamic father-son duo Steve and Ben Nadler is titled Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy. It follows the lives and writings of contentious and controversial philosophers from Galileo and Descartes to Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton. Crisscrossing Europe as it follows them in their travels and exiles, the narrative describes their meetings and clashes with each other, their confrontations with religious and royal authority, and recounts key moments in the history of modern philosophy.
Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of philosophy and the Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in 17th century philosophy. His books include Spinoza: A Life, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award, and Rembrandt’s Jews which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His son Ben Nadler is an illustrator and a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. See more of his work here.
Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton University Press, 2018), Konrad Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the lives of ordinary Germans throughout the 20th century. Drawing on six dozen memoirs of Germans born in the 1920s he demonstrates how these individuals experienced, Third Reich, the Holocaust, the Cold War and finally reunification. Ultimately, Jarausch argues that this generation’s focus on its suffering led them to a more critical understanding of their national identity, which resulted in Germany becoming the model for European democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria established itself as one of the dominant powers of Europe, despite possessing much more limited fiscal resources when compared to its counterparts. In The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State, 1650-1820 (Oxford University Press, 2018), William D. Godsey uses the financial support provided by one region of the Habsburg’s empire to understand how it maintained its status during a time of change in the nature of military power. As Godsey explains, the challenge was posed by the contrasting trends of a need for a larger standing army and the ability of the region’s economy to support it. In response to the demands placed on it, the Estates of the region – the assemblage of clerical, noble, and municipal leaders who implemented taxes for the monarchy – evolved to play a regular role in supplying the Habsburg armies with the resources it needed to operate. This evolution preserved the importance of the role the Estates played in the exercise of Habsburg power, one that was challenged occasionally by such events as the centralizing reforms of Emperor Joseph II but nonetheless persevered well into the 19th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2018), Alexander Bevilacqua uncovers a different side of the European Enlightenment, at least with regards to its engagement with Arabic and Islam. Instead of polemics, he tells the story of how books and ideas moved across continents and were studied in Europe, where they were considered a serious object of engagement. He first tracks the movement of books to Europe, then the translation of Arabic’s most famous book—the Qur’an—culminating in the study of Arabic-language materials, which he refers to as the Republic of Arabic Letters. He draws on sources in multiple languages to paint a picture of a vibrant long-distance intellectual community (or the Republic of Arabic Letters) that, for a brief period before European colonial encounters, admired, rather than derided the Arab and Muslim intellectual traditions. He talks to us about the inspiration for the book, why he thinks this intellectual community was so important, and where he sees his work amidst the greater sea of scholarship.
Alexander Bevilacqua is an Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (ca. 1450 to 1800). He was educated at Harvard College, University of Cambridge, and Princeton University. From 2014 until 2017 he was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. His work has appeared in History of European Ideas, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Past and Present. He has edited, along with F. Clark, Thinking in the Past Tense: Eight Conversations (Forthcoming in December 2018 with University of Chicago Press) and he won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize of Harvard University Press for The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment.
Nadirah Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.
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Most studies of the Macedonian conqueror Alexander III focus on the military aspects of his life and reign. Yet Alexander’s campaigns would not have been possible had it not been for the enormous plunder his armies seized in their conquests. In The Treasures of Alexander the Great: How One Man’s Wealth Shaped the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), Frank L. Holt sifts through the ancient sources to provide new insights into an understudied aspect of Alexander’s empire. Though he subsequently downplayed its holdings, Alexander inherited a substantial treasury when he took the throne in 336 BCE. This he used to win the vast wealth possessed by the Persian monarchy, making himself the richest person in the world in the process. Alexander employed his wealth in numerous ways to solidify his rule, yet as Holt demonstrates at various points even he was forced to borrow money in order to cover the expenses of his ongoing campaigns, which he did by turning to the similarly-enriched soldiers accompanying him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (Oxford University Press, 2017), Gary Bruce, professor of history at the University of Waterloo, provides the first English-language history of the Berlin Zoo from its inception in 1844 until German reunification in 1990. Bruce demonstrates how the Berlin Zoo was a critical facet of Berlin’s social and cultural life. The zoo was also used by those in political power throughout German history to communicate messages to the larger public. According to Bruce the zoo remained popular throughout its history, even in Berlin’s darkest times. It allowed ordinary Germans to escape the difficulties of modern urban life for an afternoon, letting them dream of far flung places.
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Within the space of only six months in 1990, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) managed to win the majority of the Serb vote in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In his new book, Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and the Bosnian War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Adis Maksić traces the rise of the SDS and the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. Combining discourse analysis with a theoretical focus on affect, Maksic describes how the SDS created a regime of feeling that gave rise to ethnicized modes of identity.
Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the 1960s, West Germany eagerly courted workers from Turkey to manage a labor shortage during the country’s Economic Miracle. This program caused one of the most consequential migrations in Cold War Germany. In her new book, Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Contested Borders, 1960s to 1980s (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Jennifer A. Miller revises several assumptions about the men and women who arrived in West Germany from Turkey during this era. She traces the guest worker experience from recruitment in Turkey through the train ride to Germany, the search for housing, and attempts at social integration. Revising many traditional narratives, Miller uses oral histories as well as state documents to shed light on West German policies, guest worker agency, and gendered experiences. Miller’s work adds much nuance to scholarly understanding about the social history of the guest worker program.
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the fall of 2018.
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In her new book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press, 2016), Pamela M. Potter, Professor of Germany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, carefully examines why historians and the general public have clung to a problematic narrative, which argued that the Nazi government had total control over the visual and performing arts. In order to address this narrative Potter details how historians after the fall of Nazi Germany have written about art, film, theater, music, dance and architecture. By investigating the cultural histories of Third Reich, she demonstrates how the exile, Allied occupation, the Cold War, combined with the complex definition of modernism have helped to sustain misconceptions about cultural life during the Third Reich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I was joined in Oxford by Ben Clift, Professor of Political Economy, Deputy Head of Department and Director of Research at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Warwick. Ben has just published a very important, timely and interesting book on the IMF: The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis by Ben Clift (Oxford University Press, 2018). The book provides the first comprehensive analysis of major shifts in IMF fiscal policy thinking as a consequence of the great financial crisis and the Eurozone debt crisis. It widely presents the IMF’s role in the politics of austerity. The book also offers an innovative theory specifying four mechanisms of IMF ideational change – reconciliation, operationalization, corroboration, and authoritative recognition. It combines in-depth content analysis of the Fund’s vast intellectual production with extensive interviews with IMF economists and management.
The book is structured in seven chapters plus conclusions:
1: The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis
2: Ideational Change at the IMF after the Crash
3: IMF, Economic Schools of Thought, and Their Normative Underpinnings
4: Analysing the IMF Surveillance of Advanced Economies: The Social Construction of Fiscal Space
5: The Fund’s Fiscal Policy Views and the Politics of Austerity
6: The IMF, the UK Policy Debate, and Debt & Deficit Discourse
7: The IMF and the French Fiscal Rectitude amidst the Eurozone Crisis
Conclusion – IMF Intellectual Authority and the Politics of Economic Ideas After the Crash
IMF has been strongly criticised by economists, politicians, intellectuals and activists of the protest movements. This book might surprise many of them because it presents a much more pluralist if not heterodox set of economic ideas present and followed by the IMF’s economists and managers. The readers would discover that during the Greek crisis the IMF suggested a more flexible approach. In the case of Britain the IMF criticised the austerity policy of the Coalition Government. And in general the IMF has recently signalled that fiscal rectitude is not enough without support to aggregate demand and that inequality has to be monitored as well.
Professor Clift argues that the Fund’s crisis-defining economic ideas, and crisis legacy defining ideas, were important in constructing particular interpretations of the crisis. ‘Fund leadership articulated a Keynesian market failure understanding of the crisis, focussing on deficiencies of aggregate demand, and on the destabilising properties of financial markets. The Fund’s re-emphasising of Keynesian insights into liquidity traps, demand deficiency, higher fiscal multipliers, and the folly of all countries consolidating at once sat outside orthodox economic policy-making ideas at the time. These were not the lessons policy-makers had typically drawn from academic economics before the crisis.’
This book is for those interested in the politics of economic ideas and in the interaction between economics and politics. IMF is presented as an arena where new economic ideas and the dominance of different schools of economic thought emerge. Despite internal politics, institutional rules and member states’ influence, the IMF has shown autonomy and intellectual authority. Our conversation ended talking about the future of the institution particularly looking at the European Union financial integration.
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In his thrilling and sparkling new book, Medieval Empires and the Cultures of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Samuel England, Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzes with remarkable nimbleness the interaction of literature, politics, and power in medieval imperial settings. Effortlessly traversing from Buyid Baghdad to Spain and Italy, England shows ways in which literary competition, especially in poetry, pollinated imperial visions and fissures of political sovereignty. Literature and literary duels performed in the space of the imperial court, England convincingly argues, were critical to assemblage of medieval imperial sovereignty. This finely written book will interest and delight scholars of literature, religion, politics, and history-students of Arabic will especially appreciate the copious exhibition of wonderful Arabic poetry throughout the text.
SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How can political modernization reinforce authoritarianism? What brought middle-class liberals and conservative monarchists to make common cause in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany? How did a political culture defined by anti-socialism and anti-semitism emerge? In his new book Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860 to 1918 (Oxford University Press, 2017), James Retallack uses a regional lens to rethink assumptions about Germany’s changing political culture over the span of six decades. By tracing election battles and suffrage debates, Jim illuminates a reciprocal relationship between political modernization and authoritarianism with important implications for the present day.
Jim Retallack is a Professor of History and German Studies at University of Toronto. He has authored and edited a number of books about German nationalism, anti-Semitism, elections, and historiography. Retallack is also the general editor of Oxford Studies in Modern European History and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. A website of supplementary visuals, maps, and statistics for Red Saxony can be found here.
Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What sounds like the title of a Hollywood movie is actually a result of meticulous historical research. Frances Courtney Kneupper‘s new book The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford University Press, 2016) analyzes apocalyptic prophecies of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire in terms of their genesis, perception, authorship and individual impacts in specific contexts. Kneupper furthermore illustrates the dynamics between the Church and Clergy and prophetic thought and shows how these texts shaped German identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For decades the implementation of a single European currency was seen by its advocates as a vital step in the post-World War II movement toward greater European integration. As Ashoka Mody details in Eurotragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (Oxford University Press, 2018), however, the euro that emerged was built on a dangerously flawed set of assumptions, ones which have made the euro a key factor in the continent’s ongoing economic problems. First proposed by French leaders in the 1960s, the idea of a single European currency was viewed by them as a way of shoring up their presence in the global economy. Though German politicians and bankers were initially resistant to implementing such a currency, this changed during the chancellorship of Helmut Kohl. As he grappled with the resistance to German reunification at the end of the Cold War, Kohl embraced the single currency as a symbol of Germany’s commitment to European cooperation and over the course of the 1990s he shepherded its creation over the objections of economists and growing popular discontent with the idea. These concerns proved prescient in the years following the euro’s introduction in 1999, as the single currency deprived participating nations of the ability to employ devaluation as a national response to global competition, creating added economic issues that have sharpened political tensions throughout the continent ever since. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Though Germany was convulsed by violent unrest in the weeks following the end of the First World War, one of the few places where a new republican government was established peacefully was Munich. Central to this was Kurt Eisner, for whom this was among his proudest achievements. As Albert Earle Gurganus explains in Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life (Camden House, 2018), the success of this transition and the framework for the government he led in the months following the deposition of the Bavarian monarchy reflected his firm commitment to the long-held principles that defined his politics. The son of a merchant who provided military uniforms for the Prussian court, as a student Eisner abandoned his studies for a life as a journalist. His writings soon earned him both admiration and a term of imprisonment for lèse majesté. Yet Eisner’s time in prison did nothing to dampen his career prospects, and upon his release he soon rose to become the chief editor of the Social Democratic Party’s leading newspaper. Though ideological struggles led to his dismissal from his position as editor in 1905, he remained a leading critic and commentator until his opposition to Germany’s involvement in the First World War constrained his opportunities. As Gurganus explains, his idealism was both key to his sudden ascent to his power in November 1918 and his downfall three months later, when he was assassinated while on his way to deliver his government’s resignation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (Doubleday, 2018), Rebecca Erbelding examines the War Refugee Board created by FDR in 1944 near the conclusion of World War II. At the center of the books narrative, she places the numerous efforts to save Jews from Nazi control areas. The book also highlights the young and dedicated individuals who made up the War Refugee Board and how their passion and zeal led to the rescue of tens of thousands of innocent people. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that although America started too late in their efforts save the Jews of Europe, the War Refugee Board made a significant impact and should be viewed as a success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What sort of inequalities characterize classical music today? In Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession (Routledge, 2018), Christina Scharff, a senior lecturer in culture, media and creative industries in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London, offers a detailed analysis of the way the classical music profession is marked by race, class, and gender inequalities. Drawing on contemporary debates in feminism, the work of Michel Foucault, and a critique of the entrepreneurial self, the book offers a comparative study of London and Berlin. In doing so it positions classical music as a crucial site for understanding not only cultural and creative industries, but the entirety of our unequal, post-feminist economy and society. It will be required reading and citation for all creative industries scholars, as well as an important text for cultural and media studies, sociology, music, and anyone interested in the relationship between culture and social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Stefan Zweig und der Europa-Gedanke (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), Stephan Resch analyzes the Austrian author’s relationship with Europe and the concept of pacifism. To date Stephan Zweig is a contentious figure, especially when it comes to his political activism. In the opinion of many, he did not go far enough in his political work, while others criticize his autobiographical work as euphemistic. Reason enough for Stephan Resch, Senior Lecturer for German Studies at the University of Auckland, to take a deeper look into Stefan Zweig’s work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Did capitalism exist in ancient Greece, the cradle of democracy and western civilization? I was joined to discuss this and other issues with Donni Wang, the author of Before the Market: The Political Economy of Olympianism (Common Ground, 2018). The book is not a traditional book of economics as history and philosophy play a big role. Not surprisingly Donni studied Economics, at Berkeley, and Classics, at Stanford. She now holds a position in History at Shanghai University. Previous studies have applied quantitative models and social science methods to determine the extent of market activities and growth in ancient Greece. Before the Market, instead, employs techniques from the cultural-linguistic turn to examine economic matters. With this approach the author argues to be able to shed light on a new economic system—one that is vastly different from the market system. At the same time, the underlying theoretical framework that links culture, identity, and action also prompts a radical redefinition of state power, democracy, and community, resulting in a narrative of ancient Greece that is both more dynamic and complex than in conventional accounts and also more useful and relevant for today’s world. For the concerned reader, this book is laden with lessons and ideas for both envisioning wholesale economic transformation that is needed to address the problems of the 21st century as well as examples of specific practice that can be adopted. Concepts like the commons, collective knowledge, joint ownership, and gift exchange speak directly to a number of grass-roots movements that seek to embrace alternative ways of organizing economic life. In addition, Before the Market provides a reading of democracy politics that points the way forward to a truly tolerant, inclusive and egalitarian global order. A very interesting, erudite, sophisticated and provocative book worth reading.
Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.
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How do transitions to democracy affect the shape and participation of social movements in the present? In their new book, Legacies and Memories in Movements: Justice and Democracy in Southern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018), Donatella della Porta and her collaborators develop a comparative historical study of social movements in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, tracing some of the characteristics of the last anti-austerity protests to the shape transitions to democracy took in each country. Transitions to democracy represent critical junctures that affect historical legacies and memories in different ways. Participated pacts, where political elites play a major role and civil society is excluded from the negotiations, bring about closed and exclusive political opportunities. This leads movements to develop more radical repertoires, and erase or confront the memory of the transition in their framing. Conversely, eventful transitions, where civil society plays a leading role, produce political systems that are more open to social movements’ participation. This is reflected in more institutionally-active social movements who embrace the memory of the transition and use it as a legitimating frame.
The book puts into question the idealization of transitions led by political elites and provides a more nuanced analysis of the relations between the different actors that participate in these key historical episodes. Additionally, it provides a novel perspective on the impact that transitions have for the opportunities of political participation of society at large. This work will be of interest to political scientists, historians and sociologists alike and represents a major effort in bridging these disciplines under the umbrella of social movement studies.
Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What was Italy’s role in the Holocaust? Why is it that Italy is known as the Axis power that was benevolent to Jews, despite a scholarly consensus that many Italians actively participated in anti-Jewish persecution? In Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Shira Klein skillfully narrates the historical developments that belie this myth, and the complex process that have led to its perpetuation. By examining the experiences of Italian Jews during the Second World War from a wide chronological lens, Klein shows how the particular history of Italian Jews in the century prior to the Holocaust helped to mold their positive perception of Italy during and in the aftermath of genocide. Drawing from oral testimonies as well as unpublished memoirs, Klein reveals how a uniquely Jewish Italian patriotism was fostered in the decades leading up to (and even during) Fascism. Through their allegiance to Italy, she explains, many Jewish exiles and survivors themselves helped to spread the myth of Italian innocence.
Shira Klein is Assistant Professor of History at Chapman University.
Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Labeled in history as “mad,” Juana of Castile was in fact a complex figure whose sometimes emotional nature was exploited by the men around her as a way of limiting her ability to exercise her power as queen. Gillian B. Fleming’s Juana I: Legitimacy and Conflict in Sixteenth-Century Castile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), a volume in the publisher’s “Queenship and Power” series, examines the struggles she faced in ruling that were posed by her husband, her father, and her son. The second daughter of Fernando of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, the bright and willful Juana was raised to assume the traditional duties of a royal woman. It was the death of her brother Juan and her older sister Isabel of Aragon that placed her in line to succeed her mother. Though designated as the ruler of Castile in her mother’s will, when Isabel died in 1504, Juana soon found herself confined as part of a struggle between her father and her husband Philip, over control of Castile. As Fleming explains, many of the steps she undertook to assert herself during this time often played into the arguments made about her unsuitability for ruling, which became a recurring theme in the efforts to deny her rightful authority. Even after the deaths of first her husband and then her father, her son Charles continued her confinement as a means of ensuring his control over her kingdom, a confinement that continued until her death in 1555. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today the word “barbarian” has a derogatory connotation for most people. Yet in the classical world it was one that was often used not as a pejorative but as a means of denoting people of different cultural backgrounds, which was regularly done in an era in which interactions with them were commonplace. Erik Jensen’s book Barbarians in the Greek and Roman World (Hackett Publishing Company, 2018) examines the concept of barbarians as understood by the Hellenic. Hellenistic, and Roman civilizations, showing how their ever-evolving use of the phrase offers us an understanding of their concepts of identity. Noting the origin of the word as a descriptor of how the Greeks interpreted foreign languages, Jensen explains how it was an early example of how the politically fractious people of the region identified the shared factors that distinguished them from others. Such distinctions were frequently relevant given the Greek presence in the Mediterranean world, which manifested itself in trade, colonization, and later in the conquests that established the Hellenistic world. By contrast the Roman interaction with others was defined by conquest from the start, which led to the development of a different criteria of which peoples were and were not regarded as outsiders. As Jensen reveals, it was the crises of the late imperial period which hardened the concept of barbarians into the negative one which we use today, one which has skewed our understanding of the ancient world as a consequence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance, 1921–1931 (Harvard University Press, 2018), Nathan Marcus, analyzes the events that took place around the financial crisis in Austria after World War I. When Austria was the first interwar country in Europe to suffer a hyperinflation the League of Nations stepped in to offer financial support and advice. But a total collapse of the financial system in 1931 couldn’t be avoided. Nathan Marcus offers a new perspective on the already well researched subject and an individual approach not only with regards to content but also on a methodological level by interlacing multiple perspectives and sources (such as journals and caricatures, literature, anecdotes etc.) with each other to create a wider understanding for the events.
Nathan Marcus is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the Higher School of Economics, National Research University, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Katelyn Knox’s book, Race on Display in Twentieth- and Twenty First–Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) examines francophone literature, art, dance, music, and fashion, considering how race and national identity intersect in postcolonial France. Emphasizing a widespread “institutionalized spectacularism” in France that exceeds the display of racialized bodies in more explicit, state-produced and orchestrated spectacle, Knox’s analysis emphasizes a more pervasive gaze permeating contemporary French culture. Moving from a discussion of the Colonial Exposition of 1931 to the analysis of more contemporary cultural forms, the book is a study of race that looks at a range of sources and varieties of performance.
Thinking carefully through the persistent French engagement with and mobilization of ideas about race, Knox’s chapters explore official historical discourse, rhetoric and new media, cultural marketplaces, and the field of French and Francophone studies itself. The analysis throughout includes drawing attention to and interrogating a French universalist insistence on a “colorblind” society that has made looking for and looking at race a complicated challenge. Part history, part literary and cultural analysis, the book asks serious questions about the reproduction of racist gazes that can accompany even the most well-intentioned discussions of exclusion in France. It also considers whiteness as a constellation of nationalist ideals and assumptions that must be interrogated if the divisions and discriminations of contemporary France are to be understood and addressed.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/
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In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Sandra Ott, Associate Professor of Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno examines German occupation of the Pyrenees. Particularly, Dr. Ott examines cases of collaboration and later justice and demonstrates how collaboration was often motivated out of base desires. She tells the story of this unique region through nine case studies of collaboration with a diverse group of characters bringing to life this fascinating history.
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Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contains over 1300 color photographs (with over 4000 more plus site plans on the accompanying CD). Its author, Jo Farb Hernandez, is the Director of SPACES, a non-profit focused on art environments around the world. She first became interested in place-based creative constructions when she was an undergraduate in Wisconsin. In her introduction to Singular Spaces, she recounts how this particular book began: she and her husband were in the process of renovating an old farmhouse they’d purchased in Catalonia. They took a short road-trip to explore the area around their new home and chanced upon “the enormous roadside construction of Josep Pujiula I Vila, at that time one of the largest and most idiosyncratic art environments found worldwide” (16). Shortly thereafter Farb Hernandez began documenting Pujiula’s work while writing another book. In the process she came across more and more such endeavors that demanded her attention. Singular Spaces is devoted to those sites and like them, the book is the product of years of labor and dedication.
Singular Spaces features the work of 45 artists, all men. Alongside the photographs and descriptions of the art environments, Farb Hernandez also tells the stories of their creators’ lives, and details the history and development of each project. She also describes the challenges that many of the artists have faced, not least those posed by unhappy neighbors and unsympathetic municipal authorities. In fact, helping the men deal with local adversities has led to Farb Hernandez frequently taking on the role of advocate on behalf of her interlocutors.
A recent review in the Journal of American Folklore described Singular Spaces as “incredibly important for those who are interested in architecture, the politics of place and space, folk art and art in general, art and activism, the psychology of creativity, and relationships between tradition and the individual. Jo Farb Hernandez has written more than a survey of eccentric art spaces. She has opened a door to each artist and space so that they may be explored, analyzed, and, in some cases, loved by any who enjoy such contextual art forms.”
Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Chad Alan Goldberg looks at how social thinkers from Karl Marx, to Emile Durkheim, to Robert Park mobilized ideas and ideologies about Jews to conceptualize the big themes of modernity. Goldberg shows for example how inherited schemas, which had historically painted Jews as both backwards “Orientals” and, at the same time, as ultra-modern cosmopolitans, were mobilized consciously and unconsciously to serve different sociological theories. That is, as Goldberg illustrates, because of their contradictory and ambivalent status within the European imagination, the Jew became a central object of study and a key symbol for social theorists, a symbol that they found useful for thinking through the contradictions and ambivalences of nationhood and citizenship in France, economics and power in Germany, and urbanization and assimilation in the United States. As Goldberg writes, in a phrase borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, “Jews were good to think.”
In this episode, we talk about Durkheim’s reactions to the reactionary right, and how his view about Jews may have informed other aspects of his thought; we talk about the Chicago schools idea of assimilation, which, as Goldberg argues, begins with recognizing the “marginal man” as a key character of the Modern era and ends with a vision of diversity and collaboration; we talk about the two different ways Karl Marx depicted Jews and their relationship to capital and to European history; and we talk about how the Jew or rather, the figure of the Jew continues to serve “as an intermediary for self-reflection in our own time.”
Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 2017), Thomas Weber highlights the years between 1918 and 1926 as the period in which Hitler’s worldview developed. Challenging Hitler’s own narrative, as well as the received wisdom it engendered, Weber puts paid to the idea that the future dictator was radicalized in Vienna or during the First World War. Instead, he portrays Hitler as someone whose ideas were constantly evolving up to and even after he wrote his political testament, Mein Kampf. Using an array of previously untapped sources, Weber offers a nuanced picture of Hitler, presenting him not only as a rabid ideologue, but as a careful and strategic thinker who was prepared to adapt his behavior, even his ideas, should the circumstances require it.
Thomas Weber is Professor of History and International Affairs at Aberdeen University. His twitter handle is @Thomas__Weber.
Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University, where he is researching the Ministerial Bureaucracy’s role under National Socialism. He can be contacted at obyrne.darren@gmail.com or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism, and Women’s Equality (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Motti Inbari accesses recently obtained archival materials and personal correspondence in order to depict the dominant personalities of ultra-Orthodox movements from the late 19th through the 20th centuries, and how those movements continue to confront and resist modernity. Inbari, associate professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, provides historical, psychological, and ideological perspectives on these complex and often competitive movements in Jewish religious life, in both Israel and the Diaspora.
David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.
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In her new book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016), Erin Hochman, Associate Professor of Modern German and European History at Southern Methodist University offers a new perspective on state and national building in Germany and Austria during the interwar period. Hochman argues persuasively that nationalism and the goal of redrawing Germany’s borders was not only a goal of the radical right. She looks at how supporters of the Weimar and First Austrian republics used the idea of Anschluss as a way to support democracy. For these republicans their nationalism was in stark contrast to that of the radical right; it was inclusive and supported democracy. Hochman’s book convincingly demonstrates that the rise of Hitler was not certain and that the republics could have survived and thrived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender is a collection of essays that spans over 40 years and challenges many received notions about the history of Hasidism —its origins, the evolving nature of its structure, its leadership and perhaps most controversially, the role of women in the movement. Unlike other historians who have attributed the rise of Hasidism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to either social, political, or economic crises, Rapoport-Albert refuses to ignore the spiritual dimensions and efforts on the part Hasidism to renew religious practice. While others see a strict periodization in which there was a self-conscious founding and institutionalization, here we are given the sense of an organic pietistic movement informed by the Kabbalistic tradition but open to society rather than ascetic, and nurtured by a productive opposition. Moreover, rather than conceding to the common characterization of Hasidism as a folkish and populist movement, Hasidic Studies complicates this picture by uncovering a Hasidism that was shaped around its charismatic leaders. Throughout, the question of sources plays a central role, and rather than ignore as biased the attempts of Hasidim to write their own history, Rapoport-Albert excavates from these documents crucial evidence embedded unconsciously or matter-of-factly.
The second half of the book attacks the apologetic representations of Hasidism as either egalitarian or proto-feminist – as giving women a new sense of “spiritual agency”—by showing them to be excluded from leadership as a rule and a family life divorced from traditional structures. Often Hasidism has been cast as a continuation of early modern heretical movements, particularly the messianic movement that arose around Sabbatai Zevi in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, Rapoport-Albert argues that Hasidism was in fact a retreat towards stricter traditional values, particularly regarding the prominent position given to women in the Sabbatean movement and its sexual mores.
In Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbtai Zevi 1666 – 1816, a study of the life and afterlife of the messianic movement that arose around the messianic figure of Sabbtai Zevi, Rapoport-Albert sees female spirituality as its hallmark. Here women act as a key to the movement as a whole and in understanding its relationship to normative Judaism. The book suggests a movement with a feminist-like agenda in which women play an integral part of the messianic community—as leaders, prophets, and spiritual activists—in its reading into the nature of heresy, mysticism, and community in the early modern period.
The two books are intertwined, not only thematically and as foils to one another, but by a methodological sophistication and sensitivity as well; Professor Rapoport-Albert presents a perspective deeply embedded in primary sources, that shines new light on modern Jewish history.
Ada Rapoport-Albert is Emerita Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London.
Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he sometimes wonders about the nature of political structures in the local cat community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Five decades ago, a young scholar named Robert Darnton followed up on a footnote that took him to the archives of the “Typographical Society of Neuchatel”(S.T.N.) in Switzerland, not far from the French border. Many years, and thousands of documents later, Professor Robert Darnton has published a new book, A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018). Apart from illuminating the everyday life of the trade that enabled and shaped French reading practices, the book is a methodological feat that mines an impressive array of sources to access the financial, legal, political, and cultural history of book distribution before the French Revolution.
Following the trail of Jean-Francois Favager, a sales rep of the S.T.N. who toured France in 1778, Darnton’s thirteen chapters trace his journey from Neuchatel, across the border into France, down the southeast to Lyon and Marseille, west towards Bordeaux, then north before crossing back to Besancon and home (with many stops in between). As the book pursues Favager’s story, the reader learns about the challenges of travel by horse in this period, including border-crossings, the network of roads that connected French towns and cities in the eighteenth century, and the many obstacles that arose along the way. A history of the movement of foreign books into a French market, A Literary Tour de France also explores the histories of smuggling, piracy, contract and business law and values. Focused on the world of books in the French provinces, rather than Paris, this study offers today’s reader insight into the demands and supplies of their eighteenth-century counterparts and the range of booksellers who sold their wares. The result is a rich and textured account of how and what many French people were able to read in the decades before the upheaval of 1789.
I encourage all of you to visit the books companion website, including a treasure of primary sources that will enhance and extend the reading of A Literary Tour de France.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How do immigrant populations navigate between ancestral ties and connections to their new homes? How do their plural histories create layered identities, and how do those identities change over time? Adriana M. Brodsky, Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, explores answers to these questions through an examination of Sephardi immigrants in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Argentina. Her book, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Community and National Identity, 1880-1960 (Indiana University Press, 2016), paints a complex picture of the myriad forces that worked to construct Sephardi Argentine identity from without and within. Brodsky problematizes the groups identity (or identities) from a variety of lenses to show how Sephardi immigrants in Argentina have a history that is both fractured and united. She analyzes the structural layout of Jewish cemeteries, communal associations, Zionism, women’s movements, and educational and marriage patterns, ultimately revealing that the Sephardi community while was often divided based on regions of origin, it also actively and strategically came together in times of political need. Her fascinating study speaks to the importance of studying the diversity of Jewish immigrant populations in Argentina and beyond.
Adriana M. Brodsky is Professor of History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship between Jew and the early modern state, but together with Alfred Dreyfus and Shakespeare’s Shylock, in the long history of anti-semitism as well.
While previous authors have chosen to limit themselves to barebones-facts or resorted to fictional accounts of Oppenheimer’s biography and trial, in The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton University Press, 2017), Yair Mintzker reinvestigates the case of the “Jew Suss” in light of new sources, as well as by incorporating the lives of four contemporary voices, eyewitness accounts that act as mirrors in which we can grow to see more of Oppenheimer himself. Fascinatingly, rather than presenting a unified narrative, these four voices often come into conflict with one another. The judge-inquisitor Philip Friedrich Jager; university professor and convert from Judaism, Christoph David Bernard; Mordechai Schloss, who wrote the only contemporary Jewish account of the case; and, finally, David Fassman, Oppenheimer’s first biographer. While Oppenheimer’s case stands as the narrative thread that brings these four voices together, the thick description of each life exposes overlapping worlds tied together by politics, culture, and theology. And here, the “Jew Suss” acts as a prism to better see the context of 18th-century Germany.
Professor Yair Mintzker is professor of history at Princeton University and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in 2017 .
Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his life can be accurately described as a Rashamon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against religious freedom and the secular state. By the 1960s, that position was reversed and Catholics began advocating for particularly Catholic forms of modernity. How did this happen? How did the world’s largest religious organization become modern?
James Chappel traces answers to these questions in his recent book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard University Press, 2018). It tells the story of how radical ideas emerged in the 1930s and exercised enormous influence after World War II in Catholicism and in European politics more broadly.
James Chappel is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University.
Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas of research interest in this book, Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and applies it to the evolving political situation in Catalonia.
In this interview, Woolard discusses the key theoretical and contextual elements of the book, broadly following its three-part structure. First, the concepts of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, sociolinguistic naturalism are introduced, and Woolard sets out the changing ideological grounding of linguistic authority there over the course of twenty years of fieldwork in Catalonia. Next, Woolard’s theoretical framework is applied to the case of a popular satirical television program which catalyzed the sociolinguistic rehabilitation of a Catalonian president whose Castilian Spanish was better than his Catalan. Finally, Woolard discusses her early and recent fieldwork in a Catalan-medium high school, and her experiences of following up on research informants first interviewed twenty years ago.
This is a typically rich and fascinating volume from a pioneer of linguistic anthropology. Positioned as a corrective against the banal nationalism of mainstream media discourse about Spain and Catalonia, the book calls on us to rethink our ideologies of language, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which have become so polarized in the West in recent years.
Kathryn Woolard wrote a post for Indiana University’s Communication, Media and Performance Anthropology blog (08/14/2017) in which she discusses ideas we talked about in the podcast. You can find it here.
John Weston is an Yliopistonopettaja (Associate Lecturer) at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyvaskyla. His research focuses on the relationships between language variation, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at j.weston@qmul.ac.uk.
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Though he never enjoyed the fame of his contemporaries Mozart and Haydn, Antonio Rosetti was a successful composer whose works received a wide audience. In his book, The Career of an Eighteenth-Century Kapellmeister: The Life and Music of Antonio Rosetti (University of Rochester Press, 2014), Sterling Murray provides readers with both an account of Rosetti’s career and a style study of his compositions. As a young man Rosetti found employment as a double bass player at the southern German court of Kraft Ernst, Prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein. There he began composing a wide range of instrumental music for the court, eventually rising to the position of kapellmeister for the courts Hofkapelle. A sojourn in Paris in 1781-82 enhanced Rosetti’s growing reputation by providing opportunities for publishing his music while exposing him to a wider range of styles, an experience which was soon reflected in his compositions. While financial concerns led to his relocation to the court of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1789, his death three years later cut short his career, leaving his achievements subject to the vicissitudes of taste and the changes in musical styles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. He was a heretic. And yet, he was and continues to be seen by many as perhaps the hero of the early modern period. A figure alienated by the structures that defined his life, Spinoza has been understood, by Jews and non-Jews alike, to have expressed a powerful self-definition that echoes to the present day, where biographies, plays, “guides”, and academic works continue to abound.
In place of a simplistic origin story or master narrative of a modernity that begins with Spinoza, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton University Press, 2012), tells the story of how Spinoza came to be understood as a cultural hero, a reception history of his image at many crucial junctures in Modern Jewish history. Rather than probing his philosophy or strictly philosophic influence, Schwartz studies a malleable “Spinoza” as a symbol that captures the ways in which Jews have sought to understand and define themselves. Beginning in 17th-century Amsterdam before moving to 18th-century Berlin, 19th-century Eastern Europe, and Israel and America in the 20th century, The First Modern Jew is a chronological narrative of modern Jewish history that moves seamlessly between a larger thematic thread and local histories of both the famous (Moses Mendelssohn, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Bashevis Singer) and the forgotten (Berthold Auerbach, Salomon Rubin, and Yosef Klausner). In so doing, it probes the porous boundary between history and memory: the history of Spinoza and the history of the memory of Spinoza. And thereby we can see Spinoza as the “first modern Jew,” both because he was often projected as such and because he was a means by which people have asked the quintessential modern question: what does it mean to be me?
Professor Daniel B. Schwartz is an associate professor of history and the director of the Judaic Studies program at George Washington University.
Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he is a crypto-Spinozist and his hero is Blinky the Ghost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, Autodidacticism, Artistry, Media Practice (Autodidaktik, Artistik, Medienpraktik [Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016]), Julia Kerscher, postdoc at the University of Tubingen examines the historical development of appearances of dilettantism by analyzing works of Karl Philipp Moritz, Carl Einstein and Thomas Bernhard. She uncovers how the discussion about dilettantism is linked with the question of what is considered to be art and what should be excluded. Moreover, she shows how in the 20th-century dilettantism has turned from a negative into a positive concept and how the arrival of the electronic media in our age can be debated against the backdrop of the dilettantism discourse. Altogether, the book deals with historically changing designs of anthropology, aesthetics and writing styles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did the Nazi regime respond to protest? How did Hitler’s desire for popular authority shape the relationship between state and society? Nathan Stoltzfus challenges the idea that the Third Reich relied on terror to survive in his new book Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (Yale University Press, 2016). By examining how Hitler maintained his popularity with tactical compromises in the face of protest, Nathan shows how the dictatorship sought to gradually change norms and convince Germans to believe in Nazism.
Nathan Stoltzfus is the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University. He has been a Fulbright and IREX scholar in West and East Germany and an H. F. Guggenheim Foundation scholar. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and The Daily Beast.
Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of modern Europe specializing in Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also co-hosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix.
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Historical debates about the actions of the Roman Catholic Church in relationship to the Third Reich have never been restricted to academic presses and journals like so many other topics. Rather several groups of partisans in both Germany and the United States actively followed them in popular books, magazines, and newspapers since the late 1940s. In his new book, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mark Edward Ruff explores seven divisive controversies that exploded over the church’s relationship to National Socialism during the early decades of the Federal Republic in West Germany. Ruff questions why so many early controversies ensnared German Catholics after World War II when there was a much higher rate of collaboration between the Protestant majority and the regime. He argues that public acrimony over the Concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican in 1933 and the legacy of Pius XII emerged mainly as a proxy war between secular elites, leftwing Catholics, and the church establishment over the political dominance of the Christian Democratic Union in the 1950s and 1960s and the place of religion in modern democracies. Despite so much argumentation, empirical research, and open hostility, it seems that nobody ever changed their mind once their opinions formed on these matters. Combining rigorous research with accessible writing, Ruff authored a book that many listeners will enjoy.
Michael E. OSullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in August 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that distinctly European art form, the opera, to show us the reflection of European ideas of Ottoman Turkey in the modern period. Beginning in 1683 when Ottoman guns shook the walls of Vienna, through a long eighteenth century, and up to Napoleon’s military supremacy in the nineteenth, when Turkish conquest of Europe was “no longer really imaginable” (402), the singing Turk in one form or another, dazzled, terrified, and enchanted European audiences from Vienna, to Venice, to Paris. Professor Wolff’s discussion of the music—its creation, its reception, and its context—is richly entertaining and accessible to the layman. It also reveals important currents in political and cultural thought during the Enlightenment in a Europe with ever-broader horizons. Professor Wolff moves between decades and opera houses, to argue that, rather than being some simplistic oriental foil, the operatic Turk ultimately allows the European audience to see its own humanity in a trans-Mediterranean alter ego, and composers and librettists to resolve the two in harmony with plenty of drama and humor along the way.
The reader of the Singing Turk is advised to listen along on YouTube to the operas, other compositions, and Turkish military orchestra that appear in The Singing Turk. Professor Wolff has also collected quite a few of these on a website, http://www.singingturk.com/. In our podcast, Professor Wolff also discusses twenty-first century implications of this long cultural, political, and diplomatic relationship. Furthermore, he explains one of the opera’s more peculiar romantic roles of (now mercifully defunct), that of the castrato (adult performer castrated in boyhood) and why such an actor never played the Turkish eunuch.
Professor Wolff is Silver Professor, Professor of History, and Director of Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He specializes in the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and the history of childhood, writing from an intellectual, cultural, literary—and now musical—perspective. His work considers East and West and the dialectic relationship between the two, as he did with his Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994). The Singing Turk is his seventh book.
Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British, during World War I. Challenging Europe-centric interpretations of the conflict and internment, Murphy uses a wide range of sources, illustrating both the global integrated camp network, and how experiences of internment varied according to social class, gender and race. He also explores the effects of internment on Germans’ national identity, and how their experiences of post-colonial, Weimar Germany led many to believe that true Germanness was only to be found in the colonies. A must read for anyone interested in the global dimensions of internment and First World War.
Anyone in London on 19 March is cordially invited to attend the launch of the book at the London School of Economics. Speakers include William Mulligan and David Stevenson. Information available here.
Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University, where he is researching the Ministerial Bureaucracy’s role under National Socialism. He can be contacted at obyrne.darren@gmail.com or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1.
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Historians, writes Dagomar Degroot, rarely feature in discussions about global warming. With his new book, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Degroot seeks to remedy this significant omission. The book asks what past cooling, in the form of the Little Ice Age—a variable but overall cold climatic regime that affected much of the world and endured from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries—can teach us about future warming. Focused on the Dutch Republic from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, The Frigid Golden Age examines how and why this particular society prospered during a time of climatic upheaval. What was it about the Dutch Republic that allowed its citizens to thrive during the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age? Through detailed analysis of the commerce, military and culture of the Republic, The Frigid Golden Age examines the resilience and adaptability of a society in the face of climate change, and what it might teach us about our own predicament. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), Brian Jenkins describes Lyons’s eventful life and the often subtle impact he made in international relations. The son of an officer in the Royal Navy, Lyons was long drawn to diplomatic service. Sent to Greece as an aide soon after finishing his education, he rose steadily through the ranks over the course of a series of postings in Europe. Named minister to the United States in 1858, Lyons arrived to witness the emergence of secession, and he spent much of his tenure in America grappling with the challenges posed by the war that resulted. His success in such extraordinary circumstances cemented his reputation and led to his appointment as ambassador, first to the Ottoman Empire, then to France, where he served during the fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic. Throughout it all, as Jenkins shows, Lyons set a standard of conduct as a hard-working nonpartisan defender of Britain’s interests that his successors strove to emulate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What does it mean to be a citizen? Every country has its own legal codes that confer a set of rights on official members. But full citizenship is often more than what the law says. A better question is: what does it mean to be an accepted member of one’s society? According to France’s Republicanism, national and civic terms determine identity, and basic citizenship, “being French,” trumps all other group affiliations. Race, ethnicity—those common and powerful sources of identity and symbols of belonging—simply do not exist within this model. Not so for everyone in France, according to sociologist Jean Beaman in her new book Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017). In this work, Beaman focuses on a group of people in France who have ostensibly “made it”—children of maghrebin immigrants who have obtained university (and sometimes post-graduate) degrees, work professional jobs, and entered the middle class—and who mostly embrace French culture and the country’s sense of Republicanism, but who are not accepted as French by their country. They feel French, but are not regarded as French. Driven by the question of “what does it mean to be a minority in a society that does not recognize minorities?” Beaman lets her participants’ lives and experiences shine, and her analyses reveal the unfortunate conditions and realities of their everyday existence as “citizen outsiders”: both an ordinary member of their society, and a total foreigner at the same time.
Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Benjamin R. Gampel‘s award winning volume Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first total history of a lesser known period in Jewish history, overshadowed by the Spanish expulsion of 1492 which it would come to foreshadow. Over the course of ten months, Jews across large parts of the Iberian peninsula were murdered or forced to convert to Christianity, and entire communities were decimated—the intensity and duration of this period mark it as the most devastating attack on the Jews of pre-modern Christian Europe. While many historians have written studies about 1391-92 from isolated perspectives, in the face of an overwhelming number of local archives found throughout the peninsula, and the complexity of those sources, a unified narrative has, until now, remained a desideratum. In this methodological tour-de-force, Professor Gampel tells the story of Spanish Jewry and their relationship to royal power by reading state records and the almost daily correspondence of the royal family against the grain, telling the story of the subjects of these sources imbedded in the thick context of their composers.
The book is divided into two sections that mirror its title. The first is a detailed study of the violence of 1391-92 arranged according to the geographic regions of the peninsula—the Kingdoms of Castile, Valencia, and Aragon, Catalonia and the island of Majorca. Using a rich array of archival sources and in dialogue with contemporary historiography, Professor Gampel painstakingly sets out the limits of what we can know about the riots, both of the victims and the perpetrators, detailing each episode chronologically, in order to form a picture of the period as a whole. Central to the book is the question of how and why those tasked with protecting the Jewish communities failed to do so. To this end the second section is centered around three members of the Aragonese royal family—King Joan, Queen Iolant, and Duke Marti—and their response to the violence as it unfolded. Here we see the Jewish community as one of many competing interests the royal family faced, and thereby can better appreciate the contingencies of history. The two sections together provide both a deep macro and micro study of this crucial time in Jewish and Spanish history, exposing us not only to the story and context of the too often voiceless victims, but the lives of those in power as well. Its a narrative of tragic violence and the failure of the Royal Alliance, grounded in extensive historical research stripped of none of its drama.
Professor Benjamin R. Gampel is the the Dina and Eli Field Family Chair in Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. You can hear more from him in his video lecture series on the history, society, and culture of medieval Sephardic Jewry.
Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; his friends call him young Farabi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University, examines the expulsion of nearly 3 million Germans from the Czech-German borderlands. Dr. Gerlach looks extensively at the economic factors that led to the expulsion of Germans from this area. He argues convincingly how the promise of property and social mobility contributed to the course and outcomes of ethnic cleansing. Ultimately, he demonstrates how the conflict between Czechs and Germans helped to facilitate the rise of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his work, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Sedgwick maps the ideational processes that have led to the development of contemporary western Sufism. Sedgwick showcases how Neoplatonism influenced Arab philosophy and subsequently Sufism. Pre-modern Sufism then appealed to Jewish and Christian mystics, who framed Sufism as a non-Islamic tradition, in effect emphasizing its universalism. With this historical mapping Sedgwick masterfully showcases how, even in its earliest period, Sufism was engaged with by Muslims and non-Muslims, and thus the fluidities noted in western Sufism in the contemporary context is by no means unique, but rather reflective of an age-old process of textual, philosophical and mystical transmissions. Moving between questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, universal and Islamic, this study naturally challenges how we think and frame Sufism. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Sufism, especially in modern western Sufism.
M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at mxavier@ithaca.edu.
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Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of Pax Britannica in the Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 (Viking, 2018). From the successful end of the Napoleonic Wars to the near debacle that was the Boer War, Victorious Century provides a comprehensive view of 19th-century British history in all its aspects: politics, society, art and culture. From Pitt the Younger to the young Winston Churchill, Victorious Century expertly delineates a story of continuity and change in nineteenth-century Britain. All by one of the leading historians writing in the English language today.
Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The French-Algerian War that erupted in 1954 ended with the emergence of an independent Algeria in 1962, but it was not until decades later that a broader French public turned its attention with vigor to the violence and pain of that conflict. Indeed, the French state only officially recognized the war as a war in 1999. Claire Eldridge‘s From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-noir and Harki Communities, 1962-2012 (Manchester University Press, 2016) interrogates the war’s legacies by focusing on the French settlers and the native military and civilian auxiliaries who fled Algeria in the thousands as French colonialism there came to an end. Examining pied-noir and harki grassroots collective mobilization and memory activism in France after 1962, From Exile to Empire shows that, while the war may have been repressed and silenced in a variety of ways in French society, the conflict was far from “forgotten” for these communities.
Addressing material concerns including housing, poverty, and forms of indemnity, and attempting to preserve their cultures and histories, community associations forged new identities in France while advocating for the recognition of their suffering and their positive contributions to the nation and its (former) empire. Divided into two parts, the book covers the memory work of these communities from 1962 to 1991, and then from the early 1990s up to the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict in 2012. Drawing on a wide range of pied-noir and harki sources, From Empire to Exile has much to offer those interested in the history of the war and its aftermaths. It will also make fascinating reading for anyone concerned with popular and community memory in the wake of traumatic and violent pasts more generally.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Music is frequently connected to leftist politics and seen as the soundtrack to social protest movements, most notably the civil rights movement. But the far right groups use music too. Benjamin Teitelbaum‘s Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Swedish and Nordic far right parties deployed music in the 2000’s to expand the reach of their ideas. Consciously rejecting the sounds of White Power music and the image of skinheads in favor of pop music, hip-hop, and reggae, leaders of Sweden’s far right parties used the change in music to make in-roads into mainstream political discourse.
In this podcast Teitelbaum discusses the shifting theoretical landscape that undergirds the radical nationalism and how this led to a variety of approaches toward music by far right parties. We explore how far right musicians and audiences came to use African-inspired musical forms in their effort to spread their ideas about Swedish nationalism. In addition to exploring questions of race, the conversation also examines the changing role of women in far right music and the vexed position of folk music. The podcast concludes with drawing some comparisons and contrasts between far right movements in the United States and Sweden.
Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado. Teitelbaum’s commentary on music and politics has appeared in major European and American media outlets, in addition to scholarly venues. He has contributed as an expert for NPR, Swedish Radio, Norwegian Radio, the BBC, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Helsinge Sanomat and Berlingske, and he has authored op-eds in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Dagbladet and the Wall Street Journal. Teitelbaum is also a musician who specializes in Swedish folk music and Sweden’s unofficial national instrument, the nyckelharpa. More information about him can be found on his website.
The host for this episode is Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and the co-editor of African American Culture and Legal Discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In December of 1937, four men robbed a representative of the diamond company Cartier of eight diamond rings in the Hyde Park Hotel. What made this crime unique was the identity of the perpetrators: all four men were from well-respected, wealthy London families. The trial and eventual punishment of these four men sent the London presses into a frenzy. In his brilliant historical analysis, Professor Angus McLaren (Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria) documents the crime, trial, and tribulations of these four Mayfair men. In this analysis Playboys and Mayfair Men: Crime, Class, Masculinity, and Fascism in 1930s London (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), McLaren discusses how this particular crime and the perpetrators involved intersected with larger societal forces of 1930s Britain such as appropriate sex roles, class differences and anxieties, crime and punishment as well as growing fascistic ideas. Significantly, these men and others like them were referred to as “playboys” decades before the 1950s—which is largely regarded as the era that the playboy emerged onto the social scene. Anyone interested in masculinity and gender studies generally will be fascinated by the crimes of these playboys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of victory, all sides were looking for a quick exit but had few prospects of finding one. In 1917, the Germans gambled in escalating their submarine warfare, which drew the hesitant Americans into the conflict, the French faced mutinies, and the Russians plunged the throes of Revolution. The war thus raged, spreading across two oceans to four continents, finally turning toward its conclusion.
In this episode of the podcast, David Stevenson discusses the causes, course, and effects of these events with us, and shares his insights about judging historical forces and human agency, evaluating counterfactuals, and drawing comparisons between 1917 and subsequent events of the last 100 years, including the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and conflicts of the twenty-first century.
Professor Stevenson is Stevenson Chair of International History at the London School of Economics, and has published several important works on the World War I including With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, and 1914-1918: The History of the First World War.
Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.
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Monica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and reflects upon how these interactions defined a man’s gendered and political positions within society. Focusing on training manuals, memoirs, images, satires, and other rich materials produced by some of the periods most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life.
Monica Mattfeld is an Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Northern British Columbia and specializes in animal studies and the literature and history of eighteenth-century England. She has published on early-modern horsemanship practices, theatrical animals, the early circus, and performances of gender. In addition to authoring Becoming Centaur (2017), Monica is also the co-editor of multiple animal-studies publications.
Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Lena Wetenkamp‘s Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered: The Discourse of ‘Europe’ in Contemporary German Literature (Europa erzhalt, verortet, erinnert: Europa-Diskurse in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2017)) is an analysis of the idea of “Europe” in modern German literature. It not only deals with important issues such as spaces, borders, multilingualism and European identity, but also states that there is in fact something like a European poetic. Based on a division into two major parts, this study looks on the one side at essays and pamphlets and on the other side at contemporary German literature from Terezia Mora and Ilma Rakusa. In this way, the book convincingly achieves new literary perspectives on current European questions.
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In his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that is familiar to many within and without the academy—from bold, new angles. Rather than using the diary as a historical source, Goldberg’s book centers on the diary as its subject. In addition to closely analyzing the more well-known diaries of Victor Klemperer and Chaim Kaplan, Goldberg incorporates a wide variety of lesser-known first-person narratives into his work, showing the widespread nature of diary writing as a cultural phenomenon during the part. Combining the methods of history, literary studies, and psychology, this impressively interdisciplinary book asks: how did the unfolding of the Holocaust changed victims inner selves? His answers to this question expose the tensions between creation and destruction, and the duality of helplessness and agency, that characterize this genre.
Amos Goldberg is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Coming of Age: Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973 (Berghan Books, 2016), Martin Kalb, Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College examines the construction of youth culture in Munich Germany. Kalb describes constructions of Munich youth in three distinct periods, beginning with the years following the conclusion of World War II, followed by the years of economic stability following the Marshal Plan, finally ending with the protest years culminating in 1968. Overall, Kalb convincing shows how authorities used the fears of adult society effectively as a method to strengthen their control over society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her latest book, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sarah Fishman offers reader a social history of French families in the years that followed the Second World War. Fishman is focused here on illuminating the daily and practical lives of the men, women, and children who worked and often struggled to transition from wartime to peacetime. After 1945, French families had to negotiate a variety of changes that shaped, and were shaped by, shifting ideas and attitudes about gender roles and relations, love, sexuality, marriage, and parenting. To access the lives of French working and lower-middle class families, Fishman draws on a wide range of sources, including previously neglected popular press publications that reflected the politics and experiences of working people. She also uses juvenile court records from the period that detail family lives and dynamics, as well as state and societal norms and expectations.
Tracing the contours of a broad transformation from a vision of family centered on (paternal) authority to an emphasis on relationships, including fatherhood, the book also considers the impact of the ideas of figures like Freud, Beauvoir, and Kinsey on the everyday beliefs and behaviors of ordinary people. Attentive to the continuities and changes that ran throughout the period from 1940 to the late 1960s, the book places the postwar in a context that remembers the war while also setting the stage for the eruption of French political, social, and cultural life in 1968.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Edward Ross Dickinson charts the development of modern dance in the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century. Arguing that modern dance provided the aesthetic tools to address the central features of modernity, Dickinson illustrates its impact on Euro-American cultural life, as well as on ideas about gender, nation, race, science, spirituality, and selfhood. Furthermore, he ties the development of modern dance to the emergence of mass culture and the work of marketing modernity. As becomes evident in his analysis, these ideas were fraught with contradictions as modern dance was seen to be both chaste and sexual, scientific and spiritual, universal yet grounded in racial difference. Dancing in the Blood thus provides fascinating insight into the development of modern dance, not only as an artistic genre but as part of the larger project of modernity.
Edward Ross Dickinson is Professor in History at UC, Davis. He received his PhD from UC, Berkeley, and has taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. His research interests include the history of social policy, especially in the German child welfare system, and welfare policy in New Zealand; the history of sexuality in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Central Europe; and debates about sexuality, sexual morality and sexual radicalism in Europe and the US. He is completing a book-length interpretive essay on the history of the world in the long twentieth century, which will appear in 2018.
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The German youth movement of the late Kaiserreich and ill-fated Weimar Republic has been a subject of controversy since its inception. The longing for community that drove the movement, and a sense of shared experience that members found on long hikes to historic sites, has been linked to everything from a revolution in conservative thought to the rise of Nazism. But how did the youth movement see history? Why did hiking become a bridge between the past and the present? What possibilities did members feel in the drumbeat of German history?
Find out in our discussion with Robbert-Jan Adriaansen about his new book The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933 (Berghahn Books, 2015). By examining the hiking reports of the youth movement, Robbert-Jan traces the development of historical thought among its members and how their experience of heritage became a vehicle to express hopes for the future.
Robbert-Jan Adriaansen is an assistant professor of history at the Erasmus University Rotterdam where he teaches historiography and the philosophy of history. His current research on historical reenactment is part of their interdisciplinary Research Excellence Initiative Project “War! Popular Culture and European Heritage of Major Armed Conflicts.”
Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title “Policing Hitler’s Critics.” He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix
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Anthony J. La Vopa is professor emeritus of history at North Carolina State University. His book, The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), is an erudite intellectual history that explores how cultivated men and women in early modern France and Britain thought about the intellectual capacities of each sex. The manly and feminine attributes of the mind were tied to bodily and social concepts of female weakness and sentiment and male strength and reason. Beginning with the seventeenth-century salon culture of Paris, in which women were dominant and within an expanding commercial print culture, women and men conceptualized the gendered notions of what was required for polite conversation and intellectual agility. The exertion of labor was set against the desirability of the creativity and ease of play. La Vopa examines the works of multiple prominent thinkers and the positive recasting of the labor of the mind and who was qualified to engage in it. The author also shows how those engaged in debate attempted to live out their ideal for intellectual life. In course of a century and half, ideas about the nature of intellectual labor and the limits of the gendered mind formed the foundations of modernity.
This episode of New Books in Intellectual History was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sam White’s brand new book A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) turns the tales we learned in grade school about early European colonization of North America upside-down. In the last decades of the 16th and first decades of the 17th century, three empires—Spain, France and England—each sought to establish new colonial projects on the continent of North America. They had the misfortune to embark on these projects at the most severe point of a global climatic shift called the Little Ice Age, whose harsh winters, droughts and storms seemed to plague the unready Europeans at every turn. From Florida to Maine, North Carolina to New Mexico, climate and weather-related difficulties challenged European colonists in a multitude of ways, and White explains how even the nominally successful colony projects, like Jamestown, were lucky near-misses whose success was by no means inevitable. This is a totally new look at the early history of Europeans in North America, which holds significant lessons for coping with and thinking about our modern problems of anthropogenic climate change.
Sam White is associate professor of history at Ohio State University. An expert on climate and environmental history in the early modern period, he is also the author of the acclaimed book The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-founder of the Climate History Network, a resource for historians and other professionals studying climate history and climate change.
Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster. He also has his own historical podcast, Second Decade.
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In his new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven Remy, professor of history at City University of New York, examines the Malmedy massacre which took place on December 17, 1944 and the trial that followed after the conclusion of World War II. Remy effectively demonstrates how in the decade following the trial how a network of German and American sympathizers succeeded in discrediting the trial. Remy directly looks at the accusations of torture, which the defendants and their allies alleged led to false confessions. Although these allegations were false, Remy demonstrates how amnesty advocates used them successfully to not only discredit the trial, but distorted our understanding of one of the most brutal massacres in American military history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When the nations of Latin America fought for their independence in the early 19th century, they commissioned privateers stationed in the United States to attack Spanish skipping. In Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic (University of Georgia Press, 2015), David Head examines the activities of these privateers within the context of the contemporary Atlantic world. As Head explains, these privateers, most of whom were American citizens, existed in a complex environment of international politics, diplomacy, and economic activity. Operating in violation of U.S. law, they evaded the authorities in a variety of ways, from clandestine operations in the Louisiana bayous to deceptive claims to port authorities in Baltimore. While U.S. officials were often frustrated in their efforts to enforce the law, Head finds that civil claims were often pursued by the attacked merchants with greater success. It was only with the end of the wars, though, that the activities of these privateers came to an end, leaving them to embark upon lives often changed by their dramatic experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book, The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (SUNY Press, 2017) , Lars Rensmann, Professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, argues that even scholars of the Frankfurt school have often treated the theme of antisemitism with scant attention. However, as Rensmann argues, the problem of antisemitism had been a central motivating dynamic for their interdisciplinary research, from the very early years of the Institute.
In this episode, we begin by discussing the general silence surrounding the Holocaust that presided in Germany into the 1990s, and how this can be understood as part of a phenomenon that Critical Theory called “secondary antisemitism.” We then circle back to explore how the Critical Theorists explained the “primary” phenomenon of antisemitism as an interplay of psychological, social-historical, and economic dynamics. As we learn from this book’s rich analyses, the insights developed by the Frankfurt School on the authoritarian disposition, on hatred and racism, and on the pathologies of modernity retain deep relevance and applicability for the further understanding of today’s politics of unreason.
Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of military cadres and intellectuals in Peru and Spain c. 1770-1830. The book advances the argument that a Crown-sponsored change in the idea of “merit” in the Spanish Empire made possible the rise to power of new military cadres and the renewal of the Hispanic republic of letters. Ricketts argues that these changes had important consequences as these two cohorts of individuals battled over who had the merits to rule the Empire during the captivity of Spanish king Ferdinand VII under Napoleon, and after independence in Peru. Such shift in the conception of merit accounted for the rise of men like Agustin Gamarra and Andres de Santa Cruz, two of the most prominent leaders of independent Peru, to high military rank in the Spanish imperial armies first, and in the revolutionary ones later. The quest for an intellectual renewal in Spain and Spanish America also led to a reinvigoration of a Spanish Atlantic republic of letters. There too new men rose to prominence based on their literary and intellectual achievements. Part of these Spanish Atlantic intellectuals would battle with the men of the military concerning whom had the most “merits” to govern in Spain and Spanish America. Ricketts’ book stimulates the reader to ask questions regarding the origins of “meritocratic” thinking in Spain and Latin America, as well as how coherent military bodies came into public life.
Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at acasobe1@jhu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book Morality and Literature: A Historical Typology (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013)—in German: Moral und Literatur. Eine historische Typologie—Christian Kirchmeier, post doc at the University of Munich who is currently at Yale for a research stay, examines a change of different moral systems within the course of history. By looking at very many different German literary texts from different centuries he tries to find something which he calls “the historical grammar of moral judgments,” which basically means changes in morality on a structural level. Authors and works he therefore considers include Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, Andreas Gryphius’ Leo Armenius, Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Dying Cato, Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s The Island Felsenburg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle de Scuderi and Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities.
For more information about Dr. Kirchmeier please check out: http://christian-kirchmeier.de/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Catherine Zuckert‘s new book, Machiavelli’s Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017), systematically analyzes all the texts that Machiavelli wrote, exploring each text individually, but also as part of Machiavelli’s more expansive teaching as a philosopher, but more precisely as a philosopher of politics. Zuckert examines not only Machiavelli’s own work, but she also integrates the vast scholarship of Machiavelli’s work, exploring others scholars assessment of Machiavelli’s particular project in each work and also the broader interpretation of Machiavelli as a political thinker. Machiavelli’s reputation has long been a caricature of his actual work and teaching, and Zuckert’s book delves into not only the reason for his reputation, but also how and where it is derived in the texts themselves, often at the expense or in the absence of attention to corresponding teachings in other texts, especially texts beyond The Prince. Zuckert not only pays attention to the texts themselves and the myriad other works of scholarship and analysis, she also unpacks the historical data that Machiavelli integrates into his work while focusing on the ways in which the texts are dedicated, to whom, and how these aspects of the texts are important to understanding the content as well.
By exploring all of Machiavelli’s works, and how they connect to each other and refract the teaching in each text, Zuckert goes on to elucidate Machiavelli’s political project, which she explains provides a kind of teaching that is distinct from classical theorists as well as those who came after Machiavelli and who wrote in a much different manner. Machiavelli’s Politics is not only a beautifully written book, clear and complex simultaneously, it is an extraordinary resource with extensive integration of other works and scholars who have delved into analyzing and considering Machiavelli’s works over multiple centuries from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.”
Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in German, Lewy presents a typology of perpetrator types and dispels the idea that it was impossible for killers to walk away. He also presents arguably the most accessible analysis of the post-war justice available in English. Undoubtedly a must-read for anyone wishing to understand how and why people participate in acts of mass violence.
Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University. His dissertation, Political Civil Servants and the German Administration under Nazism, explores the dynamics of Civil Service behaviour under National Socialism, asking why senior administrators assisted the regime in pursuit of its ideological goals. He has forthcoming publications with the Journal of Contemporary History and the Routledge Studies in Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. He can be contacted at obyrne.darren@gmail.com or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in western Europe over the 1970s. Observers feared Germany was becoming “ungovernable” and France was moving toward “civil war.” The source of this discontent? Nuclear power. Not weapons. Electricity.
How did anti-nuclear protest become a debate about the future of society? What united farmers, housewives, hippies, and anarchists against the state? Find out in our conversation with Andrew S. Tompkins about his new book Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2016). By weaving government documents and police records with activist newspapers and oral history interviews, Andrew explains how a transnational network of activists emerged around the issue of nuclear power despite social divides and diverse interests inside the movement.
Andrew S. Tompkins is a historian specializing in modern Europe. He is a lecturer at University of Sheffield, a former Humbolt Fellow, and current research associate of the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin.
Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new book Thieves: Stealing in Literature, Philosophy, and Myth (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016)—in German: Diebe: Die heimliche Aneignung als Ursprungserzahlung in Literatur, Philosophie und Mythos—Andreas Gehrlach, post doc at the Humboldt University of Berlin, explores theft from a cross-cultural approach. This includes a discussion of several key German philosophers, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Hans Blumenberg, Sigmund Freud and others. Therefore, Thieves can enable the reader to perceive German intellectual history from a completely new perspective. Since his childhood Gehrlach has been preoccupied with the topic of theft, thus turning an autobiographical aspect into this highly interesting and thought-provoking book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Edgar Degas died in the fall of 1917. Marking this 100th anniversary, Kathryn Brown‘s edited collection, Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2016) brings together a range of authors and methodologies to consider the French artist in context, to examine aspects of his practice in terms of form and technique, and to think and rethink critical approaches to Degas and his legacies. Working in Europe, North America, and Asia, the volume’s fascinating and provocative essays introduce the reader to the artist in a number of ways while building on, responding to, and challenging some of the traditions and conclusions of previous Degas scholarship.
Featuring an introduction as well an essay by its editor, the collection is divided into three parts. In the first section, Art in Context; Gender, Race, and Labour, authors Norma Broude, Shao-Chien Tseng, Mary Hunter, and Anthea Callen examine Degas’s representation of working women and horses, racecourses, the “cafe-concert,” female spectators, and circus performers. The second part of the book, Making and Materiality highlights the production and physicality of the art that Degas produced as objects. Exploring the relationship of Degas’s painting to photography, the internal structures of his sculptures, and aspects of his printmaking and illustration, the essays by Marni Reva Kessler, Patricia Failing, Jonas Beyer, and Brown herself, are analyses grounded in the very practical and technical aspects of what and how the artist made. In the third section of the book, Writing Degas, authors Ruth Iskin, Heather Dawkins, and Anna Gruetz Robbins all pursue the testimonies and criticism of Degas’s friends, colleagues, and art historians, as well as his own reflections on his relationships, and the studio space where he worked. Moving in many different directions, the essays nevertheless cohere as a set with the aim of complicating our understanding of the artist, reconsidering previous assumptions, and opening up new questions about his oeuvre. This was my first interview with an author/editor of a collection and it was a pleasure learning more about how this group of essays came together in such an impressive volume.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford University Press, 2013), Pamela Swett, Professor of History at McMaster University is the first comprehensive examination of commercial advertising in the Third Reich. Swett argues that advertisements played a much greater role in normalizing the Third Reich then previously thought. She highlights how advertisers at all levels enjoyed a great deal of freedom to sell their products, while using the National Socialist message not because they were forced, but because consumers were attuned to it. Swett’s book is a fascinating look at the advertising and consumer industries during the Third Reich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge, 2017), Nicholas O’Shaughnessy details the centrality of political marketing to how the Nazis governed Germany, showing how vital it was to its success. As he explains, for all of the fear generated by the Gestapo and other tools of the authoritarian state, the basis of their rule was the construction of a broad consensus through domination of the media. At the center of this effort was Adolf Hitler himself, both as an architect of it and as the main figure in its imagery. As O’Shaughnessy demonstrates, the Nazi leadership created a brand that they spent enormous effort developing and protecting. Through a pioneering use of both “new” (radio, cinema, television) and “old” (newspapers, posters, oratory) media, the Nazis crafted a message that both sold their ideology to their contemporaries and contributed to the endurance of its imagery decades after the regime itself collapsed in the onslaught of a world war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to investigate further. In Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), Theodore Vial, Professor at Iliff School of Theology, argues that the intersection of religion and race can be better understood by looking at the work of nineteenth-century German romantics. In the post-enlightenment period religion becomes a racialized category. Vial examines the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Max Muller, and Johann Gottfried Herder in order to outline the linked nature of race and religion as social categories. He puts their definitions and positions to work to determine the conceptual framework these authors deploy for theorizing difference. In our conversation we discuss Immanuel Kant on race, Schleiermacher as theologian and scholar of religion, the symbolic power of Max Muller within contemporary Religious Studies, the role of language and nation in the construction of religion and race, W. E. B. Du Bois, theological anthropology, analyzing Australian aborigines, and the legacy of nineteenth-century German constructions of race and religion for Religious Studies today.
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with the Bosnian peasants for not living up to their nationalist and political imaginations. In Whose Bosnia? National and Political Imagination in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2015),Edin Hajdarpasic makes a number of arguments about how we understand nationalism and political movements in contested spaces. By exploring how these different movements defined Bosnia and Bosnians, crafted narratives of suffering and engaged youth, he argues that nationalism was a productive, open-ended force even in the face of seeming failures to achieve the nationalists’ goals. Hajdarpasic discusses these themes, as well as “nation-compulsion” which he defined as “a set of political and moral imperatives that one grapples with as part of becoming and maintaining oneself as a proper patriot.”
Edin Hajdarpasic is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses in Western Civilization; the modern Balkans; nineteenth-century Europe; and the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did a generation of Germany’s best and brightest become radicalized? What convinced young intellectuals to join the SS and perpetrate genocide in pursuit of a racial utopia? Find out in our conversation with Christian Ingrao about his book Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Polity Press, 2015). Christian traces the experiences of the war youth generation from defining events in childhood, through their student activism, into the Reich Security Main Office, and abroad where they could finally realize their ideas. The resulting portrait reveals how a generation of intellectuals came to believe, and how those beliefs led them to destroy.
Christian Ingrao is the former director of the Institute of Contemporary History (IHTP) and their current director of research. He teaches at the Catholic University of the West (Angers). His most recent book La promesse de l’Est : Esperance nazie et genocide, 1939-1943 (Le Seuil, 2016) explores Nazi dreams of victory and visions of the Thousand Year Reich.
Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe who specializes in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His debut chapter in Interrogation in War and Conflict suggested that terror remains overstated in our understanding of routine investigation practices in Nazi Germany. Ryan’s research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast. He tweets @Staxomatix and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com.
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At the close of the nineteenth century, Europe was teeming with apocalyptic dreams of destruction and renewal. In Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), Rebecca Mitchell traces how in late imperial Russia, music came to be seen as a transcendent force that offered salvation from the era’s atmosphere of decadence and decline. At the turn of the century, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy became a major inspiration for cultural elites looking for a solution to the problems of modernity. Nietzsche’s Russian orphans adapted the adamantly amoral German writer to suit their context, combining his belief in the transformative power of music with the visions of Orthodox philosopher Vladimir Solovev. Russian music lovers launched a search for the national Orpheus, alternately advancing Aleksander Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner, and Sergei Rachmaninoff as the chosen one. These figures differed in their engagement with musical metaphysics. While Scriabin reveled in his role of prophet and endeavored to create a musical Mystery that would mark the end of history, Rachmaninoff largely avoided philosophical musings; in a conversation with the Medtner brothers, he preferred to discuss Italian pasta. Rachmaninoff’s mass popularity was met with disapproval by some of Nietzsche’s orphans, who thought that his melancholic works reveled in the problems of the age rather than solving them. Their dreams for national salvation through music disintegrated amidst the chaos of war and revolution, and major composers including Rachmaninoff emigrated. However, Mitchell argues that their ideas found new life in the Bolshevik state, the Russian diaspora, and the post-Soviet search for national identity.
Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation project explores the role of death in Soviet culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Pieter Judson established himself as one of the top scholars of the East Central Europe with his first two books Exclusive Revolutionaries (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Guardians of the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2006). His latest book, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides scholars with the first major general history of the Empire since a new wave of scholarship began chipping away at the myths built up in various national historiographies. Not only does his book offer a reappraisal of Habsburg history that incorporate concepts like national indifference, but more than previous histories it gets out of the purely political realm to look at economic changes. In so doing beyond offering a new more nuanced understanding of how and why Austria-Hungary fell apart, he also suggests the the twenty years before 1848 were much more interesting than the conventional narrative has allowed. It was a pleasure to speak with Pieter again about this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Alexander Prusin delineates the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II. He starts from the medium-term background, reaching back to the unification of Yugoslavia, and covers both the chronological process and its wide thematic breadth, with issues ranging from collaborationism to resistance. The book is important, therefore, both for historians of Yugoslavia and Southeastern Europe and to historians of World War II and the Holocaust in general.
Orel Beilinson is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe, particularly the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. His research interests include the encounter of communism, religion, and modernity; the social history of law and religion under communism; and the comparative history of communism. He can be reached at orelb@mail.tau.ac.il.
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Andrew Smith‘s Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a political history of wine radicalism. Focused on the producers rather than the consumers of what Roland Barthes famously referred to as the nation’s “totem-drink,” Terror and Terroir examines wine politics and activisms in the Languedoc following the Second World War. In a first chapter, Smith looks closely at the memory and legacy of the “Grand Revolt of 1907,” a series of major protests that became a cornerstone of winegrower mythology in the post-45 period. Tracing the evolution of the winegrowers’ movement in the region from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, the book looks at a variety of groups and organizations that sought to represent the interests of producers. After 1961, the Comite Regional d’Action Viticole (CRAV) dominated the scene.
Over the course of the next two decades, the CRAV engaged in a variety of forms of direct action that came to a head with the “Gunfight” at Montredon in 1976. Thinking carefully about the political violence of this and other milestone moments, the book also looks at the intersection of the Occitan and radical viticulture movements; the impact of changes at the national level on regional lives and politics; and the effects of the major forces of modernization, European integration, and globalization. Drawing on a range of material from national and regional archives and press sources to oral history interviews, Terror and Terroir combines complex and compelling storytelling with careful historical and political analysis of a movement that mobilized thousands of French citizens over decades. The book has much to offer readers interested in the histories of wine and political radicalism (in equal measure!).
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
People study atrocities and mass violence for a variety of reasons. When asked, many offer thoughtful intellectual or political explanations for their choice. But in truth, the field is a practical response to a cry of the heart. How, people ask, how can people do this to one another? How can men and women do such terrible things? How can they do them to people they know?
Max Bergholz asks these questions systematically in his terrific new book Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016). The book is a careful, detailed description of the violence that exploded in a rural community in Croatia in 1941. Bergholz researched the book for a decade, poring through records from local archives and libraries all across the region. This allows Bergholz, Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, to answer questions about the history of ethnicity in the region, about the intersection of local agency and national leadership, and about the political impact of the memory of this violence.
But all of this is subsidiary to the burning question at the heart of the book: why did people who had known each other for years suddenly fall upon each other with such violence? The book thus enters into a discussion with Scott Straus, Christopher Browning, James Waller and others. But Bergholz brings a distinctively historical perspective to the discussion. He doesn’t dismiss psychological analysis. Rather, he reminds us that context and situation matters enormously.
The book is an enormously important contribution to the study of mass violence. Anyone interested in why neighbors kill neighbors will have to wrestle with his conclusions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the 10th century, a succession of Byzantine rulers reversed centuries of strategic policy by embarking on a series of campaigns that dramatically reshaped their empire. This effort and its consequences for the history of the region is the focus of Anthony Kaldellis‘s Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade (Oxford University Press, 2017), which provides the first survey of this important era of Byzantine history written in over a century. Kaldellis sees the campaigns that began in the 950s as a consequence of the collapse of the Carolingian empire and the decline of the Abbasid caliphate, which provided the Byzantines with an opportunity to stabilize their southeastern frontiers and to extend and consolidate their holdings in the Balkans and in Italy. Effected through a combination of military conquest and traditional Byzantine “soft power,” the result was a greatly expanded domain, one centered now in Europe rather than in Asia. As Kaldellis explains, what brought this period to an end was not any factor internal to the empire but the simultaneous threats posed in the late 11th century by the Normans, the Pechenegs, and the Seljuk Turks, which in the end proved too much for the Byzantine state to manage successfully even with the help of the warriors of the First Crusade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Food is a hot topic these days, and not just among the folks posting pictures of their dinner on Instagram. A growing number of scholars in many fields study food’s production, distribution, consumption, connection to geopolitics, environmental impact and history. Alice Weinreb‘s new book, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford University Press, 2017), is a most welcome contribution to this rapidly expanding and timely field of study.
The global industrial food system grew out of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. In 1914, that system became a weapon of war. For combatant states, maintaining (and disrupting) food supply chains emerged as a major military-strategic objective. Today, all states are caught up in the global food system, but Germany in the twentieth-century provides a unique place to observe its fascinating and often distressing historical permutations, because the country’s history condenses so many modern forms of state (imperial, fascist, socialist, liberal-democratic), not to mention global crises and political caesurae–the World Wars, the rise of National Socialism and its defeat, the country’s division and reunification.
Professor Weinreb’s ambitious, wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study also offers a wealth of perspectives on such topics as food aid, school lunches, obesity, the condition of hunger, and gendered labor, among many others.
Alice Weinreb is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century Europe, on the history and politics of food, European environmental history, and on the Holocaust.
Monica Black is Associate Professor and Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She teaches courses in modern European and German history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employed by successive Aragonese kings over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, and their service challenges many of our long-held assumptions of the divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. For the kings of Aragon, hiring jenets gave them a powerful force of light cavalry that could be used to foster their imperial ambitions, while the jenets themselves saw their service for Christian kings as fully compatible with their tradition of jihad. By describing their relationship, Fancy’s work highlights one of the many ties that linked Christian Aragon to Muslim North Africa, two regions that are usually treated separately rather than part of the interconnected Mediterranean world that emerges from his pages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dominant social norms and expectations shape how individuals and their public activities are understood. In Roman antiquity, various shifts influenced the production and dissolution of prejudices towards certain types of occupations. In Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa, explores the legal, social, and literary modes of persecution and stigmatization of unseemly occupations and voluntary associations. One’s membership in Roman society was often regulated through reputation and social position. Criers, funerary workers, and tanners were among the many trades that were viewed as unwholesome, marginalizing these individuals from the broader community. Over time there were shifts in social perceptions of certain types of work, often catalyzed by religious communities. In our discussion we talked about taboos as an analytical category, reading soundscapes in ancient texts, views of death, corpses, and pollution, the social context of tanners and their odors, mint workers and state labor, bakers and sensual trades, gladiators, archeological topography, the role of Christian and Jewish communities in shaping social norms, and maybe surprisingly, rednecks, the field of Classics, blogging, how to do good public scholarship, the Women of Ancient History database, and how walls embody emotions of fear.
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Carla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestana details the various political, economic, and religious factors that inspired England’s government, led by its new Protector Oliver Cromwell, to attempt an invasion of Spanish-held territory in the West Indies. She narrates the failed effort to take the island of Hispaniola, and the subsequent victory in conquering Jamaica. Yet, Pestana shows how incomplete that conquest was for the early years of English rule, and the various hardships that Jamaican settlers faced when trying to build the colonial economy. Along the way, she makes bold assertions about the conquest’s place in the broader history of English imperialism, as well as the role of piracy in Jamaican history.
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The majority of the books we profile on New Books in Military History are traditional research narratives, monographs written by historians and authors seeking to present a particular campaign, organization, battle, or individual in detail. Once in a while, though, we take pride in introducing our listeners to projects that are more focused on how memory and history are intertwined, bringing the past to the present. In this episode, we speak with New York Times travel writer and amateur historian Richard Rubin about his own thoughts on the First World War and how it shaped a special relationship between many Frenchmen and the ideal of America that survives to this day. His most recent book, Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count (St. Martins Press, 2017), is a deeply personal account of Rubin’s many walks across the Western Front and his encounters with local caretakers, fellow tourists and pilgrims, and everyday people in Belgium and France. Our discussion is more of a conversation about the state of memory and the daily encounters with history that, prior to this point, remained largely unknown to so many people. The interview, and Rubin’s book, are tactile reminders of the history that lies, quite literally, just beneath our feet . . . if we know how and where to look for it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today “The Fens” is largely a misnomer, as the area of eastern England is now largely flat, dry farmland. Until the early modern era, however, it was a region of wetland marshes. Eric Ash‘s book The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) describes how The Fens was transformed into the environment we know it as today. As Ash explains, the marshes supported a population that took advantage of the lush grasses produced by the regular flooding to engage in animal husbandry, with flood control managed locally through appointed commissions of sewers. In the late 16th century, however, a combination of environmental change and political shifts led the royal government to support proposals for large-scale drainage projects that would turn the wetlands into farmlands. Though the plans’ advocates argued that drainage would improve the value of the lands in the region, the locals resisted such efforts to disrupt their ways of life through a variety of legal and extralegal means. In response the crown moved from efforts to develop consensus for the plans to asserting royal authority in environmental management in order to start the projects, beginning by the 1620s the first of a series of efforts that over the course of the next half-century drained many of the fens in the region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O’Neill shows how the city’s homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O’Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest’s homeless, O’Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement.
Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree for Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods.
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In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in the age of Charlemagne and his descendants, heretics were largely “seen as either distant foreign dangers or the legendary villains of ancient church lore.”
That is, until around 840 CE, when one Gottschalk of Orbais began preaching what he called twin predestination. Gottschalk was heavily influenced by Augustine, who had argued that long before time began, God already ordained who would be among the elect and who among the damned. Gottschalk’s twin predestination theology made him into a figure Professor Gillis refers to as a “religious outlaw,” a “heretic in the flesh,” the Carolingian Empire’s foremost religious dissenter.
Heresy & Dissent in the Carolingian Empire is a fascinating study of a figure whose meaning has been debated for centuries, but whose own moment in the 840s reveals a world beset with fears of sin and pollution.
Matthew Gillis is Assistant Professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Gerben Zaagsma, Senior researcher at the centre for contemporary and digital history at the University of Luxembourg, discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, focusing particularly on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade.
Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the Left, and asks to what extent Jewishness and Jewish concerns mattered in the International Brigades and why the Botwin Company was actually created. To this end, the book examines representations of Jewish volunteers in the Parisian Yiddish press (both communist and non-communist).
In addition, he analyses the various ways in which the memory of the experiences of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company came to be constituted and constructed after the Second World War and the Holocaust. To that end the book traces how discourses about Jewish volunteers became decisively shaped by post-Holocaust debates on Jewish responses to fascism and Nazism, analyses how, and why, volunteers of Jewish descent eventually became Jewish volunteers after the war, and discusses claims that Jewish volunteers can be seen as ‘the first Jews to resist Hitler with arms’.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the second podcast of Arguing History, historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie address the question of whether the Protestant Reformation, an event which transformed Christianity in the Western world, was an inevitable event. This they do by considering the origins of the Reformation within the context of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, the role that personality (particularly that of Martin Luther) played in events, and the interaction between faith and politics. What they reveal is the complex matrix of factors involved in events, which included the technology of the printing press, the political makeup of the German empire, and the appeal of Luther’s evolving message all of which combined to take the Reformation in directions which the participants involved never intended.
Peter Marshall is professor of history at the University of Warwick, and the author and editor of numerous works, including Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation(Yale University Press, 2017) and 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Alec Ryrie is professor in the department of theology and religion at the University of Durham. Among his many works are The Age of Reformation: The Tudors and Stewart Realms, 1485-1603 (Routledge, 2009) and Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World (Viking, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Peloponnesian War was one of the first subjects of historical inquiry, and one that has been the subject of many works ever since Thucydides wrote his famous account of the conflict. Yet these works typically focus just on the decades when Sparta’s Peloponnesian League fought against the Athenian empire. In The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jennifer T. Roberts sets the war within the broader context of inter-state hostilities in 5th and 4th century Greece. As she explains, fighting between the two sides did not begin in 431, nor did it really end in 404. Instead the Peloponnesian War was just one of a series of conflicts that stretched throughout the Hellenic era, in which victories often simply set the stage for the next round of battles. Though Sparta may have defeated Athens in 404, by continuing the story beyond then Roberts shows how the new alignments that resulted transformed the city states in ways that led to Sparta’s own defeat in 371, making her triumph in the war only a fleeting one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of his success in defeating Rome’s legions on the battlefield, Hannibal ultimately failed in his lifelong goal. In Hannibal (Simon and Schuster, 2017), Patrick N. Hunt recounts the triumphs and frustrations of the legendary commanders dramatic military career. The son of a Carthaginian leader who fought Rome in the First Punic War, Hannibal was raised to reverse Carthage’s loss in that initial conflict. This he did by taking the fight to Rome, where his outnumbered armies triumphed over the Romans in three successive battles. Yet, as Hunt explains, Rome soon learned from Hannibal’s example, and the Carthaginians’ inability to translate battlefield victories into a Roman surrender left him mired in a war of attrition he could not win. By the time he faced a Roman army at Zama in 202 BCE, the situation was now reversed, as Scipio Africanus used many of Hannibal’s own tactics against him. In this Hunt exposes the irony of Hannibal’s life, as his effort to destroy Rome’s nascent empire only made it stronger, setting the stage for the next seven centuries of its domination of the Mediterranean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press 2013) Dr. Raul Coronado provides an intellectual history of the Spanish America’s decentered from the dominant narrative of Enlightenment, revolution, and independence stemming from Protestant Europe and British America. Examining pamphlets, broadsheets, manuscripts, and newspapers, Coronado situates the emergence of Spanish American revolutionary thought at the moment of rupture, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed King Fernando VII in 1808. It was at this moment, Coronado argues, when subjects of the Spanish Crown were thrust into the modern era with the task of envisioning and producing an alternative to the ancien regime. With an engaging and sweeping narrative that transports readers across time and space, Coronado explores the central actors and ideas that intersected in and developed out of the Spanish American borderlands to lead independence movements throughout Latin America during the first half of the 19th century. Rooted in the region that would become modern-day Texas, A World Not to Come explores the formation of community and identity, as well as the transmission of ideas, among Texas Mexicans during the eras of Mexican independence and U.S. westward expansion. In the process, Coronado provides a different history of modernity (“alternative west”) that is truly transnational in scope and content.
David-James Gonzales (DJ) has a PhD in History from the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the intersection of Latina/o civic engagement and politics on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural displays and amusements, an emergent urban modernity including a host of negotiations between social classes, public and private, men and women, citizens and the state. And if I had to name one historical figure to stand for the transformation of the nineteenth-century capital? Haussmann. Hands down.
Alexia Yates‘s book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital (Harvard UP, 2015), opened my eyes to a whole other world of everyday urbanism and historical actors in the city during the first decades of the Third Republic. Acknowledging the undeniable impact of Haussmann and Haussmannization on the city that Paris became under and after the Second Empire, Selling Paris considers the activities, interests, and effects of a host of other figures who shaped the city’s property relations and commercial culture from the early years of the Third Republic to the First World War. In the books chapters, readers will find a social history of the business of French building during this period, from planning and production to use. Focused on the architects, private developers, municipal authorities, speculators, real estate agents, notaries, property owners, and tenants whose interactions and negotiations influenced the form, representation, and experience of Parisian real estate in purposeful ways, the book makes significant contributions to our understanding of the history of the capital and capitalism in France.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In mid-March, Europeans observed the Dutch national elections with intense interest. Onlookers believed that a victory of the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders will influence the results of coming elections in France, the UK, and Germany. It was thought that it would impact these countries immigration policies, and shape their attitudes to their Muslim population. The media coverage stressed the racist and xenophobic rhetoric of Wilders and his supporters, and emphasized the growing tensions between the Netherland’s Muslim and non-Muslim citizens.
In Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) anthropologist and scholar of religion Pooyan Tamimi Arab uses sound to suggest a counter-narrative about the state of the Dutch nation. This exceptional monograph looks at debates over the azan, the Muslim call to pray, to reveal the civic negotiations between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. Tamimi Arab looks to local town halls meetings where community representatives work to find a compromise between the wish for public worship and demands for a discreet practice. By focusing on the sonic dimensions of public worship, Tamimi Arab can expose hidden power struggles. He finds for example, that a dual desire to belong in the nation and to keep a connection to their countries of origin motivates many of those demanding the use of loudspeakers for the azan. In his field work, Tamimi Arab observed how although conflicting needs pose challenges to religious tolerance, tensions were often mitigated on the ground. His account of the process results in a more optimist portrayal of a society in influx than the standard narrative of Europe in the twenty-first century. This makes Amplifying Islam a useful example for scholars who aspire to challenge the privileged status of the text in current scholarship.
Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and its activists impact on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17
At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins. Modernist architects believed they could build a new city that would match the modernization goals of the new communist government. In Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) , Brigitte Le Normand reveals the ideals that under girded these architects plans for Belgrade, along with the postwar realities that thwarted their attempts to foster a new society through a modernist built environment. She analyzes the political, social, and ideological implications of urban planning and the built environment, demonstrating how modernist architects were able to mold their ideal cityscape to fit Yugoslavia’s third way after the Tito-Stalin split and how market socialism created expectations that undermined their vision of social spaces. Her work demonstrates how architects and urban planners in Belgrade were part of a larger movement of modernism in postwar Europe and were affected by the movement away from modernism in the 1960s.
Brigitte Le Normand is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A revealing exploration of representative modes of medievalism, Medievalism: A Critical History (Boydell & Brewer; hardcover 2015, paperback 2017), by David Matthews, examines the people, institutions, and moments that have driven societies around the world to reimagine and revive a medieval past. Eschewing shallow comprehensiveness, David Matthews instead offers a careful and extended handling of significant moments of medieval revival.
From Sir Walter Scott and Cardinal Newman embracing structures of medieval ceremony in the early nineteen century to today’s medieval reenactments and medieval markets that employ touristic capital by celebrating a medieval inheritance, Matthews explores the positive vision of the romantic middle ages. Imagined as a world of chivalry and preindustrial economy defined by courtesy and noblesse, the romantic medieval offers connection to the land, more primitive, and more peaceful, social relations, to those who long for a world before industrialism and global capitalism. Following the interlaced negative vision of the grotesque middle ages–a world of barbarity and violence, of cruelty, ignorance, superstition, and narrow parochialism–the argument examines the ways in which communities and thinkers recover both grim and grand visions of the medieval, also exploring aspects medievalism that fall outside this neat binary.
Medievalism: A Critical History moves deftly from examinations of medieval recovery in statecraft, aesthetics, art, literature, architecture, and the scholarly discipline of medieval studies. Matthews shows that an investment in the medieval has often reached far beyond academic interest in historical detail or popular interest in knights and castles. He pays particular attention to what is here called civic medievalism–attempts by writers and thinkers to recover that part of the middle ages that encouraged trade, labor, and industry, an interest on the part of statesmen and business leaders who find in the middle ages a worthy model of infrastructural expansion and open commerce. Likewise, with careful eye on ways in which being “medieval” can serve as a condemnation, Matthews pays close attention to how the idea of being medieval in the present day has the power to both attract and repel those who see an unevenness of time in our present world.
Discussing the ways in which various writers and communities have employed these modes of medievalism to great effect, Medievalism: A Critical History asks readers to consider why we employ the past to do work in the present, and how the pursuit of recovering the past makes that very past a malleable thing. Careful not to exaggerate the significance of medievalism in moments when it was merely one stream of many, while also directing attention to ways in which interest in the medieval world has been underrecognized, David Matthews makes a commendably searching and scholarly contribution to the study of medievalism.
Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation by exploring how imperial priorities shaped map-making of he dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and how these changed over the long century during which a fully independent Polish state did not exist. While focused primarily on Russian cartography is the primary focus of this work, Seegel places those developments in context with discussion of Polish nationalist map-making and a discussion of Habsburg map-making of the region as well. In so doing, he also offers intriguing portraits of the cartographers who ultimately made this research possible. It was a pleasure to interview him at last about this book and I invite you to listen to our discussion of his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), David I. Shyovitz, Associate Professor of History, and of Jewish and Israel Studies, at Northwestern University, plumbs the worldview and theology of the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the Jewish Pietists, who flourished in the Rhine Valley and in Regensburg in the 12th and 13th centuries. Professor Shyovitz marshals compelling evidence to show that the Pietists submitted both the natural world and the human body to close and disciplined empirical study. While they were fascinated by inexplicable phenomena, bodily transformation, spells and incantations, and even bodily and effluvia and excrement, the Pietists’ fascination was driven by their effort to forge links between the natural world and their theological worldview.
David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.
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At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016) is one of my favorites of the past several years. An interrogation of the meanings of queer, theory, French, and response, the book is anchored around the anti-gay marriage demonstrations and activisms that proliferated in France during the lead-up to the passage of the 2013 Loi Taubira (a.k.a. “marriage pour tous”). The book focuses on a central claim of French opponents of gay marriage and adoption: the notion that (American) gender and queer theory is responsible for spreading homosexuality in France, and has thus contributed to the undoing of the French family and the nation as a whole.
Throughout its four chapters, the book considers the French response to queer theory in terms of fantasy and echo. This is not a book about reception in a passive or uncomplicated sense. Rather it is the study of a set of reverberations back and forth across the Atlantic that is always already a matter of translation and interpretation. Indeed, the so-called American theory that anti-gay activists have presented as a foreign menace finds much of its own inspiration in the work of French thinkers and writers. Drawing in part on a series of interviews with French feminist and queer intellectuals and activists, the book also offers critical insight regarding the meanings and anxieties surrounding minority identities and communities in contemporary France. Queer Theory will be compelling reading to anyone interested in the history and politics of sexuality, and in the possibilities of thinking and enacting change into the future, in France, in the U.S., and beyond.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.
*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb reacted to the (post-)Yugoslav wars, with an emphasis on their discourses and activities regarding (sexual) war violence and on each other. Using a Bourdieu-based methodology supplemented by interviews, she challenges common assumptions that were not subject to scholarly debate before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the capital of the African nation of Angola today stands a statue to Njinga, the 17th century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba kingdoms. Its presence is a testament to her skills as a diplomat, warrior, and leader of her people, all of which she demonstrated over the course of a reign described by Linda Heywood in Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard University Press, 2017). The daughter of the Ndongo king Mbande a Ngola, Njinga grew up in a west central Africa that was facing growing encroachment by Portugal, who were major customers in the regions slave trade. Seeking to extend their control, the Portuguese challenged Njinga’s succession to the throne in 1624, prompting a war that lasted for three decades. To persevere, Njinga had to navigate the complex politics of the region, gaining control of the Matamba kingdom and pursuing ties with both the Vatican and the Dutch to provide a counterweight to the Portuguese. The treaty signed with Portugal in 1656 was a testament to her success, allowing her to focus on establishing a legacy of an independent kingdom that she could pass on to her sister after her death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Historically, foreign policy has been seen as a sphere shaped and determined by the concerns of men alone. In ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Julie Gottlieb demonstrates the fallacy of such a view when applied to understanding how Britain responded to the growing aggressiveness of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. By highlighting the activities of politically-engaged women from across the ideological spectrum, she details the range of efforts they undertook from hosting social engagements with politically prominent individuals to lobbying on key issues in their efforts to sway the development of foreign policy. As she reveals, much of the debate over appeasement was framed in gendered terms, often citing the concerns of women as justification for concessions to avoid war. Gottlieb also assesses the attitudes of British women generally towards appeasement, drawing upon the fledgling efforts of public opinion polling to identify their positions on the issues and the influence they exerted politically. The result is a nuanced reassessment of the development of appeasement and the debates that took place over it, both in the years prior to the war and in the months that followed Britain’s entry into it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Most accounts about the naval battles of the First World War focus upon the stalemate between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, or the German raiders who attempted to disrupt Allied commerce. In Securing the Narrow Sea: The Dover Patrol 1914-1918 (Seaforth Publishing, 2017; distributed in the US by Naval Institute Press), Steve Dunn focuses on the often overlooked service of the British naval forces stationed in the English Channel during the conflict. The eclectic collection of destroyers, converted yachts, and requisitioned trawlers that comprised the patrol made for a considerable contrast with the dreadnoughts at Scapa Flow, yet, as Dunn demonstrates, they played a vital role in securing the Channel for the safe transport of British troops to France and in opposing the transit of German U-boats to their stations. In describing the admirals who commanded the station over the course of the war, the lives of the men who served aboard the ships, and the various engagements which they fought against their German opponents, he explains the unglamorous yet frequently dangerous contribution the patrol made to Britain’s victory over Germany in 1918, one that was subsequently glossed over in the postwar era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jeanette Jouili‘s fascinating new book Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2015) navigates practices and challenges of living pious ethical lives in inhospitable conditions. Through a finely textured analysis of quotidian practices of piety among conservative Muslim women in France and Germany, this book offers a nuanced and analytically rich examination of the intersection of ethics, secular conditions, and religious normative imaginaries. The strength of this book lies in the way it brilliantly hues the tensions of everyday life with sharp theoretical reflections on questions of ethics, moral agency, and gender. Although a commentary of aspirations of piety among Muslim women in Europe, this book also shows fractures in European promises of pluralism.
SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How do you make taxpayers comply?
Lotta Bjorklund Larsen‘s ethnography, Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (Berghahn Books, 2017) offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies: the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project’s passage through the Agency, from its inception, through the research phase, in discussions with management to its final abandonment. With its fiscal anthropological approach, Shaping Taxpayers reveals how diverse knowledge claims–legal, economic, cultural–compete to shape taxpayer behaviour.
Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree from Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities.
The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy.
Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States.
James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this episode, I speak with Tim Walker, the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017). This book stems from recent interest in Finland’s educational system resulting from its success on international assessments and explains how policy translates into classroom routines and structures as well as what American teachers can learn from their Finnish counterparts. We discuss how the two countries take different views on what makes good teachers and learning outcomes as well as ways teachers can promote well-being in any school context.
He recommends the following books for listeners interested in his work and our conversation:
Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? by Pasi Sahlberg
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley
The Well-Balanced Teacher: How to Work Smarter and Stay Sane Inside the Classroom and Out by Mike Anderson
Walker joins New Books in Education for the interview. To share your thoughts on the podcast, you can connect with him on Twitter at @timdwalk.
Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Anna Harwell Celenza examines the arrival of jazz in Italy after World War I and the role of Mussolini in promoting jazz throughout Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. With the technology of the radio and gramophone, jazz became part of the local music culture and ethnic and national identities were not viewed across the new mediums. In Jazz Italian Style Celenza explores how Italians made jazz their own, creating a genre distinguishable from American varieties and influencing Italian-American musicians. Well researched and documented, Celenza’s work presents a narrative of jazz that is seldom heard and must be remembered. In addition, Celenza uses @JazzItalianStyl to promote Italian Jazz and share some of the music she recovers in her book.
Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
500 years ago, a German monk and professor named Martin Luther started a well-intentioned movement to reform “the Church” (Jesus founded only one, after all). Luther’s object was not to split the Church, but to bring it into conformity with what he thought was the “true Christianity,” the one he discovered (and, he claimed, any believer could discover) in the Scriptures.
Things didn’t work out the way he wanted it to, for the Church did split. And split, and split, and split. There are a lot of different kinds of Protestants. In alphabetical order (and not an exhaustive list by any means): Adventists, Anabaptists, Anglicans, Baptists, Calvinists, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostalists, Pietists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, and Quakers. Each of these confessions can be further subdivided. For example, I was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), not the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
What happened? Why can’t the Protestants get along? Why do they keep founding new churches?Does anything unite them? And what role did they play in creating modern religious (and political) culture? In his wonderful and witty book Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Viking, 2017), Alec Ryrie offers answers. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Caterina Corner lived a life that was composed of a mixture of adventure, power, and tragedy. The daughter of a Venetian patrician and merchant, she was married to the king of Cyprus while barely a teenager. Within two years of voyaging to her new home in 1472, she became a mother, a widow, and the ruler of Cyprus, over which she reigned until she was dethroned by her Venetian benefactors in 1489. In Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2015), Holly Hurlburt describes the life and artistic legacy of this remarkable woman. As she explains, much of our image of her is shaped by the portraits and other artwork of her, both from her reign and afterward. In combination with the extant documentary record, they reveal how Caterina maintained and projected her authority as queen in a tumultuous time while facing challenges from several Mediterranean powers. Ever after her removal to a community in northern Venice, she maintained her influence and dignity as the lady of Asolo, both as a noble landowner and as a Renaissance patron. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Raz Chen-Morris‘s new book traces a significant and surprising notion through the work of Johannes Kepler: in order to account for real physical motions, one has to investigate artificially produced shadows and reflections. Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) beautifully places Kepler’s optics into conversation with the art and literature of the period. It looks carefully at the crucial ways that changing notions of visibility set Kepler’s optics up as the cornerstone to his radical Copernican astronomy as Kepler made three moves that helped him bridge the visual gap between the heavens and its observers: (1) He defined light as a mathematical body, (2) He showed how instruments of observation could be manipulated mathematically to achieve exact representation of distant and almost invisible heavenly occurrences, and (3) He helped develop a new language for scientific observation by reformulating the relationship of mathematics to phenomena. In the course of his elegant analysis of how and why this all played out, Chen-Morris also guides readers through the relationships between Kepler’s ideas, Shakespeare’s writings, Renaissance painting, and more. Its a fascinating book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From the early days of the BBC in 1922, women were everywhere in the broadcasting company’s offices. They were absent, however, argues Dr. Kate Murphy from most of the historiography devoted to this illustrious institution. In this vibrant monograph, Murphy sets out to find these hidden female figures. A former producer of the long-running program Woman’s Hour and currently a Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth University in the UK, Murphy is cognizant both of women’s contribution to the BBC and of the challenges they face working there. In Behind the Wireless: A History of Women at the BBC (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Murphy delivers on the titles promises. First, she offers a detailed portrait of the BBC in the interwar period as a unique workplace complete with medical services, a subsidized canteen, and a country-club for its workers. She demonstrates why the fact that the company was created around on a new technology made it especially suitable for women in general, and ambitious ones in particular. Second, she illuminates the daily routines, challenges and opportunities for the scores of female typists, secretaries, clerks and telephone-operators who labored for the company. Murphy supplements this institutional history with four case studies of outstanding women, who rose to the top echelons of the organization. These three components make for a fascinating read. The book will complement the scholarship about the BBC but also add to the current exploration of the participation of women in the workforce in the interwar period. I expect that the book will be of great interest for scholars of media, gender, modern Britain and labor relations. It is a wonderful example of how to bring all these concerns into conversation.
Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and the impact its activists had on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il
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The prowess of the Roman empire was imbued with courage and militarism. Symbolised by the combative male soldier, Michael Edward Stewart‘s tool of historical enquiry is masculinity. In his book, The Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas in the Early Byzantine Empire (Kismet Press, 2016), Stewart explores whether theological constructions of manhood as ascetic and pacifist changed the contours of manly Romanitas. From the martial metaphors of Synesius of Cyrene, to the third gender of Eunuchs, to the paganism of Emperor Julian to the piety of Theodosius I – The Soldier’s Life reminds us that gender has been constructed for centuries. The fluidity of boundaries and power in this ancient construct of masculinity makes a poignant case against restrictive binaries and static hegemony. Published by Kismet press, this book is available online as part of a larger project for making knowledge, history and scholarship accessible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Meredith K. Ray’s new book contextualizes and translates a range of seventeenth-century letters, mostly between Margherita Sarrocchi (1560-1617) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), that collectively offer a fascinating window into the correspondence of two brilliant early modern writers and intellectuals. Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology, and Poetics in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) traces the relationship between Sarrocchi, a Naples-born writer, famous for her salons and for writing an epic poem that emphasized the significance of women as knowers of the natural world, with Galileo. The letters feature three major themes: Sarrocchi consulting Galileo for writerly advice as she revised her epic poem, Sarrocchi’s efforts to defend Galileo’s discoveries to the scientific community in Italy, and Sarrocchi and Galileo’s shared interest in judicial astrology and natal charts or nativities. The slim volume will be a resource not just for readers and researchers but also for classroom discussion, where the letters could serve as great primary sources to feature in a number of course contexts. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Mark Braude’s Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle (Simon and Schuster, 2016) tells the captivating story of the rise of Monte Carlo as Europe’s most famous casino-resort from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the 1920s. In a series of fascinating chapters, Braude takes readers through the history of this modern, luxury playground, from the legalization of gambling in Monaco in 1855, through a rise of the site in the decades that followed, a period of decline after the First World War, and a revival during the Jazz Age of the interwar years.
Throughout, Making Monte Carlo follows the lives of individuals, families, companies, and a larger network of player-consumers, workers, and witnesses. Center-stage are the members of the Blanc family who first opened Le Grand Casino de Monte Carlo in 1858 and controlled the Societe des bains de mers (SBM). The SBM is Braude’s main archival source for the inside story of casino plans, management, and operations. The book also engages the lives and interests of the Grimaldis, the dynasty that presided over the tiny principality that became a haven for gaming and entertainments, a center of risk and adventure, of fantasy and speed. And then there are those who came to game, to work, to be entertained, and to watch. A number of participants would tell their stories, contributing to a mythologizing that made of Monte Carlo a destination whose imaginative dimensions exceeded by far its physical area.
Making Monte Carlo is at once a history of commercial and business interests and of the rapid and remarkable changes in modern culture that took place in the period covered by Braude’s chapters. This was an era of the proliferation of mass spectacle, of advertising and marketing, of innovations in the technologies of leisure, recreation, transport, and tourism. It was an age that saw the emergence of new forms of capitalist exploitation and imagination, of transformations in the idea of selling and in the selling of ideas. Considering the impact of Monte Carlo’s development on tourists rich and less-so, on the workers who made the casinos, hotels, and clubs run, and on all those (in Monaco and beyond its small territory) who witnessed the spectacle as it unfolded, the book will be a compelling read to anyone interested in the place itself, as well as all those cultural dreams it has sought to encourage and represent since its inauguration as a high-end, high-stakes capital.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016), Elana Shapira, Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, examines the complex histories of Jewish cultural patronage in Vienna. She offers a nuanced and compelling account of the cultural networks of the time. This book is an important contribution, which overturns established ideas about the Jewishness of Viennese cultural figures of this period. Shapira brings into question dominant ideas about assimilation, modernism and cultural interchange. This book will be an important reference on this subject for many years to come.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) presents the history of the nation’s forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey and also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America’s most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. The author rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a “slave king” as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, he identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa.
The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves also suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with European primarily Portuguese cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas. The book has already garnered honors as the winner of the Richard O. Collins Award in African Studies, the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, and the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize.
Jeroen Dewulf is associate professor of Dutch studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and director of the school’s Institute of European Studies. In addition to The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo: The Forgotten History of America’s Dutch-Owned Slaves, he is also the author of Spirit of Resistance: Dutch Clandestine Literature during the Nazi Occupation and co-editor of Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. His current research focuses on the connections between African-American culture in New Orleans and West African traditions, and will also soon be published in book form.
James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did the idea of time change during the nineteenth century? In Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World (Oxford University Press, 2015) Ryan Vieira, a sessional lecturer at McMaster University, explores Parliament in the nineteenth century to understand both the bureaucratic structures and the individual parliamentarians’ experiences of time. The understanding of time was shaped by changes in the ideas of industriousness, efficiency and respectability, as well as new communications and technologies.The book challenges current understandings of constitutional change and parliamentary reform, offering a new story of the Victorian age. Moreover, the book considers the context of the British Empire, thinking through the impact of these changes on parliamentary systems across the globe. The book will be essential reading for historians and students of politics, as well as a fascinating text for the general reader.
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Matthew James Crawford’s new book is a fascinating history of an object that was central to the history of science, technology, and medicine in the early modern Spanish Atlantic world. The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) looks closely at the struggles of the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century to control the cinchona tree and its bark, and traces the history of quina as a product of local, imperial, and commercial networks in [the] eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Science and empire were deeply intertwined in the Spanish Atlantic, and Crawford offers a window into the epistemic culture produced by Spanish colonial governance and resulting encounters across and within the Andean and Atlantic contexts. Part One of the book looks carefully at what it meant to know nature in the early modern Atlantic World. It traces the transformations of quina from a local Andean remedy into a botanical commodity and an imperial natural resource from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, showing how these transformations resulted from the bark’s integration into Andean, Atlantic, and imperial networks of circulation of people, texts, objects, and images. Part Two of the book explores several key conflicts in the late eighteenth century that emerged as the Spanish Crown tried to assert greater control over the tree and its bark. It’s a story that will be of interest to the histories of science, medicine, natural history, and early modernity! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books (The Jewish Publication Society, 2016), Rabbi Mark Glickman, of Temple Bnai Tikvah in Calgary, examines the massive theft of Jewish books by the Nazis. He offers a compelling account of the history of Jewish books in Europe, the place of Jewish books and culture in Nazi ideology and Jewish efforts to save these books during the Holocaust and rescue and redistribute them after the war. This book is a highly readable contribution, which should bring this little known history to a wide audience.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Part detective story, part travelogue, Noah Lederman decided to write A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for his Family’s Holocaust Secrets (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) to find answers to the questions he had since childhood about his grandparents experiences during the Holocaust. Through conversations with family members, visiting his ancestral town, and combing available documents, this memoir shares both the stories uncovered and the ways in which survivors and their descendants grapple with and overcome tragedy. Find him on Twitter @SomewhereOrBust.
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Stephen Brockmann’s The Writers’ State: Constructing East German Literature, 1945-1959 (Camden House, 2015) introduces readers to a specific atmosphere–political, cultural, and historical–that accompanied the emergence of East German literature from 1945-1959. Covering almost fifteen years, the research presents insightful observations of the literary process that happened to be intricately connected with the political turbulence.
As Stephen Brockmann puts it, literature in East Germany was never about “just” literature: “It was always also about collective identity and the path toward a better future–however imaginary and illusive that future may be (7).” In the post-war Germany that happened to go through a division process, literature, culture affairs in general, appeared to be involved in the state making and identity construction. In the GDR in particular, literature was employed as a tool to re-direct national identity and memory. In this process, politicians and functionaries were shaping the cultural affairs through a close collaboration with writers and artists. It would be unfair to say that the officials were particularly eager to encourage artists to participate in the construction of a new state–the GDR-0that was, in fact, based on the historical and cultural past of Germany. In post-Nazi Germany, writers were taking an initiative to come to terms with the Nazi past, offering ways to move forward, putting the tragic past behind, and produce new history. While engaging with the memory of the past, writers were responding to the contemporary political developments, shaping the understanding of the present and outlining routes for the future.
Brockmann narrates a detailed account of the cultural and political developments, successfully illustrating the intersections of the political and the cultural. Alongside the analyses of the exemplary works of East German writers (Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, etc.), Brockmann presents a vast collection of historical data confirming the collaboration of the politicians and artists in the matters of state and nation construction. Particular attention is given to the official organizations, which functioned to secure a certain development of the cultural affairs and that were extensively supported and governed by the functionaries.
Brockmann’s research also includes an insightful investigation of the cooperation of GDR and the USSR, particular in terms of constructing an ideological foundation for the East Germany sector. While extensively incorporating German literary traditions into their endeavors to construct new literature, East German writers were also engaging with the influences exercised by Soviet propaganda and Soviet literature.
The Writers’ State is an attempt to re-evaluate the 1940s and the 1950s in the history of German culture and literature. Brockmann challenges a cliche according to which this time period is rather uneventful in terms of cultural developments and re-discovers intriguing nuances of the East German literary landscape.
Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA). Dr. Brockmann also has courtesy appointments in the departments of English and History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators. But you also find a lot of bizarre, well, people. These include giant people, tiny people, one-footed people, people with two heads, and people with no heads at all (their eyes, mouths and noses are in their chests). What is one to make of all these different kinds of humanity? And, more important from a historical point of view, what did Renaissance mapmakers think they were doing when they adorned their cartographical products with them? In her wonderful new book Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Surekha Davies offer answers aplenty, and good ones. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 2016) Devin Naar delves deep into the archives to produce this intimate and exciting portrait of Salonica’s Jewish community between the late 19th century until World War II, when the overwhelming majority of the population was deported to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Naar’s study takes readers into institutional hallways and homes of Jewish elites and ordinary citizens, revealing a community rapidly adjusting to changes in its relationship to political regimes claiming Salonika and its diverse residents as their own. Jewish Salonica offers readers an opportunity to consider Jewish communal agency and vibrancy in a period and place too often missing from modern Jewish historical narratives.
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During the mid- to late 1930s, a small but socially prominent group of right-wing Britons took a public stance in support of the Nazi regime in Germany. While many of them curtailed their activities upon Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, as Richard Griffiths reveals in his book What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45 (Routledge, 2016) some of them continued to support their nation’s declared enemy in a variety of ways. Refuting ex post facto justifications of their actions, Griffiths punctures the myth of wartime national unity by demonstrating how Oswald Mosley and others sought to erode Britons’ support for the war effort in the early months of the conflict by joining pacifist organizations and criticizing openly the motivations behind Britain’s participation in the conflict. Though many of these prominent pro-Nazis were locked up by the authorities in May 1940, several far-right advocates for Germany among the upper class were spared arrest, thanks to their connections and government concerns about the impact on public opinion of detaining of so many prominent members of the social elite. With the prewar pro-Nazi movement disrupted by the detentions, however, many of its unrepentant members turned to individual activities designed to advance their beliefs, while others gradually abandoned politics in favor of other activities as their views were marginalized permanently by the course of events both during and after the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research (Palgrave, 2016). Dr. Benneworth, from the University of Twente’s Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, was part of a pan-European project to consider the impact of Impact and the way Arts and Humanities narrate their public value, research which was the basis for the book. The book draws on a wealth of empirical and theoretical material, including comparative case studies from Ireland, Norway, and The Netherlands. The comparative approach allows the book to contextualise engagements with science policy, the role and purpose of the university, public value, and innovation, to offer a new vision of Arts and Humanities research that avoids instrumentalisation. The book is important and essential reading for all interested in the future of higher education and research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Was the War for American Independence really about American independence? It depends on who you ask.
In his new book, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (Knopf, 2016), Larrie Ferreiro draws on decades of new research in archives and on battlefields across the US and Europe to detail the smuggling, espionage, gun running, and politicking that wrested the United States from British control. A revision of the national myth that the American colonies rose up and threw off imperial oversight solely by the unity found in the strength of their convictions, this globalist return to the 1760s and 70s weaves together military, economic, diplomatic, and social history with fascinating stories of the European soldiers, sailors, merchants, and ministers who conspired and collaborated to give the north American colonies a fighting chance. In Brothers at Arms, and in this interview, Dr. Ferreiro advances the argument that for the governments of France and Spain, defeating the British in the American colonies was as much about achieving their own interests in the sphere of European power as it was about heeding the call to advance the ideals of liberty and justice across the Atlantic, and that the relationships that developed between France, Spain, and the new United States did more to shape American institutions and ways of life that we often acknowledge.
Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carls work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Benjamin Martin’s The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) examines the attempt by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to forge a European cultural empire out of their military conquests during World War II. Martin shows that the idea of Europe as a discrete political and cultural entity did not come from the postwar period (much less the European Union of the 1990s), but owes much to the cultural discourses of the 1930s. Germany in particular pushed for a kind of authentic “volkisch” cultural nationalism with a basis in folk traditions of central and eastern Europe. Germany’s initiatives in music, film, and literature appealed to the cultural sensibilities of Europe’s conservative cultural elite, offering a third way between American commercialism (epitomized by jazz and Hollywood films) and Soviet Bolshevism.
With the Fall of France in 1940, the Nazi-fascist new order aimed to replace Anglo-French Civilization the universalist basis of European culture since the Enlightenment, with Kultur, a vision of culture that was transcendent and deeply rooted in national specificity. Nazi Germany’s attack on modernism created friction between its ally fascist Italy. Mussolini’s government promoted modernist experimentation in music and art as well the unconventional style of the futurists. Unlike Hitler, who abhorred modernism, Mussolini was a patron to modernism as well as more traditional artistic styles. Both coexisted in the fascist state. Martin shows that although Italy could scarcely compete with Germany militarily, the Italians believed they could export their culture in such a way as to build a kind of Italian-focused cultural hegemony in Europe, supplementing and even competing with Germany.
James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Assistant Professor Federica Goffi fills a blind spot in current architectural theory and practice with this book, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s, the Vatican (Routledge, 2013). In proposing a hybrid approach which merges architectural and conservation theory the work offers the reader a counter-viewpoint to common understandings of preservation as singular moment from the past which has been frozen and brought forward to the present.
Through a micro-historical study of a Renaissance concept of restoration, a theoretical framework to question the issue of conservation as a creative endeavor arises. It focuses on Tiberio Alfarano’s 1571 ichnography of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, into which a complex body of religious, political, architectural and cultural elements is woven. By merging past and present temple’s plans, Alfarano created a track-drawing questioning the design pursued after Michelangelo’s death (1564), opening the gaze towards other possible future imaginings. Federica Goffi book further uncovers how the drawing was acted on by Carlo Maderno (1556-1629), who literally used it as physical substratum to for new design proposals, completing the renewal of the temple in 1626.
This research shows how architectural and conservation practices can be merged in contemporary renovation. By creating hybrid drawings, the retrospective and prospective gaze of built conservation forms a continuous and contiguous reality, where a pre-existent condition engages with future design joining multiple temporalities within a continuity of identity. The study might provide a paradigmatic and timely model to retune contemporary architectural sensibility when transforming a building of recognized significance.
Brant Matthew Tate
https://au.linkedin.com/in/t8architect
https://uq.academia.edu/BrantMatthewTate
branttate@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity.
Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience.
In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor.
In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city.
Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
James Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American history at Harvard University. Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers a detailed and sweeping intellectual history of the ideas that are at the heart of the democratic process. Kloppenberg traces the features of democracy beginning with ancient Athens and Rome to revolutionary America and Europe to the challenge of the American Civil War. He examines the conflict fraught process of applying the principles of deliberation, pluralism, and reciprocity in establishing a form of government in which popular sovereignty, autonomy and equality would be realized. Drawing from the works of multitude religious and Enlightenment thinkers and placing ideas within cultural and often violent political upheaval, Kloppenberg challenges us to reflect on the unfulfilled promise of American democracy.
Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kelly Watson’s Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York University Press, 2015) explores the history of the New World through the lens of the cannibal myth. Watson establishes that accusations of cannibalism in the Americas during the early modern period became a valuable discursive tool to justify the European imperial project. She shows how early accounts of crazed cannibal women grounded the often discordant voices of Spanish explorers, colonial officials, and clergy into one persuasive call for action in the Caribbean and Mexico.
Watson shows how Spanish accounts followed similar calls for action against cannibals in ancient and medieval texts echoing the writings of Pliny and Herodotus. Although these claims were often exaggerated or fabricated, the cannibal myth became a kind of prehistory essential for the atrocities and enslavement of native peoples of the Americas. French and English colonists also employed the cannibal myth for their own interests. Watson shows how French Jesuit missionaries used the spectre of native cannibalism as a means to amplify their own sense of Christian martyrdom in Quebec. The English too used captivity narratives to reinforce their claim to North American lands as a something that was once wild and savage now made civilized through great diligence and personal risk. In all contexts, the cannibal myth identified and enhanced the masculine identities of the colonizers, enhancing a claim to subjectivity, justice, and reason to the perceived chaos of effeminized native peoples.
James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of The Composition of Movements to Come (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Stevphen Shukaitis, a senior lecturer in work and organisation at the University of Essex, approaches these issues from an Autonomist Marxist perspective, thinking through a diverse range of issues, for example cultural labour, and practices, for example the art strike. The book also uses a range of artistic examples, including a detailed engagement with Neue Slowenische Kunst to think through the composition of movements to come. The podcast discusses a forthcoming exhibition of the work of Gee Vaucher at Firstsite in Essex, UK. The book will be of interest to critical theorists, as well as scholars from art, politics and social movement studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Richard Bourke, Professor in the History of Political Thought in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, began developing his history of Edmund Burke’s political thought in 1991. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press, 2015) uses Burke as a window into the eighteenth-century articulations of British imperial power, exploring the way that Burke approached relations between Britain, Ireland, America, India, and France. Beginning with Burke’s boyhood in Ireland, and closing with the challenge of grappling with Burke’s ongoing legacy, this beautifully written book displays Professor Bourke’s long study, attention to detail, and gift for trenchant observation. Our conversation ranged over subjects as familiar today as they were in the 1700s, including Burke’s understanding of representative politics as a means of resolving conflicts present in the public at large, struggles between state and corporate power, and the warrant for popular revolution.
“A career doesn’t have the coherence we impose upon it belatedly, but there exist preoccupations that recur and drive our action.”
Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Megan Thomas offers a thoroughly researched and closely attentive account of how anthropological sciences contributed to the making of the Philippines. While attending to the political concerns that drive Edward Said’s critique of orientalism, Thomas corrects his thesis by pointing to how orientalist forms of knowledge and modes of inquiry could be put to the service of nascent nationalist projects. Filipino polymaths used expertise obtained in ethnology, philology, orthography, folklore and history to advance claims that situated them as the equals of, and sometimes superiors to, their archipelago’s Hispanic rulers. Drawing on Spanish, German, French, English and Tagalog language sources, Orientalists, Propagandists and Ilustrados is a study of the colonial encounter in the best traditions of Southeast Asian scholarship. Not only does it offer a nuanced telling of the colonial intellectual encounter with the islands, and an intelligent and engaged critique of postcolonial scholarship; it is also a compelling history of the Filipino present.
Megan Thomas joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss colonial forms of knowledge and the difference between India and the Philippines, racial theory in 19th century Filipino nationalism, the letter K controversy, and the legacy of the late, great Ben Anderson. (Visitors to the website in the Philippines can go to the Anvil Publishing website to order the 2016 reprint of the book, with a new introduction by Caroline Hau.)
Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press, 2016) Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick explores these, and many more, questions about the final years in a rich intellectual life. The book combines detailed studies of Foucault’s recently collected lecture series with archival material and his publications, to give an in depth engagement with the changes and continuities in his thought during the last decade. Addressing questions associated with key terms, such as governmentality, as well as confession, the self, power, truth telling, and many other core ideas and themes, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in this most important of Western thinkers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why were German Jews so fascinated by Iberian Sephardic history? In Role Model and Countermodel: The Golden Age of Iberian Jewry and German Jewish Culture during the Era of Emancipation (Lexington Books, 2015), University of Oklahoma Professor Dr. Carsten Schapkow looks beyond the typical model of German-Jewish assimilation in response to emancipation in German lands a failed model, according to many to uncover the paradigm that Jews in Germany really spoke, wrote, and dreamed about during the long 19th century: the history of the Iberian Sephardic Jews as their model.
From popular journalists and authors such as Heinrich Graetz and Ludwig Philippson to elite academics, from scientists to philosophers, Jews in Germany imagined their future according to their understanding of Jewish life under Muslims and Christians in Spain and Portugal during the so-called Golden Age and the period of la convivencia. According to their understanding of that era in Iberia, Jews had served as cultural mediators, their language and other skills enabling Jews to benefit the majority culture. Jews integrated into the majority culture, according to this view, without sacrificing their identity. They were able to make a difference not only within Jewish history, that describes this era as a Golden Age, but also be regarded as important participants in Iberian culture, diplomacy, science, and philosophy. Dr. Schapkow draws on an impressive variety of sources to prove his point.
Dr. Schapkow spoke to New Books in Jewish Studies from Germany, sharing very interesting insights into both the history of Iberian Jews and the history of German Jews offering a window onto extraordinarily engaging questions. Read this exceptional book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Sephardi Jews with roots in the Ottoman Empire who sought citizenship within European nations for a variety of reasons, including socio-economic mobility and political refuge. While analyzing complex legal systems and the ways in which different nations viewed their extraterritorial subjects, Abrevaya Stein never loses site of the individual experiences of Jewish men and women. Indeed, by offering a series of case studies that range from Salonica during the Balkans War to 1930s Shanghai and Baghdad, she demonstrates how questions over citizenship and status were often determined by local politics and personalities and could lead to vastly different fates for these Jewish “proteges.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jessica Greenberg’s After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores a dual tension at work in Serbia in the early 2000s. She reveals young people’s disappointment in what they saw as a betrayal by their parents’ generation that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the failure of democracy in Serbia, as well as adults’ disappointment that young people did not live up to expectations of what student activists should be. This “politics of disappointment”opened up new understandings of democratic engagement on the part of Serbian students, resulting in activism that utilized “quality” protests, expertise in administrative reform, and procedural participation in politics. Greenberg draws on ethnographic research with three student groups to demonstrate young people’s frustration with the practicalities of life in Serbia and the consequence that student activists rejected utopias, “whether socialist, nationalist or revolutionary.” Although Greenberg argues throughout the book that lived democracy is profoundly contradictory and flawed and that it will never live up to idealized moments and normative expectations, she also demonstrates that democratic engagement can take a variety of forms in post-socialist, post-Cold War Eastern Europe.
Jessica Greenberg is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. Recent publications include articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Caroline Ford’s Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016) explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far from being a product of the postwar environmental movement, Ford shows how French society began to understand how humans adversely affected their surroundings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Popular writers like Francois-Antoine Rauch demonstrated how deforestation altered the climate and damaged the habitability of the nation. War, revolution, and a series of devastating floods brought the questions of deforestation, urbanization, and industrial capitalism into conflict with the finite resources of nature. Public worries over resource depletion and climate change mingled with a new bourgeois consciousness developing in the nineteenth century. France’s countryside became a place of romantic longing for families, a source of inspiration for artists, and an important symbol of national pride. Historical landmarks became sites of a unique French heritage to be preserved and protected for future generations. Empire also became a site of environmental sensitivity, where the conflicting interests of Europeans and colonized peoples played out through discourses of conservation and ecological change in French Algeria.
James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civil society and political culture from the 1970s to the present. Picking up where many historical studies leave off, the book pursues the legacies of the period of France’s Trente Glorieuses, including a number of critical political shifts and turning points during the last four decades. A study focused on French elites, the book moves from consideration of the contributions of intellectuals, academics, and journalists, to the ways that changing ideas and vocabularies played out in the everyday life of French politics.
Concerned with the broad consensual middle ground of French politics since the 1970s, the book is divided into two parts: the first examines French neo-republicanism in the wake of De Gaulle, while the second looks at a range of liberal critiques of the varieties of that republicanism. Seeking to push past traditional categories of left and right in the French context, the book looks closely at how actors across the political middle responded to the major issues that seemed to most challenge definitions of national identity. Considering the impact of postcolonialism in debates about laicite, integration, and immigration, A Divided Republic also looks at parite, the idea of the Anglo-Saxon in French political discourse, the question of regional differences, and the role of the language of crisis in state reform. Attentive to the always evolving and contested meanings of ideologies, terminologies, and their strategic deployment, the book will be highly compelling reading for anyone interested how the political thinks, speaks, and acts in contemporary France.
Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. Please drop her a line at panchasi@sfu.ca if you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
You read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points out in his excellent new book Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015) they often got it right, despite their “Orientalist” prejudices. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Islamophobia, both as a term and concept, has a storied and complicated history, and understanding its many layers in our current historical moment remains important for any number of audiences and purposes. By focusing on contemporary incarnations but also giving historical context, Todd Green accomplishes an admirable task in The Fear of Islam: An Introduction to Islamophobia in the West (Fortress Press, 2015). Professor Green combines lucid and accessible prose with meticulous attention to detail and extensive footnotes; he strikes an impressive balance while simultaneously aiming at a scholarly and lay audience. The book explores the contours of Islamophobia both in North America and Europe, which outlines instructive similarities and differences, as the phenomenon surfaces in various contexts, within an array of colonial and political histories.
Green organizes his book in smart fashion, making the chapters accessible on their own (for teaching purposes, for example), though likely best understood in sequence as each chapter builds organically on what precedes it. He explores the history of Orientalism, impact of 9/11, “professional Islamophobes,” media portrayals of Islam and Muslims, and offers some prescriptions at the end for combating Islamophobia. Green combines historical analysis, social-scientific polls, and also conducts interviews with the likes of Keith Ellison, Ingrid Mattson, and Tariq Ramadan, all of which contribute to the richness of the text. In terms of applications, any number of college instructors could consider adapting this text for use in the classroom, and it will also interest scholars who focus on Islam in the West, critiques of Orientalism, religion and politics, as well as the lay reader who seeks an erudite yet digestible introduction to the enigma of Islamophobia.
Elliott Bazzano is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His research and teaching interests include theory and methodology in the study of religion, Islamic studies, Quranic studies, mysticism, religion and media, and religion and drugs. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at (bazzanea@lemoyne.edu). Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Peter Trawny, professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, explores the place of anti-Semitism in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Using Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks, Trawny explains that the philosopher’s anti-Semitism was not just a few stray remarks, but was deeply incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an impressive study of the economic and political vitality of the forest, from the reign of Louis XIV through the middle of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Franche-Comte region, the book explores the meanings and values of the forest to a range of stakeholders– the state, landowners, manufacturers, and peasants–all of whom sought varying modes and degrees of control over Frances woodland resources and spaces. Examining key moments in the states attempt to manage the forest, the book pays close attention to local forms of response and resistance to interventions such as the Ordinance of 1669 and the Forest Code of 1827.
Revealing the deeply political significance of environmental resources and concerns throughout a period of revolutionary upheaval, including shifts from monarchy to republic to empire, and back again, Forests in Revolutionary France is a book that reminds us of the connections and tensions between the histories of central authorities and everyday lives, between private and public interests, and between tradition and modernity in the discourses and practices of conservation, community, and property over two centuries. Examining the long and complex history that notions of preservation and degradation have had in France, as elsewhere, the book also contributes to our understanding of contemporary concerns over the uses and abuses of the forest in an era of increasing awareness of climate change and the need for more sustainable alternatives to existing/previous approaches to the natural environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center, investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the ways in which they related to their origins, impacted upon their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and differences that emerged among them over time. Jacobs builds an in depth picture of these theorists, particularly in relation to their theorization of antisemitism and their attitudes towards Israel. This book is a definitive history of the topic which will be referenced for many years to come.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and most readable account of the Crusades relying on Islamic sources. Cobb expands the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Crusades by placing traditional conflicts within Muslim accounts of Frankish aggression. In general, medieval Muslims were not overly concerned with Europe and ongoing relationships between Christians and Muslims only really existed in the Mediterranean context. European expansion into Muslim lands throughout the Middle Ages marked a different phase of encounter,but these incursions were not always clearly demarcated by religious boundaries. Cobb illustrates the often competing logic behind political alliances, military aggression and intervention, or discursive justification. The Race for Paradise does a wonderful job of presenting the narrative in a new light and dissolving many of the assumptions about pre-modern conflicts that have been produced by one-sided accounts of the Crusades. In our conversation we discussed the Frankish conquests, the significance of Jerusalem, Mediterranean Muslims communities, Arabic sources, notions of jihad, Frankish rule in the Levant, Saladin and his political heirs, thinking about the Crusades today, and making an audio book.
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I (NAL Caliber, 2016), National Archives historian and forensic archivist Mitchell Yockelson reappraises the American Expeditionary Force’s performance under the command of General John J. Pershing. Accordingly, the American forces’ combat experience in the September to November 1918 Meuse-Argonne Campaign is shown to be far more pivotal to Allied victory than allowed for in the standard Anglo-centric literature of the conflict. Even as Pershing’s army acquired its craft in hard fighting against an increasingly implacable and desperate German opponent, the men of the A.E.F. proved to be relentless in their efforts to clear the densely wooded and fortified forest that had resisted French efforts for the previous four years. Yockelson’s account of the campaign is even-handed and well-written, providing the foundation for an interesting conversation about the book and his own approach to writing and interpreting history from a wide range of primary and secondary sources. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1190). John Freed fills this gap with his new book, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (Yale University Press, 2016), which offers readers both an account of Frederick’s life and his posthumous image as a German ruler. Freed begins by describing the historical background of 12th century Germany, setting Frederick’s succession to the throne within the context of medieval dynastic politics. From there he recounts Frederick’s campaigns against both the papacy and the Italian communes, his subsequent efforts to strengthen his rule in Germany, and his death in the Near East while participating in the Third Crusade. Though an undercurrent of frustrated ambition ran throughout many of his efforts, Frederick nonetheless became a symbol of a united Germany by the 19th century and, in the process, achieved a stature as a sovereign that belied the complicated realities of the world in which he lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From the 1880s onward, Beirut-based calendars and almanacs were in high demand as they packaged at least four different calendars into one, including: “the reformed Gregorian calendar; the unreformed, Julian calendar used by various churches of the East; the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar; and the Ottoman ‘Rumi’ or sometimes financial/’Maliyye’ calendar.” Described as a center of calendar pluralism, Beirut’s plurality of time was less an exception than it was a quandary to later advocates who aimed to organize time along geographical lines.
In The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2015), Vanessa Ogle excavates 19th century movements to reform and standardize time: summer time, calendar time, time zones, religious time, and national time among others. Ogle questions the inevitability of 21st century time, demonstrating that it was the object of active creation for nearly two centuries prior. The rise of nationalism, the consolidation of colonial practice, along with autonomous religious reform movements simultaneously gave rise to, and were in turn, molded by advocacy focused on time. New communications technologies, such as the telegraph, and time-keeping devices, such as city clock towers, similarly served as the infrastructure around which time-keeping debates became organized.
Written as a historical account, time becomes a central character in this book: casting a common lens over otherwise disconnected places and people, raising controversy, and shifting between the center and the periphery of a broader story of 19th century transformation.
Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science and technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his expansive The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (Yale University Press, 2015), Daniel Jutte suggests new ways of understanding the scientific revolution of the early modern period through exploring the ways in which Christians and Jews engaged in the exchange of secret knowledge. As opposed to contemporary understandings of secrets as information needing to be exposed to the public or being withheld for potentially dangerous reasons, Jutte argues that early modern Christians and Jews often thought of arcane knowledge as positive and truthful. By looking at what he terms the economy of secrets, particularly Jewish participation in the keeping and transmittance of knowledge in areas as diverse as alchemy, cryptography, and espionage, Jutte argues for broader understanding of Jewish agency, economic opportunity, and sites of intellectual and cultural exchange during this era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This is particularly true of the lives of women, which are often, in biography, confined to the marriage plot and detailed as events in the lives of men. As Jessa Crispin writes in her new book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats & Ex-Countries (University of Chicago Press, 2015), “The important task is to understand and modify the stories that are holding sway.”
The founder and editor of the recently shuttered lit-blog Bookslut, Crispin spent a year and a half traveling abroad. Her genre-bending book, The Dead Ladies Project, is the legacy of that year and it’s a work that goes a long way in modifying the stories we typically tell, not just about women but about human beings- as thinkers, travelers, artists, and individuals.
It’s a contemplative, wandering work, which captures the disorientations of travel, the anxiety/ecstasy of being alone, the ways in which we carry our pasts with us, and the integral role stories play in our understanding of our possibilities and the ways in which we live our lives.”What saves you is a new story to tell yourself about how things could be,” Crispin suggests and, as she moves from Berlin, Trieste, Sarajevo, St. Petersburg, contemplating the lives of William James, Nora Barnacle, Rebecca West, and Claude Cahun, she opens up story after story, expanding the narrative possibilities as she goes.
Hers is a story which suggests the richness that comes of bouncing our lives off those of others. “It was the dead I wanted to talk to,” she writes, as she sets out on her travels. “I’d always been attracted to the unloosed, the wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere. I needed to know how they did it, how they survived.” It’s an account which suggests the hunger for and value of such stories- the stories of lives which, as Carolyn G. Heilbrun put it, enable us to forge new fictions and new narratives for our own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Ethan Katz examines and interrogates Jewish-Muslim relations from 1914 to the present. Arguing that interactions between Jews and Muslims must be understood in and through the respective, changing statuses and relationships of both communities to the French state, The Burdens of Brotherhood pursues the history of this “triangular affair.” Drawing on a range of archival, press and media sources, as well as oral interviews, the book emphasizes everyday lives and mutual perceptions in and between spaces private and public, local and transnational. Its chapters move from the diversity and legacies of wartime experiences, to family and community gathering places in three different French cities (Paris, Strasbourg, and Marseille), to the routes and mobilities of people, cultures, and politics across the Mediterranean. The Burdens of Brotherhood revisits the First World War, the interwar years, the period of Vichy and the Occupation, the French-Algerian War, and the final decades of the twentieth century. It also traces the impact of international movements and politics on ethno-religious communities and identities in the French context, from forms of Zionism and anti-imperialism to the vicissitudes of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948. Towards the end of our conversation, Ethan and I had a chance to speak about the recent French past, including the events of January 2015 that he addresses in the book’s conclusion. Written with the present in mind, The Burdens of Brotherhood offers vital historical perspective and insight on issues of urgent concern with important implications for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How does one “rethink and revise the key concepts of Hannah Arendt’s political theory in light of the struggles of asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants” (207)? In her new book Rightlessness in An Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants (Oxford University Press, 2015), Ayten Gundogdu (Political Science, Barnard College) engages this question to explore both a radical critique and radical rethinking of human rights in our age. The book challenges and reimagines central dimensions to Arendt’s thought – rightlessness, the political and the social, personhood, labor and work, and the ‘right to have rights’ – at the same time that it provides incisive analysis of the precarious conditions of and political action by migrants. The book works with Arendt to offer important critiques of a number of aspects of contemporary human rights theory and practice, and ultimately develops an approach to human rights as “political practices of founding.”
John McMahon has recently completed his PhD in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and will be Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Beloit College starting in August 2016. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014), Sven-Erik Rose, Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, explores how Jewish intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century reevaluated Judaism with the tools of German philosophy. That philosophy offered Jews ideas with which to think about the place of Jews in German society.
The book won the 2015 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belonging and unbelonging among Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenes and even Austrians. Ana Foteva applies postmodern geography, literary, and colonial theories to demonstrate the relationship between the development of national identity, the pull of Habsburg imperial identity, the shaping of Yugoslav identity, and the fracturing of the Balkans in the 1990s. In our podcast conversation, she discusses and challenges stereotypes of the Balkans as a region of perpetual conflict. Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe (Peter Lang, 20speaks to complex identities in the region rarely seen in contemporary media accounts.
Ana Foteva received her PhD in German literature at Purdue University. Currently she holds the position of Visiting Assistant Professor in German Studies at St. Lawrence University.
Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Commons at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Russian and East European history at the University of Washington. Her research interests include the intersections of national, Soviet and European identities in the Baltic countries. Recent publications include articles in Ab Imperio and Cahiers du Monde Russe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At least twice in past interview descriptions I’ve used the famous phrase attributed to Hitler: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” To be honest, I couldn’t have told you much more about the extent of German knowledge of the Armenian genocide and its aftermath.
After reading Stefan Ihrig’s wonderful new book Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Harvard University Press, 2016), that’s no longer true. The book is a comprehensive and insightful look at what Germans knew about the Armenian genocide, when they knew it, what they wrote and said about, and how what they wrote and said mattered. It’s a wonderful book, full of colorful quotations and insightful asides.
It’s important, of course, for people interested in Armenia and/or the Holocaust. But it’s equally important in suggesting the ways in which genocides do not happen in isolation and in suggesting our need to see the phenomenon globally rather than separately. And it reminds us that the suffering of genocide doesn’t end with the conclusion of the conflict, but lingers on, as do the disputes about what really happened.
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In Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (University of Illinois, 2015), Kenyon Zimmer, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas, Arlington, examines the anarchist movements and ideas of immigrants to the United States from the 1880’s through the 1940’s. Using sources in half a dozen different languages, Zimmer builds an in-depth picture of these movements’ achievements and challenges. This book is a definitive transnational history of working-class immigrant radicalism, which suggests that anarchist ideas are very much still relevant today.
Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser[at]student.unimelb.edu.au.
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How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Studies and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, explores are range of examples to probe the decade of Right Wing government between 2002 and 2012. Drawing on the implicit/explicit distinction in cultural policy studies, Ahearne considers how core cultural concepts have changed in France, for example the French idea of ‘laicity’ and state secularism, as well as discussing specific cultural examples. These include television and media policy, museum building, eduction policy and the political uses of French history. Overall the book is framed by the continuities and differences between the Chriac and Sarkozy regimes in France, along with the struggle for hegemony over culture and thus over government. The book will be of interest to cultural policy, cultural and media studies and French scholars, as well as those interested in examples of the governmental use of culture.
Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books In Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets @Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940 (Bloomsbury, 2015), Daniel Tilles, Assistant Professor of History at the Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland, examines the use of antisemitism by Britain’s interwar fascists and the ways in which the country’s Jews reacted to this. Tilles challenges existing conceptions of the antisemitism of the British Union of Fascists, demonstrating that it was a far more central aspect of the party’s ideology than has previously been assumed. This book is a definitive account of British Fascism and its Jewish opponents during this period. With the rise of the far right in Europe, this book is very much relevant today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
One hundred and forty-five years ago this week, the French state massacred thousands of its own people during the semaine sanglante (bloody week) of the Paris Commune. Kristin Ross’ Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso Books, 2015) pushes readers to consider Communard thought and actions in a frame that moves beyond the 72 days that traditionally define (and confine) the Commune as an event. This is a Commune that begins with the meetings and reunions of the 1860s rather than the states attempted seizure of the cannons protecting the capital in March 1871. Extending the spatial and temporal bounds of the Commune to include the lifetime of its participants and supporters within and beyond Paris, Communal Luxury opens up new possibilities for our historical understanding of 1871. It also renders visible and analyzes a neglected archive of Communard thought as a resource for contemporary political struggles and activisms in the 21st century. Liberating the Commune from both the French national republican histories that have attempted to incorporate it, and histories of state communism that have cast the Commune as the failed precursor to 1917, Ross pursues the lived and conceived history of a set of events that have gained mythological status in the century and a half since their unfolding. The book directs our attention to the ideas and perspectives of a range of actors and thinkers: Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Eugene Poittier, Elisee Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, William Morris, and Karl Marx. From the Communard call for a Universal Republic, to new programs for education and the arts (including an aspiration to the public beauty of communal luxury), to shifting visions of the possibilities of revolution and solidarity into the future, the book explores what Marx referred to as the working existence of the Commune. More a study of the theory and political praxis of the movement than a history of the Paris Commune in a traditional sense, the book illuminates the past while speaking to the present in profound ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton University Press, 2015), Todd Endelman looks across three centuries and on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to examine the history of Jews who decided to leave Judaism, most often in the form of conversion to Christianity. While offering new contexts for studying the minority of those who sincerely embraced their new faith, Endelman’s primary interest lies with the hundreds of thousands of Jews who became Christians in the Modern period for what he describes as primarily “pragmatic” concerns – continued obstacles to full political, social and occupational integration in their nations of origin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nicole Rudolph‘s At Home in Postwar France: Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort (Berghahn Books, 2015) contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the three decades after 1945 known as the Trente glorieuses. Rudolph’s emphasis is on French designs and experiences of dwelling, and the interior spaces of French homes in particular. The book argues that housing was essential to the modernizing project that French society engaged in during these years, a vital site of reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War, and a key locus of nation-building and democratization. In this period, the French state actively pursued policies that sought to guarantee its citizens the right to safe, hygienic, and comfortable homes that would nurture individual happiness while helping to strengthen families as the building blocks of a thriving society.
From the creation of a Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism in 1945, to the housing crisis of 1953, to the yearly Salon des arts menagers promoting new household methods and technologies, to the oil crisis of the early 1970s, At Home in Postwar France examines the class, gender, and design ideals and tensions of a France in the throes of major transformations on multiple fronts. Pursuing the diffusion, mediation, and reception of the new housing forms that developed in the period, the book considers the contributions of state officials, architects and designers, and proponents of domestic economy and organization in France. It also examines the reactions of the residents and social commentators who felt and evaluated the impact of these forms. At Home in Postwar France explores a range of hopes and dreams for modern French living spaces, thinking through a variety of new approaches to housing on a mass scale. Taking on the complicated relationship between home and citizenship in postwar France, the book offers readers new perspective on how French women and men dwelt and thought about dwelling during this critical period in the nations history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Most biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (Pegasus, 2015) the inaugural volume of a projected three-volume biography of the French ruler Michael Broers’ takes a different approach. Drawing upon a new and vastly expanded collection of Napoleons letters to chronicle his subjects life from his early years in Corsica to the eve of his 1805 campaign, Broers focuses on his achievements in politics and state-building. He sees Napoleon’s time as conqueror and ruler of Italy as key both to his emergence as a prospective leader and to the development of his ideas of governance. Though applied bluntly in Egypt, their legacy in Napoleons development of the French state during his subsequent years as First Consul and as emperor are made clear by the author, who details how they created not just the structure of administration France uses to this day but more modern and uniform states throughout much of Europe as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Ayesha Ramachandran illustrates the anticipated enormity and surprising subtlety of these questions. Prose, vivid imagery and poetry form the text’s arc as Ramachandran distills an interdisciplinary evolution of Eurocentric debates about the relationship between self and god, self and nation, world and empire, and world and universe.
Worldmakers combines a set of “founding” works, from maps to medical literature, to portray a period where allegory, the Cosmos, and classical myth interacted directly with physics and biology. Dr. Ramachandran creatively captures “two modes of world-making: imperial and cosmic” through the constructed notion of the “Other”, which frames not only the logic of imperial conquest, but earlier attempts to separate and organize the sciences. Rather than seeking to narrate a coherent whole, as is the goal of many of the book’s main characters, Ramachandran highlights the disparate trajectory of these ideas in mythical, then imperial and national, and finally scientific imagination.
Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science & technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2016), Robert Holub, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of German at Ohio State University, evaluates the debate over whether famed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was an anti-Semite. Holub distinguishes between political anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Germany, and more general anti-Jewish prejudice. Utilizing evidence from Nietzsches published and unpublished writings and letters, Holub shows that Nietzsche reveals that he harbored anti-Jewish prejudices throughout his life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person’s fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg‘s new book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography (MacLehose Press, 2016). A diplomatic envoy in Hungary, Wallenberg has been lauded throughout the world for his efforts to save Jews living during World War II. But, his fate following his arrest in 1945 remains unknown and, as a result, his story has no clear end. In her excellent biography, Carlberg excavates the details of Wallenberg’s end, but she also digs deeply into the story of his life- shedding light upon a time that is often eclipsed by all that came after. It’s a time which is essential to any understanding of the man Wallenberg was,the course he pursued, and the hero he’s remembered as.
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In German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton University Press, 2016), John M. Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, examines the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry. Efron provides us with an account of how German Jews saw Sephardim as worldly, morally and intellectually superior, and beautiful, products of the tolerant Muslim environment in which they lived. This book is a highly original contribution which will be referred to for many years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Michael Goebel‘s Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) thinks globally while focusing on the local, everyday histories of non-Europeans in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Examining the myriad ways that Paris functioned as a hatchery or clearinghouse for the development of anti-imperial ideas and movements, the book argues that the social history of migration is central to any understanding of the political and intellectual histories of nationalism, from the interwar years through the period of decolonizations that followed the Second World War.
Anti-Imperial Metropolis traces the experiences and statuses of different categories of non-Europeans in the city, groups identified variously as French citizens, colonial subjects, and foreigners. Interested in how non-European students, workers, and activists from various parts of the globe met and interacted in Paris, the book details how politicization happened when it did, and how differences between communities revealed crucial inconsistencies and contradictions in the ideological underpinnings and workings of imperialism itself. Moving from the private worlds of non-Europeans as they lived day-to-day in the city, to the work of mutual aid associations, to the impact these communities and their exchanges could have on international diplomacy, the book reveals much about the imbrication of culture and politics. Drawing on a wealth of archival material from several countries, Anti-Imperial Metropolis offers readers new perspective on Paris’ interwar past while making a significant contribution to the transnational history of empires and their undoings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his path clearing new book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, presents a fascinating account of how conversion from Islam to Christianity was imagined, debated, and contested in early modern Spain. Shifting focus from the experiences of converts to intellectual discussions and disputes on matters such as coercion and assimilation, Kimmel demonstrates that such discussions were intimately tied to not only questions of religious reform but also to the demarcation of varied scholarly disciplines within Christianity. It is this nexus of knowledge, religious reform, and conversion that this book brilliantly explores and uncovers. Questioning binaries such as tolerance/intolerance and religious/secular, Kimmel highlights the complex material, intellectual, and political conditions and considerations that informed scholarly engagements with the questions and puzzles of religious conversion in early Modern Spain. In our conversation, we talked about the major themes and arguments of the book and its striking relevance to discourses on religious tolerance in the present. Parables of Coercion is at once beautifully written and unusually multilayered for a first book. It will also make an excellent choice for courses on Muslim-Christian relations, early modern religion, religious conversion, secularism, and Islamic Spain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellent new book Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). What Brown-Fleming makes clear in her work is that the archive is far richer and more interesting than that.
The book is partly an extended discussion of the contents of the archive. But Brown-Fleming’s goals are broader than this. She hopes to help people recognize the new kinds of research questions the archive makes it possible to ask and answer. She tries to help researchers imagine how they might employ Big Data approaches to open new vistas on old questions. And she hopes to give people personal examples of the stakes of these questions by offering specific examples of stories, tragedies and conflicts drawn from the archive itself.
Anyone who is interested in research about the Holocaust should read this book. And if you don’t do primary research, you should still read it–to get a better sense of how research is done, to get a better sense of places where our understanding of the Holocaust is still patchy, and to get a better understanding of one of the most important postwar institutions that dealt with refugees and displaced people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France. She argues that ideas about the family were tied to national identity, citizenship, and ethnicity. Her works adds to the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and the history of the Jewish family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, published in 1863. Renan’s was a nineteenth-century non-fiction bestseller, but is far from widely read today. In a series of chapters that explore issues of authorship, content, and reception, Priest offers readers a contextual analysis of this “secular” life of Jesus within Renan’s own biography and oeuvre. He also examines the controversy surrounding the book in France, and traces its continuing impact and legacies into the early twentieth century.
One of the major contributions of this work is its analysis of the popular reception of Vie de Jesus by French citizens across the political and religious spectrum. In addition to contemporary press and pamphlet discussion of the text, Priest also consulted hundreds of letters addressed to its author from men and women throughout France. This previously unexamined archival material gives us a glimpse of how “everyday” readers responded to Renan’s work, its spiritual and political meanings. The Gospel According to Renan illuminates the history of reading and writing under the Second Empire. Its in-depth analysis of La Vie de Jesus also reveals a great deal about the intersections of religion and politics in the years leading up to the Third Republic.
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In his new book Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2016), cultural historian James Nott charts the untold history of dancing and dance halls in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. This exploration reveals the transformations of working-class communities, and of the changing notions of femininity, masculinity and leisure that occur in this period. To do so, Nott navigates us skillfully between the perspectives of the dance hall owners, dance teachers and innovators. He them leads us to consider the point of view of enthusiastic jiving individuals. Finally, we take our place on the sidelines with the onlookers and killjoys alarmed by this ‘craze.’
This kaleidoscope of voices and images illuminates the role of the dance hall as a social space. It is argued that the dance hall brought together men and women in search of fun, but also provided them with a safe space to try out identities and behaviors. Nott claims that the spread and success of the dance hall reached the whole country. He situates it within the democratization process of British culture that was led by commercialism in the 1920s and 1930s, and even more so after the Second World war.
Nott points to the American origins of the music and dances that dominated the dance hall. But also suggest that a national style was forged on the dance-floor and via the business models and publicity methods of the institution. Consequently, he maintains, a uniquely British space was born.
The story of the rise and fall of the dance hall is constructed through its economic history. Its financial success and decline are analyzed with sources from the day’s trade press, the archives of individual companies and the regulation and licensing records of towns and cities. The cultural role of the dance hall is revealed through its representation in local and national press. Oral interviews, contemporaneous social surveys and Mass Observation reports are woven together to construct the experience of going to the palais. The result is a superb analysis of gender and race relations, as well as a fascinating look at an industry that had once rivaled cinema as an ultimate pastime.
Dr James Nott is a social and cultural historian at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Music for the People: Popular Music and dance in Interwar Britain (OUP, 2002) and co-editor of Classes, Politics and Cultures: Essays in British History in Honour of Ross McKibbin (OUP, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people from the British Commonwealth migrated the United Kingdom with plans to settle and find work. Kennetta Hammond Perry‘s new book, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015), is a political history of postwar Caribbean migration. Perry shifts our attention away from the response of white Britons and focuses it instead on the politics of black Caribbean migrants. As Perry notes, migration itself was a practice of citizenship, and Afro-Caribbeans saw moving to the UK not as immigration but as their right as British citizens. Furthermore, Perry demonstrates that as black political activists organized against racial discrimination, racist violence, and legislation designed to limit migration, their shared belief that living in Britain was one of their citizenship rights was the foundation of their activism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) argues that “in order to understand the forces that shaped thinking about racial difference in early modern philosophy, we must look to the philosophers’ own interest in a scientific classification and physical anthropology, with an eye to the way these projects were influenced by early modern globalization and by the associated projects of global commerce, collection, and systematization of the order of nature.” The resulting book is a thoughtful contribution to both the history of philosophy and science in early modernity, and to the modern history of concepts of race and identity, and is highly recommended to readers and teachers in both fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2014), historian Stefan Ihrig examines the history of Mustafa Kemal and Republican Turkey through the interpretive lens of Nazi political discourse. Ihrig shows how Ataturk’s Turkey became a symbol of resistance and national rebirth in the interwar period. Challenging semi-colonial or orientalist visions of Turkey held by British and French, German nationalists saw many of their own aspirations play out in Anatolia after World War I. Ataturk’s struggle against the Entente and the Greek Army became an inspiration for the right-wing press, initially overshadowing early fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini
Ataturk’s Turkey became model of governance not only to be praised by the Nazi elite, but to be emulated German state. Nazi leaders borrowed liberally from Ataturk’s example, citing “Turkish lessons for Germany” in the right-wing press. Hitler described Ataturk as his own “star in the darkness” during his years of imprisonment and political isolation during the 1920s. Ataturk’s dictatorship paved the way for the Nazis twisted visions of national progress, authority, and modernity. The ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks mirrored the Nazi party’s own view of Jews as a dangerous enemy within. Ihrig shows how the Nazi vision of Ataturk (albeit not the reality) inspired Hitler’s foreign and domestic policy in the years leading up to the World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Published in October 2015, Caroline Shaw‘s timely new book, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces the intertwined development of the category of refugee and of the moral commitment of Britons to providing refuge for persecuted foreigners. By confidently working across a range of methods and geopolitical contexts, Shaw shows how the refugee category became “potentially universal in scope,” thanks to the depth of this moral commitment. Yet the attendant challenges of providing relief and resettlement for a potentially endless stream of people fleeing slavery in the US and East Africa, political persecution in continental Europe, and Russian pogroms raised a number of questions, not least where these refugees would live and work. Here, the British Empire provided an important safety valve: resettling refugees abroad made the work of relief seem feasible, despite real problems on the ground. By the later nineteenth century, however, this moral commitment ran up against tightened resources and the increasingly violent radical politics of many who sought relief, leading both to the enshrinement of a “right to refuge” in law and the simultaneous narrowing of who exactly counted as a persecuted foreigner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philosopher. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks closely at the involvement of Bell and others in a project of conservative reform in nineteenth century British medical education. We follow Berkowitz not only into the pages of the works that made Bell famous, but also into the classrooms in which Bell advocated a pedagogy that trained hand and eye together and developed his interest in systems of all sorts, including the nerves, education, and display. Readers will learn about the growth of a new genre of medical weeklies that changed the public face of medicine, the founding of new institutions that changed the teaching of medicine, and the controversy over motor and sensory nerves that accompanied major transformations in the medical science of Bell’s lifetime. It is a fascinating story that honors the importance of the history of education in shaping the histories of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation.
Timothy Snyder does just this with his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015). He does so by boldly arguing that we don’t really understand what happened during the Holocaust. He argues in favor of an emphasis on ideology with Adolf Hitler at the center. But he also stresses the importance of the experience of occupation and the role of state structures, incentives and punishments. It was, he suggests, the persistence or disappearance of states that made all the difference in the way the Holocaust emerged over time.
Because of our misunderstanding of the nature of the Holocaust, we’ve misunderstood the lessons that it should teach us. Because the world of our time rhymes with that of the Holocaust, this misunderstanding poses real threats to our world.
It’s a tremendous book, fully worth of the extensive praise it has received. It will no doubt lead to many conversations among holocaust and genocide scholars alike.
We only had time to touch on the big themes of the book in this interview. Hopefully you’ll get a feel for the flavor of his argument and why it’s so challenging to the discipline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Italians have a reputation for being rather, well, ineffectual. Everyone ‘knows’ that Italian trains don’t run on time unless Italy is ruled by a bald, bombastic, bully. And of course historians will tell youthat they didn’t even run on time then. The food is excellent, the scenery marvelous, the weather wonderful. Italians know how to live and they’ve got a great place to do it. But they just aren’t very tough, or so the story goes.
Except for the Genoese. As Nicholas Walton points out in his page-turning, story-filled history Genoa, ‘La Superba’: The Rise and Fall of a Merchant Pirate Superpower (Hurst, 2015), the residents of this hard-scrabble Mediterranean port evolved a sort of un-Italian, hard-scrabble character. The Genoese are tough, hard as the rocks that make up the Genoese landscape. This isn’t to say they aren’t generous, kind and loving. That they are. But they are also tough-minded and perhaps a little cunning. The Genoese will get it done, find a way, make it work, and might just take your lunch money if you’re not careful. As Walton shows, they always have. His terrific history suggests they always will. Read the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire.
Linstrum explores the careers of scientists sent to the South Pacific, India, and Africa to verify and define characteristics of white racial superiority. Far from confirming the inferiority of the colonized, psychologists exposed flaws in Britain’s civilizing mission, often doubting or subverting its underlying assumptions. Linstrum exposes a fundamental tension between the authoritarian goals of state and the role of science, showing how expert knowledge could be adapted as a tool of colonization just as it could be undermined by scientific discovery.
Despite its critics, Linstrum shows how psychology mobilized to take part in Britain’s counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya. Colonial administrators borrowed tools from psychology to conduct interrogations and suppress dissent. The colonial state attempted to cast doubt on the psychological maturity of the colonized, articulating Third World nationalism itself as a kind of pathology. Britain’s representatives aimed to actively reshape thoughts and feelings in their quest to win “hearts and minds.”
Linstrum’s book challenges rigid definitions of scientists in the service of empire, complicating earlier narratives which portrayed psychologists as powerful supporters of colonial discourse. Psychology’s intended role was to aid the technocratic administration of a waning empire. While attempting to make the colonized knowable and predictable, British psychologists unintentionally exposed the dysfunctions inherent in European society, challenging the notion of an irrational, inferior “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1951 a West-Indian seaman was killed in Cape Town by two white policemen. His murder had initiated protests and demonstrations in the Caribbean and in London. This, tells us Dr. Elizabeth M. Williams, was the beginning of the international Anti-apartheid movement. In The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa: Black British Solidarity and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (I.B.Tauris, 2015), Williams marries two histories that are usually treated separately, the history of the British anti-apartheid movement (AAM) and the history of black activism in Britain to reveal a hidden history of black anti-apartheid activism in Britain. The book argues that black individuals rejected the AAM because it did not engage with domestic forms of racism and discrimination. The predominantly white constituency of the AAM as an organization, and its close ties to the African National Congress rather than the Pan Africanist Congress, added further discomfort.
Williams ushers in evidence from a variety of published and unpublished documents from official state, organizational and newspaper archives. She enriches the narrative and her argument by weaving in oral interviews conducted with leading figures of the black anti-apartheid struggle in Britain and politicians involved with British foreign policy in South Africa.
Elizabeth M. Williams is a historian of modern British history, Africa and the African diaspora. She is an academic Librarian and is based at Goldsmith’s University of London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On August 21, 1933, the teenaged Violette Noziere attempted to kill both her parents.
At first, seemingly so clearcut, the case ultimately came to be characterized by a “troubling ambiguity” that unsettled Paris for years.
Were the Nozieresan upstanding middle-class family? Was Violette a victim of sexual assault, her father a heinous predator? Was Violette a sexual degenerate? In an age of unprecedented social mobility, had the family tragically overstepped, with the parents granting a wild daughter too much freedom? No one knew.
It was the perfect cautionary tale of the time- giving voice to concerns of contemporary France’s, fears of changing attitudes towards gender, class, industry, economics, art, everything. In Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris, Sarah Maza weaves together social history with an astute analysis of the times to paint a vivid portrait of Noziere’s society, her circumstances and her crime.
It’s a gripping tale that provides an intimate glimpse into a period that is often overshadowed: Paris of the 1930s, transfixed by a story of parricide and incest, tensed for the war that is about to come.
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In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of total war. Thorsheim argues wartime salvage efforts linked civilians socially as well as materially to the war. Salvage drives served to focus people’s efforts and helped them make sense of the events around them and their role in the conflict. The ebb and flow of resource scarcity served as a metric in which to measure changing military and strategic concerns against the Axis, but also complicated the wartime alliance between the British Empire and the United States.
Although essential for national survival, Thorsheim shows how wartime salvage tended to alienate as much as unite the British public. Vigorous, but often ill-conceived, salvage efforts led to infringements of civil liberties, destroyed historical artifacts, and damaged private property. Some materials were never recycled and left to languish in enormous dumps long after the end of the war. The national salvage effort angered thousands and left many without compensation for their losses, souring a generation on recycling.
Unlike the environmental movement of the 1970s, Waste into Weapons shows recycling was a means to further destruction rather than conservation. Thorsheim’s book sheds light on a little known episode in environmental history and provides alternative genealogy of recycling in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic philosophy transformed magic from being reputable to being a joke. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, tells the relatively unknown story of the Nazi pre-war concentration camps. From 1933 to 1939, these sites of terror isolated, ostracized, and excluded Jews from German society.
Drawing on a range of unexplored archives, Wunschmann explores the evolution and systematization of the concentration camp system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, challenges the view that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead, Mandel argues that the Muslim-Jewish conflict in France has been shaped by local, national, and international forces, including the decolonization of French North Africa. Looking at key moments, from Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, to the 1968 student riots, to France’s experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s, Mandel poses a challenge to the reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A historiographical paradigm opened in the late 1970s with groundbreaking works on nationalism. To a large extent these were constructivist interpretations, which drew heavily on literary criticism. Since then it is commonplace to speak of national myths and master narratives. If it is true that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, then the appearance of Stefan Berger‘s masterful survey of national history writing in Europe may indicate that we have reached the end of this critical project. His book The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) certainly attempts a summation.
As Berger argues, the nation has formed the key framework of modern history writing. Because his book discusses most of the best known European historians of the past three centuries, it will be of interest to a broad range of readers. It is fitting to discuss this work in “New Books in Intellectual History” because its aim is not to correct the errors of past historians, but rather to uncover their underlying philosophies of history and the institutional and political contexts in which they wrote. Whether we are today indeed in a postnational phase of the historical craft is a topic we discuss in the following interview.
Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her new book Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the majority of Caribbean states are in fact non-sovereign. Moreover, even for those nations that are nominally independent, their sovereignty is nonetheless continually compromised by the foreign influence that comes with globalization. Thus, the Caribbean as a whole is a region where non-sovereignty is the dominant political status, requiring alternative political frameworks that move beyond identifying sovereignty as the inevitable and necessary result of decolonization. Bonilla calls this process of imagining and testing out these new frameworks “non-sovereign politics.” Non-Sovereign Futures examines the emergence of non-sovereign politics through an ethnography of labor activists in Guadeloupe. Whereas union activists had explicitly nationalist agendas in the 1950s and 1960s, by the early 2000s, sovereignty was no longer the terrain on which activists made claims upon the state. Bonilla provides a compelling analysis of the ways that Guadeloupean labor activists disrupted island life through a series of labor and general strikes, engaged and shaped the historical legacies of slavery and emancipation, and transformed their own personal political selves. Though these activists frequently expressed disappointment with the results of these strikes, Bonilla insists that their true accomplishment was in imagining new possibilities for making claims upon the French state that were no longer bound to the unsatisfying question of sovereignty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspective to the history of Algerian Jews, looking at the Saharan Jews to south of the larger, coastal communities. Saharan Jews received different treatment from French authorities, asking us to rethink the story we tell about colonialism and decolonization and Jewish history.
Stein draws on materials from thirty archives across six countries to shed light on this small, but revealing, community that has not received its due attention until now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fighting in France or Russia, women working to support the war effort, or mothers or fathers worrying about their children) experience the war?
Nicholas Stargardt‘s new book The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2015) sets out to answer these questions. The book is a delight. Stargardt approaches his subject with a depth of feeling and of insight that all historians aspire to. His analysis is careful, measured and nuanced, shedding new light on a variety of important questions. But the book’s strength lies in the way it immerses itself into the lives of ordinary Germans. Stargardt’s retelling of their stories is compassionate and empathetic. It is the nature of the lives of his subjects that many of his stories end suddenly rather than happily. Wisely, he allows us to mourn with his subjects, yet reminds us to remember the crimes many committed. It’s a terribly difficult balance to strike, and it’s to his credit that he does so consistently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new introduction in which Bourdon explores the historiography of the medium in the years since the book’s original publication. A history of television that is also a history of the De Gaulle presidency and the early years of the Fifth Republic, Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle examines a range of issues, from government legislation to programming and content, to the variety of personnel (directors, producers, technicians, administrators) who made television happen during this “era of professionalization.” Exploring the medium as both information and entertainment, the book considers the relationship between television and the cinema, situating television within the broader cultural and political history of France during this critical period. Covering key events and turning points, including the introduction of a second channel in 1964 and a key directors’ strike in 1965, the book also charts the years leading up to 1968 in France, exploring the impact that TV and les eventements had upon one another.
This new edition considers the history of TV in light of the technological and cultural developments of the last twenty-five years (reality TV, the Internet) and the new (especially audiovisual) archival material available to researchers of television’s past in France. Bringing together the analysis of government policy, culture, and labour, the book is vital reading for anyone interested in the history of the French media and/or the Fifth Republic’s crucial first decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relevant for the consideration of “the ecological question.” Based on a doctoral thesis written under Badiou’s supervision, Am Johal‘s new book, Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene(Atropos Press, 2015) is a thinking through and with Badiou’s work while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of our time: the relationship between human beings, technology, and nature; the meaning of change; and the possibilities of democratic politics and resistance. This, during an era that many now refer to as the “Anthropocene,” a period in which the impact of human beings on geological conditions and change has become unmistakable.
Ecological Metapolitics is a work of engaged philosophy that will illuminate readers’ understanding of Badiou’s oeuvre. The book also makes an important contribution to our understanding of the past, present, and future of a modernity troubled on scales local and global. In dialogue with one of the most significant French thinkers of the postwar period, the book engages in ideas and debates that reach well beyond the boundaries of national spaces, cultures, and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, one of the largest and longest lasting fascist social movements in Europe. Drawing on oral interviews, memoirs and the archives of the Romanian secret police, Roland Clark reveals the contribution of seemingly contradictory practices – deadly violence and charitable activities, intellectual and manual labor, political action and religious rituals – to fascist subjectivities in interwar Romania. Arguing against fascism as primarily an ideology, Clark focuses on everyday practices through which young men and women “became fascist.” As he explores the rise and fall of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Clark places it in the broader political and social context of Romanian nationalism, 19th-century state-building and interwar European fascist movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Published by Palgrave in 2015, Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives brings together scholars from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, the US, Germany, and Denmark. Through a set of wide-ranging essays, the authors collectively tackle a major question: how were emotions conceptualised and practised in Christian missions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries? Case studies take up sites in North America, the Philippines, India, China, the Congo, Germany, Papua New Guinea, Greenland and Australia in order to show how emotional practices such as prayer, tears, shouting, and feelings of joy or frustration, shaped relationships between missionaries, prospective converts, and supporters at home.
Claire McLisky, one of the volume editors, speaks to NBIR from Brisbane, Australia where she is a research fellow at Griffith University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In particular, he traces the implementation of the Code Noir, France’s earliest attempt to impose a legal structure on its American colonies’ plantation system. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Code ostensibly regulated how masters and slaves related to one another. Provisions in the Code sought to keep a strong colonial economy going, which meant limiting how much control an owner had over enslaved people. This produced areas of tension between imperial officials wanting to rein in abuse, and planters desire for total control over their laborers. At the same time, it created a legal consciousness for enslaved people who would eventually use the terms of the Code Noir in their insurgency turned revolution. Ghachem’s account adds rich complexity to our understanding of why the Haitian Revolution occurred. Rather than see it as a novel burst of enslaved action, Ghachem shows how the Revolution was part of a much longer tradition, anchored in the laws of slavery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!”
The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A “midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s” who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it’s hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this modern scientist, from his early relationships with Freud and dialectical materialism, to his work on the orgasm as a kind of “electrophysiological discharge,” to his research into potential treatments for cancer. The book concludes by considering why understanding Reich’s scientific work matters for us today, including a brief introduction to some recent experimental work related to Reich’s research. It is an absorbing story that’s also a pleasure to read, and pays careful attention to Reich’s scientific work while still translating it in clear terms for non-specialist readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
"Pop pop pop pop musik" -M
Jonathyne Briggs' new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic's first two decades. What made certain sounds "French," and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Francoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book considers French musical production and consumption in global cultural context. Exploring the relationship between audio and national identities and communities, Briggs tracks both the influences from outside France on a range of scenes in and beyond Paris, and the reach of "French" sounds beyond the nation's borders.
Sounds French is a book that examines the contributions of artists and listeners, reading "the noise" of (and surrounding) the music treated in its pages. The book also includes links to some of the songs that Briggs writes about (see the companion website developed by OUP). Fans of yé-yé, Johnny Hallyday, chanson, Jean-Michel Jarre, Alain Stivell, Metal Urbain, and/or Daft Punk will all find much to learn and enjoy here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the conventional narratives of Communist Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, student activism tends to get short shrift. While the role of students in 1956 is unavoidable and widely acknowledged, after that their role and their relationship to the society at large has been minimized. The famous Kuron-Modzielewski letter of 1964 is treated first and foremost as an intra-elite affair, while the failure of the student protests in 1968 to provoke a broader movement as well as students’ subsequent lack of involvement in the protests of December 1970 have been taken as evidence of students’ lack of connection to broader society. Only in the late 1970s did was that gap bridged, first with founding of KOR after the strikes of 1976 and then during the Solidarity era. This account has been pervasive since the 1970s, and even people with only passing knowledge of Polish history have been exposed to it through Andrzej Wajda’s 1981 film “Man of Iron.” There the student turned factory worker Maciej Birkut recounts first being told by his father the former Stakhanovite turned worker activist that 1968 is not the right time to challenge the governments and then stands by in spite during the strikes of 1970 only to learn of his father’s death. Yet as so often happens when a historian take up a topic that has become so engrained that most people do not even stop to question it. In his new book Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent (Lexington Books, 2015), Tom Junes reveals that received narrative to be a myth that bears only partial connection to the truth. Covering the development of student politics in Poland from 1946 until the end of Communism, Junes argues that there were 8 distinct generations of students during that period, beginning with the students of the immediate postwar period whose worldview was shaped by their pre-War and War experiences to the students of the 1980s who embraced Solidarity, but felt betrayed by the roundtable negotiations that brought an end to Communist rule in 1989. It is a scrupulously researched book drawing on oral history as well as conventional primary source documents, and it was a pleasure to speak with Junes recently about his research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings on religious conversion and how conversion became a means through which other “technologies of transformation” were figured. His reading of diverse texts, from the translated King James Bible to the poetry of Milton, helps us understand the ways in which the figure of the Jew could serve a variety of purposes in the early modern English imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died alone and whose bodies were never claimed. Known as the “forgotten,” their stories are at the heart of Richard C. Keller‘s fascinating new book Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Official narratives of the disaster focused narrowly on the problem of the elderly who died alone, seemingly because their families were too busy vacationing to check in or claim their relatives. Yet, as Keller shows, these official narratives were incomplete and often incorrect. Moreover, by focusing so intently on elderly victims, these narratives have shaped subsequent public health initiatives, which have collectively identified the elderly as the most vulnerable population in the event of heat, all the while ignoring other similarly vulnerable groups.
Fatal Isolation pushes past official narratives to provide the first historical treatment of the disaster. By drawing on disaster studies, social theory, ethnography, demography, and sociology, Keller weaves together the August vacation, housing policy, architecture, and debates over the place of the aging in French society. In the process, Fatal Isolation uncovers a much longer, much richer, and much more complex history of the disaster and French society’s own contributions to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps?
Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museums’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women’s camp of Ravensbruck, Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system and Dan Stone about the liberation of the camps. Today I’ll conclude the series with an interview with Shelly Cline about female guards in the camps.
This is something of a departure for the podcast, which usually focuses on the authors of published books. But Shelly’s dissertation “Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust” (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014) is a perfect conclusion to the series. It examines carefully and thoughtfully the women who served as guards in concentration camps across Germany and its territories. In the manuscript, Shelly suggests that we will better understand the guards’ experience and perspective if we look at them from the perspective of people working at a job, a job they applied for, trained for, and worked at, one they sometimes liked, but often found stressful and difficult. It’s a fascinating notion, one that made me stop and think many times while reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the “needs” that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model “person,” anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like “minimum wage,” like “citizen”) that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John McMillian‘s Beatles vs. Stones (Simon and Schuster, 2013) presents a compelling composite biography of the two seminal bands of the 1960s, examining both the myth-making and reality behind the great pop rivalry. More than just a history of the bands, Beatles vs. Stones explores the complex role both groups played in popular culture during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. Although the “feud” was initially fodder for fan magazines and publicity stunts, as the bands and their audiences matured musically and politically, the divide came to reflect many of the key cultural divisions of the age. McMillian charts the makeover of the leather-clad Beatles from their early days in Germany to the “four loveable lads” who became an international sensation, and then that of the Rolling Stones, initially styled similarly to the Beatles, but quickly rebranded as their bad-boy antithesis.
Beatles vs. Stones takes a critical look at both the actual artists and the image they portrayed, delving lucidly into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as business concerns, as cultural phenomena, and as artists often bewildered and at times disturbed by the cultural impact they themselves could not control.
A noted scholar of the New Left and the underground papers of the 1960s, McMillian currently serves as Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. He is also the author of 2011’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media America, co-editor of two volumes, The Radical Reader and The New Left Revisited, and is the editor of the journal The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his second book, author Terrance J. Finnegan describes America’s early experience fighting the Germans during World War I. Finnegan’s A Delicate Affair on the Western Front: America Learns How to Fight a Modern War in the Woevre Trenches (The History Press, 2015) provides in-depth research and a great deal of context to portray the 26th Infantry Division’s desperate defense of the Woevre sector in April 1918. Relying on meticulous mining of primary documents, the author describes the leaders, tactical doctrine, weaponry, and intelligence processes of the French, German, and new American forces fighting near Seicheprey in northeastern France. Finnegan also builds on research from his first book, Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance and Photographic Interpretation on the Western Front–World War I, to carefully explain intelligence collection on both sides of the trenches.
In a lively interview, Finnegan explains how the action near Seicheprey–sometimes called a trench raid, sometimes a battle–was vitally important to newly arrived American soldiers learning the craft of trench warfare. It was an extremely dangerous environment, with chemical weapons, artillery duels, small-scale trench raids, and snipers making life miserable for the combatants. At Seicheprey, the Germans decided to test the metal of American National Guard soldiers of the 26th Yankee Division, one of the first four US divisions to arrive in France. Early on 20 April 1918, using Stormtroop tactics perfected in other sectors of the Eastern and Western Fronts, the Germans smothered American positions with high explosive and chemical artillery fire, followed by infantry attacks that bypassed strong points and penetrated the defenses in many areas. The New England Guardsmen gave up some ground in a confused battle, but soon counterattacked and gained back what they had lost.
This is a dense book, packed with details about the adversaries that any reader interested in World War I ground combat would appreciate. It is a holistic view of a single engagement that leaves no questions and thoroughly explains the action. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When ESPN anchor Stuart Scott passed away from cancer this past January, he was widely hailed for his innovative style, which mixed heavy does of African American slang and pop culture references. His signature phrases are now commonly used terms in the American lexicon: “As cool as the other side of the pillow” and, of course, “Boo-Yah!” After the announcer’s death, Barack Obama remarked that Scott “helped usher in a new way to talk about our favorite teams and the day’s best plays.”
No disrespect to America’s Sports Fan-in-Chief, but already a century before Stuart Scott was dropping quotes from Shakespeare and Tupac Shakur in his game summaries, Pierce Egan was mixing the Bard and street slang into his sports writing. An Irish-born printshop worker, Egan moved from manning the presses to take up the pen, writing sketches about life in early-nineteenth-century London. In particular, Egan wrote about the world of boxing, an illegal activity that brought together upper- and lower-class enthusiasts. Egan wrote prolifically about the matches (surreptitiously staged at out-of-the-way rural spots), the fighters, the patrons and fans. As David Snowdon shows in his book Writing the Prizefight: Pierce Egan’s Boxiana World (Peter Lang, 2013), Egan’s accounts – published in multiple volumes titled Boxiana –painted a vivid picture of the early boxing community, known as “the Fancy.” Egan also established a distinctive style for writing about sport, one that mixed classical analogies, high literary references, and the vernacular of London’s lower classes. The blend inspired later English writers of the 19th century, and its echoes are still heard in the rapid-fire, pop culture-saturated style of today’s ESPN announcers.
David’s book was awarded the 2014 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize by the British Society of Sports History. You can hear New Books in Sports interviews with previous Lord Aberdare Prize winners Tony Collins, Simon Martin, and Christopher Young and Kay Schiller. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings on religious conversion and how conversion became a means through which other “technologies of transformation” were figured. His reading of diverse texts, from the translated King James Bible to the poetry of Milton, helps us understand the ways in which the figure of the Jew could serve a variety of purposes in the early modern English imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Tabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might have picked up, and/or spread around town in the 1740s. Focused on rumor during the War of Austrian Succession that lasted from 1740-1748, Ewing’s is a book that examines a range of urban voices and opinions across a pivotal decade of the Enlightenment.
Taking very seriously the landscapes of gossip and fantasy, Rumor, Diplomacy, and War is intriguing in its subject matter and its methodology. Interested in the circulation of speech and ideas, Ewing tracks a variety of bruits–open and clandestine media, royal efforts to release and police information about matters of state and military conflict, and oral and written forms of communication. All this, with the aim of exploring a distinctively early-modern brand of political participation, and an “inchoate citizenship” that existed in the decades before the French Revolution. Questions of national identity, loyalty to the regime (or not), and political expression/representation were in the air during these years of war and Enlightenment. Ewing’s is a book that shows us how much historians can hear if we listen carefully. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were “enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally.” As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer’s account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet.
Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women’s camp of Ravensbruck and Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system. I’ll conclude the series in a few weeks with an interview with Shelly Cline about the female guards who staffed some of the camps.
In this fourth episode, Dan Stone makes a convincing case that the Holocaust reverberated for years after the war came to a close. The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2010),is slender but packed with information and insights. It certainly provides a top-down discussion of the issues and challenges that accompanied the dissolution of the camp system. He makes clear the various policies adopted by the liberating countries and how these were caught up in both domestic and international politics. But it goes beyond this to offer a wide variety of anecdotes and perspectives of camps survivors and liberators demonstrating the long-lasting impact of their experiences. It’s a perfect example of the kind of integrated history of the Holocaust that Nik Wachsmann identified in his discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Per the books jacket, “Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money’s design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money’s creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. “Commodity money” was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard – all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money.”
Some of the topics we cover are:
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How the work’s assertion that money is a mode of governance in a material world undermines claims in economics about money’s neutrality.
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The “free minting” system and why legal enforcement was essential to it.
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The radical redesign of money that began in the 17th century.
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Before I read this excellent book, I had no idea that Rome–that is, the Roman Empire–ever had an empress. But, as Joyce E. Salisbury tells us in Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), it did. And she was a very good one. Galla Placidia ruled in tough times for the Empire.She had to govern arealmwith two capitals, preside over endless debates about what being a Christian really meant, deal with several varieties of hostile (though not only) “barbarians,” reshape the imperial office she held, and make sure her son followed her in that office. Moreover, she had to do it all in a metaphorical snake pit. As Joyce points out, she was up to it all. Alas, her successors were not, and the empire she nurtured so well soon “fell” (or, as Joyce has it, “was pushed”). Listen in to hear the whole story! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers the significance of philology, the study of language, that for centuries was synonymous with humanistic intellectual life. Turner provides a detailed and fascinating study that traces philology’s beginning in Greek and Roman speculation about language and follows it to the early twentieth century. At the library in Alexandria, Greeks speculated about language, invented rhetoric, analyzed texts and created grammar. Roman diffusion and Christian adaptation spread the influence of philology. The medieval scholars kept it alive until the Renaissance when humanist gave it new life only to escape the most toxic aspects of the Reformation. By the nineteenth century, philology covered three distinct modes of inquiry: textual philology included the study of ancient and biblical literature, language theories of origin, and comparative historical studies of structure and language systems. All philologists held to the belief that history was key to understanding the diversity and change in language. Comparative methods and genealogical understanding accompanied historical analysis. These methods applied not only to texts but also to material objects, structures, art, people groups, and eventually became the foundation for the modern disciplines of anthropology, history, art history, linguistics, literary and religious studies we know today. Turner points to the need to reintegrate scholarly erudition away from insular disciplines and recover the expansive and humanistic reach of philology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm about her book on Ravensbruc. Later, I’ll talk with Dan Stone and Shelly Cline.
Today I had the great pleasure to chat with Nikolaus Wachsmann about his new book titled KL:A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015).Nik began his career interested in justice and prisons in Nazi Germany. Having published a book on that subject, he made the natural jump to the concentration camp system. After pushing the research further as editor of three compilations of essays, he has now published a comprehensive survey of the camp system.The book is tremendous: a well-conceived mixture of institutional history, narrative storytelling and careful analysis. It’s not always easy to read–I read it on my Kindle as I led students across Europe and occasionally found myself putting the Kindle down and staring out the window for several minutes as I contemplated the pain his subjects had endured. But it’s a wonderful treatment of a complicated subject. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Lisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In the aftermath of the Holocaust, wracked by grief and determined to facilitate the writing of an objective history of catastrophe, the historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered evidence of the persecution from Jewish leaders in Paris and from the wreckage of bombed-out buildings in Berlin. Many Jews in France and the United States saw his collecting of those papers as a heroic effort; however, in time, this “rescuer” became a thief. Most of the documents he acquired in the 1950s–mostly pertaining to Jewish history in France since the seventeenth century–he stole from the archives. After World War II ended, Szajkowski married and worked at YIVO (also known as the Jewish Scientific Institute), where his prickly personality and unorthodox methods now needed to be curbed, leading to a temporary split from the organization, during which he established himself as a leading scholar of French Jewry. But as he did, the once heroic collector of documents now became an archive thief. By 1949, there were suspicions of his misdeeds in the archives. Lisa Leff is a historian of Europe since 1789 whose research focuses on Jews in France. Her first book, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity, examines the rise of Jewish international aid in 19th-century France. For more information on Dr. Leff, you can visit her American University webpage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later, I’ll talk with Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline.
Today, however, I got the chance to talk with Sarah Helm. Sarah has written a tremendous book titled Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (Nan A. Talese, 2015). The books is at turns grim, touching and, just occasionally, inspiring. It’s one of the most accessible of the many books I’ve read about the concentration camp system. And it focuses on on of the under-served groups of victims of the genocide: women. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one encounters tangible pieces of the subject’s life- letters, diaries, receipts, knick-knacks; one never knows what one will find. But how to incorporate that experience into a book? This is one of many compellingly original angles that Daisy Hay brings to the story of Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli in her new book, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)
The story of Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli occurs in a moment of changing attitudes towards marriage, celebrity and love- a moment more often seen through the eyes of men and viewed in terms of “history.” Using the Mary Anne Disraeli archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford- assembled by Mrs. Disraeli herself- Hay opens up this story in two ways: by bringing the voices and experiences of women into it, and by considering the Disraeli’s as “born storytellers” in 19th century world that was “thick with stories. “They themselves spun stories around their partnership,” Hay writes, “but they also made the tales they spun come true.” It’s an illuminating perspective from which to write a biography of public figures, and also one which highlights the vital importance of archives in the preservation of stories of the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this oversight, turning our attention to the importance of biological field stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in generating new scientific practices, theories, and networks. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the German- and French-speaking scientific community in Europe, looking at a number of influential case studies that collectively embody what de Bont calls a “station movement” in this period. Exploring the relationship between these field stations and a notion of “experimentalism” embraced therein, de Bont usefully undermines a tendency to focus on laboratories as sites of experimentation in the history of science. The stations ranged in kind from very technologically sophisticated marine labs to cabins in the woods, from urban Naples to the isolated beaches of France to the birdlands of East Prussia. Some of the practices cultivated at these sites spread into a wider political and intellectual economy, transforming disciplines and spaces of inquiry and education in the process. It’s a fascinating study that offers readers a more robust and complex understanding of the spaces of modern science and their entangled histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand. When I tell them that the true number is above 40,000, I get astonished stares and a barrage of ‘your kidding’ (and stronger words).
The camps and ghettos were an essential part of the Nazi system.So today we’re beginning a five part series dedicated to the camps and ghettos in Germany, the areas Germany controlled and in Germany’s allies. Later this summer we’ll hear from Sarah Helms, Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline.
The series starts, however, with an interview with Geoff Megargee. Geoff is the general editor of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (Indiana University Press 2009-).This is a monumental project. Each of the first two volumes runs well over 1000 pages and includes an enormous amount of information. Once the series is done, it will probably exceed 10,000 pages.
The result will be an almost unprecedented addition to our understanding of the Holocaust. I’ll talk with Geoff about the process of creating the Encyclopedia and about how the accumulation of knowledge about specific camps can reshape our understanding of the Holocaust as a whole. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia?
These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists applying computational tools to language change. In an article published in Science, they claimed to have found decisive support for the Anatolian hypothesis.
In their book, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis make the case that this conclusion is premature, and based on unwarranted assumptions. In this interview, Asya and Martin talk to me about the history of the Indo-European homeland question, the problems they see in the Science article, and the form that a good theory of Indo-European origins needs to take. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world.
A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks both at women’s practical engagements with science and with their literary engagements with natural philosophy.
Ch. 1 brings us to the Romagna, and to the formidable Caterina Sforza’s experiments with alchemical recipes as compiled in a manuscript that exists today in only a single manuscript copy. Both recipes and secrets were forms of currency in this context, and Ch. 2 looks at the vogue for printed “books of secrets” in sixteenth century Italy. This chapter pays special attention to the influential Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont (1555) and the Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, while also exploring the influence of books of secrets on other early modern literary genres including vernacular treatises, dialogues, and letter collections. Ch. 3 look at the literature of debate over women, or querelle des femmes that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking particularly closely at the intertwining discourses about women and science in Moderata Fonte’s writing of chivalric romance and dialogue, and in Lucrezia Marinella’s epic poetry and pastoral writing. Ch. 4 moves us to Padua and Rome, where women had begun, by the early seventeenth century, to participate in scientific discourse in more formal ways. Here, Ray looks closely at Camilla Erculiani’s letters on natural philosophy (1584) that defended women’s aptitude for science, and at her networking with scientific communities in Poland and her eventual questioning by the Inquisition. The chapter then turns to Margherita Sarrocchi’s work, her epic poem Scanderbeide, and her fascinating relationship with Galileo. It is a fascinating book that will be of interest to readers eager to learn more about the history of science, literature, and/or women in early modernity. If you listen closely to the interview, you’ll also hear me comparing Caterina Sforza to Doritos. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000 (De Gruyter, 2014), Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, demonstrates how the construction of what constitutes ‘religion’ and ‘science’ was a relational process that emerged with the competition between various systems of knowledge. In this book, von Stuckrad traces the transformation and perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses. In the first half of the book, he presents the discursive constructions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ through the disciplines of astrology, astronomy, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, and scientific experimentation more generally. The second half of the book explores the power of academic legitimization of knowledge in emerging European modernities. Here, the discursive entanglements of professional and participant explanations of modern practices shaped and solidified those realities. Key figures in the history of the field of Religious Studies, such as Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, played instrumental roles in legitimizing the authority of mysticism, goddess worship, and shamanism. Ultimately, what we discover is that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are not so much distinctive spheres but elastic systems that arise within the particular circumstances of secular modernity. In our conversation we discussed discursive approaches to the study of religion, the Theosophical Society, marginalized forms of knowledge, the occult sciences, Jewish mysticism, secularization, nature-focused spiritualities, experiential knowledge, pagan religious practices, and ‘modern’ science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) together. His instinct was sound. While they deal with different subjects, they share a common approach and structure that casts new light on each subject individually and on the war more generally.
Often, works on the Holocaust focus on Germany, Poland and the USSR while marginalizing smaller and weaker countries. The two books here certainly address these countries. But they do the topic a great service by bringing other areas to the forefront. Each book is structured geographically, with contributors examining the course of racial science or the genocide of the Roma in a specific country. This allows the authors to look in depth at the historical context that led to different decisions and ideas. And it allows them to honor the agency of Rumanians or Croations or Latvians rather than simply surveying German actions in specific regions.
Such an approach might have led to a series of essays that ran parallel to each other without ever touching on common themes. Fortunately, Weiss-Wendt (and his co-editor, Rory Yeomans) make sure that doesn’t happen. Instead, the careful construction of the essays and the thoughtful introductions shed light on patterns of behavior and the interactions that shaped genocide across Eastern Europe. In doing so, they’ve added to our knowledge not just of the genocide of the Roma or of racial science, but of the role and actions of peoples heretofore largely ignored in the literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) is a fascinating exploration of books and their readers during a moment of intense transformation in British society. Secord brings us into a period of the nineteenth century when transformations in publishing and an expanded reading public helped create a wide-ranging conversation about science and its possible futures. Out of this utopian moment several works emerged that reflected on the practices and prospects of science, and Secord guides us through seven of them in turn: the dialogues of Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel, the polemic of Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, John Herschel’s moralizing Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Mary Somerville’s mathematical On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, George Combe’s phrenological The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, and Thomas Carlyle’s bizarre and wonderful Sartor Resartus. In each case, Secord pays careful attention to the physicality of books and the ways that their readers create and transform them. In addition to being great fun to read, the book will also be helpful for teachers putting together material for undergraduate lecture courses on the history of science and/or book history, and will find a happy home on syllabi for upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminars in the history of books and reading, the sciences and modernity, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the construction of national identities (or indifference to them) in recent years. J. Laurence Hare, Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, makes a novel and highly compelling contribution to that literature with Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands (University of Toronto Press, 2015). As the title suggests, the book looks at the role of antiquities and archaeology in the creation of Danish and German national identities from the early nationalist period through the twentieth century. The region between Denmark and Germany is perhaps not the place many Americans think of when they think of Scandinavia (home of wind-swept islands and fjords) or Germany (with its forests and Alpine vistas). Yet the German-Danish borderland has a very distinctive landscape all it own–of fens and moors, swamps and dikes–and that landscape contains fascinating antiquities. Unlike the Mediterranean, with its coliseums and cathedrals, the German-Danish borderland is the home of burial mounds and lost cities of the Viking Age, bog bodies and earth works, and mysterious treasures like the Golden Horns of Gallehus. Hare’s book detailing the ways these artifacts of an ancient past came to stand as markers of modern identities is an elegantly written and thoroughly fascinating contribution to the expanding literature on borderlands. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Freedom Time considers the politics and poetics of Aimee Casaire and Leopold Senghor during the period 1945-1960, “thinking with” and “working through” the ways these figures anticipated a post-imperial world. The book explores notions of liberation and temporality, considering the alternatives to nationalism and the nation-state that these thinkers imagined as they looked forward to a more democratic, autonomous future on the other side of colonialism.
While The French Imperial Nation State asked readers to “rethink France,” the project here is, in the author’s own words, to “unthink France”. Indeed, France, decolonization, and even liberation itself, are all interrogated in this work, as they were by the authors who are at the center of the project. Freedom Time is a book that takes seriously the futures envisioned by Casaire and Senghor, situating their projects historically and intellectually within contexts French and global, and considering the implications of their thought for a contemporary world still troubled by profound inequalities. It is an important book for those interested in the most urgent political questions, and in the problems and promises of freedoms past, present, and future.
At the beginning of our interview, Gary mentions a video link I sent him before we spoke. It is a video of Lauryn Hill performing “Freedom Time,” a wonderful song that I was reminded of by this wonderful book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who is David Bowie? Fans and critics have debated this question throughout his lengthy and storied career. Chris O’Leary, in his new book Rebel Rebel (Zero Books, 2015) meticulously examines Bowie’s earliest recordings and provides crucial insight into how Bowie wrote and recorded these songs. O’Leary considers Bowie’s influences and how his desire for commercial success caused him to experiment with a wide range of styles. These early years provide crucial clues of understanding who Bowie is. The podcast explores these questions and more. O’Leary also recommends a number of “lost” Bowie songs that are worth a listen.
Chris O’Leary is a writer and editor. He also writes a blog dedicated to David Bowie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. Following the choreography and performances of key figures from the hip hop world in France, McCarren’s is a history that pays close attention to dancers and their moves, and especially to the ways in which contemporary dance is informed by-and responsive to-social and political concerns and change.
Tracing the history of le hip hop as a form that arrived in France from the United States in the 1980s, French Moves examines the ways this cultural import came to “speak French”. Dance has occupied a privileged place in French national culture historically.French hip hop benefited from the outset from the support of a Socialist government interested in encouraging this meeting of street and stage in performances that embody youth, cultural diversity, and a mouvement social on a number of levels. Considering politics, poetics, techniques and technologies, the book has exciting and important implications for how we think about bodies and borders. It will be of great interest to anyone thinking through issues of citizenship and difference, from the end of the twentieth century up through the complexities of identity and nation in present-day France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli, it’s a sentence many people might assume was being applied to Coco Chanel, for Chanel looms large as the fashion designer of the last century. But Schiaparelli was, as Secrest reveals, more than a fashion designer: she was an artist. And, through her collaborations with SalvadoreDali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others, she was in the vanguard of surrealism and transformed women’s fashions into an art form.
Who was Schiap? It’s hard to know. But then we can never know everything about another person, which iswhat makes reading biography so beguiling: the illusion that we could. It’s a circumstance Secret openly acknowledges. “A great many aspects of Elsa Schiaparelli’s life will probably never be known,” Secrestwrites. “She was not much of a letter writer… If she had a diary, it has not survived. Her memoir is an example of an evasiveness that was almost automatic.” And yet, there are things we can know: Schiaparelli’s “gambler’s instinct” and “conjurer’s sleight of hand”; that she was famously difficult, a perfectionist, voracious reader, and excellent skier; that smoking was her one indulgence.
She was, also, an extraordinarily gifted artist who worked very, very hard. In 1922, she had “no money, no career, no future, and a very sick daughter.” Five years later, Vogue was callingher V-neck sweater with 3/4-sleeves and a trump l’oeil bow “an artistic masterpiece.” Secrest’s biography is, ultimately, a compelling story of a complicated, determinedworking woman, and we need all the stories like that we can get. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field.
Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for anyone interested in the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a village perched above the sea in northeastern Scotland. It’s a place of great wealth and also poverty, a place of staunch Protestantism among many of the older people and reckless abandon or religious unconcern among the young and “incomers” – that is, new arrivals in the village. By tracing the millennialist faith of the village’s many Presbyterian and Brethren churches, this careful ethnography calls into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern societies. It asks, how do the fishermen of Gamrie experience life as both modern and enchanted?
Joseph Webster is Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. The Anthropology of Protestantism comes out in paperback in June 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch ateliers in which exotic geography was produced by bookmakers, paying special attention to frontispieces and other paratexts through which these editor-printer-booksellers created a new way of looking at the world. Picturing, here, was a kind of performance. Schmidt considers how the exotic, non-European body was produced not just in texts and pictures but also in a range of material arts that depicted the body experiencing pleasure and pain. The book concludes by looking ahead to the middle of the eighteenth century, when there was a backlash against exotic geography, and a call for more “order and method” in the geographical description of the world. Inventing Exoticism is a focused, gorgeously illustrated multi-media exploration of a topic of crucial importance to the history of the early modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying seems to be true. As a general rule, the countries that were relatively free and relatively prosperous 100 years ago are the ones that are relatively free and relatively prosperous today.200 years ago? Yes, more or less. 300 years ago? Well, probably. 400 years ago? A good argument could be made…
Why? According to one argument, the difference is caused by the rich praying on the poor. In a word, imperialism. But if you survey countries around the world, it’s not clear whether imperialism (and colonization) hurt or helped development. The Spanish thoroughly imperialized Mexico, and it’s pretty prosperous; no one really got into the interior of Africa and it’s not. And what are we to make of developmental differences within, say, prosperous Europe? No real imperialism there; a lot of bloody war, but no imperialism as such. Germany is free and prosperous. Russia is not free and not prosperous. Why is that?
In their impressive and refreshing bookThe Long Process of Development: Building Markets and States in Pre-industrial England, Spain and their Colonies (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Jerry F. Hough and Robin Grier argue that it’s not so much imperialism that impedes development, but style of governance and, especially, time. If autocratic governments do nothing buttake rents, thesocieties they rule will not develop, not ever, no matter how long or hard the governmentstry to development them. If they are even semi-popular and pro-trade, they will develop, though it will take a very, very long time. There’s no magic built. You can’t simply import democracy and capitalism and hope for a rapid transitionto freedom and prosperity.The process of development takes centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle cried out “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall. The controversial moment became a myth almost instantly. The four words De Gaulle uttered remain emblematic of an extremely important moment in the histories of Quebec and Canada. Illustrative of the General’s penchant for political provocation and spectacle, they also hold a special place in his dramatic biography.
David Meren‘s With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944-1970(University of British Columbia Press, 2012), is anchored by President de Gaulle’s famous cri du balcon. Situating the incident within the broader context of a complex “triangle” of relations between Canada, Quebec, and France, the book deepens our understanding of what De Gaulle said and the meanings his exclamation have carried since. At the same time, the book develops a much broader and richer historical picture of the relationship between these three societies, and their nationalisms, from the end of the Second World War to the end of the 1960s.
With Friends Like These is an exciting example of an international history that interweaves the analysis of diplomacy, economic interests, and societal and cultural change over two and half decades. In our conversation, David and I discussed his methodology and the challenges of thinking together these three national communities within a rapidly shifting global context during the period. We also had a chance to talk about some of the legacies of the history of the Canada-Quebec-France triangle for contemporary political and cultural identities and exchanges. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I have really enjoyed Michael Leggiere‘s earlier work, including the excellent Napoleon and Berlin : The Franco-Prussian War in North Germany, 1813 (2002), like this work, part of the Campaigns and Commanders series at the University of Oklahoma Press. In Blucher: Scourge of Napoleon (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), Leggiere rescues Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher from the shadow cast by Wellington (and Wellington’s many and prolific admirers). It was Blucher, argues Leggiere, who continually bedeviled Napoleon after 1812 and who created the conditions for the Emperor’s few but decisive defeats, including Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815) – hence the subtitle. Partly because of the focus on Wellington, partly because of myth-making on the part of German nationalists and military leaders, Blucher is too often presented as a strategic imbecile, a mere hard-charging hussar, deserving of the label applied by his troops: “Marshal Forward.” But Leggiere highlights Blucher’srestraint, his canny retreats, as well as his political savvy, to present a much more nuanced picture.
Blucher: Scourge of Napoleon was the winner of the 2015 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) looks carefully at the literary structure and aesthetic elements of Weber’s arguments, considering how the texts offer an “allegorical resource for thinking sociologically.” Kemple argues that the formal structure of Weber’s ideas is inseparable from the content, and that understanding one is crucial for understanding the other. As a way into that formal structure, in each chapter Kemple offers an ingenious visual diagram that acts as a kind of “talking picture,” simultaneously evoking the cinematic elements of Weber’s own work and giving readers another tool for engaging the performative aspects of it. Kemple’s book is particularly attentive to the ways that Weber’s performance is shaped by a close engagement with the work of other writers, musicians, and thinkers, from Goethe and Tolstoy to Machiavelli and Martin Luther, and from the Bhagavadgita to The Valkyries. In addition, Marianne Weber – Max’s “wife, intellectual partner, and posthumous editor” – is an important presence throughout the book in helping us understand and read Weber’s work anew. Kemple’s thoughtful and beautifully written analysis helps us understand not just Weber’s own work, but also the value of that work for attending to issues of our own present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Despite being Germany's most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from his patron the duke Karl August).
InThe Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (Princeton University Press, 2006), Michael Gorra takes the reader on a reverse journey, for it is by slipping in "incognito" that we will begin to find Germany in all its imponderables. The result of a year's sabbatical residence in Hamburg, this book is a deep and discursive exploration of a country with millennia of history, and it explores how Germany's dark role during the twentieth century weaves in and out of the everyday in the twenty-first.
The travel companions Gorra invites along are an exceptional group: Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin. They all have looked at traveling through a kaleidoscopic lens and do not follow the linear as much as channel the essence of physical, historical, and cultural motion.
Gorra states the unlikelihood of there ever being a book called A Year in Schleswig-Holstein or Under the Nordrhein-Westfälische Sun. This is the land of school trips to war memorials commemorating the dead of all sides. Of burnt-out buildings that remain so and become part of the landscape. The fiercest debates now about outsiders may be about the East Germans whose integration into the reunited Germany began following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Even Berlin itself is hard to define because it is still in the throws of becoming. Since 1852, it has undergone almost constant change. City maps show nine different iterations between 1902 and 1949. And more momentous change is taking place now, for Berlin has become the newest "destination" global city.
Perhaps no German painting is more mysterious than "The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," the 1817 work by David Caspar Friedrich. In using it to open "The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany," Gorra suggests that for Germany, the quest is a more appropriate approach than a road map in the search for clarity.
A Pulitzer-Prize finalist in biography, Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Hugo Frey‘s new book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995 (Berghahn Books, 2014) distinguishes between a national cinema (films made in France) and a nationalist cinema motivated by the specific agenda to promote une certaine idee de la France. Working with ideas about “political mythology” and the “film event,” Frey analyses a series of films and filmmakers, including: Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, and Francois Truffaut.
Contributing to a vast and complex field of work on the cinema in France since 1945, Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers readers an analysis of French “metafilms” (films about film and filmmaking) in the postwar period; the representation of French history and modernity; the conversation between French cinema and Hollywood (and France and the United States more generally); the complex relationship between French film, nationalism, and empire; antisemitism; and the politics of the extreme Right up to the mid-1990s.
In our conversation, Hugo and I consider the legacies of the fifty year period covered in the book, including the links between the issues discussed in its pages and more contemporary struggles over national identity and difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Aristotle Tziampiris is The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation (Springer, 2015). Tziampiris is Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International and European Affairs at the Department of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus.
The recent fiscal debt crisis in Greece has drawn world attention to the country’s position in global affairs. Rather than pursue the financial situation, Tziampiris investigates the foreign policy making of Greece, particularly its changing relationship with Israel and Turkey. Greece and Israel have had a distant relationship for much of the last 50 years, but recent politics for both countries have moved the two toward a budding friendship. Tziampiris bases his argument and key findings on high-level original interviews which lend the book a degree of legitimacy and significance. Based on these conversations with Greek and Israeli diplomats, he points to the Gaza Freeodm Flotilla as the point where leaders from the two countries began to rebuild their bi-lateral relationship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I won’t speak for you, but I find it utterly remarkable that the British were able to “rule” India. Britain, of course, is a small island off a small continent some significant distance from most of its colonies. India, in contrast, is essentially a continentunto itself and the home of an ancient, sophisticated civilization. How could the tiny UK “rule” an entire continental civilization?
Happily, Dhara Anjaria gives us some answers in her excellent Curzon’s India: Networks of Colonial Governance, 1899-1905 (Oxford University Press, 2014).In a word, the Brits didn’t rule Indiaalone, at least when they were ruling India well. Through the lens ofGeorge Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Anjaria tells the tale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nick Wilding‘s new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian’s role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family’s mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a “rich, old, slightly batty widow” in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of “intermediaries and go-betweens” in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits.
There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows anything about European history–and European diplomatic history in particular–who doesn’tknow a little something about the Congress of Vienna. That “little something” is probably that the Congress fostered a post-war (Napoleonic War, that is) settlement called the “Concert of Europe” that lasted, roughly, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
That’s a good sound bite. But, as Brian Vick shows in his lively, fascinating bookThe Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014), a lot more than diplomatic toing-and-froing went on in Vienna. The diplomats and their huge entourages, well, partied a lot. The ate (generally well), drank (often too much) and “consorted” (to put it diplomatically). As Vick demonstrates, this setting has a distinct impact on the negotiations and their eventual outcome. In vino veritas? Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale. In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Kaeten Mistry reveals how events in Italy proved surprisingly crucial in defining a conflict that dominated much of the twentieth century. For the United States, it marked the first intervention in the postwar era to influence events abroad through political warfare, the use of all measures ‘short of war’ in foreign affairs. Drawing particular attention to the Italian election of 18 April 1948, he explains how the campaign for the first national election of the newfound Italian republic marked a critical defeat for communism in the early cold war. The United States utilized a range of overt and covert methods against Marxist political and social power. Political warfare seemingly outlined a way to tackle communist strength more widely.
Analyzing American political warfare efforts against the Italian left allows Mistry to advance a number of important arguments. He shows how U.S. efforts were largely improvised and many key decisions ad hoc. While officials in Washington like George F. Kennan worked to institutionalize political warfare, Italian actors and a host of non-governmental organizations played a crucial role in the defeat of the Italian left, even if they did not always share the same agenda as American officials. Mistry emphasizes Italian agency, explaining how Christian Democrat Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi pursued his own agenda to protect national sovereignty. The Vatican had its own objectives, as did trade unions, citizen groups, and multinational corporations. Other actors held a less rigid view of the Cold War than their American counterparts. In short, political warfare was more than an American story yet U.S. officials and commentators lined up to praise the election campaign as a distinctly American success. Mistry argues that this ‘perception of success’ contributed to an expanded use of political warfare, as U.S efforts turned to subverting communist power in Eastern Europe and, later, the Global South.
The work is a refreshing reminder of how foreign policy is rarely under the control of elite figures in Washington. Rather, it is subject to negotiation with various foreign and non-governmental actors. When viewed in this light, Mistry’s work is a useful reminder that governments will almost always invite trouble when they assume the ‘success’ of their efforts to shape events abroad, overlooking the role and motives of other peoples and groups, to make the case for intervention elsewhere. Enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sophia Rose Arjana explores a variety of creative productions–including art, literature, film–in order to tell a story not about how Muslims construct their own identities but rather about how Western thinkers have constructed ideas about Muslims and monsters. To what extent are these imaginary constructs real? Is it possible for one’s imagination to create things that are more telling than what is actually real? Arjana’s monograph is compelling, in part, because of the plethora of examples she offers–from a range of cultures and time periods–to help us understand just how deeply stereotypes and fears run in the very fabric of Western imaginations. She demonstrates, in fact, that it’s not just Muslims who are portrayed in troubling ways, but also characters that seem foreign to any extent. Dracula, for example, pushes boundaries between Muslim and Jewish–and is also not quite human; in this way, Arjana draws important parallels between the historically contingent categories of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Arjana also draws on films, such as Star Wars and 300, while noting that not all Orientalist imagery is necessarily offensive, even if some of it clearly is for many people. Whether the book ultimately conveys despair or optimism about the current state of cultural affairs will likely vary from reader to reader. It remains clear, however, that Arjana meticulously and artfully portrays a long continuum of how certain types of people have seen themselves as civilized and human, precisely in relation to an inhuman or “post-human” contrast that fits somewhere in the category of Muslim monsters. Given the wide range of popular cultural icons that Arjana explores in her carefully written, rich, and provocative monograph appeals at once to fields such as literature, gender studies, art history, religious studies, and political science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
American policymakers and scholars alike have looked to the rapid transformation of Germany, specifically West Germany, from a defeated Nazi state into a thriving democracy as one of the most successful postwar reconstructions of the twentieth century. Scholars have variously credited an influential U.S. occupation or Germans’ own revulsion at their Nazi past as the cause of the success. Udi Greenberg, Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College, pushes scholars to rethink these common explanations for the transformation in his new book The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundation of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), Greenberg shows how a small group of German emigres, who came of age during Germany’s Weimar Republic, provided the intellectual leadership for West Germany’s postwar reconstruction as a democratic republic. The book focuses on five individuals, Protestant political thinker Carl J. Friedrich, Socialist theoretician Ernst Fraenkel, Catholic journalist Waldemar Gurian, liberal lawyer Karl Loewenstein, and international relations expert Hans Morgenthau. Each of these emigres became important leaders in the intellectual transformation of Germany and were key figures in facilitating a collaboration between American occupiers and Germany citizens.
Beyond their role in the democratization of West Germany, Greenberg also shows that these emigres were key architects of the Cold War order. These emigres saw democracy and anti-communism as closely linked, an interpretation they brought not only to the reconstruction of Germany, but also to Cold War projects across the globe. These men became key players in U.S. Cold War policymaking in Korea, Latin America, and beyond. In doing so, they gained influential roles in at the center of American power and helped shape the early Cold War for better and worse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Akwugo Emejulu has written Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies, and Politics in America and Britain (Policy Press, 2015). Emejulu is a lecturer at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, and co-director of the Center for Education for Racial Equality.
What is community development exactly? Emejulu’s book integrates historical, theoretical, and comparative approaches to answering this difficult question. She describes several discourses, including: Democracy, Power, Poverty, Empowerment, and Populist, and maps how community development has changed in the United States and also in Britain. The book informs theoretical questions about how social movements use language to link leaders and followers and larger questions of participatory democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histories and urban development of Montreal and Brussels from the 1880s to 1914. We’ve read about Paris, London, New York, and Berlin, but what of the middle-sized cities in Europe and North America where so many turn-of-the-century dwellers saw, smelled, heard, touched, and tasted their way through urban life? What did it feel like to live in Montreal and Brussels, to walk their streets, to work in their sites of industry and production, to seek refuge in their domestic spaces?
A model of transnational scholarship, The Feel of the City moves from discussion of panoramic and labyrinthine images of the city, to the analysis of sources revealing the ways inhabitants across the social landscape experienced work, home, and the street. In our conversation, Nicolas and I talk about how contemporaries and scholars grapple with this contested term. We also take on ideas about the body and affect, gender and class, the impact of linguistic difference in representations of urban life, and even a recent controversy regarding noise and flight paths over Brussels today. Have a listen… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Alon Confino's A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of Fürth on November 10, 1938: Jews are forced from their homes and assembled in the main square.Many are made to stand for hours at the local community center; the men are beaten, humiliated, and transported to Dachau.There is a good deal of symbolic violence, too.The synagogue and all its contents are vandalized and then destroyed.The Torah scrolls are rolled out, stamped on, and set ablaze.
Book burning was a common ritual during the Third Reich but Confino ponders: why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible?Historians' standard explanations for the Holocaust – racial ideology, administrative, technologically-driven processes of extermination, the brutalization of war, and the dynamics of competition between Stalin and Hitler — cannot fully account for why this foundational text of European-Christian civilization was desecrated and set on fire repeatedly in Germany in the years leading up to World War II. Nor can such explanations render or lend insight into the hatred, murderous resentment, and sadism expressed by Germans toward their Jewish neighbors during this time.A number of groups were persecuted under National Socialism but Jews were special, contradictory figures, and both inferiority and awesome powers were attributed to them.Confino ask how Nazis fantasized about Jews — the place the Jew came to occupy in the Nazi imagination – and seeks to show the ways such fantasies set the context for and enabled mass deportations and death camps.
The answers provided in Confino's book unfold within an apparent paradox.On the one hand, the Nazis wanted to eradicate the Jews from the story of Aryan origins — to expunge Jewish memory, sever the tie between Judaism and Christianity, and take the place of the Jews in historical time.This is why some burned the Torah and even attempted to excise all references to Jews in the New Testament. Others, however, especially in the years after Kristallnacht, became obsessed with preserving synagogues and all sorts of books and judaica in museums – with making Jews the objects of commemoration and rewriting their past.Since Nazis linked the murder of the Jews to redemption and strove to weave their victory over Jewish influence into a narrative of a new Aryan civilization, Confino argues that the impulse to commemorate Jews while simultaneously destroying Jewish life is not as paradoxical as it might initially seem.
A World Without Jews pays careful attention to the imaginings as well as emotions of both Germans and Jews, tracing outbursts of obscene violence to unbearable intimacies.Through contemporaries' diaries, letters, and photographs Confino attempts to get at the feelings and sensibilities undergirding ritual mockery and guilt-driven denials and to capture what many conventional social and political histories miss: that communities are built (and destroyed) not only on beliefs, narratives, and economies but affects, too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can significantly inform how we see its art, literature, medicine, architecture, and more, Tweeting Da Vinci (Da Vinci Press, 2014) takes a deeply interdisciplinary approach to engaging the cultural history of Italy from the Etruscans to Da Vinci and beyond. The chapters explore the significance of volcanic activity, cave geology, lightning, gemstones, the healing powers of amber, underwater cities, and much more as they inform how we understand the histories of painting, religious practice, entombment, and the work of authors including Virgil, Dante, and Leonardo Da Vinci, among others. A pair of chapters focuses particularly closely on demonstrating how analyzing Da Vinci’s art from the perspective of geology and botany has helped to identify and authenticate his work and that of his students. Enjoy!
Here’s the website for an upcoming conference on medical geology, a topic that Ann discusses during the interview: http://medgeo15.web.ua.pt/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Show me how it doos.”
Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at “delivering sermons from tree stumps” as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was “Darwin’s Bulldog.”
Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell’s theistic science was the “standard” and Huxley was the “challenger,” and ending at the point when Huxley “won,” Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day.The first genocidal conflict covered in real time, dozens of reporters covered the war from the front lines or from a Sarajevo under siege.
Not surprisingly, the media coverage was accompanied by a flood of memoirs and histories trying to explain the wars to a population that, at least in the US, knew little to nothing about the region. These were valuable studies–informative, interesting and often emotionally shattering. Istill assign them in classes today.
But histories of the present, to steal a phrase from Timothy Garton Ash, are always incomplete and impressionistic.They lack both the opportunity to engage primary sources and the perspective offered by distance.
Twenty years on, we’re now in a position to begin to reexamine and rethink many of the conclusions drawn in the midst of the conflict. Robert J. Donia‘s new book Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2014)is an excellent step in this direction. Donia takes advantage of a remarkable depth of sources, including wiretap records of the phone calls Karadzic made with leading officials in Bosnia and Yugoslavia, to paint a compelling picture of a man transformed by conflict. His argument is simple, that it was the events of the late 1980s and especially early 1990s that made Karadzic into a nationalist willing to employ ethnic cleansing and genocidal massacres in his quest to secure safety and power for his people. In elevating Kardzic, Donia revises our understanding of the role and guilt of Slobodan Milosevic. His argument is detailed and well-supported, made even more compelling by Donia’s recollections of his encounters with Karadzic when Donia was a witness at before the ICTY. It’s a book anyone interested in understanding what happened in the former Yugoslavia will have to read and engage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is Ska music?
This is a deceptively complicated question. In this podcast Heather Augustyn, the author of Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation(Scarecrow Press, 2013) discusses ska’s journey from a local music in 1950s and 1960s Jamaica, its journey to Great Britain and its fusion with punk and other 1970s musical forms, and then its arrival and dissemination across the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Even as the music developed in different locations and responded to local conditions, it retained its core sound and its central themes and imagery. Augustyn draws on her decades-long research as she tells the story of ska’s growth and development.
Heather Augustyn is a journalist and writing teacher living in Chesterton, Ind. She author of Ska: An Oral History (with a foreword by Cedella Marley) which was nominated for the ARSC Award for Excellence, Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World’s Greatest Trombonist (with a foreword by Delfeayo Marsalis). Her website is http://skabook.com and she blogs at Foundation Ska. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
In the past decade, geographers and historians have begun using GIS for innovative historical research. Among the most innovative scholars using this technology is Anne Knowles, professor of geography at Middlebury College. Her new books Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (co-edited with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano) are superb examples of how scholars can use GIS to better understand the past.
In this podcast, Professor Knowles discusses the iron industry in Antebellum America, the Holocaust, and how GIS can help illuminate previously unknown facets of both. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world’s great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equality, a vibrant public sphere, and perhaps most important–political participation–defines the country’s self-image.
It was not ever so. In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, literally, not to mention ethically and existentially. And much of its population, in that moment, given the chance, would very likely have chosen to return the Nazis to power.
Sean Forner is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. His book, German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), deals with that moment in Germany just after the Second World War, when a network of individuals he calls engaged democrats emerged. These individuals occupied a range of political positions, but all shared a dream of a Germany that would be both committed to democracy, and beholden neither to West nor East. That part of their project–creating a Germany between the incipient polarities of the Cold War–was not to be, but the engaged democrats of the immediate post-1945 era are nonetheless a highly significant part of the transformation that arguably helped to create–or lay the foundations for–the Germany of today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of which tie into early modern Spanish debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century are assumed to have been conservatives. In Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Cornell University Press, 2014), Carol E. Harrison goes beyond this familiar dichotomy to unveil a tradition of lay Catholicism that refused to go to either side, remaining in the political middle and marrying traditional Catholicism with a progressive social consciousness. Many of these people were the companions and heirs of the all-too-ill-known Félicité de Lamennais, whose condemnation by the pope in the 1830s did not prevent his social and religious vision from continuing to flourish throughout the century.
I spoke with Harrison to hear her perspective on her Catholics, who range from the celebrated daughter of Victor Hugo Léopoldine, to a totally forgotten best-selling novelist, Pauline Craven, to the Empress Eugenia de Montijo herself. Nor were male Catholics missing from the story: we talked about the well-known historian Frédéric Ozanam, the melancholy poet Maurice de Guérin, and the Dominican star Henri Lacordaire. I heard all about their 'romantic impulse toward a renewal of faith'." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great powers and small states that is necessary to create and enforce norms across the globe. The 1856 Declaration of Paris marks the precise moment when international law became universal, and is the template for creating new norms until today. Moreover, the treaty was an aggressive and successful British move to end privateering forever – then the United States’ main weapon in case of war with Britain. Based on previously untapped archival sources, Jan Lemnitzer shows why Britain granted generous neutral rights in the Crimean War, how the Europeans forced the United States to respect international law during the American Civil War, and why Bismarck threatened violent redemption during the Franco-German War of 1870/71. The powerful conclusion exposes the 19th century roots of our present international system, and why it is as fragile as before the First World War. A sample chapter of the book can be found on the publishers website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France. Focusing on the rise and fall of a mythic, early-modern French bandit, Kwass’s study moves between the micro- and the macro-historical, revealing the crucial role that smuggling played in a French economic and political landscape that must be understood in global perspective. The book shows how the underground economy that emerged during the ancien regime developed in close relationship to the trade practices and regulation attempts of the French state. The opposite was also true. State efforts to regulate trade in tobacco and calico from the reign of Louis XIV onwards contributed to the development of illicit activity and networks, and the desire to quash the economic underground, in turn, provoked changes in economic policy, legislation, and perceptions of the need for reform in the years leading up to the French Revolution.
Revisiting the history of the “consumer revolution” of the eighteenth century, Contraband draws our attention to the violence and struggle that accompanied the proliferation of goods and markets associated with “modernity.” In our interview, Michael underlines his aim to write a history inspired by, and in conversation with, more recent events and debates about “the dark side of globalization”. This makes the book a must-read for anyone interested in the longer-term history of the forms of contraband, regulation, and resistance that shape the economic, political, and cultural networks (both legal and illicit) of the present on a global scale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the decades after the Second World War, France became the foremost nudist site in Europe. Stephen L. Harp‘s new book, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press, 2014) explains how this came to be. A study of nudist ideas, activity, and sites from the interwar years to the mid-1970s, the book is a fascinating history of the people (the Durville brothers, Kienne de Mongeot, and Albert Lecocq) and places (the Ile du Levant, Montalivet, and Cap d’Agde) that made nude tourism and leisure a major phenomenon in France.
Building on previous scholarship that has explored nudism in different national contexts, Au Naturel is a transnational history that illuminates the movement of bodies, beliefs, and practices across political borders, and the emergence of a postwar European community from a unique perspective. Drawing on a rich archive of materials from the local to the international, Harp reveals that nudism was both cultural and political in its meanings and effects in and beyond France. A history of the body and sexuality, Au Naturel is a story of shifting landscapes and values that will be of tremendous interest to readers across multiple fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the impression given was that the Gestapo were all knowing and ever present.
We now know differently, of course. But knowing that the Nazi state functioned as much or more through consensus as coercion has led historians to think again about the way in which this consensus was created and sustained. And it has produced a series of books addressing the question of what this consensus meant for policy making and execution.
Thomas Kuehne‘s fabulous new book has contributed greatly to this discussion. Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (Yale University Press, 2013), looks hard at the role belonging played in the emergence and success of the Nazi Party. He tells us how important the desire for a sense of community was in the way people responded to the the crises of the 20s and 30s. And he tells us how this desire for community shaped efforts to exclude people who were not part of the community, whether through isolation, removal, or destruction. It’s a great book.
Skype was not as cooperative as I would have liked during the interview and there’s a low buzz present at times. The sound is not ideal, but it shouldn’t be too disruptive, and Kuehne’s work and words are fascinating. So I hope you’ll give it a listen.You’ll be glad you did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) charts the New Labour era of cultural policy, detailing the shift from the optimism of the late 1990s to the eventual crisis of funding and policy currently confronting culture in the UK. The book identifies the faustian pact between government and cultural sector, as increased funding came at the price of delivering economic and social policy agendas and responding to bureaucratic forms of management. The book uses a range of examples to illustrate this problematic bargain, from the disasters of the Millennium Dome and The Public, through an analysis of the 2012 Olympic Games. Alongside the range of cultural policy projects discussed is an exploration of the infrastructure, in particular the government departments and public bodies, which are at the root of the failure of British cultural policy between 1997 and today. These failures, including how policy did little or nothing to broaden the base of consumers for state sponsored cultural institutions, are set against the need to renew the meaning and purpose of culture in government. Written with a sharp wit and full of intriguing commentary on the personalities of the key players, the book is essential reading for anyone keen to understand why Britain continues to struggle with the idea of cultural policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University.
Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in response to recent police-related deaths (Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in New York City), Schneider explains why some of these protests have resulted in rioting in the past and others in peaceful protest. Why, she ponders, has Paris burned while New York City has not had significant rioting in decades, despite similar sociopolitical conditions? New York, Schneider argues, has effective social movement organizations in place to channel frustration surrounding past police violence toward organized protest. For anyone trying to make sense of what recent events, this book is a must read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How those within the Brussels Beltway in the EU institutions must pine for the simple days of the past. Not only was the European project in itself far less contested, but the nature of the journalism surrounding the EU was also far more accommodating.
One of the main lessons of John Lloyd and Cristina Marconi‘s fascinating book Reporting the EU: News, Media and the European Institutions (I. B. Tauris, 2014) is how much it has mirrored the evolution of the European project itself. In the first couple of decades the journalists were as likely to be true believers as the Eurocrats in the corridors of power, even if their reports tended to reflect the concerns and interests of the individual countries that they served. That started to change as the EU (under various names) grew and changed.
In the 1980s the British press developed a real streak of Euroscepticism, and journalists in general began to ask more questions than the Eurocrats were used to. Big developments such as the Maastricht Treaty and the expansion into the poorer corners of the former Soviet Empire begged bigger questions. And then there was the euro crisis, and the current wave of popular Euroscepticism that has found a home in almost every corner of the continent. All the while Eurocrats and EU boosters charged that Euroscepticism was something contrived through the practicing of hostile journalism by spiteful editors in thrall to shadowy media tycoons. If only the people of Europe had a fair picture of what they did, they’d say: then they’d fall in behind the European project once again.
At least the euro crisis has led to the EU finding its way to the front pages of newspapers, along with a widespread realisation that what goes on within that Brussels Beltway (and in places like Berlin) matters to all its citizens far more than they’d realised. The authors of the book hope that recognition will continue to give the EU, for all its complexity, a legitimate place in Europe’s popular media, worthy of this peculiar set of institutions that has grown to have such an impact in so many parts of daily life.
I hope you enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her imaginative and scrupulous book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014), historian Michelle Moyd writes about theaskari, Africans soldiers recruited in the ranks of the German East African colonial army. Praised by Germans for their loyalty and courage, the askari were reviled by Tanzanians for the violence and disruptions the askari caused in their service to the colonial state. Moyd questions the starkness of these characterizations. By linking askari micro-histories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, she shows how the askari, as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, not only helped to build the colonial state but also sought to carve out paths to respectability and influence within their own local African contexts. Moyd offers a truly fresh perspective on African colonial troops as state-making agents and critiques the mythologies surrounding the askari by focusing on the nature and contexts of colonial violence, notions of masculinity and respectability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
If you look up the word “secular” in just about about any English-language dictionary, you’ll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This “not-religious-ness” would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can’t be religious. If a court is secular, it can’t be religious. If a party is secular, it can’t be religious.
But, as Todd H. Weir points out in his fascinating book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the origins of what we might call “secularism”–the faith with no faith–were profoundly religious. To understand how this could be so, Weir takes us back to an age and place–the nineteenth-century German Lands–in which belonging to a church was a matter of state. The question then and there wasn’t whether you were going to adhere to a faith, but which one. Yet, in the wake of the Enlightenment, there were those who did not want to belong to one of the “established” (as in “establishment clause”) religions. They–“dissenters”–were seeking their own path to God and they petitioned the state to allow them to do so. Sometimes the lords of the land (and often heads of the church) granted this wish; sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they did, reversed themselves, and then reversed themselves again. Given the novelty of “free religion” and “free thinking,” it was hard to know what to do. In any case, the back and forth between officials and religious dissenters opened a space–narrow at first and then gradually widening–in which the faithful could be not only different but, well, not very faithful at all. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From London to Rome, Paris to Stockholm, there is no other contemporary issue that can move the general public’s political needle quite so quickly as immigration. In the seas between Libya and Malta, Tunisia and Italy, hundreds risk the crossing to a presumably new and better life, and many of those hundreds lose their lives in doing so. Many more try to enter from Turkey to Greece and Bulgaria, from Belarus and Ukraine to Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Latvia, and from Morocco up across the treacherous waters of the Gates of Hercules to Spain. Others crowd into internal pinch points within the EU, such as the port of Calais, just a few watery miles from the white cliffs of Dover.
Matthew Carr‘s excellent book – Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent (New Press/Hurst, 2012) – is an attempt to make sense of this gigantic issue. He is a journalist, so there are compelling human stories involving those making the hopeful and often fateful journeys. There is also a comprehensive study of how the Union, in dissolving so many of its own internal borders, has systematically built up its external frontiers. The author makes the case that this has led to countless individual tragedies, but – perhaps more importantly – that such an attempt to counter flows of people either looking for better lives, escaping tyranny, or both, is futile and ultimately counter-productive.
Comprehensive solutions, whether technical or political, are unsurprisingly harder to identify. But that does not make this book any less compelling. Migration problems cannot be wished away, whatever the politicians say – the only real response is to understand the issue in all its humanity and all its complexity. That’s the value of this book.
I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence of biopolitical strategies of population management.
Taking a cue from Foucault, some historians of modern Germany have interpreted the talk about sex and reproduction in the Kaiserreich as the foundational stage of a discourse about eugenics that would ultimately contribute to National Socialism and its racial state. In his book Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dickinson challenges this view. He likens German sex talk to a barroom brawl that started at one table and spread across a crowded room. Sex was as a field of contestation, involving Christian moralists, sex reformers and sexologists, each tied to social and political interests. In this interview, we discuss the different anthropologies that undergirded the respective positions. Christian (and some Jewish) morality activists argued that sex had to be overcome through the moral virtue, while sex reformers and sexologists understood sex in a monist vein, as a natural drive and the engine of creative production and human biological and social evolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism.
John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Who are the Clash? How did they become the “only band that matters”? In this podcast, Randal Doane, the author of Stealing All Transmissions: A Secret History of the Clash (PM Press, 2014), discusses the American context of the Clash’s popularity and their generally positive reception by FM free form deejays and rock critics. The podcast covers a lot of ground, including what Lou Reed was like as a FM deejay in the 1970s to the effect of Sandy Pearlman on recording the Clash’s second album.
Randal Doane is an Assistant Dean of Studies at Oberlin College and earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published essays and articles on music and aesthetics, illegal file-sharing, and Bruce Springsteen, and blogs and tweetsabout music and culture. He recently published an essay about U2’s “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, in truth, a messy but workable mixture of a number of extremes, ideals and concepts? These are the type of questions that Mark Corner‘s new book The European Union: An Introduction (I. B. Tauris, 2014) seeks to both ask about the EU and tentatively answer. This is not just another routine tour around the institutions and functions of the European Union – instead, it’s a sharply written introduction to the EU that makes the reader understand it beyond the constraints of terms such as ‘nation state’. It’s also a very timely book, as the 28 member bloc is under scrutiny as never before, especially in the wake of both the euro crisis and the continent-wide rise of Eurosceptic parties. It’s a recommended read for anybody trying to make sense of one of the grandest twentieth-century projects that is still evolving and adapting to the world today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French Jews and the state during this critical period of French history, the book emphasizes the notion of a “Plural Vichy,” a regime that was complex rather than homogenous in its ideology and aims, including its antisemitism. Finding evidence of cooperation and accommodation between French Jewish young people and organizations and the state, the author shows the ways in which Vichy was uneven in its policies and practices, particularly in the two years immediately following the defeat of 1940.
Drawing on a wealth of local and national archival sources, Petain’s Jewish Children examines Vichy’s inclusion of Jewish youth in the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, as well as responses of a range of Jewish youth organizations (including the Jewish Scouts) to Vichy’s ideals and plans. As the book shows, these groups saw in certain Vichy policies and programs for French regeneration (especially the notions of a national cultural revolution and a return to the land) opportunities for the improvement of self, community, and nation. The author also draws on a series of fascinating interviews he conducted with a number of French Jews who lived through this difficult period. Complicating our understanding of years that have been understood predominantly in terms of persecution, resistance, and rescue, Petain’s Jewish Children will be of great interest to scholars of both French and Jewish studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Germans belonging to the generation born at the turn of the twentieth century endured staggering losses, many of which became difficult to mourn or even acknowledge: their parents in World War I, financial and physical security during the Weimar Republic, the racially pure utopian promise of the Third Reich, and likely several loved ones in the catastrophic final throes of World War II and the privation of the immediate postwar period.
Thomas Kohut, in his provocative and moving book, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2012), argues that the Weimar-youth generation’s inability to work through these losses informed its members’ particular brand of anti-Semitism, enabling them to look away from the Holocaust and leading them to seek comfort in the collective, the Volksgemeinschaft – initially in the Youth Movement, then the Reich Work Service, and finally the Free German Circle in their twilight years. The turn to the collective not only compensated for loss but also impeded empathy for the plight of Jewish neighbors and engendered chronic optimism and psychic fragility.
Through an analysis of sixty-two oral history interviews condensed into six composites, Kohut argues for the importance of empathy (defined as thinking one’s way into the experience of another) for both history and the consulting room. Empathy facilitates reparative mourning and guilt while its absence — as affect, social practice, and critical category – can have devastating, indeed genocidal, consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the early 1830s, the French school teacher Eugénie Luce migrated to Algeria. A decade later, she was a major force in the debates around educational practices there, insisting that not only were women entitled to quality education, but that women's education served a fundamental role in the French mission in the colonies. "Woman is the most powerful of all influences in Africa as in Europe," she wrote in 1846, the year after she founded a school for the instruction of indigenous Muslim girls.
In A Frenchwoman's Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, Rebecca Rogers (Stanford University Press, 2013), a Professor at the Université Paris Descartes and an expert in the history of the French educational system, lucidly explores Luce's work in the field, bringing a wealth of precise details– everything from what the lessons in the school room were like to prize-giving ceremonies and hygiene inspections. But Rogers also lets the reader in on the questions that remain about Luce's own life.
Rogers notes that while "Eugénie Allix's efforts to establish and finance her school have left ample traces in the colonial archives," there are many details of her life that are not present and which can only be lightly sketched. For example, "[C]ivil registers offer tenuous insight into Eugénie's social network during her first decade of life in Algeria"… The circumstances of her second marriage "have left no trace in the archival record"… It's an interesting meditation on the limitations of archives– how the story that is told of the life after is dependent upon the letters and signatures and red tape that the people of history have left behind them, as well as the moves the biographer must make to fill those gaps.
So often the stories of women in history become the stories of all the men they knew and yet, in this case, the archive itself prevents that. As Rogers writes, the men in her life "[b]oth shaped her life in ways the biographer can only imagine" and yet the biographer is left to imagine precisely because the proof is not there. "She appears in the colonial archives as very much an independent woman," which represents a rather refreshing reversal, almost as unique today as it would've been in the 19th century: a woman whose story stands solely on her work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Primary source readers represent an unusual historical genre. Unlike editions, their aim is not to enable the reader to hear, as clearly as possible, the voice of a single historical personage or institution. Nor are they purely interpretive works in which the author’s voice is foregrounded. In this conversation with Princeton University historian Anson Rabinbach, we learn what methodological, but also what moral challenges faced him and coeditor Sander Gilman in crafting The Third Reich Sourcebook (University of California Press, 2013). We learn how they selected and how they decided to preface the voices of Nazi ideologues, politicians, fellow travellers and victims.
With 411 primary documents that take the reader systematically through the key cultural fields and criminal activities of the regime, the Sourcebook represents a major engagement with the Nazi worldview by two leading intellectual historians. They found this worldview less uniform and internally consistent than others have surmised. Beyond the exaltation of the German Volk and the demonization of Jewry, much was up for grabs, including the epistemological framework meant to ground these core concepts. In this interview, Rabinbach paints a picture of German intellectual life under the Third Reich that was contradictory and complex, yet above all impoverished. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The new book, Constructing Neoliberalism: Economic Transformation in Anglo-American Democracies (University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows how political elites in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada successfully introduced radically new economic policies in the 1980s. While opinion polls have consistently showed that neoliberal policies are not popular, governments in all four countries have continued implementing an agenda that includes government spending cuts, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and free trade. The book’s author, Jonathan Swarts, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University North Central in northwestern Indiana, says he finds it fascinating how governments of all political stripes in the four Anglo-American democracies have adopted neoliberalism, which he calls a new “political-economic imaginary.” In this interview with the New Books Network, Professor Swarts discusses how political leaders in the four Anglo-American democracies brought about the neoliberal economic transformation using a combination of persuasion and coercion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-European or Anglo-centric models of the history of colonial medicine, Osborne’s book focuses on the centrality, transformations, and ultimate demise of naval medicine in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Motivating the central arguments and narrative of the book is a concern with place, places, and emplacement, and Osborne explores maritime medical practices and the ecology of disease in French provincial port cities, on ships, in prisons, in hospitals and schools, and beyond. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France pays special attention to how the study and conception of race, and its connection with health and disease, was formed and reformed in these settings. Readers with a special interest in the relationship between medicine and the military will find much to enjoy here, as will those who come to the book wanting to know more about the maritime history of diseases like Yellow Fever, lead poisoning, and Malaria. There’s also some wonderful storytelling here, including a fascinating account of a book-bomber in Chapter 4. It is a beautifully written account, and it should be required reading for those interested in the history of medicine and healing, of France, of the colonial medical past, and of place and locality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) narrates the emergence of a new image of the machine, a new concept of nature, a new theory of knowledge, and a new political orientation through a series of chapters that each use the work of a single figure to open up a world of romantic machines.
Part 1 of the book looks at the work of physical scientists whose model of precision experiment and math was transformed by an encounter with romantic philosophy and aesthetics, and introduces the electro-magnetic work of physicist AndreMarie Ampre, the instrumental practices of Prussian geophysical researcher Alexander von Humboldt, and the labor theory of knowledge in relation to the instruments of astronomer and politician Francois Arago. Part 2 looks at the impact of technology on theories of the self and the human, focusing on the fantastic arts and public spectacles featuring new discoveries in optics, mechanics, and natural history. (Readers will find lively discussions of dioramas, hallucinatory opera, symphonies, museums, magic shows, and expositions, here.) Part 3 treats the utopian thinkers and engineer-scientists of the late Restoration and the July Monarchy, looking at religiously-inflected social technologies of conversion, communication, and temporal coordination in the work and thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, printer and literary critic Pierre Leroux’s work and theories, and Auguste Comte’s instruments of thought and paper. It is a rich, elegantly argued work that offers not just a history of science and technology, but also a tracing of the roots of some contemporary continental philosophy, as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study. John Protevi‘s new book offers a wonderfully stimulating conceptual toolbox for doing just that. Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) creates (and guides readers through) a dialogue between the work of Gilles Deleuze and some key works and concepts animating contemporary geophilosophy, cognitive science, and biology. In doing so, Protevi’s work also has the potential to inform work in STS by turning our attention to new possibilities of thinking with scale, and with a process-oriented philosophy (among many other things). A first introduction lays out some of the basic conceptual tools and orientations emerging from Deleuze’s work, and a second introduction uses some of these ideas to explore the work of Francisco Varela in terms of a political physiology of “bodies politic.” After this pair of introductions, the following chapters focus on particular case studies, ranging from ancient and modern warfare, to hydropolitics, to the notion of a “socially mediated neuroplasticity” in cognitive science, to the role of affect in understanding the Occupy Wall Street movement, to the “eco-devo-evo” of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, and much, much else. It’s a fascinating study that has much to offer for the reader who is interested in the creative and analytic possibilities of bringing continental philosophy to bear in science studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a fascinating account of the co-production of facts and worlds, taking readers into the sciences of Rome from the first century BC to the second century AD. Masterfully blending approaches from the history and philosophy of science, Lehoux traces the significance of the “threefold cord” of nature, law, and the gods in making up the early Roman world. The chapters use the works of Cicero, Seneca, Galen, Ptolemy, and others to explore topics making up the foundation of a history of Roman science, including the importance of divination to Roman politics and natural knowledge, the relationship between optics and ethics in the Roman world, and the entanglements of law, nature, and witnessing. What Did the Romans Know? also contributes to philosophical debates over the theory-ladenness of observation, scientific and historical realism, and relativism. Lehoux ends his account as an “epistemological coherentist,” suggesting a model for thinking about and with the sciences in history and beyond. On top of all of this, the language of the text sparkles. It’s a wonderfully enjoyable read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Helene Snee, a researcher at the University of Manchester, has written an excellent new book that should be essential reading for anyone interested in the modern world. The book uses the example of the ‘gap year’, an important moment in young people’s lives, to deconstruct issues of class, cosmopolitanism and identity. Like many other aspects of contemporary life, common assumptions about travel (as opposed to tourism) or the individual experience (as opposed to patterns in social life) are taken apart in the book. The book reflects broader debates around class in British society that have been influenced by French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, such as the recent Great British Class Survey. The book situates itself in the tradition that seeks to unsettle the assumptions about taken for granted ideas about what is good judgement or good taste, asking why one form of, largely, middle class self development is privileged over others.
A Cosmopolitan Journey? Difference, Distinction and Identity Work in Gap Year Travel (Ashgate, 2014) is not just a contribution to critical theory. In order to understand the lives of the gap year individuals, Snee uses online blogs as evidence for the way that the ‘gappers’ tell stories that are about the places they have come from (rather than travelled to), about having ‘authentic’ (& potentially middle class) experiences during their travels and about being self-developing individuals. Crucially the book shows how even the word ‘travelling’ draws boundaries with ‘tourism’ to show how power and class dominance function to make it seem as if ‘not everyone has the good taste to take a gap year’, rather than the choice of a gap year being part of a much broader social structure.
Snee’s combination of travel and tourism as a topic, using predominantly young people’s experiences as an example, along with the way the text speaks directly to sociological debates between thinkers such as Bourdieu and Giddens, mark A Cosmopolitan Journey out as essential reading for a very wide audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I occasionally teach Western Civilization and you may have taken it in college. We all know the drill: Greeks-Romans-Dark Ages-Middle Ages-Renaissance-Reformation-Scientific Revolution-Enlightenment-Romanticism-Modernity. Or something like that. I teach Western Civilization as a “march of ideas”: Reason, Beauty, Freedom, Equality, Justice (caps intended) and the like. This way of telling the tale is sort of Whiggish, as historians like to say. It takes the liberal democratic present as its starting point and goes looking for the origins of a familiar now in an unfamiliar then. Flawed though it is, the “march of ideas” way of telling the story of the West works, at least for me, and I imagine it works for many of my colleagues.
It did not work for Nazis, for they did not believe ideas–liberal-democratic or otherwise–move history; rather, they believed races moved history, and more particularly the all-conquering Aryan race. Beginning from this premise, the Nazis re-imagined Western Civilization through a racist lense. The results, as David B. Dennis shows in his detailed, thoroughly-researched, and eye-opening book Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012), were simply bizarre. Nazi writers–including many very learned academics–cast reason aside and “Aryanized” a past that was obviously not “Aryan” (whatever that means) in any way. The question, of course, is not whether any of it was true–it’s all the purest bunk. The question, rather, is whether anyone really believed it, a question David and I discuss at some length. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
David N. Livingstone‘s new book traces the processes by which communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shared the same Scottish Calvinist heritage engaged with Darwin and Darwinians in different local contexts. Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) locates evolutionary debates in particular sites and situations as a way of understanding the history of science in terms of “geographies of reading” and “speech spaces.” The chapters introduce episodes that bring us into specific localities of reading and talking about Darwin, from Edinburgh in the 1870s, to Belfast during the “Winter of Discontent” following John Tyndall’s “Belfast Address,” to Toronto, to South Carolina, and finally to Princeton, NJ. These episodes collectively move readers away from understanding Darwin and his histories in terms of “isms,” instead looking carefully at the roles of three interrelated factors in shaping public encounters with Darwin’s ideas: place, politics, and rhetoric. The book concludes with a look at the ways that these factors continue to be pervasive in more recent dealings with Darwin. With its vibrant language, careful research, and compelling argument, Dealing with Darwin will be a must-read for historians of science, especially those interested in evolution, religion, Darwin, and/or locality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The social and cultural historian Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK is interested in the everyday moments between great events. In his books Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime, On Roads: A Hidden History and now Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (Profile Books, 2013) he documents the mundane activities that make up our lives.
In Armchair Nation Moran surveys the history of television watching in Britain from the technology’s first demonstration in a department store in 1925 and up to today. Moran’s engaging narrative progresses through major milestones in the medium’s history. To document how watching television had become a daily habit for a multitude of individuals, Moran uses an assortment of sources such as newspaper reviews, listings and interviews, diaries, and Mass Observation entries. While Moran hesitates to treat the consumption of television as an act of community building, he does frame it as a communal and meaningful act that binds millions together. Therefore, for Moran, the analysis of television consumption is also a meditation about the characteristics and challenges of collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Host Jonathan Judaken and author Alice Conklin discuss the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as this neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. In Memphis, and in America generally, we remain haunted by the history of “race” as a concept, and racism as a set of social practices. To gain some perspective on our local history, it is useful to take a step back, both in time and place. Alice Conklin‘s newest book, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013), tells the story of how the discipline of anthropology and Paris’ ethnographic museum par excellence, the Museum of Man, are wound into the history of racial science and colonial conquest, but also ultimately played an important part in undoing scientific racism. The book offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high water mark of French imperialism and European fascism, as well as recovers a neglected chapter in the international history of the human sciences. Alice Conklin is a professor in the Department of History at Ohio State University. Her first book, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997) examined the ways in which France’s liberal Third Republic produced a consensus on the legitimacy of imperialism through the notion of a special “mission to civilize” – highlighting the racist and republican elements that together influenced French policy-making. The book won the 1998 Book Prize of the Berskshire Conference of Women’s Historians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For those who are savvy about all things psychoanalytic, be they analysts, analysands, or fellow travelers, the existence, presence, work, writing, and imprimatur of Adam Phillips is given long, as opposed to short, shrift. It is safe to say that his voice is singular in its mellifluousness and its range.
I first encountered his writing at one of my dearest friend’s, and any second now new NBiP host and psychoanalyst Anne Wennerstrand’s wedding. Her husband, (doyen of the world of choreography), Doug Elkins, insisted I read a snippet from Phillip’s book, On Monogamy, before they slipped on their rings. This request placed the thinking of Phillips squarely into my casually bridesmaided lap. That Elkins, a dancer with what we then called “downtown” street credibility knew from Adam Phillips perhaps 15 years ago says something; and it says something about Phillips and his reach.
In Phillips’ most recent book, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale UP, 2014), we encounter the biography of a man who thought the entire genre of biography was nothing but bunk. And yet, in this biography of Freud we also encounter a writer who seeks to show respect for Freud’s dis-ease if not utter disrespect for the attempt to write the story of his life. As such, the book illustrates Phillips’ clinical acumen as much as his mind, his writing mien, and the life of his subject. Demonstrating great caution, going up to the lip of certain facts without speculating unduly, like a savvy but sensitive psychoanalyst, Phillips offers the world a book that, like a true tree of life, grows in many directions at once. As no doubt it will be read by people unfamiliar with “the talking cure” it carries a heavy burden in a day and age that prefers writing/texting/emailing to talking a deux, forget entering into an analysis!
Embedded within the text we find a vast exploration of the difference between “telling one’s story” (on Oprah or in a blog as is de rigeur in the culture of confession du moment) and speaking in the analytic dyad. Ultimately, as compared with what real truths might be uttered in a psychoanalysis, indeed the facts of biography look paltry. And furthermore, as this is a book that plays hardball with commonplace conceptions of knowledge, data, and truth, as compared with the exploration of unruly desire and its vicissitudes, we find ourselves returned to Freud who told us that the truths we create for the public work well to hide the real thing, the kinds of archaic truths spoken solely within the confines of a psychoanalytic setting.
Phillips brings back the primacy of the sexual to Freud, and hence to psychoanalysis. Bring on the alleluia chorus and enjoy the interview!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Allied planning for the expulsion, when and how it took place, and the multitude of deaths that occurred as a result of it.
We know much less about what happened to the expellees after the expulsion. Where did they go? What did they do? And, perhaps most interestingly, what did they think about their former Heimat? In The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Andrew Demshuk answers many of these questions and thereby sheds considerable light on post-war German history. He shows that though most of the expellees made good in West Germany, they still thought often about the “lost East.” Not surprisingly given the twists and turns of nostalgia, they created an idealized image of these territories, one without Nazis. Yet they also created a kind of counter-image–equally mythical–of an East thoroughly and irrevocably corrupted by Polish administration. Naturally, the idealized East of the past was far preferable to the (putatively) spoiled East of the present, so most of them had no desire to go back. Simply remembering what supposedly had been was enough to satisfy their homesickness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University of Tennessee Press, 2014), is simple: “!!!!” Text speak, to be sure, but it conveys the surprise I felt.
One can ask many questions about the trials of the German guards and administrators of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Why did it take so long to put them on trial? How did the German public and government respond to the trials? What do the trials say about German memory of the Holocaust?
Bryant answers all of these questions thoughtfully and persuasively. But, the heart of his book is a close study of the prosecution of a few dozen German soldiers, most of whom clearly had dirty hands. He takes us step by step through the process of locating the accused and those who could testify against them, through the complexities of the German legal code, and through the testimony and eventual convictions. And he explains why many of the accused were convicted of lesser crimes, or not convicted at all.
Bryant, trained as both a lawyer and an historian, is uniquely qualified to lead us on this journey. He does so with the verve of someone writing in the true crime genre, integrating life stories of the accused and the courtroom strategies of their trials with a thoughtful analysis of the legal code and culture that shaped their fates.
By the time I finished the book, my initial response had turned into a reluctant understanding. I’m not sure what the right solution is to the problems of transitional justice. But Bryant makes it abundantly clear why these trials turned out in this way, however uncomfortable that might make us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1873, the German scientist Rudolf Virchow declared in Parliament that liberals were locked in a Kulturkampf, a “culture war” with the forces of Catholicism, which he viewed as the chief hindrance to progress and modernity. Over the past two decades, historians have appropriated the term “culture war,” liberated it from its German origin and applied it as a generic expression for secular-catholic conflicts across nineteenth-century Europe. Intellectual and cultural historians have discovered in anti-catholicism a discourse and practice through which liberal ideas of subjectivity, sociability, and nation were constructed. Catholicism was, in short, the Other of a modernity understood to be rational, scientific and possibly Protestant.
But what of those other religious Others of European modernity — the Jews? How did Jews relate to, contribute to, or perhaps oppose liberal anti-catholicism? What light do the polemics of Jewish anticlericals throw on one of the key topics of contemporary political philosophy, namely the theory of secularism? These are the questions explored in The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford University Press 2014), an ambitious work that takes the reader from the late Enlightenment to the twentieth century and across many disciplinary boundaries. Join us in this interview with the author, Ari Joskowicz, assistant professor of Jewish Studies and European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Craig Martin‘s new book carefully traces religious arguments for and against Aristotelianism from the eleventh through the eighteenth centuries. Based on a close reading of a staggering array of primary sources, Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) in turn subverts several assumptions about the connection between Aristotelian thought and the emergence of the new sciences in early modernity. The book argues that we ought to understand the seventeenth century decline of Aristotle and Aristotelians as an authority in natural philosophy in its relation to the contemporaneous religious readings of Aristotelian texts. In a series of chapters that each look carefully at a particular temporal and philosophical context of debate over the readings of Aristotle, Averroes, and their interlocutors by various religious communities, Martin’s book offers a compelling and deeply textured account of arguments over the piety, language, translation, and other aspects of the Aristotelian corpus. This is a book that beautifully shows the interrelationships of the histories of science and religion, while taking readings on a journey through the philosophical corpora of some of the most foundational thinkers on the nature of the cosmos and the soul; through transformations in the craft of historical analysis; and through an important period when translation (and debates about it) helped shape the intellectual histories of the medieval and early modern worlds. It is a fascinating book, and an especially important study for anyone interested in the history of early modern science and/or the relationships between the early histories of science and religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This year marks the 225th anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution. You don’t have to be a historian to know and appreciate how significant that revolution is to our understanding of French society and culture since the eighteenth century. Noah Shusterman‘s new book, The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics (Routledge, 2013) is an accessible book that provides readers with an overview of the major events and historical actors who shaped the Revolution from the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789 to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. It is a book that offers a compelling narrative and draws on the vast field of scholarship that has analyzed and interpreted these events for over two centuries.
This new study of the French Revolution emphasizes the central roles that religion and gender played as events unfolded, from the “liberal revolution” of 1789 through the emergence of the republic, from the Terror to Napoleon’s ascent. Readers familiar with the history of the French Revolution will especially appreciate chapters that pay close attention to the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the revolt in the Vendee, issues and events that do not often get the play they may deserve in other surveys. Those who have always wanted to learn about the Revolution will find this book a highly informative and fascinating introduction to historical events and actors that help us understand so much that followed, in France and well beyond its borders. In our interview, Noah and I talk about teaching , the plethora of historical and political interpretations of the French Revolution, and the continuing relevance of that history to a contemporary French republic still struggling with issues of faith, desire, and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In the current political climate it might be easy to assume that Muslims in the ‘West’ have always been viewed in a negative light. However, when we examine the historical relationship between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors we find a much more complicated picture. In Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c.1050-1614 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Brian A. Catlos, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, offers the first comprehensive overview of Muslim minorities in Latin Christian lands during the Middle Ages. The book provides a narrative history of regional Muslim subjects in the Latin west, including Islamic Sicily, Al-Andalus, expansion in the Near East, the Muslim communities of Medieval Hungary, and portraits of travelers, merchants, and slaves in Western Europe. Here we find that Muslims often had great deal of agency in structuring the subject/ruler relationship due to the material and economic contributions they made to local communities. The second half of the book explores thematic issues that were shared across Muslims communities of the Mediterranean world. Catlos surveys ideological, administrative, and practical matters, including Muslim concern about legitimacy and assimilation, legal culture, and everyday social life in these multi-confessional communities. In our conversation we discussed the reign of Christian Spains, Norman rule, the adoption of Arabo-Islamic culture, Morisco hybridity, Islam in Christian imagination, the role of Muslim women, and everyday public religious life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A simple search for “Holocaust” on Amazon turns up a stunning 27,642 results. How can there still be uncovered terrain?
Wendy Lower shows it is in fact possible to say new things about the Holocaust (to be fair, she’s following a handful of other scholars who have focused on gender and the Holocaust). Her questions are simple. What did the approximately 500,000 women who went East to live and work in the territories occupied by the German armies know about the killing of Jews (and other categories of victims)? To what degree did they participate in the killing? How did this experience affect them after the war?
Her answers are disturbing, to say the least. For Lower uncovers ample evidence that women both witnessed and participated in the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets” in Eastern Europe. The patterns of participation varied, as did their acknowledgement of their actions. But the evidence is undeniable that women played a significant role in facilitating the Final Solution.
Lower, along with people writing about Rwanda, about the frontiers of Australia and the United States, and a variety of other moments in time and space, illustrates our need to pay more attention to women and to gender in our study of mass violence. Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), is an admirable contribution to the discussion, well-researched, well-written and emotionally compelling. I can’t think of a better place to start in examining these issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores this world via the work of Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur and his vast and varied networks of correspondents, assistants, colleagues, and co-naturalists. As we read, we follow this loose network across the bakeries, gardens, tidepools, hedges, studies, academies, kitchens, poultry yards, specimen collections, and other spaces of quotidian life and their associated practices of natural history. As these men and women observed, chased, collected, dissected, preserved, painted, described, and tested, they practiced the production of knowledge about the natural world as a part of their intimate, daily lives. The chapters of Terrall’s book observe them as they in turn observe aphids, mayflies, sea anemones, chickens, and other creatures as a means to understand larger questions about the nature of generation, metamorphosis, reproduction, and other lived behaviors and processes. They feed material from inside the quills of young pigeon feathers to spiders in order to study spider silk and its commercial potential. They glue glass to cocoons to create windows into the metamorphoses of the butterflies inside. They use hog bristles to turn tiny polyps inside-out and observe how they responded. They draw, they incubate, and they incorporate practices and materials from the physical sciences to do so. Catching Nature in the Act contributes thoughtfully to several interrelated historiographical threads in the history of science – the histories of practice and place, the importance of the household as a space of observation and experiment, the role of networks of correspondence and collaboration, the relationship between natural science and theology – and offers helpful revisions of dominant approaches to each of those historiographies of science and its histories. It is a must-read for historians of science, and a fascinating narrative for any interested reader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilation–against the Soviet Union on Soviet soil. The Germans killed millions upon millions of Red Army soldiers, Communist Party officials, and ordinary Soviet citizens. As the Germans were pushed back by the Soviets, they conducted a ruthless scorched-earth policy. Stalin’s propaganda organs made much of German atrocities and encouraged Soviet soldiers to punish Germans wherever they found them.
It’s little wonder, then, that Soviet troops sought a kind of wild, indiscriminate revenge against the Germans as they crossed into German territory. They murdered, raped, and pillaged on an incredible scale. But, as Filip Slaveski shows in his remarkable new book The Soviet Occupation of Germany: Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945-1947 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), the Soviet authorities did not turn a blind-eye to this sort of retribution. Though they wanted to demilitarize Germany and to strip it of industry, they did not plan or condone mass violence against Germans. Moscow quickly replaced the Red Army as an occupying force with SVAG, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. It’s task was to end the wild violence and govern (indeed, protect) the German population.
Slaveski demonstrates that SVAG’s task was very difficult or, perhaps, impossible. It neither had the political support from the top (Stalin pitted it against the army) nor the resources to both police the million plus vengeful Soviet troops in occupied Germany nor manage the impoverished German population. Ultimately, the violence only ended when most of the Soviet troops left.
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Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse (Sceptre, 2013) is the second book by John Dickie on the history of the three organized crime groups from Southern Italy: the Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra, the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria and the Camorra from Naples.
Dickie has an advantage over other researchers in organized crime by being able to read the Italian sources in the original. This puts him in a position to provide an English language book that has more detail and local characters than other authors.
The book sets out the history of the three groups from the Second World War to today. It shows how they integrated themselves into the normal social and political life of state; a political alliance that was tied up with the fight against Communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Italian state has tried to recognize and respond to the threat these three groups present to the power of the government to control southern Italy.
This is a fascinating look into the reality of these mafia organizations, the horrors and depravations they impose on society and their threat to democracy. It is difficult to overstate the danger they have presented to the Italian nation including the real chance that they would displace the government in certain regions. Dickie’s book puts the power of organized crime into perspective. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in organized crime and its influence on society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from internal passports after failing to do so during seven decades of Soviet rule? What led German leaders to finally grant guest workers from Southern and Eastern Europe the path to citizenship after nearly five decades? How was Turkey able to move beyond the assimilation-based model that had guided the Turkish republic for eight decades and move toward a multi-cultural society?
In his book Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Sener Akturk makes a carefully constructed argument for how states can redefine “regimes of ethnicity” through the confluence of three key processes – the rise of new counter-elites, the development of new discourses, and the emergence of hegemonic majorities, which together can give governments the power to change laws on citizenship. His argument not only explains processes that took place at the dawn of the 21st century in Germany, Turkey, and Russia, but offers a glimpse of how other states can address questions of integration in an increasingly globalized world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught.
I will do just that after reading Mark Levene‘s new two volume work The Crisis of Genocide (2 Vols. Devastation: The European Rimlands, 1912-1938; Annihilation and The European Rimlands, 1938-1953) (Oxford University Press, 2014). These books, a continuation of Mark’s earlier volumes titled Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, offer a rich and thought-provoking analysis of the ways in which the changing expectations and culture of the international system interacted with local events and personalities to drive mass violence. The work is more analytical than narrative. It is complex and requires careful attention to argument and evidence. But it amply repays this effort with a reading of modern European history that made me rethink how I understood the period. I learned much from the book about the details of violence in Anatolia and the Balkans. But it was his broader treatment of the changing norms of international relations that really made me think hard.
Levene’s earlier volume established his work as a must-read for historians of genocide and mass violence. His new volumes deserve equal praise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats not just published images, but also argues for the centrality of “working images” to the histories of science and observation, paying special attention to personal drawings in private notebooks as instruments of individual and collective observation. Nasim’s approach blends the history and philosophy of science in a study that informs the histories of astronomy, images, and paperwork, and that emphasizes the importance of the philosophy of mind and its history in shaping this heavenly narrative. His transdisciplinary approach spans several media that include maps and portraits, oil paintings and etchings, private drawings and collectively-produced published images. The book helped me see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and the starry night above, with new eyes and a new appreciation for the vision and visioning of nineteenth century astronomical observers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013) such an interesting read in 2014. In this detailed study of the varied economic, political, social, and cultural meanings and practices of “credit” from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century, Crowston draws our attention to mutually constitutive worlds and systems of circulation. At once a genealogy of credit; an economic, social, and cultural history of fashion; and an examination of the roles of gender and desire in Old Regime France, Credit, Fashion, Sex makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the French Revolution while respecting the historical integrity of the period that came before.
In addition to its conceptual and historiographical insights regarding credit and the complexities of Old Regime society, the book offers readers a fascinating and extensively-researched analysis of the everyday practices and systems of exchange that operated “behind the scenes” of more familiar stories. For example, the book illuminates the mythology and critiques surrounding Marie Antoinette, the queen who embodied like no one else the intersection between ideas about credit, fashion, and sexuality in the era before 1789. At the same time, Crowston gives us a glimpse of other figures and social actors who played vital roles in the society of the period: Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker; the fashion merchants who made so much luxury and refinement possible, as well as all those wives not married to Louis XVI who traded on/in their husbands’ credit, participating in multiple economic and cultural systems of circulation and power.
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When I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attention on the Western front at the expense of the other aspects of the war. In the years since then (I won’t say how many), historians have worked hard to remedy this neglect. Nevertheless, we still know much less about the Eastern Front than we do about events in France or even the homefronts of Western and Central Europe.
Geoffrey Wawro‘s new book A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire (Basic Books, 2014), fills in an important part of this gap. Wawro is most interested in understanding why the Empire chose to go to war despite (or perhaps because of) its many challenges and why it failed so immediately and drastically. Decisions made by diplomats, soldiers and politicians in Vienna played a critical role in starting the war. And decisions made by the leaders of the Monarchy’s army’s played just as important a role in leading an admittedly flawed instrument to defeat.
Wawro tells this story with verve and insight. His characterizations are compelling and his prose stimulating. It’s a book that reads like a novel yet answers crucial questions about the course of the war. It helps us understand a collapse that set the stage for decades of death and destruction. For that reason alone, Wawro’s analysis of that collapse is a great addition to our understanding of the war and of Central Europe in the Twentieth Century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter in a maternity shop: ‘In our country I couldn’t even imagine that such a specialized shop could exist’.” Well-stocked shops, attractive cafes, and medieval streets were among the many discoveries that Soviet citizens made in their trips abroad. After decades of closed borders and rumors of life abroad, the 1950s ushered in a new era — an era in which Soviet citizens would be able to participate in the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and items.
In All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2011), Anne Gorsuch discusses the varied experiences of Soviet citizens traveling at home, to the “near abroad” of Estonia, and to Eastern and Western Europe, in the Khrushchev era. For many, this travel was no holiday but a purposeful excursion. Tourists were to learn about other parts of the world, but most importantly, they were to represent the Soviet Union in a Cold War struggle over culture. The Soviet tourist was an actor and the world his stage. If tourism was an olive branch and propaganda tool, however, it was also an opportunity for personal encounter and pleasure, including shopping on Oxford Street in London and enjoying the French Riviera. These experiences did not inevitably lead to anti-Soviet opinions or actions. For many elite travelers in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was possible for them to admire, purchase, and envy Western consumer goods, and still believe in the future of Soviet socialism. Dr. Gorsuch examines new opportunities for cultural exchange and transnational encounter, exploring the meaning of travel and exploration for a country breaking the chains of Stalinization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account of notes and note-taking among early modern English virtuosi. Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a fascinating glimpse into practices of information management as they allowed English scholars to bridge text and memory, print media and manuscripts, journals and commonplace books, reading and observation, the individual and the collective. Yeo’s book explores the relationship between early modern methods of collecting and storing information and the larger project of Baconian natural history, paying special attention to the ways that Bacon and several Fellows of the Royal Society used notebooks and other note-keeping technologies. Beyond this, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science is also deeply embedded in the history of memory and its (dis)contents, and engages (especially in a chapter on Samuel Hartlib and his circle) the historiography of epistolary networks and early modern histories of correspondence. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East(Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz trace the many connections between Germany–Imperial and Nazi–and the Arab world. Their particular focus is on a fellow named Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between from 1921 to 1948. Both Al-Husseini and, a bit later, Hitler inherited a project hatched by the German officials in World War I, namely, to start an Islamist Jihad against the Western Powers in the Middle East. The two found common cause in this project: al Husseini wanted the French and British out and Hitler wanted to Germany to dominate the region. But they were also united by another cause: eliminationist Jew-hatred.
Al-Husseini and Hitler worked together throughout the war to murder and plan the murder of as many Jews as they could get their hands on. After the war al-Husseini denied any connection with Hitler, yet he continued their common anti-Western, anti-Jewish project. Al-Husseini enlisted many former Nazis for just this purpose. In the late 1940s al-Husseini remained influential, not only among Palestinian Arabs, but widely in the Middle East. That influence, so Rubin and Schwanitz show, can be seen in the actions of many post-war Arab nationalist and Islamist leader–right down to today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” reflects a wandering, impulsive mind distinguished by a remarkable disconnection from reality. There are obvious themes: strident German nationalism, radical racialism, vicious anti-semitism, and militarism. Do these themes add up to an internally consistent “worldview”?
Richard Weikart argues that they do. In his excellent book Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), Weickart points out that Hitler, like so many of his generation, was powerfully influenced by a particular reading of Darwin’s theory of evolution. By this interpretation, human “races” were seen as species and, as such, deemed to be in eternal struggle for life itself. “Nature,” according to these theorists (usually called “Social Darwinists”), selected the most fit races and destroyed the less fit. Weikart shows that Hitler held very fast to this idea, as can be seen both in his pronouncements and actions. He also shows that Hitler–in contrast to many other Social Darwinists–had no trouble leaping over the distinction between “is” and “ought.” According to the Fuhrer, the “fact” that the “races” were subject to evolutionary process meant that they should struggle with all their might. Here, might was ethically right by what Hitler believed was irrefutable “natural law.” It was a recipe for madness and, of course, immense tragedy. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things.
In the past few years, this has changed. We now have a greater understanding of Lemkin’s role in pushing the UN to write and pass the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Moreover, researchers have a newfound appreciation for the depth and insights of his research. Genocide scholars talk about their field experiencing a ‘return to Lemkin’
It seems an appropriate time, then, to reexamine Lemkin’s ideas and career. We’re doing so in a special, two-part series of interviews with scholars who have edited and published Lemkin’s writings. Earlier this month, I posted an interview with Steve Jacobs, who carefully edited and annotated an edition of Lemkin’s writings about the history and nature of genocide, simply titled Lemkin on Genocide.
This time, I talked with Donna-Lee Frieze, who has meticulously edited Lemkin’s unpublished autobiography Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (Yale University Press, 2013). The book gives us a new appreciation for Lemkin’s work. It offers us a deeper insight into who he was and how he fit into his times. And it shows how his experiences shaped his lifelong crusade to create an framework within international law that would protect persecuted ethnic and religious groups.
One brief note about the sound. We taped this interview in what was late winter in Wichita. Bizarrely enough, New York that day was evidently much warmer than Wichita. Donna accordingly taped this interview sitting next to an open window. Occasionally, you can hear the passing traffic in the background. If you’re not in New York, consider this local color. If you are, feel free to brag that spring comes early in your town. You don’t get that chance often. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett‘s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio is a book with a big mission: to write inventively about the life of someone with whom most everyone outside of Italy is entirely unfamiliar whilst also promoting the literary legacy of a man celebrated within his own country and little translated (much less read) everywhere else. In the end, Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War (Knopf, 2013) succeeds on both fronts, which is precisely why it remains one of the most lauded biographies of the last year.
It’s not a straightforward day-by-day narrative. Rather, the story zooms in and out, taking flight and exuberantly soaring through whole weeks, months, years only to, at other moments, slow down to sensuously revel in the details of a weekend on the beach or an afternoon spent in bed. There’s something about this technique that beautifully mimics the ways in which we often reflect upon our own lives, with whole boring years blotted from memory whilst every single detail of a particularly haunting evening is eternally seared upon the brain. This is, I imagine, in large part why the book is such joy to read- because (at the risk of making sound simple something which very much isn’t) we’re reading the life of a flamboyant character written in much the same way we tend to think upon our own.
d’Annunzio thought words, written well, could inflame nations and excite history and change the world. For him, writes Hughes-Hallett, “writing was a martial art.” Artistically, he was a poet, novelist, playwright and lover (the classification isn’t accidental- for d’Annunzio experienced love affairs as real relationships and literary creations), but also a soldier, flier, and politician. Those are the raw ingredients of his story. Superficially fascinating, to be sure, but it’s Hughes-Hallet’s mixing of them that so animates the biography of this short, bald man with narrow sloping shoulders and terrible teeth. And it’s the tensions that emerge through the telling that ensure that, even if you’ve never read a word of d’Annunzio’s poetry, his story sticks with you, which is a sign of an both a good book and an interesting life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Federico Fabbrini is Assistant Professor of European & Comparative Constitutional Law at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands. In his new book, entitled Fundamental Rights in Europe: Challenges and Transformations in Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2014), Fabbrini analyses the constitutional implications of the highly complex European architecture for the protection of fundamental rights and the interactions between the various European human rights standards.
By innovatively comparing this architecture with the United States Federal System, the book advances an analytical model that systematically explains the dynamics at play within the European multilevel human rights architecture. The book however also goes beyond simple theory and tests the model of challenges and transformations by examining four very interesting and extremely relevant case studies. In the end, a ‘neo-federal’ theory is proposed that is able to frame the dilemmas of ‘identity, equality, and supremacy’ behind this multilevel architecture in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of dry ice. In Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Mitchell argues that we are in the midst of a vitalist turn in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and that this is only the latest in a series of eras of what he calls “experimental vitalism.” Experimental Life is largely devoted to exploring the first of those eras by tracing an experimental vitalism through a wide range of Romantic textual worlds from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After a wonderful discussion of the meanings of the “experimental” in the arts and sciences, Mitchell’s book proceeds to look at a series of cases through which we can understand how Romantic thinkers sought out the points of perplexity in vital phenomena, encouraged that perplexity, and often did so by exploring “altered states” that seemed to confuse life and death. These altered states included suspended animation, disorientation, digestion and collapsurgence, mediality, and encounters with the uncanniness of plant life, and Mitchell’s treatment of each case is both beautifully articulated and full of unusual and illuminating juxtapositions. Ultimately, Experimental Life offers readers not just a way of understanding these Romantic contexts, but also engages each case in a way that informs how we think about contemporary biomedical sciences and biopolitics.
Experimental Life has also just won the annual book prize for the British Society for Literature and Science. Congratulations, Rob! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things.
In the past few years, this has changed. We now have a greater understanding of Lemkin’s role in pushing the UN to write and pass the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Moreover, researchers have a newfound appreciation for the depth and insights of his research. Genocide scholars talk about their field experiencing a ‘return to Lemkin.’
It seems an appropriate time, then to reexamine Lemkin’s ideas and career. We’ll do so in a special two-part series of interviews with scholars who have edited and published Lemkin’s writings. Later this month, I’ll post an interview with Donna Lee Frieze, who has meticulously edited Lemkin’s unpublished autobiography, Totally Unofficial.
First, however, I’ll talk with Steven L. Jacobs. Steve recently published a carefully edited and annotated edition of Lemkin’s writings about the history and nature of genocide, simply titled Lemkin on Genocide (Lexington Books, 2012). This work was written during the 1940s, but never published. Through it, we gain a new appreciation for the depth of Lemkin’s theoretical understanding and the breadth of his research. In addition, reading Jacob’s book provides us a richer sense of how Lemkin fit into the ideological currents of his time. In editing this work, Steve has done a great service to all those interested in genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metropolitan convicts in the eight decades following the French Revolution. Unlike the better-known case of British Australia, French Guiana failed to turn from penal colony to economically viable territory and today remains a sparsely populated overseas department of France.
The cover photograph of a forested riverbank shrouded in mist evokes the continual disappearance of human settlement in Guiana. Spieler approaches this erasure not as a failure of French colonial policy, but rather as an expression and product of its design. Her book is a marvelous legal history that shows how the laws of empire shaped a colonial topography, relocated its inhabitants and played a decisive part in their ongoing destruction.
In understanding laws and penal colonies as sites of experimentation, where new methods of subjugation and new subjectivities were produced, Spieler picks up Michel Foucault’s seminal work of 1975, Discipline and Punish. Yet whereas Foucault saw the emergence of a disciplinary society in which the techniques of the prison were multiplied and scattered throughout society, Spieler insists on the importance of certain spaces, certain targets and certain laws. She insists on the importance of margins, of borders, of non-citizens and of the non-free. In short, she insists on the importance of colony and its imperial context in understanding the development of modern rights, laws and space.
In this way, she makes a significant contribution not only to the history colonialism, but to central debates in social and critical theory. In recognition of this achievement her book won the George L. Mosse Prize for European intellectual history and the J. Russell Major Prize for French history, both of the American Historical Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I overheard Ed Vielmetti and Lou Rosenfeldtalking about something called “del.icio.us” [sic]. It sounded interesting, so I asked them–complete strangers though they were–about it. They kindly brought me up to speed on something else called “Web 2.0.” Then I begin thinking…
Turns out a lot thinking is done in cafes, as Leona Rittner, W. Scott Haine, and Jeffrey H. Jacksonpoint out in their fascinating book The Thinking Space: The Cafe as a Cultural Institution in Paris, Italy and Vienna (Ashgate, 2013). At one time or another, most modern Western intellectuals found themselves in one or another cafedrinking coffee, dreaming big dreams, and often arguing with another. The caffeine helped, but the atmosphere and company helped even more. Unhurried, quiet, comfortable, warm, public, inexpensive, full of reading material, open long hours, and right on the corner. The coffee house is an ideal “third place” for cerebral types. To my mind the most fascinating thing about this remarkable collection of essays is the variety of kinds of coffee houses found around Europe. Needless to say, they didn’t (and don’t) all look like your local Starbucks. If you like cafes, you should grab a copy of this book and read it . . . in a cafe, of course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to narrate the emergence of a particular kind of intelligence that was formed by visualization techniques. Hunter’s book pays close attention to the work of Robert Hooke while situating Hooke within a community of painters, architects, writers, customs brokers, telescope makers, and other fashioners of early modern experiments of all sorts. A significant contribution to both the histories of science and of art, Wicked Intelligence pays equal attention to the flat spaces of the imaged page and the built spaces of the museum, the city, and the “laboratory of the mind.” It is a beautifully written book based on a gorgeously weird archive. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornographic nature. Colette Colligan‘s new book, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) explores the rich and fascinating history of these “Paris editions” across seven decades of literary publishing in France, in English. Troubling too-simplistic notions of British prudishness versus French sexual liberalism and “high” versus “low” literatures, Colligan’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Paris’s expatriate past, a past that remains part of the city’s mythology to this day.
The book includes discussion of the cultural, legal, and commercial sides of this story, as well as closer textual analyses of some key examples of “degraded” and high modernist literature. In its chapters, readers will be introduced to characters and works that may not be so well known, including the British expatriate publisher Charles Carrington (whose publishing credits include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1908). In addition to illuminating the lives of lesser known figures and texts, A Publisher’s Paradise also situates the history of “dirty books” published in the French capital to literary legends Sylvia Beach (the owner of the Parisian landmark English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Co. and publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922) and Vladimir Nabokov (whose novel Lolita was first published by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris in 1955). The book will be a rewarding read to anyone interested in the histories of publishing, pornography, and/or Parisian cultural life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is now largely forgotten. That’s too bad for a number of reasons. He was a brilliant thinker who wrote some of the most insightful analyses of the development and workings of capitalism around. You can still read his work and profit. He was the intellectual godfather of several notable British Marxist historians of the “New Left” of the 1960s and 1970s: Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, among others. And, perhaps most importantly, his life gives us a window into a forgotten time, one in which a economists took communism seriously and fellows at Cambridge could earnestly believe in a bright communist future. This, I think, is a time we must not forget.
Thanks to Timothy Shenk‘s well-researched, readable biography Maurice Dobb: Political Economist (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), we won’t have to. Shenk tells Dobb’s tale in all its tortured complexity. A member of the establishment and an anti-establishmentarian. A dyed-in-the-wool Marxist and a deadly serious empirically-oriented economist. A supporter of the Soviet Union and a critic of Soviet power. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In her previous book, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), Deborah Cohen took us into the homes of Britons and examined their relation to their habitat and its artifacts from 1830 onwards. In her new book, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfall.” Yet, Walter Benjamin urged his friend Gershom Scholem to read Klage’s latest book in 1930, at a time when Klages was increasingly bending his anti-Semitic philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) in a political direction. It was, Benjamin wrote, “without a doubt, a great philosophical work, regardless of the context in which the author may be and remain suspect.”
Nitzan Lebovic, historian at Lehigh University, has set himself the task of unfolding the ways in which Klages’s philosophy became both an inspiration for Nazi cultural politics and a subterranean source in the history of critical philosophy from Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben. In this podcast, we discuss his book The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
If you have spent a bit of time in Germany or with German friends, you may have noticed the deep interest and affinity many Germans have for American Indians. What are the origins of this striking and enduring fascination? In many ways, it might be said to go back to Tacitus’ Germania – or at least, to 19th-century Germans’ readings of Germania – but it was also indelibly shaped by the writings of explorer Alexander von Humboldt and by James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which were enormously influential in Germany and on Germans abroad. German landscape painters also created some of the most enduring and iconic images of the American West. When Germans in America fought with American Indians over land, their compatriots in Europe tended to side with the Indians. Later, over the successive ruptures of 20th century German history, Germans always found new ways of engaging with American Indians, whether through hobbyist organizations, Wild West shows, through their political commitments to Indian political causes – like the American Indian Movement – or through the astoundingly popular novels of Karl May.
Exploring with great verve the transnational connections between various groups of Germans and Native Americans over two centuries, H. Glenn Penny‘s Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) engages in a wide-ranging set of discussions that open up new and unexpected vistas onto questions of modern German history, the history of European and American colonialism, histories and legacies of genocide, and a host of other key topics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
A report to the General Assembly of Scottish Presbyterians of 1923 contains the following passage: “God placed the people of this world in families, and history which is the narrative of His providence tells us that when kingdoms are divided against themselves they cannot stand. Those nations homogenous in race were the most prosperous and were entrusted by the Almighty with the highest tasks.” Strange as it appears today, such a racial theology was commonplace among Christians prior to 1945.
Where did the notion that races had providential roles come from? One origin was a theory that the world had been inhabited by humans before Adam. The history of this theory, which formed at the intersections of science, religion and colonial geography, is taken up in Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). In this interview with its author, David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University Belfast, we discuss how Pre-Adamism moved from being a seventeenth-century heresy to a widely accepted theological and scientific theory of the nineteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, however, have long ignored them. Enlightenment philosophers used descriptions of powerful women in the French court to mock the monarchy. Nineteenth-century historians propagated myths about these historical women to discredit the monarchy and to justify the exclusion of women from the French republic. Feminist scholars have eschewed royal women as subjects because their influence stemmed from their sexual and romantic association with kings and not because of their own merit. And contemporary historiography in France has long turned away from political elites to focus on social and cultural sites of inquiry.
Kathleen Wellman, in Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France (Yale University Press, 2013, Yale), argues that women of the French court deserve our undivided attention because they greatly influenced the French Renaissance. Between the mid-15th century to the end of the 16th century, women such as Agnès Sorel, Anne of Brittany, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine de Medici, and Marguerite de Valois, acted with agency, carved out spheres of influence, overcame constraints, and made use of their positions for personal and political ends, and in the process influenced the course of French history. Wellman's engrossing account of royal women compels us to revise our understanding of the French Renaissance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), include reflections on Darwin’s theories of natural selection and divergence, Ernst Haeckel’s life and work, the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer, the linguistic theories of August Schleicher, and the historical tendency to relate Hitler’s Nazism to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Individually, the essays are models of close and careful reading of the documentary traces of the life and work of Darwin, Haeckel, and others, and include some exceptionally affecting and tragic moments. Many of them touch on evolutionary theory’s moral character, its roots in Romanticism, and its conception of mankind. In addition to offering a fascinating set of case studies in the history of biology, the essays and appendices also collectively raise some important questions about how historians understand the past and bring it into narrative existence. What kind of thing is the past? What sets the history of science apart from other historical disciplines? Is it reasonable to use contemporary science to help construe the past? What is a scientific theory and where is it located? What does it mean to ask (and what might it look like to carefully answer) a question like, Was Hitler a Darwinian? The essays in Richards’ collection are wonderfully reflective considerations that reward the time and attention of both specialists in the history of biology and thoughtful general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Conventional wisdom holds that the birth of the rock star came in 1956 with the ascendance of Elvis Presley. Not so, says author Michael Walker, who argues in his page-turning What You Want is in the Limo (Spiegel and Grau, 2013) that in 1973 the Elvis, Chuck Berry and Beatles styled “rock and roll stardom” of the fifties and sixties gave way to “modern rock stardom,” as embodied by the members of Led Zeppelin, the Alice Cooper Band, and the Who. This new way of living and performing came into full bloom that year as these legendary groups toured America in a manner that bore little resemblance to the everybody-jam-in-the-van cross-country rock tours of prior years. With what Walker calls “the infrastructure” of rock stardom now in place, private jets and black limousines whisked these musicians from luxury hotels to cavernous arenas where they performed in front of monstrous crowds. When it was time to wind down after the show, these stars enjoyed the benefits of a “halter-topped, lude-dropping coke-and-glitter-flecked” rock culture that fetishized depravity and provided riches previously unheard of in the music business.
While Walker’s addictive and fun book provides the kind of sordid and hedonistic details that are the makings of all great rock biographies, he also offers up the morality play corrective that demonstrates the costs of this manner of living. Alice Cooper later conceded that his record-breaking 1973 tour “wrecked” his band, which broke up soon after. For Led Zeppelin, the years following 1973 saw the band enter a “creative funk that stoke[d] rumors that the band is cursed.” The Who, Walker writes, departed “the decade after a pair of desultory albums.” But before the fall, these musicians threw one hell of a yearlong party.
Michael Walker is the author of the national bestseller Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,the Washington Post, andRolling Stone, among other publications. He lives in Los Angeles and can reached via Twitter @mwwwalker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be.
It’s a statement that seems obvious enough and yet one which is still, to some degree, casually combative. For biography has long been a genre wherein story-telling is disproportionately devoted to cradle-to-grave narratives about the lives of white men. It’s also a field wherein there persists a notion that there are things one, as a biographer, is and is not at liberty to do. This is changing, yes, but slowly, so that when books come along that bring forth stories that aren’t told in the standard, stale way, they often come under critical fire. As such, Neil McKenna‘s Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England (Faber & Faber, 2013) stands at the frontline, a staunch example of the histories that need to be told and what biography can be.
Through meticulous research and lush, incisive prose, McKenna presents a gripping and startling account of the arrest and prosecution of two Victorian drag queens. It’s a deft performance that strikes a tricky balance, playfully re-creating the underworld of 19th century London and the colorful personalities who inhabited it, whilst simultaneously conveying the importance of what is at stake for the people involved and society at-large. Make no mistake, this is a serious book, but one which is nonetheless shot through with the joie de vivre and chutzpah characteristic of the charming Miss Fanny Park and Miss Stella Boulton themselves.
For readers who believe biography can only be written in one particular way, Fanny & Stella may induce an apoplectic fit. But, for those eager for innovation and displays of daring within the field, Fanny and Stella promises an exciting encounter with something alarming and bold and bright and new. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexuality, and race played in the far-right ideologies of the 1930s. Re-reading the work and ideas of a group of male intellectuals known as the Jeune Droite or “Young New Right,” Sanos argues that aesthetics and politics were deeply intertwined in these authors’ representations of a crisis of French civilization and in the antisemitic, racist, and misogynist responses they articulated. Figures like Maurice Blanchot and Louis-Ferdinand Celine were some of the most famous members of an intellectual movement that elaborated an “aesthetics of hate” in which Jews, women, and homosexuals figured as emblems of decadence and decline. The book also traces in fascinating ways some of the crucial links between French anti-Semitism and imperialism, examining connections between metropolitan and colonial racisms.
While Sanos is careful to point out that hers is not a history of fascism per se, The Aesthetics of Hate makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the far-right in France and beyond. The book illuminates the intersections between gender, sexuality, and race in modern France, as well as the fundamental interdependence of French culture and politics through the twentieth century. An archaeology of some of the more repugnant political ideas of the 1930s, the book also has broader implications for our understanding of contemporary French expressions of cultural anxiety, racism, and hateful politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
If you went to college in the United States and took a Western Civ class, you’ve probably read at least a bit of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). The two are so often paired in history and political science classes that they are sometimes published together. No wonder, really, because Paine’s Rights of Man was written in response to Burke’s Reflections.
It’s easy to understand why these two book are standard fare in college: arguably, Burke’s and Paine’s books are the intellectual well-springs of what we call the republican (with a small “r”) “Right” and the “Left.” Much of what American Republicans think can be traced to Burke; much of what American Democrats think can be traced to Paine. For this reason, Burke and Paine are–with the possible exception of J.S. Mill–the most important political thinkers in the modern Western republican tradition.
And for all these reasons, Yuval Levin‘s wonderful The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2013) is very relevant today. Levin masterfully explains not only why Burke and Paine thought what they thought (that is, he provides the historical context for their ideas), but he also makes clear how their ideas matter today. Listen in and find out why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Jeffrey Church is the author of Infinite Autonomy: The Divided Individual in the Political Thought of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche (Penn State Press 2012). The book won the Best First Book Award from the Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association in 2013. Church is associate professor of political science at the University of Houston.
Church re-examines Hegel and Nietzsche in order to reconcile their conceptions of the individual. He links the two as “evil twins” rather than enemies in their shared efforts to reconstruct the individual with the communal. In building this argument, Church find that the two reach very different conclusions about what humans can do to realize their individuality, with Hegel seeking out public life and Nietzsche culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and conquering was what they did. So, when they attacked and subdued vast stretches of the world, they did so without regret or second-thought.
All that changed after French Revolution. France was not, ostensibly at least, ruled by people whose business was war. Yet, even for the French republicans, imperialism remained attractive. And so the question was put: how does a republican state “do” imperialism?
In her excellent book By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2011), Jennifer Sessions tells us how with reference to the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. The answer the French gave was strikingly simple: you make you imperial subjects into citizens and your imperial territories part of the mother country. That was the theory, at least. Sessions shows us how it worked out–or didn’t work out–in practice. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Christianity and socialism go together like fire and water,” remarked August Bebel, Germany’s leading socialist, in 1874. The anticlerical violence of revolutions in Mexico, Russia, and Spain in the early twentieth century appears to confirm his verdict. Yet, not everyone in interwar Europe accepted the incompatibility of religion and socialism, as we learn in this interview with political theorist and Professor at Queen’s University Belfast Vincent Geoghegan. The dynamism of Stalinist Russia in the early 1930s sent shockwaves through Depression-era Britain, leading a group of intellectuals to rethink their Christianity. In his new book Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth (Routledge, 2011) Geoghegan explores the efforts of four intellectuals to fuse the two in theory and in the form of a short-lived political party called Common Wealth.
Our conversation begins with the pivotal theorist in Common Wealth, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray. Macmurray saw in communism a continuation of the ethical and social project of Christianity. He interpreted communist anticlericalism as a correction to the Christian churches, which had lost sight of this project. Of his own earlier Protestantism he wrote in 1934, “That faith today is in rags and tatters. I should rather go naked than be seen in it.” Socialism became his new form of Christian faith.
Our interview ends with a contemplation of the relevance of Common Wealth for today’s theoretical debates about post-secularism. One sign that we live in a post-secular age is that even left-of-center statesmen, such as Barack Obama or Tony Blair, publicly identify religious faith as a starting point for their political and ethical commitments. To explain his own views, Blair told Labour Party supporters in 1994, “if you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray. It’s all there.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I always learn something when I interview authors, but in this chat with Todd H. Weir I learned something startling: I’m a monist. What is more, you may be a monist too and not even know it. Do you believe that there is really only one kind of stuff and that everything we observe–and our powers of observation themselves–are made of that stuff? If so, you’re a monist.
But what kind? As Todd explains, the history of monism is not monistic: since its birth in the nineteenth century, there have been multiple monisms (which, you must admit, is a diverting irony). You can read about many of them in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview (Palgrave, 2012), the edited volume Todd and I discuss in the interview. Despite their differences, all the monisms were radical, for they implied that there was no God and that religion was essentially an evolved superstition. This being so, monism was always controversial. It still is. Stephen J. Gould didn’t like it, but his colleague E.O. Wilson and most of the “New Atheists” do. Listen in and see where you stand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with Dan Stone about his thoughtful work analyzing and critiquing the current state of our knowledge of the subject.
This week is a natural follow-on to that interview. Peter Hayes and John Roth have edited a remarkable compilation of essays about the Holocaust. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010) surveys the field, but does so in a significantly different way than Stone. Hayes and Roth have recruited dozens of the brightest young researchers to offer a summary of and reflection on what we now know about many of the most important topics in Holocaust Studies. Each entry is relatively short (12-15 pages) and packed with information useful to newcomers and veterans alike. Each offers some sense of the trajectory of our knowledge and understanding of the topic. Almost all are immensely readable. If you are looking to get a comprehensive understanding of the discipline or simply trying to brush up on a specific subject, this is a wonderful resource. And, unusually for reference books, it is priced at a level that allows individuals to add it to their personal libraries.
John, Peter and I had a great conversation. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In West Germany in September and October of 1977, a group of self-described urban guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. In exchange for Schleyer, the RAF demanded the release of its imprisoned leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. Those months in 1977 following the abduction of Schleyer are often referred to as the German Autumn, and they represent a crescendo of leftist political violence that had its origins, in some ways, almost a decade before.
Terror prompted a crisis in the 70s for the West German government and German democracy. Of course, 1977 was not the first time in history that a German republic had been tested by a group of radicals intending to bring it down. That had already happened in the 1930s. But 1977 turned out very differently than 1933–when the Nazis “captured” power in a profoundly embattled and dysfunctional democracy. In fact, as Karrin Hanshew argues in her fascinating book, “West Germany’s terrorist crisis helped to usher in the relatively stable civil society that still defines Germany today. Karrin Hanshew‘s new book Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is, at once, a political history of the FRG, a history of democracy, a history of political theory in the abstract and in action, and a history of social movements, among many other things. I learned so much from it and I think that you will too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, and then lost in the first game of the knockout stage. The official noted that Europe’s top teams, such as the first-place Soviet Union, all had players over two meters tall (6’6″). The official summed up the disparity: “The giant [basketball player] is like an atomic armament. If a nation does not possess one, it is an unbalanced struggle.” The core of the complaint was simple: If France was to stand tall in the Cold War world, then it had to stand tall in the sports arena.
Historian Lindsay Krasnoff looks at this sports crisis in postwar France and the French government’s attempts to remedy it in her book The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010 (Lexington, 2012). Lindsay frames her study in two episodes of international athletic failure: the 1960 Rome Olympics, at which France won no gold medals and finished below Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey in the overall table, and the implosion of the national team at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Looking at the decades in between, Lindsay shows how leaders of the Fifth Republic, beginning with President Charles de Gaulle, sought to build a sporting culture, particularly through the training of young athletes. There have been successes. While officials once lamented the limits of French basketball talent, there are now more players from France on NBA rosters than from any other nation outside North America. But the rebellion on the practice pitch in South Africa was a reminder that the work of turning France into a consistent sporting power has been uneven. And the reactions of French officials, starting with President Sarkozy, show that this project remains one of national importance.
Note: the views that Lindsay expresses in the interview are hers alone and do not represent those of her employer, the U.S. Department of State, or the U.S. Government. Information presented here is based on publicly available, declassified sources and oral history interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Occasionally you hear shrill news reports about American Nazis. Judging by the pictures of them, they are almost always skin-headed morons who can’t put two words together (other than “Sieg Heil” or some such). Often it’s not clear whether they are really Nazis or are just parodies of Nazis. Or maybe, hoping for a sick laugh, they’re just having us on.
One thing is clear: they are very, very few. I can say with some confidence that National Socialism is not popular in the United States and never has been. Yet as Arnie Bernstein points out in his book Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), there was a brief moment when some Americans took National Socialism seriously, namely the 1930s. This fact, of course, is hard for us to wrap our minds around. It is, however, important to remember that there was a time when Fascism was not seen as pure evil, but rather as a viable alternative to democratic Capitalism and authoritarian Communism. Fortunately for Americans (but unfortunately for the American Nazis), the “German-American Bund” was led by someone who was, well, not very serious–one Fritz Kuhn. He was not a skin-headed moron. He was, as Arnie makes clear, an opportunistic, philandering, unprincipled, pilfering buffoon. So much the better for us. Listen in to this fascinating–and largely forgotten–story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia.
Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Benedetta Berti is the author of Armed Political Organizations: from Conflict to Integration (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Berti is a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University.
The book investigates the inner workings of three organizations: Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Irish Republican Army. Berti’s intricate research reveals the history and institutional components of each group beyond what we have come to accept about each. These are organizations that have used violence and military strategies, but also have social service wings that provide education and public health programs. Over time, each adopted increasingly political aims and the mechanisms to participate in elections. Berti’s claims that changes in political opportunity structure help explain the timing of these moves into electioneering.
The findings from this comprehensive book can advance comparative politics scholarship on armed conflict and social movements, but also should be read by public administration and organizational theory researchers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Germany embarked on the age of imperialism a bit later than other global powers, and the German experience of empire was much shorter-lived than that of Britain or France or Portugal. Nonetheless, empire was fundamental, Jeff Bowersox argues, to Germans’ self-understanding and sense of place in the world in an era marked by sweeping changes, including rapid industrialization and economic growth; the rise of an urban proletariat in ever-expanding cities; and the emergence of mass consumer culture and mass politics. Indeed, Bowersox notes, a linkage between German identity and empire long outlasted the German Empire itself. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2013) looks specifically at youth in this context, and at how young Germans encountered their nation’s overseas empire through a variety of media from the founding of the German nation-state to the eve of World War One.
Germany was not only a brand-new country in this period, as Bowersox points out, it was also a decidedly youthful one: in the first decade of the twentieth century, four in five Germans were under the age of 45. Raising Germans in the Age of Empire looks at how a nation of young people experienced exotic places, at least imaginatively, through material culture, mass education, and social movements like Scouting. The book uses truly fascinating sources–toys, games, school books, cartoons, among many others–to make new and engaging arguments about the German experience of colonialism in the age of European imperialism.
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There are 13 million Jews in the world today. There are also 13 million Senegalese, 13 million Zambians, 13 million Zimbabweans, and 13 million Chadians. These are tiny–a realist might say “insignificant”–nations. But here’s the funny–though that doesn’t seem like the right world–thing. One of them is the focus of a persistent, virulent, worldwide prejudice, an intense hostility that is totally out of proportion with its size and, the realist would add, significance. And you know exactly which one it is.
In his eye-opening book The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (Little, Brown and Co., 2013), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen explores the historical origins of anti-semitism in Europe and its remarkable spread after the Second World War. It is, at least to me, a bizarre and discouraging story. There is, of course, no rational basis for anti-semitism per se. Yet it is everywhere, part of national cultures and discourses throughout the world. This is true where there are Jews (always in tiny numbers) and it is true where there are no Jews at all (as in most of the developing world). Goldhagen does a masterful job of describing the migration of anti-semitism from Europe to everywhere else and works hard to explain it. I don’t know if even he would say he succeeded in the latter task because, well, the entire phenomenon seems to defy rational explanation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Ask most educated people about the development of American slavery, and you’re likely to hear something about Virginia or, just maybe, South Carolina. In his far-reaching but concise and elegantly written new book A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Simon Newman takes us to the tiny Caribbean island of Barbados to trace the beginnings of African slavery in British America. The cotton slavery we know from the killing fields of Mississippi and Louisiana can be traced back to the sugar regimen that developed in Barbados. And that slavery, Newman shows, must be understood amidst the larger trajectory of bound labor in England and Scotland, and even in the British forts on Africa’s Gold Coast. A New World of Labor shows how the regime of bound servant labor — not the institution of West African slavery — provided the foundation for slavery as it developed in Britain’s New World plantation colonies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history and meanings of the republican calendar as a representation of the complexities of revolutionaries' understandings of past, present, and future. As she examines the tensions between linear and cyclical visions of time during this pivotal period in French and world history, Perovic considers the calendar as both an object and an ideological project. The book is a history of the calendar itself and also a literary, intellectual, and political biography of Sylvain Maréchal, a revolutionary who played a pivotal role in the development of the new temporal order. Anyone who has ever wanted to know more about the massive cultural and political shifts of the French Revolution will be interested in reading this book. Perovic's narrative and arguments speak to a wide range of scholarship on republican values and culture, as well as to the broader periodization and historiography of the French Revolution. At the same time, the book reaches further, reading the republican calendar as exemplary of the bigger picture of modern temporality, offering the reader much to think about in terms of the time structures and habits we use to understand our daily lives and our places in history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
There is a fascinating area of study of how communities around the world realized there was such a concept as organized crime. This topic is driven by social attitudes and, to an increasing degree, by media images such as the Godfather movies. Some criminal groups actually model their movie icons, with generational differences for those who saw the Godfather, or Scarface and now Sopranos. In Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK (Oxford University Press, 2013), Dick Hobbs provides us with an analysis of how the image of organized crime grew and changed over time in the UK. As he points out, the types of crimes that are associated with organized crime have always existed, but the recognition of the concept is relatively new. It is driven in part by xenophobic attitudes to migrants and also by the need for government agencies to define the type of work they do. As you will hear in the interview, the same issues that apply in the UK are definitely present in Australia, and there are a number of authors who point to a similar phenomenon in the US. Hobbs has given us an ethnographic history of the social nature of these crimes in the UK. He points out that the crimes are a means of providing services that are accepted by the community but depending and how and by whom they are delivered, they can be classified as either a criminal plague or a social ecology. However, regardless of the academic goals of the book, Lush Life is a great read. I must admit to participating in one of Hobbs’ symptoms that supports the mythology of organized crime, namely, I really enjoyed reading about the characters and their ‘business’ practices. For those of you who are interested in researching this topic please listen to the end of the interview when I asked Dick for his suggestions on the best way to conduct studies in organized crime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Thanks in no small part to John K. Thornton, professor of history at Boston University, the field of Atlantic history has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of historical research over the past quarter century. Thornton has long insisted that the the age of discovery fostered linkages between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that transformed the diverse peoples of all three regions. Europeans did not simply impose their will upon Africans and Native Americans. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) showcases Thornton’s deep research in the primary source material of multiple nationalities — and languages — to provide the most comprehensive interpretation we have of how the first era of globalization transformed the cultures of all the peoples of the Atlantic basin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I have read quite a few books on terrorism but always from an English language perspective. This has meant that I was missing the alternative stories from other nations. Guido Steinberg has done me a favour by publishing his German study in English. German Jihad: On the Internationalisation of Islamist Terrorism (Columbia UP, 2013)provides an excellent, detailed analysis of the recent history of the growth of Jihad inspired terrorism by German residents of both European and Asian heritage. He begins the book with one of the best explanations of the near enemy (apostate Islamic governments) and the far enemy (Western nations who are seen as supporting the near enemy), that I have read. He then explains the importance of the demographics of migration to Germany and its role in the Jihadist movement. Germany has a largely Turkish migrant population. As such they did not have the same influences or inspirations as Jihadists from an Arabic background. Importantly, they also did not have the same network of connections which allowed them to easily join international organisations such as Al Qaeda. These circumstances led to a particular series of connections and a lack of awareness by local law enforcement of the growing threat of terrorist activity. Guido gives us a professional and thorough analysis of this history and has sufficient detail to keep a research student engrossed for weeks. I highly recommend the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We all know that the “victors” generally write history. The “losers,” then, often get a bum rap. Such was the case with King James II. He’s got a pretty poor reputation, largely due to the purveyors of the “Whig Interpretation of History.” They claimed that James II was a tyrant who tried to impose Catholicism on the United Kingdom. But, as Scott Sowerby shows in his new book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013), James II was really no such thing. Actually, he was the head of a movement to repeal many of religious restrictions (the “Test Act”) put in place after the Civil War. He favored toleration, at least of a limited sort. Listen to Scott tell his story and that of the “repealers.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Superstitions flourish in our world–think of the elaborate rituals of baseball players, or knocking wood to avoid tempting fate, or that bit of happiness (or relief) we might experience from finding a lucky (heads up only!) penny. Yet it is part of the mythology of modernity that ours is a “disenchanted” age (or at least so said German sociologist Max Weber in a famous 1918 lecture). Since the Enlightenment, there has been a tradition of invoking a superstitious Middle Ages as a supposed counterpoint to “our” own rationalized and intellectualized times (to paraphrase Weber). The Middle Ages was one of the historical entities against which European modernity in many senses constituted itself, and it continues popularly to be imagined as uniformly saturated with superstition.
Yet as Michael D. Bailey‘s latest book, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press, 2013) shows, that age had its own, highly developed, intellectually rigorous and contentiously debated notions of what was superstitious in practice and in thought. In the book, Bailey looks at how university-based academics and clerics, using the systematizing methods of scholasticism, formulated ideas about what was superstitious over two centuries–between, roughly, 1300 and 1500. He offers us, in other words, a history of evolving ideas of superstition and of what was considered superstitious by the most learned men of that era. Much as the category of superstition has been used to establish and manage putative boundaries between modern and not, late medieval scholars and clerics debated superstition–locating it in practices as varied as learned astrology, necromancy, and everyday medicinal charms–to patrol the shifting boundaries both of legitimate science and of proper religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so many things- and also one of the pleasures of reading it: the fact that a biography can reveal something not simply about another person, but also provide an in-depth glimpse into other worlds. Such is the case with Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite‘s Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) which, in the course of exploring a grisly unsolved murder, immerses the reader in the 1930s Paris underworld.
In 1937, Laetitia Toureaux was discovered in the first class car of ametrotrain with a 9-inch knife stuck in her neck. In Murder in the Metro, Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite untangle Toureaux’s complicated life–she was, at one time, simultaneously spying for the Italian government, the Paris police, and the French terrorist organization the Cagoule–in an effort to give a plausible explanation for how and why she might have died.
However, their work extends beyond sleuthing; Murder in the Metrois a gripping story, but it’s also an effort to call scholarly attention to the use of terrorism during France’s Third Republic and, following World War II, the subsequent downplaying–even, at times, obfuscation–of such acts. Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite write that, in 1937, Toureaux’s life and death “offered a perfect tableau for the press to explore and expound upon the issues of gender and, to a lesser extent, class.” Today, she still acts as a tableau of sorts, her history merging with that of the Cagoule to provide a canvas from which scholars–with Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite leading the charge–can explore the nuances of the times in which she lived: a period marked by progress and innovation, but also violence and political unrest, all set against the clouds of a fast-approaching war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Few history books sell better than biographies of Nazi leaders. They attract anyone even tangentially interested in World War Two or Nazi Germany. It’s not surprising, then, that there are dozens of biographies of Himmler, Goering, and Hitler himself.
Oddly, though, Reinhard Heydrich is relatively understudied. Robert Gerwarth’s wonderful new biography of Heydrich, titled Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (Yale UP, 2012), fills this gap admirably. Gerwarth’s book is part of a new wave of serious biographies that have appeared in the last years. All are characterized by a thoughtful engagement with recent research on the Holocaust. All devote considerable attention to their subjects’ lives in the period before the Nazi takeover. All emphasize the choices made by their subjects and the way these choices were not predetermined. Hitler’s Hangman is an outstanding example of this new scholarship.
Gerwarth’s work, in particular, is distinguished by its particularly effective writing. He synthesizes a great deal of information gracefully, a demanding task in a biography this concise. At the same time, he preserves space for anecdotes and details that illuminate his topic and add color to his narrative.
Hitler’s Hangman has been widely praised by reviewers across the spectrum. It is praise that is richly deserved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician,” but never “the smear.” We meet these three lively women in the pages of Alisha Rankin‘s wonderful new book on the medical practices of noblewomen from the last decades of the sixteenth century. Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013) considers the intellectual and social contexts of healing practices in early modern Germany, focusing on elite women who spent much of their adult lives devising and administering medicinal remedies. The book argues that noblewomen were celebrated as healers not despite their gender, but because of it, offering a useful corrective to the historiography of gender and the sciences in early modernity. Rankin situates three in-depth case studies within a careful exploration of some of the main factors that enabled the kind of success that noblewomen-healers like Dorothea of Mansfield and Anna of Saxony enjoyed in sixteenth-century Germany: more opportunities for information exchange through local communities and wider epistolary networks; an increasing focus on empirical knowledge in its many forms; and the foundation role of written medicinal recipes as a form of kunst. It is a thoughtfully written and very clearly argued work that informs many aspects of the history of gender, of science and medicine, and of practical epistemologies. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When I was an undergraduate, I was taught that merchants in early modern Western Europe were “proto-capitalists.” I was never quite sure what that meant. If it meant they traded property for money, yes. But that would make everyone who traded things for money over the past, say, 5,000 years, a “proto-capitalist.” If it meant that they thought of their property as capital to be used for maximizing profit, then no. As Martha C. Howell points out in her excellent Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge UP, 2010), early modern merchants–at least in the Low Countries–didn’t really think of their property as “capital” at all, and they certainly didn’t use it exclusively for the maximization of profit. Their idea of property was, according to Howell, as much medieval as modern. Essentially, they adapted received (medieval) categories of property to novel commercial conditions. The result was a unique hybrid of the old and new. In hindsight, their understanding of property might seem “proto-capitalist.” But really it was just the way they conceived of property. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absolutist state nor sitting idly by while modern economic and military forces swept them into obscurity. Rather, by examining the many local and regional conflicts of the era, Sandberg shows that the French nobles of the era were capable actors in a complex arena dominated by a culture of honor, sophisticated systems of credit, and dangerous civil conflicts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work of ground-breaking artists, lived in grand homes on the famous Ringstrasse, and thought life was good and they were valued as Austrians. With O’Connor’s background in art and her skills of investigative reporting, we come to know the people who turn the art world upside down during the last years of the Empire. Klimt, rock star artist of his era, is in great demand. Her family treasured his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Austrians came to regard it as their Mona Lisa. Adele Bloch-Bauer, as O’Connor explains, was different. This wealthy Jewish woman hosted “Red Saturdays” at home, salons in which she voiced her opinions on the issues of the day, eager to implement reforms to improve workers’ lives. O’Connor characterizes her as “an unfinished woman,” for she died at 43. Wishing to immortalize Klimt, she directed that the portraits and landscapes that she and her husband had in their home be given to the Austrian Gallery. But after Adele died, life changed for Jews in Vienna: in 1938, the Anschluss made Austria part of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s henchmen commandeered Adele’s home and helped themselves to paintings and other works of art. Her family survived, barely. When the war ended, Austria kept the Klimts. When the battle to recover the Klimt portrait resumed in Los Angles in the 1990s, O’Connor interviewed Maria Altmann, niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, who spearheaded the family’s legal case. Working with Altmann was attorney Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the famed composer and passionate advocate in the battle to recover the painting. Listen to this interview for further details of The Lady in Gold and read the book to learn more.
(See the Artsy page on Klimt; it’s terrific.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Scholars have pointed to various historical ingredients they see as necessary for the development of modern sport: political changes that allowed people to form associations, the rise of competitive capitalism, an emphasis on calculation and measurement, the advance of secularization. But this attention to economic, social, and political factors has missed one important piece. For games to have become modern, participants first had to think like moderns. The peasant who had once celebrated seasonal festivals with some village game had to become an individual player–someone who wanted to beat his opponents, show off his prowess, and bask in the cheers.
Historian Peter Hansen makes this point in his study of mountain climbing, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2013). Prior to the 1700s, mountain peaks had been the preserve of gods and kings, while their crags and caves had been the hiding places of demons and spirits. Even the miners and shepherds who worked in the mountains for centuries did not climb to the summits. Why would they bother? According to Peter, the birth of the modern sport of mountaineering thus required a fundamental change in thinking. People had to look up at a peak and want to reach it, just for the sake of being at the top, and they had to think of themselves as able to do it.
Peter’s book is a sweeping account of the history of mountain climbing and its connections to modern culture, from the first attempts to scale the Alps in the 18th century to mountaineering in the current age of climate change. He focuses on two episodes in that history: the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786 by Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat, and the 1953 climb of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. As we learn in the interview, there are striking parallels between these two important chapters in mountaineering. Above all, both feats tap into our fascination with high places and the solitary climber at the top. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When Americans go overseas, they know just who they are–Americans. But what was it like for a citizen of the United States to go abroad before there was a clear idea of what an “American” was? This is one (among many) of the fascinating questions Daniel Kilbride addresses in his equally fascinating book Being American in Europe: 1750-1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). In the Revolutionary Period and for some decades after, Americans–nearly all affluent and white–went to Europe to see the “Old World” and to figure out who they were. They knew that their culture was in some sense European, but they did their best to tease out differences that would give them an “American” identity. Some admired Europe; some despised it. All saw themselves in it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have changed its ways. It had spent the second half of the century building a system of shared sovereignty that was set to expand not just into the countries of the former Soviet bloc, but into what used to be the USSR itself. In the words of one author, Europe (or at least its model) was about to run the 21st century.
Things look different now, of course, thanks to the impact of the financial crisis on the single currency, the euro. However the European Union (as the project is currently named) has managed to burnish its image in some areas – for instance it now on the verge of covering 28 countries, and even managed to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize (somewhat controversially, although after the first half of the 20th century its role in keeping Europe largely at peace is certainly laudable).
The project that lies at the heart of this is the subject of Luuk van Middelaar‘s The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union (Yale University Press, 2013). It’s not a history book as such, but more a book of political philosophy, that knits together a series of concepts, challenges, and constructs, that together have formed something that in the dark days of the immediate post-War period seemed a long, long way away.
As such, it’s rather an important book. The continent and the European project have both been riven by crises over the last half decade, and some of the achievements Brussels can point to are now seriously threatened. Luuk – who has had a ringside seat of the crisis as the speechwriter for President Herman van Rompuy – has a look at the underpinnings that go beyond the immediate debates, and the insights this provides will no doubt play a role in shaping the European project (whatever it becomes) in decades to come. Enjoy the interview! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Oregon’s Gretchen Soderlund, is about far more than the title suggests. Using sex trafficking and scandal as a starting point, Soderlund delves into an era of journalism that features muckrakers and sensationalists, key political players and journalists with social and cultural agendas. It is a book about racial identity, journalists and their audiences, and Great Britain’s influence on journalistic practices and culture. “From an early twenty-first century vantage point,” Soderlund writes, “it is clear that issues of immigration, urbanization, heterosociability, and racial mixing were stitched into white slavery narratives.” Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism took Soderlund deep into the archives of journalism history. The result is a thorough, important discussion about one of the key periods in American journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), historian Elizabeth Foster draws on a wealth of archival material to reveal the interests and negotiations of key powerbrokers in the colony from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of French rule and the significance of local agency in its various forms, Foster interrogates the relationship between metropole and colony while exploring a religious landscape in Senegal that included French, African, and metis Catholics; Muslims; and animists.
The book’s chapters explore a variety of fascinating themes and events, from a scandal involving a nun accused of becoming pregnant in 1886, to the trial of an African accused of murdering a Wolof agent of the French empire, to the impact of the First World War and the Popular Front in colonial Senegal. Rethinking French republicanism, laicite, and assimilation in their colonial manifestations during the Third Republic, Faith in Empire has much to offer readers interested in debates about the imperial past and its legacies; historical and contemporary struggles over secularism; and the complicated relationship between religion and politics in France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams, while other foreign cricketers were withdrawn by their national boards at various points in the tournament for service in international matches. Political and ethnic tensions in the state of Tamil Nadu required a change in host cities, from Chennai to Delhi, for playoff matches. After a dispute over franchise fees and three unsuccessful campaigns on the field, the franchise in Pune folded at the season’s end. And most significantly, the playoff rounds took place under the cloud of a spot-fixing scandal, as three players for the Rajasthan Royals and eleven bookies were arrested in Delhi in May. Following upon previous scandals, the fixing arrests brought another blow to the IPL’s integrity. Observers point to the flood of cash that has overwhelmed Indian cricket in such a short time, rendering franchise owners, administrators, and players unable to withstand its force. The question arises, as the IPL aspires to build a structure that will tower alongside the world’s other great sports brands, will it manage to establish solid footings?
Plenty of cricket fans take a good measure of satisfaction in watching the IPL’s problems. In its short life, the league has upended the game from its time-honored traditions. Samir Chopra is among those who lament some of the changes that the IPL and T20 have brought to the sport. But he also recognizes that the Indian Premier League offers a model that can potentially improve cricket. A philosopher at Brooklyn College and a regular contributor to ESPN Cricinfo, Samir is alert to the profound identity crisis in which world cricket finds itself. He plumbs various aspects of this current turmoil in his thoughtful and eloquent book Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket (HarperCollins, 2012). But rather than denouncing the IPL and all its vulgar wealth as the cause of the crisis, he points to a franchise-based form of international cricket, with players treated as professionals rather than servants indentured to national boards, as something that can potentially benefit all forms of the game. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it?
According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it’s just that they don’t really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century. In Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Parthasarathi says that those forces were economic. English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn’t produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. They did. According to Parthasarath, the “Industrial Revolution” was born out of economic competition and innovation (with, of course, a helping hand from the state). That makes a lot of sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts‘ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013) draws on a wealth of material from French and American archives to show us that the war was an experience saturated with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Battles were critical, of course, but so too was sex.
The American GI in war-torn France was a soldier, a tourist, a liberator, and also a destroyer. Military propaganda represented the Normandy campaign as a soldier’s opportunity for sexual adventure, framing the invasion and occupation of France in terms of the rescue of damsels in distress by heroic tough guys from a manly nation. Convinced of the hyper-sexuality of French women and culture, many American soldiers courted, paid for sex with, and even assaulted women they met in French homes, streets, hotels, and brothels. This is a book about what American GIs thought about France; what they did while they were “over there”; how French women and men received and responded to the “advances” of American troops; and the lasting impact of this complex set of encounters on individual lives, communities, and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more about the region than most people in the US about the region. Yet I was just as surprised as anyone else at the scale of the hatred and violence that erupted. With the part of the world I studied enduring atrocity after atrocity, I spent quite a bit of time wondering if graduate study in history was really the best profession to pursue. And I spent a lot of time devouring various accounts to try to understand how such violence could come out of what seemed like nowhere.
Paul Mojzes‘ new book Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century(Rowman and Littlefield, 2011) ably addresses the second concern. A native of the region, Paul brings a deep understanding of the long-term roots of Balkan violence that many of the initial responses lacked. At the same time, he recognizes the significant changes that accompanied the twentieth century. Moreover, he brings an even-handedness that is rare in discussions of the region.
The result is careful, even-handed examination of history of mass violence in the Balkans. It treats widely-discussed incidents with sensitivity and draws attention to other, little-known persecutions. And it does so with a sensitivity drawn from Paul’s long engagement in interfaith dialogue. While the book clearly functions within the norms of a scholarly work, Paul’s ethical sensibility lies behind it and illuminates his discussion. All in all, his book is a fine contribution to the literature on the subject.
My interview with Paul was just as interesting as his book. I hope you enjoy it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life?
When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics.
In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and “Calvinist linguistics”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared prosperity. First known for his work on electoral reform in the United States, Hill began travelling through Europe in the late 90’s to study the use of proportional representation (PR) in European elections. Once there, his research agenda gradually broadened to include European approaches to healthcare, corporate governance, support for families, transportation, energy, media, and other policies that together constitute what Hill calls “The European Way,” as compared to “The American Way.” This comparison is laid out with clarity and a wealth of examples in Hill’s highly-readable book Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age (University of California Press, 2010). In the first half of this interview, we discuss the compatibility of European healthcare systems with thriving economies, focusing on models from Germany for controlling costs and increasing transparency. Hill explains how Europe manages to maintain more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S. and China combined, while at the same time offering benefits to workers like paid maternity leave, generous vacations, paid sick leave, and low-cost child care. We also discuss CEO perspectives on codetermination–a form of corporate power-sharing among workers and management–in German companies like Deutsche Bank, Mercedes, and Volkswagen. In the second half of the interview, we take up the American side of the question. I ask Steven if European-style policies are only possible in small countries with PR, or if they are also possible in a large country without PR, like the United States. Hill describes what it would it take for U.S. states to enact similar policies and where, if anywhere, that is most likely to happen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and disciplinary realms, Hui argues that the scientific study of sound sensation not only was framed in terms of musical aesthetics, but became increasingly so over time. The book traces a series of arguments by practitioners of the study of sound sensation as they sought to uncover universal rules for understanding the sonic world: How much epistemic weight ought to be placed on the experiences of an individual listener? What sorts of expertise were relevant or necessary for a sound scientist’s experimental practice? Did musical training matter? Was there a proper way to listen to music? The Psychophysical Ear follows sound scientists as they grappled with these and other questions, struggling with the consequences of understanding the act of listening as a practice that was fundamentally grounded in particular historical contexts as phonographic technology and the increasing number of performances of non-Western music in Europe were transforming the sonic world of Europe. Hui’s story often involves the reader’s own sensorium in the story, urging us to imagine or play sequences of musical notes that prove crucial to some of the arguments of the actors in the story. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
John Dickie is an historian of Italian organized crime who has a fairly unique perspective as he writes in English but is able to read the Italian sources. This allows him to bring new points of view and information to Anglo-American audiences. His new book is Mafia Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias (Septre, 2012). This book builds on his previous work Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, by including the other major groups from southern Italy – the ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra. John points out the surprisingly recent creation of these groups and tracks their rise in their respective localities. The book is both entertaining and very readable. This is not dry history but the stories of real people, both as members of the organized crime groups and, in a much smaller category, those trying to fight the criminality in the region. It is not giving too much away to say that the criminals are winning – especially in the point of history at which this book ends, namely, the arrival of the Allies in World War II. Clearly this is volume one of a larger work and the next volume should be out this year. For those who are interested in the theory of organized crime, I suggest you suspend your assumptions as the data does not match current accepted wisdom. We see ethnocentric groups, hierarchical organizations, and the power of familial relationships. For those who simply enjoy reading about organized crime, you will not be disappointed as this book is full of everything you expect – crime, murder, drama and deceit. Overall it is a book of tragedy – tragedy for a beautiful region of the world overcome by a social disease Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing.
Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life(Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without these delightful illusions… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.’ Chanel’s is a life that, all these years later, still reads as radical, which puts into perspective how terribly shocking it must have appeared in the early 20th century.
Chaney has chosen an unusually challenging subject. Mired in myths, some of them of her own devising, the image of Chanel that has been passed down to us is clouded at best and, as Chaney acknowledges, quoting L.P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’
The story of Chanel’s life emerges in more muted tones than one might expect, with gray areas aplenty, from which it is unreasonable to demand clarity or place judgment.
And yet Coco Chanel remains an uncompromising account. Chaney doesn’t ignore Chanel’s capacity for storytelling but, rather, explores the meanings of her stories, their unrealities, and the significance of the details that Chanel chose to omit. She doesn’t side-step the controversies surrounding Chanel’s life during the occupation of Paris, but instead grapples head-on with the moral ambiguities and compromises that occurred during the Occupation and in Vichy France.
What emerges is an unflinching portrait of a complex, intelligent, unapologetic, incredibly hard working woman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, the shirtless Duce, Ferraris, Vespas, doping scandals, World Cup celebrations, Serie A officials on the take, Il Grande Torino, and the barefoot marathoner Abebe Bikila. You find all this and more in Simon Martin‘s history of Italian sports, Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair with Sport (I.B.Tauris, 2011).
Simon’s book is sports history at its best–that is, it’s history at its fullest. As you hear in the interview, Italian sport offers a window to understanding the country’s uneven economic development, its fractious politics, the ideology and aesthetics of Fascism, the unrelenting weight of corruption, the role of the Catholic Church, and the persistent divide between North and South. Above all, there is the unresolved question of what it means to be Italian. Metternich’s adage that “Italy is only a geographical expression”still holds a kernel of truth, some 150 years after the Risorgimento.One of Simon’s principal arguments is that sport is the one thing which most consistently binds the country together.
Simon’s book was awarded the 2012 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize, presented each year by the British Society for Sports History. This was the second time he’s received the award, having won in 2004 for his history of Italian football under Fascism. You can also find interviews with other winners of the Aberdare Prize in the New Books in Sports archive: the 2011 winners, Chris Young and Kai Schiller, talking about their book on the 1972 Munich Olympics; and Tony Collins on his history of English rugby union, which won the award for 2010.
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The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) pays special attention to the many resonances of emplacement and locality, and to the agency of the Vesuvian landscape, as it explores the continuities and transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century volcanic landscape. Volcanology emerged along with Neapolitan identity while volcanoes became emblematic of the south in the writings of European travelers: rumbling, unpredictable, given to heated eruptions. Cocco’s account shows us the beauty of these transformations as they were embodied in paintings, poems, letters, and other media. Scholars and enthusiasts of the urban and political history of Europe will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the history of vernacular understandings of nature. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish?
Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to reflect on the reinterpretation and refashioning of alchemy from the eighteenth century to the present. Principe’s pages reveal histories of alchemy that are wonderfully rich and diverse, and we meet them in laboratories, recipes, images, dramatic plays, and poems. In the course of our conversation, we talked about aspects of the craft of the alchemist as well as that of the historian, including Principe’s fascinating attempts to recreate alchemical recipes and practices in his own laboratory. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Spanish Civil War is one of those events that I have always felt I should know more about. Thanks to Stanley Payne‘s concise, lucid new work on the subject, I feel less that way. I do not exaggerate when I say that Payne, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, is the nation’s foremost expert on Spanish history and on historical fascism in general. That expertise shines in this book and really comes to the fore in this interview. Published by Cambridge University Press as part of its Essential Histories series, Payne’s work synthesizes a lifetime of study in Spain, laying out the origins of the civil war in Spain’s deeply fractured political culture, and tracing the international and military developments that led to Francisco Franco’s eventual triumph in 1939. As Payne points out, the Spanish Civil War has been mythologized for political purposes since the day it began, much to the detriment of our understanding of the real story. The details of how and why the war began, how it was fought, and what was at stake have too-often been lost in a public effort to assign blame or capture the war’s legacy for political purposes. Payne revels in debunking some of these myths while carefully balancing conflicting arguments and accounts. Enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Many people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high school student murders several of his classmates, it’s going to be “all over the news.” But it’s hard to blame the press, exclusively at least. Joy Wiltenburg‘s Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany (University of Virginia Press, 2012) suggests (to me at least), that those who criticize the press for sensationalism have cause and effect reversed: the press doesn’t cause demand for sensational stories, the people who buy the press do. When the “press” first emerged in the sixteenth century, “demand” for “if it bleeds, it leads” style reporting seems to have been already quite developed. There’s just something emotionally compelling about a man who chops up his family. The early modern Germans wanted to read about and so do we. Joy explains why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Eire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland did too. Yet around 60,000 “neutral” Irish volunteered to fight on one side (with the Allies, in this case). That was unusual. After the war, most of the Irish volunteers remained in the UK. But 12,000 of them came back to Ireland. In Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen and the Second World War (Merrion, 2012), Bernard Kelly tells their story. Like most things in Irish history, it’s complicated. On the one hand, the volunteers had served in the armed forces of Ireland’s archenemy (at least according to Republicans). On the other hand, they had fought the Nazis and thereby protected the Free World. Bernard explains how the Irish veterans were received and, interestingly, how they are still being discussed in Ireland today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive numbers of Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies. The results, of course, were catastrophic. Fewer listeners are probably well informed about the Allied effort after the War to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling massive numbers of Germans. The results, as R. M. Douglasdemonstrates in his well-researched, even-handed book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2012), were catastrophic. As many as 14 million Germans were displaced and somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million parished. Of course the Nazi and Allied “ethnic cleansings” (if that’s the right word) were not equivalent, a point that Douglas goes to great pains to emphasis. But the one is well known and the other is not. Until now. I urge you to read this book and find out what happened in this largely forgotten (and very disturbing) episode in the history of the Second World War and its aftermath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our understanding of the Final Solution. We now know much more about the mechanics of destruction in the East, about the interaction between center and periphery in planning and carrying out mass killings, and about the interaction between Germans, local inhabitants and Jews.
Twenty years later, historians have begun to integrate these new studies into broad reexaminations of the Holocaust. Donald Bloxham has written one of the best of these. His book, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford UP, 2009), is a remarkable attempt to put the Holocaust into the broader context of global history. It’s analytical rather than narrative. Its arguments are careful and always attentive to nuance and complexity. And Bloxham demonstrates a deep understanding of research on the Holocaust and in the broader field of Genocide Studies. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, you will come out of this book having reconsidered what you thought you knew about the Holocaust and about European history in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book she examines the career of a single Nazi administrator in “the East”, Udo Klusa, in minute detail day by day, week by week, month by month while the Germans were improvising what became known as the “Holocaust.” Klausa was not a big wig; he was a functionary, a part of a (particularly awful) colonial machine. He believed in the Nazi mission to “Germanize” Poland, but he was by no means a “fanatical” Nazi. He followed orders (by our standards horrendous ones), but he did not do so mindlessly. He wanted to build a career, but he was not–apparently–willing to do anything to do so. Fullbrook investigates just how far Klausa was willing to go, what he found acceptable and what he found (or seemed to find) objectionable. It’s a tricky subject because Klausa himself tried to cover his tracks after the war. He seems to have seen that policies he once found quite sensible were, after the war, not so. Fullbrook does a masterful job of using archival sources to show where Klausa’s memory becomes particularly selective. Though it would be too much to call Fullbrook’s portrait of Klausa “sympathetic,” it is certainly both historically and psychologically nuanced and therefore helps us understand his mentality both during the war and after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern period. Inspired by the archaeology of Foucault but using an approach that spans the history of science, art history, and visual studies, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) identifies a “specimen logic” through which images of insects were removed from their habitats, decontextualized, and mobilized into networks of regional and global exchange and circulation. Part I of the book traces the emergence of insects as subject matter for artistic representation, looking in turn at the work of Joris Hoefnagel, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Thomas Moffet, and still-life painters from 1580-1620. The choices made by these artists contributed to the transformation of ideas about nature as controllable and commodifiable. Part II shifts our attention to the later seventeenth century, and considers how the work of artists such as Robert Hooke and Maria Sibylla Merian helped visualize insects (as well as their own professional identities) anew across several media. Neri’s work urges us to reconsider some common binaries that tend to characterize thinking and writing about images in history: art/science, professional/amateur, image/object.
To see some of the images that we talked about in the interview, check out the following links:
Hoefnagel images can be found here, and the stag beetle is here.
Digitized images from Aldrovandi’s work can be navigated to from here [site is in Italian].
The Van Der Ast image can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Sanjay Subrahmanyam‘s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2012) uses three key themes in early modern history – diplomacy, warfare, and visual representation – to show how commensurability across cultures, rather than existing prior to an encounter, had to be actively made by its agents. Subrahmanyam brings us into the many faces of a key battle in the sixteenth-century history of the Deccan, a dramatic martyrdom by cannon in the Malay world, and a circulation of visual tropes across European and Mughal contexts in a fascinating analysis of the ways that insult, intimacy, violence, and paint shaped relationships within and among the courtly ecologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book expertly weaves a series of compelling microhistorical narratives into a larger story that takes us across the Indian Ocean and beyond, and is a must-read for anyone interested in global history or early modernity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This past September an independent panel commissioned in 2009 by the British government released its 395-page report on the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of April 1989. The published findings and the accompanying release of documents confirmed what had long been charged: the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at the grounds in Sheffield were the result of unsafe stadium design, insufficient crowd management, and failed policing and emergency response. Most significantly, the report gave proof that authorities in Sheffield had covered their failure by casting blame on the supposedly drunken and unruly fans. This line had been carried in the papers, most notoriously by The Sun, which published false reports that Liverpool fans had picked the pockets of the dead and wounded and even urinated on corpses. Such stories gained traction because they fit a general narrative that the press and politicians, both Labour and Conservative, had been repeating since the 1960s: football fans were delinquents, and their violent behavior at grounds in Britain and abroad was a black mark on the nation’s reputation
Brett Bebber investigates the origins of this narrative and the corresponding government measures against fan violence in his book Violence and Racism in Football: Politics and Cultural Conflict in British Society, 1968-1998 (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). As he acknowledges, much has been written about football violence in the UK. But Brett brings a fresh approach to this familiar topic. As an American who admits to having been cool to soccer, he has an outsider’s perspective to the deep passions and divisions in English football. And unlike the journalists and social scientists who have focused on the fans, Brett is a historian whose research brought him to the archives of government offices and the records of police departments. What these documents show is that the Home Office and other government departments adopted strategies that typically exacerbated, rather than reduced, the tense atmosphere at football grounds, and planted seeds that would bear ill fruit in 1989. The Hillsborough report stated that Sheffield authorities viewed the task of crowd management “exclusively through a lens of potential crowd disorder.” This hostile perspective was guiding government policy already in the 1960s, when officials began to mandate the penning of spectators, and commissioned tests on how much force a human body could endure when pressed against a steel barrier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross published a book about the subject that, very shortly thereafter, started a huge controversy about Polish participation in the Holocaust. In the furor that followed, many simply took it for granted that Gross’s interpretation of what happened–that radically anti-Semitic Poles murdered the Jews with little prompting from the Germans–was simply correct. But was it? This is the question Marek Jan Chodakiewicz tries to answer in The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After (Columbia University Press; East European Monographs, 2005). After an exhaustive and meticulous investigation of the sources (which are imperfect at best), Chodakiewicz concludes that we don’t and will never know exactly what happened on that horrible July day in Jedwabne, but it was certainly more complicated and mysterious than Gross imagines. Chodakiewicz puts the massacre in its wider context or, perhaps more accurately, contexts. These include: Jedwabne itself, Polish life there, Jewish life there, the interaction between the two communities in the town, the Soviet occupation, the coming of the Germans, German policies toward Poles and Jews, the Polish resistance, Polish anti-Semitism, Polish anti-Communism, and the intersection of the two (“Zydokomuna“). No punches are pulled: Chodakiewicz places much of the blame for the atrocity squarely on the Poles (or, rather, some faction of them) in Jedwabne. But he puts their actions–insofar as we can know them–into a much wider frame and therefore helps us understand why they did what they did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011) introduces the notion of a “trading zone,” building on the articulation of the concept in anthropology and in the work of Peter Galison, to explain the gradual breaking-down of the distinction between learned scholars and artist/practitioners as distinct and coherent entities in early modern Europe. Several kinds of trading zones, from the Vitruvian tradition to the physical spaces of arsenals and the city of Rome, provided common ground on which both practitioners and university-educated men came together to share ideas about substantive issues. As a result of this interchange, Long argues, empirical values that had been intrinsic to artisanal work came to be embedded more broadly in European culture, and categories that had initially been bifurcated (like art and nature) became more interchangeable. Long guides readers from a historiographical account of the idea of artisanal influence on the new sciences as it has emerged and developed since the 1920s, and through a series of engaging chapters that introduce works and figures that are crucial to the development of these ideas, including a wonderful account of the architecture of Rome from the pages of Vitruvius through the streets of a city dotted with obelisks and occasionally overcome with waters. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and often overseas. They had, effectively, taken the German past. And they kept it for the better part of a decade. Why did they take the records and why did they eventually return them? In her fascinating book The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Astrid M. Eckert explains. The Western Allies saw that the archives could be used for a number of purposes: military intelligence (the Germans knew a lot about the Soviets), occupational administration, prosecuting war criminals, and making sure that the history of World War II was written just the way they wanted it written. And they used them in all these ways. The Germans, of course, wanted their documents back. They wanted to write their own history. But the Western Allies were skeptical that the Germans could really manage their archives (many German archivists had been active Nazis) or portray their past truthfully (it was, after all, a rather ugly past). In the end, the Allies relented and the archives were given back, new archivists were trained, and Germans faced their past themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and be seen by my peers. As Jennifer Hall-Witt explains in her fascinating book Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), that’s apparently why English notables went to the opera in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. They dressed up, went out, and “made the scene.” All the while there was an opera being performed, but it doesn’t seem anyone was paying close attention to it. They milled about, traded glances, visited each other’s boxes, talked, joked and generally had a good time. That all changed in the second half of the century. Most significantly, people began to watch and listen to the opera instead of each other. Jennifer tells us why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011) offers readers an intellectual and cultural history of Europe on the mechanical wings and flexing backs of its automata. Balancing a cognitive argument with careful historical contextualization, Minsoo Kang maps the landscape of self-moving entities as actual and conceptual objects. He allows us a glimpse into the many ways that these categorical anomalies, as perennial figures in what we might think of as a cultural imagination, have helped shape some of the most influential work in the history of science, literature, and ideas. Kang also offers many chapters worth of fascinating examples in this carefully curated cabinet of wonders. In the course of our conversation, we also spoke about the particular joys and challenges of balancing the work of a historian with a concurrent career in fiction writing, and debated the benefits of being an AM vs. PM writer. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
With Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (Harvard University Press, 2012), Ben Shepherd, a Reader at Glasgow Caledonian University, offers us insight into the complex and harrowing history of the German Army’s occupation of the former Yugoslavia from 1941-1943. By analyzing the command structures at the divisional and regimental level, Shepherd helps to explain how and why the violence ebbed and flowed in the various occupied regions. But he also looks further down, to see how the behavior of specific units was shaped by the vagaries of terrain, supply, the character of the opposition, and even certain commanders’ backgrounds and experiences. Always cautious not to make claims beyond the limits of his evidence, Shepherd nevertheless draws important conclusions about how history, personality, and National Socialist ideology shaped the behavior of the German Army in the Second World War. For that and for illuminating in clear and concise prose the foggy and chaotic political and military environment in the Balkans during those years, Shepherd should be congratulated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, the concept of a unified science, the increasing divergence of what we might translate as theoretical and practical scientific pursuits. Though these concepts will seem familiar to readers, Phillips’ careful study pays special attention to how science emerged and transformed in German-speaking Europe in very locally-specific ways. Following the transformation of Naturwissenschaft from an eighteenth century invention to a “rallying-cry” by the middle of the nineteenth century, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850 maps the relationships between the collective use of words, the development of concepts, and the creation and ramification of collective social sites. Phillips reveals a world of many distinct but overlapping publics, spanning private learned societies, technical academies, gardens, agricultural societies, and universities, among others. Phillips urges to move beyond simple binaries in our understanding of history, demonstrating that the conceptual and material foundations of modern science in German-speaking Europe, and the figures that populated its spaces, emerged out of border zones and juxtapositions. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural developments of the times. Making the situation worse were the guardians of the sport, who were reluctant to respond to the changes around them. The men of the Marlyebone Cricket Club and administrators of county sides held to the old class division, preferring amateur gentlemen to serve as their captains, even when there were few Oxbridge graduates with enough money or free time to devote themselves to the sport–or enough talent to merit a captaincy. And while other governing bodies of international sport were cutting ties with apartheid South Africa, the MCC still saw that country’s side as a legitimate competitor and made plans for tours.
As Guy Fraser-Sampson shows in his history of English cricket in the late Sixties and early Seventies, these obstinate positions led English cricket into one controversy after another. When the professional Brian Close, son of a weaver, became captain of the England side in 1966, he went on to lead the team to successful series against the West Indies, India, and Pakistan. But the following year the MCC stripped Close of the captaincy on feeble charges that he had violated the code of the game. And when South African cricket officials warned the MCC that a team which included Basil D’Oliveira, a “colored” native of Cape Town, would not be welcome in the country, the talented D’Oliveira was excluded from the England side. Both decisions brought scorn from English cricket fans. But as Guy explains in our interview, the MCC was not an institution responsive to public mood.
Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977 (Elliott & Thompson, 2011) tells the stories of the Close and D’Oliveira affairs, along with the successes achieved on the field by Ray Illingworth’s side in the 1970s. The book concludes with Kerry Packer’s creation of World Series Cricket and the challenge that it posed to the English cricket establishment. But even more significant, in Guy’s treatment, is the turn toward aggressive bowling in the 1970s, which left batsmen battered and ushered in what he terms “a dark age” for cricket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was the true ‘World City’. We threw around a couple of ideas – it seems obligatory to mention something connected to China these days – before deciding that the city where we both sat was the true holder of that title.
London has its frustrations, and as somebody who recently moved out of London I am acutely aware of some of them: the crowds, the transport system, the sheer expense! But it is also a quite remarkable and exciting place (as the Olympic games seem to have demonstrated), full of energy, history and a sense of occasion that belies its location in the corner of a slightly damp island off the north west coast of the Eurasian landmass.
How this place became a real World City is the underlying story at the heart of Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward‘s London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). England and London in 1550 were slightly peripheral places, and certainly in the shadow of some of the true great cities of Europe and beyond. By 1750, however, London had been transformed into a place of innovation, wealth, power and progress, and England was well on the path to becoming a nation that was to shape much of the history of the world over the next two centuries.
The story is also deeply human and very colourful, involving lashes of gin, some terrible smells, lots of sex, and countless accounts of amazing lives and shabby deaths. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book and talk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up the throne. It’s precisely this oversimplification of the facts that Anne Sebba seeks to correct in her excellent new biography That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (St. Martin’s Press, 2012).
The first woman to write a full biography of the Duchess, Sebba provides a much-needed rehabilitation of this polarizing figure. The bite of the title succinctly captures the bitterness and antipathy directed towards Wallis Simpson- during her life and after- but Sebba’s impeccable research illuminates a woman far more complex than the popular imagination has allowed. This is myth-busting to the nth degree.
With access to previously undiscovered letters, Sebba creates an account of the Duchess’s life that is, at times, downright revelatory. For instance, Wallis Simpson didn’t intend to marry the Prince of Wales. Who knew?! As Sebba writes: “She was not in love with Edward himself but in love with the opulence, the lifestyle, the way doors opened for her, the way he made all her childish dreams come true. She was sure it was a fairytale that would end, but while it lasted she could not bring herself to end it herself.”
Ultimately, this was the stuff of tragedy rather than fairytale, but the story is riveting nonetheless. “That Woman,” an American woman who captivated a Prince to the point of obsession. As Sebba writes: “Few who knew them well would describe what they shared as love.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on–with the executioner’s aid–the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless.
Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a necessary evil. They had come to view execution as a sort of ultimate banishment, and not as an opportunity for an object lesson. It was a tool for getting rid of people–the quicker and quieter, the better. In fact, the French government finally put an end to public executions in 1939 when one particular guillotine collided with photo journalism. No matter how speedy the blade, the shutter was faster.
Historian Paul Friedland concludes his rich and expansive new book, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), by drawing back the curtain on this aspect of the guillotine’s past. Even more importantly, moreover, Friedland demonstrates that modern preoccupations with exemplary deterrence as a justification for punishment have led to distortions in how we understand public executions as they happened in the past. He begins his study in the medieval period, where he observes that public executions functioned mainly as rituals for repairing damage to the social fabric. He then follows the thread over half a millennium, tracing many evolutions in attitudes and practice, but never finding deterrence theory at work quite as some commentators have.
Paul Friedland is an affiliate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University (2011-2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; and civilians in the cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s failure to stem the allied bombing campaign of the RAF at night time and the USAAF during the day.
The staggering scale of losses during those last months of war also hints at why 1945 is such a grimly fascinating one from a historical perspective: Nazi Germany faced an inevitable end, yet continued to fight grimly until the bitter end, achieving a total defeat that was unprecedented in modern history. In doing so it created a ‘zero hour’ for the German people, who then set about rebuilding their lives, economic activity and ultimately Germany itself, with the Nazi era firmly in the past.
The legacy of the Nazis, of course, was all around – not just in the sheer scale of destruction and suffering, but also in the survivors of Nazi camps, both Jewish and otherwise, and the foreign labourers, all of whom found themselves freed in a defeated nation. The country was divided into zones of occupation, each with their own character, their own challenges and their own solutions.
In the midst of this a new Germany was born -or more accurately, two new Germanys). Much of the eventual political, economic and social achievements of West Germany were founded on the peculiarities of 1945, in particular the totality of the Nazi defeat and the yearning for stability after chaos and destruction. There was also – and this sounds peculiar to us looking back at the crimes of the Nazis – a distinct sense of victimhood.
Richard Bessel‘s Germany 1945: From War to Peace (Harper, 2009) is an excellent guide to that tumultuous and difficult year, from the military reverses of the early months to the immense challenges that rose in the wake of defeat. It was a book that I came across almost by chance, in a shop in Doha airport that frustratingly failed to provide me with a copy of The Economist to read on a flight back to London. I was already fifty pages in by the time we lifted off, and – once home – I got in touch with the author, hoping for an interview. I hope you enjoy listening to the results!
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As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were “arguably the first media celebrities.” Upon their arrival at Louis XIV’s Court of Versailles, the sisters made a splash when Marie and the young King promptly fell in love. Ultimately, the couple’s relationship– which climaxed with a forced separation and Marie’s confinement in a convent– reads like something out of Shakespeare.
Forced into advantageous mismatches that were, at turns, oppressive and abusive, the sisters jumped back into public view when Hortense, donning men’s clothing and making use of the new post coach service, left her husband and took to the road. Marie promptly joined her.
At a time when it was borderline scandalous for women to travel unaccompanied by men, much less divorce them, the sisters darted about Europe, seeking refuge from the husbands who actively pursued them. The story of their escape seemed like something out of a novel and, for years, the whole of Europe was riveted. As Goldsmith writes, the sisters were “admired by libertines, feminists and free-thinkers but viewed by others as frivolous at best and threats to civil society at worst.”
Both women penned memoirs, with that of Hortense being the first memoir written to which a woman signed her name. What is perhaps most striking about the sisters now is how brazenly unapologetic they were. As Hortense writes: “I know that a woman’s glory lies in her not giving rise to gossip, but one cannot always choose the kind of life one would like to lead.” She and her sister landed lives of adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now.
In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences.
While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of an artist and the art of his time to form “un present parfait.”
It was a year that influenced not only his poetry but also his prose. As Hargrove writes, the theater Eliot encountered while in Paris “may have been the inspiration for the difficult dramatic goal which Eliot later set for himself: to write verse drama in an age conditioned to prose and to write of spiritual and moral concerns in an age largely devoid of and unsympathetic to them.”
But perhaps most impressive- especially to any lover of Paris- is Hargrove’s meticulous recreation of the city as it was then. Through chapters on sport, popular entertainment, transportation, etc., she elegantly situates the young poet amid a city so alive it seems to strain against the page. The end result is a book that leaves the reader longing for both the poetry and Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012), Sally Bedell Smith peels back the layers of mystique to reveal the very shy woman who is the current Queen. It isn’t so much a dismantling as a reevaluation, an effort to appreciate a figure who– though part of an institution that is seen by some as vestigial– is nonetheless deeply impressive and truly beloved.
Smith interviewed over 200 people, 160 of whom are on the record as the queen’s relatives and friends–a fact that suggests that the 40 individuals who opted for anonymity are even grander higher ups. Though the book is not “authorized,” it carries significant clout. Buckingham Palace also offered Smith limited access to the Queen, so the author could see her subject in action and play witness to her quiet charm. That’s the biggest stamp of approval for which a royal writer can hope.
Like many royal biographies, Elizabeth the Queen is filled with small, gossipy tidbits. We learn what the Queen eats for breakfast and what she carries in her ubiquitous handbag. But Smith also offers substantive insight into the less examined areas of the queen’s life, in particular her religious faith, her life pre-ascension and her relationship with the Queen Mother. The end result is a lively portrait of a hard-working woman who, in her own way, has represented “a new Elizabethan age.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker’s lifetime. This will be required reading for scholars of Victorian science, of natural history, and of the history of imperial science, but it will also reward any reader interested in a compelling story written by a writer’s writer. It was a pleasure to read, and equally a pleasure to talk with Jim about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It’s springtime in the American Midwest. The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new baseball season has already produced history-making performances and rising stars. But the students in my sports history class don’t want to talk about any of that. Instead, the subject of sports talk among these red-blooded Americans is . . . the Champions League! European football, unlike the American variety, is a sport of global reach and increasing popularity. In the weeks ahead, hundreds of millions of fans around the world will watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League and the group stages and knockout rounds of 2012 UEFA European Championship. To mark the occasion, we take a break from our normal slate of interviews to bring together a team of scholars and experts who look at European football in its various dimensions. In this special double episode, we talk about the economic and business side of soccer with Simon Chadwick and Brad Humphreys, contributor to the blog The Sports Economist. Director of the CIES Football Observatory, Raffaele Poli, discusses the movement of players in the European labor market, while David Ranc, manager of the research project Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, explains how football fans have responded to the arrival of foreign players to their clubs. We welcome back sociologist Peter Millward, who talks about his work on the club, national, and European identities of soccer fans Historians Jean Williams and Manfred Zeller speak to us about women’s football in Europe and the history of soccer in Ukraine, one of the co-hosts of Euro 2012. We chat about football shirts with one of the bloggers at the sites Football Shirt Culture.com and Design Football.com. And the BBC’s Tim Vickery offers his views, as a removed but certainly knowledgeable observer, on the Euro tournament and European football’s worldwide appeal. Whether you are also a distant fan, or a supporter of your local club, hopefully you’ll learn something new from this podcast seminar. At the very least, our guests have plenty of suggestions of football books for your summer reading list. And watch out for another special episode of the podcast, later in the summer, as we’ll gather another team of experts to help us understand the Olympics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today we are talking with Philip Gounev (co-edited with Vincenzo Ruggiero) about his new book Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe (Taylor and Francis, 2012). He is the co-author of this book with Vincenzo Ruggiero, and they have a number of people who have made contributions to individual chapters. This is a great combination of two researcher’s skills. Prof Ruggiero is a major theorist on the topic of organized crime and Philip is a leading researcher into corruption in Europe.
The issue of corruption is always ‘timely’. It may be that in a global financial crisis the consequences of corrupt practices have even greater impact. The authors focus on the connection between corruption and organized crime, especially how these two concepts interact in a market place. Organized criminals need security to ensure stable operations, and the public officials can provide that security through corrupt practices. I do a great deal of research into corruption and organized crime but I still learnt an enormous amount from this book. Any researchers in this area from the English speaking world will benefit from reading this book as about half of their references come from non-English speaking sources; thus this is an opportunity to see data and theories that you otherwise would not have the chance to read in English. I really enjoyed both reading this book and talking with Philip. I hope you enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans died as a result of World War II, or between 8% to 11% of the German population at the time.* It’s hardly any wonder, then, that in the first half of the twentieth century the Germans were preoccupied with death and how to deal with it–it was all around them.
Monica Black‘s impressive Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2011) explains how they did it. She focuses on remembrances of various sorts (funerals, monuments, eulogies, etc.) and the ways in which they were shaped by German tradition, transient ideology, and exigency. As Monica demonstrates, Germans themselves changed “German Way of Death” radically over this short period as they attempted to deal with a whole variety of competing pressures, values and interests. This is a fascinating book as it shows how the dead, though gone, are really (and particularly in the German case) still with us.
*To put German losses in perspective, 117,000 Americans died in World War I (.13% of the population) and 418,000 Americans died in World War II (.37% of the population). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players. For the league’s teams, the draft is the chance to re-stock their rosters with fresh young talent, basing their choices on reams of analytical reports and hours of dissected game films. The players, on the other hand, see the draft as the fulfillment of their lifelong dreams, the chance to slip the penury of amateur collegiate status and earn millions as a professional athlete. Like everything the NFL does, the draft is an epic, made-for-television spectacle, with fans cheering and jeering from the balcony of New York’s Radio City Music Hall, team executives arrayed on the floor like UN diplomats in crisis deliberations, the wise chorus of ESPN experts predicting each team’s selection and then decrying those teams that didn’t do as they had predicted, and the players themselves, dressed in tailor-made suits purchased with their expected millions, waiting for their names to be called. The whole proceeding is broadcast with an accompanying riot of statistics, scrolling text, and computer-generated graphics.
Once upon a time, football was different.
Historian Randy Roberts presents this earlier age of college football, in all its color and drama, in his newest book, A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). At the start of World War II, government and military leaders decided (after much debate) that college football had to keep going; it was good exercise for young men soon to leave for overseas service and good entertainment for the home front. And two teams that gained the most talented recruits and the most national attention during the war were the academies for prospective officers: Army and Navy. Randy’s book focuses on the Army team of coach Red Blaik, who came to West Point in 1941 to revive a losing program. By autumn 1944, through his own relentless preparation and innovations in strategy, and with the contributions of two of the greatest backs to play the game, Blaik had built one of the best teams in the country. In November of that year, troops overseas were stalled on the battlefield, and people at home were weary of rationing. They turned on their radios to listen to a football game, the biggest game of the year, played not by pro prospects looking ahead to their big payday, but by officer candidates who expected to go to war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned, the “bad guys” of Western history, for they (apparently) didn’t like reason, truth, progress and all that. First among the black-hats was Joseph de Maistre. He believed the French Revolution was “satanic,” as were the ideas behind it. Or so I thought until I read Carolina Armenteros‘ excellent book The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Turns out de Maistre was a good deal more subtle and thoughtful than the “received view” of him suggests, and Carolina does a marvelous job of making plain how and why. In this interview, Carolina explains not only the complexity of his thought, but also that he wasn’t really French, let alone a black-hat wearing reactionary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a German journalist who came to England while a teenager, and who has lived here and worked here ever since (even managing to marry an English girl).
As you would expect from such a background, Philip’s Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (Faber and Faber, 2012) is full of closely observed insights about the linkages (and differences) between these two great European rivals. He takes us through familiar territory and introduces us to new ways of seeing, for instance, the way the two square up on the football pitch (with an examination of two of the great players for each country, Bertie Vogts and Kevin Keegan). He brings fresh material to old subjects, such as the apparent gulf between the two when it comes to comedy (the Germans indeed do, he argues, have a sense of humour – but he glories in how the English build humour into so many aspects of their life). And he also brings us (or me at least) into fresh territory – for instance in their approaches to philosophy.
There’s a lot to recommend this book, but, above all, it is also extremely timely. The Europe of today is crisis ridden and divided, and the global financial crisis has – through its exposition of the rickety structure upon which the euro is built – called into question the whole nature of European integration. Germany, for so long the willing, uncomplaining engine of integration, has been thrust into an unaccustomed leading role in Europe, while the crisis has also forced Britain into a position where its Euroscepticism may be forced to declare itself beyond sniping from the sidelines.
These are interesting times in Europe. The balance of Anglo-German relations will be one of the main determinants of how the continent reinvents itself once the immediate crisis (eventually) begins to subide. This book is a useful, well written and insightful contribution to this relationship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Alabama-Auburn. Maple Leafs-Canadiens. Boca Juniors-River Plate. Carlton-Collingwood.Fenerbahce-Galatasaray. Great rivalries are the catalysts of national sporting cultures. They are the high point of a season, fueling emotions as well as ticket sales and media hype. The most famous rivalries typically have bearing for league standings and championships. But many are also grounded in long-standing divisions between social classes or religious and ethnic communities.
The case can be made that the most intense rivalry in all of sports is between Glasgow’s two football clubs: Celtic and Rangers. Known collectively as the “Old Firm,” the two clubs have dominated Scottish football for more than a century. The last time a team other than Celtic or Rangers won the Scottish league was 1985. But the rivalry is built on more than the competition for titles and trophies. Rangers were long associated with Scottish Protestantism, and the club refused for decades to sign a Catholic player. Celtic, on the other hand, was historically the club of Irish Catholic immigrants, and still today fans wave Irish tricolor flags at matches.
As sportswriter Richard Wilson explains, the sectarian division that undergirds the Old Firm is waning, as secularization advances and intermarriage becomes more common. But the intensity surrounding the Old Firm derby has not lessened. In his book Inside the Divide: One City, Two Clubs, the Old Firm (Canongate, 2012), Richard presents the story of a single match in January 2010, as viewed from different participants: the players and managers, the police and the press, supporters of both clubs, and even the nurses who tend to the drunk and wounded after the game. The composite picture shows the anxiety and tension that precede the match, and then the energy and passion that erupt inside the grounds.Richard makes clear that the two hours or so at Ibrox or Celtic Park are exhilarating, exhausting, and breathlessly quick. The noise is overpowering, as supporters of both sides do battle in chants and song. On occasion, though, they will still slide into slurs against their opponents. Despite the policing and the anti-sectarian campaigns, the deep animosities still emerge, offering a reminder that in the Old Firm, as in all rivalries, fans are still tribal creatures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory in Newcastle. He ended up making the parts of the spot lights that were used to guide anti-aircraft batteries (and my grandmother made parachutes, just over the River Tyne in Gateshead).
Although this was not half as exciting to find out about as a young boy as discovering that he was in fact a Commando or part of the Long Range Desert Group, what my grandfather was part of was vital to the defeat of Nazism. In his excellent book, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2011), David Edgerton is all about this crucial non-military part of Britain’s war with Germany, and it sets about challenges perceptions almost from the front page.
His argument is that Britain was actually far more able and well resourced than commonly thought. It entered the war as the richest per-capita nation in the world, a ‘world island’ interconnected with markets across the globe. It had industry and it had a formidable military. Even after France fell, Britain still had its empire to fall back on, and that is before the economic (and then military) assistance of the USA is taken into account. It had the luxury of fighting a war that it was comfortable with, through Bomber Command and in North Africa and the Mediterranean: not for Britain the mass bloodshed that characterized the Eastern Front. Even by the end of the war, an exhausted Britain was still in enviable shape, although – especially in comparison to the USA – it did not seem to be.
The book is full of fascinating information, facts and arguments. I did not realize that (again, contrary to accepted opinion) British tanks were actually extremely highly rated, or that British units were extremely well equipped with armour. The bombing campaign was extremely well suited to statistical analysis. In 1939 the Admiralty was sent around a thousand letters a day from garden-shed inventors, each promising that his amateur tinkering had produced an invention that might win the war against the Germans.
I also appreciated that this book explained to me exactly how my grandfather (and grandmother) had done so much to win the war, without having to fire a shot. It was not risk free: I remember my grandfather telling me how a bomb had scored a direct hit on the factory’s toilet, just after one of his colleagues had disappeared inside with his morning newspaper. But it was also vital, and I thoroughly recommend the book, especially to those who want to know a little bit more about how war was fought, beyond the simple matter of bullets and blood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II (University of North Texas Press, 2011). Muth’s book, which has recently been selected for the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List, is a provocative analytical comparison of the respective cultures of officership in the US Army and the German armed forces in the first half of the twentieth century. In setting up his comparison, Muth pulls few punches in his critique of the flaws resident in both institutions. Yet while the American army managed to overcome these flaws, Muth notes that the Wehrmacht ultimately fell victim to its own hubris and ossified culture inherent in its origins. He continues to offer valuable insights as to how these institutional problems and successes continue to shape the culture of officership in the US Army today. I especially recommend reading Muth’s book in tandem with one of our earlier choices, Michael Matheny’s Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945; taken together, the two books present an interesting debate on the subject of American military culture in the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s.
And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death.
In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II.
And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one cannot help but be steered back to Piaf’s records. Burke was undoubtedly conscious of this as it’s where she got her title.
“That kid Piaf tears your guts out.” So said Maurice Chevalier after hearing the 19-year-old newcomer sing in a Parisian nightclub. Nearly 50 years after death, as No Regrets proves, she still does.
*No Regrets will be available in paperback on April 1, 2012, from Chicago Review Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit – as being founded upon the open ocean: unconfined, stormy and there to be mastered. A route to the rest of the world and limitless opportunity. The Mediterranean, by contrast, always seemed a bit limp. It had no tides; its main purpose was as a tourist destination; it was (at least on its northern shore) very European in a way that Britain was not. It seemed as cramped as an Italian tourist beach in autumn.
But I was very, very wrong.
That is why reading Robert Holland‘s excellent book Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800 (Penguin, 2012) was such an eye opener to me. British history has been intimately bound up with the Med, and not just through the odd colonial oddity like Gibraltar or Malta, or through the search for a viable theatre in the Second World War. As Holland argues, it is the British that made the Med into something of a region, rather than a collection of regions. It was where Britain confronted Napoleon, and – many years later – where they found an outlet to take the war to Hitler.
In between, and indeed after, it was a key area for British interests, and a place where British influence was great. You can see the results in modern day Palestine, in Greece, in Egypt. Holland is also particularly good at explaining the history of places such as Cyprus, Corfu, Malta and Gibraltar, where the British empire was a key factor in daily life and nation building.
Near the end of the interview we also touch on the Mediterranean of today, and Robert Holland speaks movingly about the current economic crisis and its impact. He keenly regrets the inability of the states of the Mediterranean to see themselves as neighbours within a region, and the loss of a true pan-Mediterranean identity.
I was wrong about Britain and its relationship to this crucial region, and that’s why I both enjoyed reading the book and talking to the author. I hope you enjoy listening just as much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of our previous guests, Matthias Strohn, recommended the book, and I am glad he did. Stahel’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of German planning for and execution of Operation Barbarossa. Stahel highlights the many flaws and paradoxes intrinsic to German thinking about war in the East, not least of which was the deception perpetrated by Halder, who masked the centrality of the drive on Moscow to his own plans in order to avoid confrontation with Hitler. By late August 1941, Stahel argues, the German failure decisively to defeat the Soviet regime (even while winning significant victories at places like Minsk and Smolensk) spelled doom for the Wehrmacht.
Nor is Stahel resting on his laurels. By the time I conducted the interview, his second work had just hit the shelves. In Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Stahel analyzes in detail the critical battle on the southern front. After talking with Stahel late last year, that one is on my reading list as well. And Typhoon is on its way after that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
In Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After (Omnibus 2011) Andy Neill provides a detailed account of Faces, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed groups of the early seventies. Neill begins his story with biographies of those who would become Faces including, of course, sections about each of their early bands: Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Ian “Mac” McLagan with Small Faces; Rod Stewart and Ron Wood with the Jeff Beck Group. The book’s mid-section details Face’s career through four albums and countless tours of England and, essential for their commercial success, the United States. Also included is an analysis of the balance that was sometime kept and sometimes not, between Face’s career and the career of their superstar sfront man, Rod Stewart. Neill devotes the final part of his story to the band’s break-up and the individual members’ post-Faces careers. All-in-all, Neill provides a richly researched history of a band and all the people who went into making their tenure possible.
Andy Neill is a music writer, researcher and historian who co-wrote Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who as well as compiling Across the Universe: John, Paul, George, and Ringo on Tour and on Stage. He contributes liner notes for archive projects including the Who’s back catalogue, and is a consultant on numerous music biographies and documentaries. His writing has appeared in Mojo, Record Collector, and Ugly Things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, class conflict, imperialism, political repression, globalization. The history of bicycle racing brings in another key ingredient of the modern age: technology. The sport began only with the invention of a machine, and its history, from the mid-1800s to today, has been linked to the constant adaptation of that machine.
Andrew Ritchie documents the first decades of this history in his book Quest for Speed: A History of Early Bicycle Racing 1868-1903 (Cycle Publishing, 2011). As he explains in our interview, an important part of the story is the evolution of the bicycle, from early wood-and-steel models that rattled their riders, through the high-wheel bikes that we typically associate with 19th-century cycling, to the more familiar bicycles of the 1890s, with chain-driven rear wheels and pneumatic tires. An important point Andrew makes is that technological development and changes in competition were always linked. Riders, mechanics, designers, and manufacturers worked in concert, always seeking a better and, above all, faster bicycle.
Andrew does discuss the people of early cycling as well as the machines. We talk about two figures who gained international stardom as champion cyclists, Arthur Zimmerman and Major Taylor, the African-American rider whom Andrew profiled in a previous book. We also discuss what sets cyclists apart. In the 1800s riders had emotional attachments to their bicycles, they tended to hang out in bike shops, and they stood out on the roads in their strange clothes. In short, they were not much different from today’s cyclists–with the exception of those nifty handlebar moustaches. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead of me full of verb tables and conjugations. The choice was between pain in French or pain in German. On the French side we had (for a fourteen year old) summer sun, beautiful women in skimpy dresses, and achingly cool films full of gruff types moodily smoking cigarettes. On the German side we had… Well, I was fourteen so I didn’t know much more than cars and wars.
For some reason I chose German.
It was by no means a bad decision. I spent several happy Easter holidays travelling to a small town just outside Frankfurt, where we stayed with German families, drank German beer and discovered German girls. We visited Heidelberg and the ominous, barbed wire border with East Germany. The sun shone. Somehow I even did pretty well in my German exams. A few years later I even ended up living in Vienna.
The apparent oddness of my decision is something that is tackled in Simon Winder‘s fascinating book, Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which digs into the unknown Germany and its often astonishing and slightly bewildering history (and geography). Despite being so central to Europe, especially now that it’s discovering a new role as the economic crisis bites, and the last century or so of our history, not many people know too much about it beyond, well, cars and wars. Few go on holiday there and few of us look for a German restaurant when it’s time to go out for a meal.
‘Germania’ is a corrective to this, and a real eye opener. His description of something called a ‘slaughterhouse platter’ might not convince many to visit German restaurants. But his meanderings through the micro-kingdoms and bizarre historical twists of Germania will change attitudes, and perhaps bring a few more tourists to the cobbled streets, majestic cathedrals and odd museums of a much misunderstood country. I hope you enjoy the interview!
NB: In the US the book title is Germania: In wayward pursuit of the Germans and their history, while here in Britain it is Germania: a personal history of Germans ancient and modern. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, 90s, 2000!”). And there was “The ODESSA File” (“Germany believes she doesn’t need us now…but one day she’ll know that she does!”). “The ODESSA File” was my favorite because it explained what really happened, how the evil Nazis formed a super-secret group (Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angeheorigen) to get themselves out of Germany so they could one day return to power.
The trouble is that’s not what happened at all. In fact, there was no ODESSA. In 1947, someone tricked Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal into believing “ODESSA” existed (he was quite willing to be tricked). Then Fredrick Forsyth amplified the myth in his book “The ODESSA File” (1972). Then Hollywood gave the story the full Hollywood treatment in movie “The ODESSA File” (1974). Hollywood tricked me into believing it existed (I was quite willing to be tricked).
If you want to know the truth about how the Nazis got away, read Gerald Steinacher remarkably thorough Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011). He shows that there was a sort of conspiracy to get the Nazis out, it just wasn’t very conspiratorial. Even before the war the Nazis (and the SS particularly) were thinking about how to get away from the crumbling Reich. They talked to one an other, made contacts abroad, and traded tips. After some experimenting with various routes, they determined one was far and away most effective: through Austria, into Italy, and then overseas. They had a lot of help. Some of it was for hire, for example in South Tyrol where a kind of Nazi-smuggling industry arose. Some was gratis, for example that offered by a German bishop in Rome. Add some bungling by the International Red Cross, some skullduggery by the OSS, some complicity by foreign powers (e.g., Argentina) seeking German “experts,” and–just like that–the “Ratlines” were clear and known to anyone paying attention. Steinacher shows that no ODESSA-like organization was necessary for the Nazis to escape. All they had to do was follow the well-trodden, clearly marked path that lead away from justice in Europe and into safety abroad. That’s more disturbing than ODESSA.
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If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do your home cookin’, but you can eat as if you did.”
I grew up with Aunt Jemima and loved her syrup dearly, so I knew this. But I did not know that a similar tradition of racist commercial icons existed in Imperial Germany. I do now, thanks to David Ciarlo‘s insightful Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard UP, 2011). The Germans had been using images such as the “tobacco moor” to stamp their exotic trade goods since the eighteenth century. But it was only in the 1890s that they began to use the “moor” in mass advertising per se. It was only then, too, that they began to carve out an empire full of “moors” in southwest Africa. David skillfully connects the two phenomenon, showing that the latter tangibly altered the character of the former. The image of Africans in ads went from one that emphasized the exotic to one that stressed the exotic under German domination. Depictions that were almost entirely fanciful became much more concrete. Africans came to represent racial Untermenchen in the service of their German overlords. It was an appealing picture, and one the Germans would–unfortunately–not soon forget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Many of us know that Nazi regime tried to control Germans’ fertility: some people should reproduce more, according to the National Socialists, and some should reproduce less or not at all. Policies like coercive sterilization for the supposedly “unfit” were the flip side to benefits for “racially fit” Germans who propagated. But the fact is, many states the world over have tried to exert control over their citizens’ reproductive practices. Even with radical differences in government, the notion that the state’s health depends in part on its citizens’ fertility can be remarkably stubborn.
In her book, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Historian Annette Timm takes us to “the belly of the beast”: to Germany’s capital, Berlin. But her interest isn’t so much in the ideology of reproductive politics as in its implementation. What programs did the German state – and the municipality of Berlin – establish to enhance the “health of the nation”? How did these programs survive over no fewer than five regimes: the liberal Weimar state (1918-33), Nazism, foreign occupation, and finally Communist rule in the East and liberal democracy in the West? How did they respond to economic and demographic crises, like the wave of rapes and the influx of homeless refugees at the end of the Second World War? How did new medical technologies, like penicillin and the birth control pill, help to steer this history?
Anyone who follows reproductive politics and the politics of health care today knows that these issues are still with us. Annette Timm’s book helps us to put them into perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a young family: he and his wife, Teresa, had just adopted a baby girl only six months earlier. And Robert was also at the top of his professional career. He was the star goalkeeper for the club Hannover 96 of the Bundesliga, and he was expected to be the starting keeper for the German national team at the World Cup in South Africa. But despite this success, and the new addition to his family, Robert was unable to overcome a severe clinical depression that had gripped him for months. Only a small circle of family and friends knew of the depth of his illness. For others, both those who knew Robert personally and those who knew of him only as one of Germany’s best footballers, his death was an incomprehensible shock.
Ronald Reng was among those stunned by Robert Enke’s death.An award-winning German sports journalist based in Barcelona, Ronnie had meet Robert in 2002, when he was the standout keeper for the Portuguese side Benfica. The two men became friends when Robert moved to Barcelona months later, after signing with the city’s storied club. But Ronnie was never aware of his friend’s depression, and he was left to ask what could have drawn Robert, a man with seemingly everything to live for, to the belief that death was his only solution. The answers unfolded in the research and writing of his biography A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011).
In writing his friend’s life story, Ronnie drew upon the diaries and letters of Robert and Teresa, interviews with Robert’s friends, family, teammates and coaches, and his own conversations with Robert over the years. As he explains in the interview, his aim was to tell Robert’s story from Robert’s own perspective. In this, he succeeds.Readers gain a sense of the anxiety and anticipation as a football keeper tracks his opponents and then decides, in the space of a split-second, whether to leap or retreat. And readers also realize how debilitating and uncontrollable depression can be. Robert did everything that is recommended to battle depression: he admitted his illness, sought medical help, took medications, and pushed himself out of bed to follow a structured routine. Still, his thoughts remained black.
Ronnie’s portrait of his friend is an extraordinary piece of writing, and the book was the deserving winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for 2011. The story is indeed a tragedy.Robert Enke was, at once, a remarkably gifted athlete and also a pleasant and humble man. Readers will like him, and root for him, and ache for him. And I believe that those who pick up the book will hold the thought while reading, as I did: “I hope this ends differently that I know it does.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
The Victor’s Crown brings to vivid life the signal role of sport in the classical world. Ranging over a dozen centuries–from Archaic Greece through to the late Roman and early Byzantine empires–David Potter’s lively narrative shows how sport, to the ancients, was not just a dim reflection of religion and politics but a potent social force in its own right. The passion for sport among the participants and fans of antiquity has been matched in history only by our own time.
Potter first charts the origins of competitive athletics in Greece during the eighth century BC and the emergence of the Olympics as a preeminent cultural event. He focuses especially on the experiences of spectators and athletes, especially in violent sports such as boxing and wrestling, and describes the physiology of conditioning, training techniques, and sport’s role in education. Throughout, we meet the great athletes of the past and learn what made them great. The rise of the Roman Empire transformed the sporting world by popularizing new entertainments, particularly gladiatorial combat, a specialized form of chariot racing, and beast hunts. Here, too, Potter examines sport from the perspectives of both athlete and spectator, as he vividly describes competitions held in such famous arenas as the Roman Coliseum and the Circus Maximus. The Roman government promoted and organized sport as a central feature of the Empire, making it a sort of common cultural currency to the diverse inhabitants of its vast territory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar Timothy Nunan has provided us with an excellent translation of three of Schmitt’s essay on military affairs. These essays are relevant from a variety of perspectives. They reflect interwar debates about international law, neutrality, and the League of Nations and so are of interest to historians of the period. Schmitt was also a fervent supporter of Hitler and the Nazi party and so it may be surprising that his influence (note his longevity) may in some ways be increasing. His ideas about what constitutes an empire, his thoughts on “just war,” and on war crimes demand our attention despite our revulsion at his political views. For making more of Schmitt’s work accessible to an English-speaking audience, Nunan is to be thanked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You don’t just draw a line and tell people that it’s now the “border,” for in order for borders to be borders, they have to be seen as such. Sheffer shows that for quite a number of years after 1945, the Germans in Neustadt and Sonneberg–closely situated towns in, respectively, the American and Soviet zones of occupation–didn’t really know whether the border was a border and, if so, what kind of border it was or should be. “It”–whatever it was–was shifting, lawless, contested, resented, profitable, and sometimes deadly. The Grenze at Burned Bridge was really a kind of anarchical region dividing people who were in no way different from one another but who were compelled to behave as if they were by two occupying powers. The degree to which they were so compelled differed and this made all the difference in the end (the end being 1990, the year of reunification). Years of Nazi propaganda had taught Germans to fear Communist Russians. So when the Soviets arrived in Sonneberg and began to rape and pillage, their fears were realized and they fled. When Soviets (with the help of East German Communists) imposed Stalinism and all that went with it, their fears were doubled and they fled. And when Soviet order reduced once prosperous Sonneberg to a mere economic shadow of Wirtschaftwunder-era Neustadt, their fears were tripled and they fled. For the Soviets and their East German toadies, this “defection” was embarrassing, so they made what was an ill-defined, porous border zone into a militarized, nearly sealed wall. For anyone familiar with Soviet border policy in the 1930s, what they did in Germany is not surprising. What is surprising (at least to me) is the Americans’ and Neustadters’ response to the influx of Easterners, namely, something between ambivalence and hostility. The former wanted order on the border and the latter wanted security from the Eastern “mob.” Both took active measures to keep the Ossis out, all the while issuing pronouncements about the necessity of Wiedervereinigung. The Soviets are responsible for the division of Germany, but, as Edith shows, they had help. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.”
Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest inexplaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe-those of France and England-only began to examine the African in earnest at the same time that their plantation- and slave-based colonies in the Caribbean came on line in the seventeenth century. “Colonial expansion” and “Scientific Revolution” ran together, it seems, and it is in their confluence that we see the origins of modern color-based racial discourse.
That discourse, as Curran shows, was first worked out in what are sometimes called “Travel Accounts,” books that look for all the world like ethnographies. Europeans wrote thousands of them about every corner of the globe (Full disclosure: long ago I wrote a book about early European ethnographies of Old Russia). These books, in turn, provided grist (or “data”?) for the scientific mills of “naturalists” back home. At the same time these naturalists were looking outward for the origins of human difference, other scientifically-minded types were looking inwards. They were medical doctors, and more particularly anatomists. They wondered why, in the mechanical sense, black skin was black, and so they took black skin apart looking for mechanisms. And of course these twin discourses, ethnographic and medical, were intertwined with a third–that centered on the ethics of the then booming Atlantic slave-trade. Europeans wondered what science could tell them about the rightness or wrongness of African slavery.
This is an important contribution to an important topic. But it is also a model of how intellectual history should be done. Curran moves well beyond the parade of Big Thinkers that have long dominated the history of ideas. He reads them, to be sure, but he also reads what they read. By this technique, he moves deeper and deeper into the culture of ethnography, anatomy, and slavery in search of the origins and forms of “Blackness.”
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This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent over the previous summer. The German government’s commissioner for tourism proudly declared that the success of the Women’s World Cup “strengthened the global image of Germany as a cosmopolitan and family-friendly travel destination with excellent infrastructure,” making the country the “world champion of hospitality.”
As the statement shows, German officials are highly conscious of their nation’s “brand,” and the effectiveness of that brand in drawing tourists. The same can be said of other nations that host major international sporting events. Think of the attention to the “new South Africa” in 2010 or the “new China” in 2008. Organizers of these events do not simply plan a schedule of competitions; they seek to present an attractive image of their country to visitors at the stadiums and viewers watching on television.
This concern with national image was at the center of planning for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. When the organizers made their bid to host the games, only two decades had passed since the end of the Nazi state. Germany still had a big image problem, something that the planners hoped to remedy with the Munich games. Kay Schiller and Christopher Young examine this effort to re-craft the German brand in The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (University of California Press, 2010), named the best book for 2011 by both the British and North American societies for sports history. As Kay and Chris discuss, the West German planners were alert to everything from the graphic design of the venue posters to the legacies of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The aim was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk–a complete work of art–that would depict their country as modern, welcoming, and non-ideological. And in Kay and Chris’ judgment, they were largely successful: the Munich games were a model of planning and executing a major international event.
But then came the fifth of September. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
“Before reggae there was rock steady, and before that, ska,” writes Cedella Marley in the foreword to Heather Augustyn’s 2010 book Ska: An Oral History (McFarland, 2010). By way of interviews with dozens of ska musicians, Augustyn traces the history of the music from its Jamaican roots, through its 2Tone revival in 1970’s and 80’s England, to its current regional popularity in the United States. She interviewed Derrick Morgan, Doreen Shaffer, Laurel Aitken, Toots Hibert, Judge Dread, Roddy Radiation, Dave Wakeling, Pauline Black, Kix Thompson, and Buster Bloodvessel to name just a few. The book provides a solid understanding of ska as a music with roots in American jazz and soul mixed with the indigenous music of the Carribean. Augustyn’s interviews also highlight the importance of Jamaica’s status as a former colony in the creation of English ska as well as providing an insight into the music’s reflection of British and Jamaican race and class relations. Most importantly, Ska gives voice to many of the artists responsible for the creation of one of the most enduring musical genres of the last fifty years.
Heather Augustyn is a correspondent for The Times of Northwest Indiana. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Village Voice, In These Times, and The Humanist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines!” What in the heck did that mean? I’d never seen a “Swed-ish mag-a-zine.” Thanks to Elizabeth Heineman‘s wonderful book Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago Press, 2011), now I understand. You see, the last and perhaps most significant Swedish contribution (if that’s what it was) to Western Civilization was legalized hardcore porn. In the early 1970s the Swedes (and their porn-allies, the Danes) flooded European markets with the stuff. The Scandinavians were making a killing.
As Lisa explains, the “Swedish Invasion” put the queen of the German erotica industry, Beate Uhse, in something of a bind – but it also came at a moment of great opportunity. In the first two decades after World War II, the Luftwaffe pilot-turned erotica entrepreneur had built a sex empire legitimized by the idea that erotica helped married, heterosexual couples have more fulfilling relationships. After all, the bread and butter of the industry were condoms (for customers who could hardly afford babies, given wartime devastation) and basic how-to manuals (for customers suffered from dire sexual ignorance). And the demand was there: by the early 1960s, fully half of West German household had patronized a mail-order erotica firm. But by the end of that decade, pornography – both homegrown and imported – was the backbone of the industry. So what, exactly, was the social mission of the erotica industry in this brave new world? In the end, the market decided with more than a little help from liberalism: German men wanted porn and the West German courts and Parliament couldn’t think of a reason not to let them have it. And so it is that you can buy porn on every high street in Germany, often in a Beate Uhse Erotik-Shop (Warning: really NSFW).
This is a terrifically interesting book. Read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
As we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the conflict. Many books will certainly promise much, but in the end deliver little. Fortunately this is not the case with Michael Neiberg‘s latest book Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011).
In this important new view of the opening months of the war, Neiberg offers a fresh look at the July Crisis, how it was perceived across Europe, and the first two months of the war. Rather than focusing on the same old voices of the European literati and political elites, Neiberg shows us how the average person considered the march to war. In the process he reveals a number of startling insights that challenge the war’s standard historical orthodoxy, revealing that many of our assumptions about the collective and individual responses to the July Crisis are based on misperception and poor assumptions. Rather than a continent primed for war through a network of military alliances, unfettered military bureaucracies, and a cultural predisposition that viewed war as the great test of nations and men, he reveals a society that genuinely believed peace was possible until the very last moment, and which only accepted war as a last alternative, and which would be defensive in nature. This insight and so many others earn Dance of the Furies the label of “revisionist history” in the best possible sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Most modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin. Baseball has its Cooperstown. Golf its St. Andrews. Basketball its Springfield College. If you are a football fan, whether of the All Blacks or the Springboks, the Magpies or the Swans, the Longhorns or the Stampeders, your ancestral shrine is a centuries-old boarding school in the West Midlands of England. It was at this place in 1823, according to legend, that schoolboy William Webb Ellis first caught a football and ran with it. The game that developed after this violation of the rules took the name of young Webb Ellis’ school: Rugby. The branches of rugby football spread widely in the 19th century and took on distinctive shapes, so that every sport today in which players run with and toss an oval ball, as opposed to dribbling and kicking a round one, can trace its history back to Webb Ellis’ forward rush.
The legend of William Webb Ellis is just one subject that Tony Collins addresses in A Social History of English Rugby Union (Routledge, 2009). The book is a masterly work of scholarship that earned the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History in 2010. Tony unfolds the history of rugby union from its origins at Rugby and other elite schools of the 19th century, through its expansion into Britain’s industrial cities and overseas empire, and down to its current status as a worldwide sport that draws big crowds, bigger television audiences, and even bigger revenues. But the larger and more important story is what the sport’s history reveals about England in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even if you are not a fan of rugby, you will learn a lot from this book about England and its empire, the nation at war, and the social and cultural changes of the postwar decades.
As Tony explains in the interview, a study of rugby is particularly useful for viewing larger historical issues. The two codes of rugby–“rugby union” and “rugby league”–are distinguished not only by different rules and styles of play but also by different social, cultural, and political outlooks. If you don’t know the first thing about union and league, don’t worry: Tony gives us a lesson. But whether you know of rugby only from Matt Damon in Invictus or you’re a veteran player, you’ll appreciate Tony’s insights into the game, the history of modern England, and the reasons that the history of sports matters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton University Press, 2011), a collection of his father’s missives from Poland and Russia during the early years of the Second World War, now translated into English. As you can imagine, this was an intensely personal project, and one that says almost as much about the postwar generation of “fatherless children” like Jarausch as it reveals about men like his father (also named Konrad) who found themselves in the cauldron of war.
Jarausch seems to resist the comparison but I liken this work to Victor Klemperer’s diaries, I Shall Bear Witness, that were published with great fanfare almost fifteen years ago. The circumstances of the two men were vastly different (Klemperer was converted Jew, married to an “Aryan,” living in Dresden during the years of Nazi rule). But both men were deeply humanist members of Germany’s educated middle class (Bildungsburgertum) who saw their fellow Germans go insane and take the nation they loved down the path of moral and physical ruin.
This work is of special interest to military historians because the elder Jarausch documents areas of activity rarely touched upon by other Wehrmacht memoirists and writers. Too old to serve in the combat arm, Jarausch spent his time in rear areas in Poland and the Soviet Union, training recruits and guarding prisoners. In clear and often touching prose, Jarausch documents both the drudgery and the deadly dilemmas of service in Hitler’s army. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Being a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years in dusty libraries and archives, and even more years teaching students who sometimes don’t seem interested in learning what you have to teach. But the job does have its pleasures, and one of the greatest–and surely the guiltiest–is watching people screw history up. Not a day goes by when we don’t see someone get it wrong, dead wrong, or so wrong that it’s not even wrong. To us, history is firmly anchored in authenticated sources that have been subjected to intense scrutiny and debate by people who know what they are talking about. To most other folks (though surely none of the people reading these words), history is something a dimly remembered teacher taught you, something you saw on the “History Channel,” or something someone told you once. This kind of history is not anchored in anything other than popular ideas and attitudes, which themselves are constantly changing. In this light, it’s not particularly surprising that when most people talk about history, they don’t get things quite right. When people make historical mistakes, we historians earnestly knit our brows and solemnly bemoan the deficit of historical knowledge. Privately we sometimes chuckle. I’ve done this myself, and I have to tell you I feel bad about it.
I can only imagine, then, that Christopher Krebs had an absolute blast writing A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (Norton, 2011), for it is an epic tale of getting it wrong, history-wise. Beginning about half a millennium ago, people began to say all kinds of wrongheaded things about Tacitus’s thin volume: that Tacitus was writing about “Germans” (he wasn’t); that he knew a lot about “Germans” (he didn’t); that he uniformly praised “Germans” (nope); that the traits he ascribes to “Germans” can be found among modern German-speakers (wrong again).
Were it not for the fact that these “interpretations” emboldened evil people (especially the Nazis) to do evil things (too numerous to recount), this exercise in bad history would be funny. But, as Krebs points out, it’s really not very funny at all. It’s a reminder that we professional historians have a duty to make sure we get what we say about the past straight, or else. Christopher Krebs is clearly fulfilling his duty in this important, readable, and very witty book. It deserves a wide audience. That means you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is an important challenge to the existing literature on interwar German military doctrine. The stunning German victories in 1939 and 1940 have usually been attributed to their practice of “Blitzkrieg” (Lightning War). The inventive use of armored divisions and airpower allowed the Wehrmacht to sweep its enemies from the battlefield with relatively low casualties (on the German side, at least) and with little negative impact on the German homefront or domestic economy. James Corum, Robert Citino (a recent interviewee) and others have traced the roots of this combined arms doctrine in the interwar period, focusing on the “stormtroop” innovations World War One and the advocacy of mobility above all else by planners like Hans von Seeckt.
But Strohn believes that this understandable fixation on the roots of Blitzkrieg has blinded us to the practical importance of defensive doctrine in the 100,000 man Reichswehr. With no hope of challenging France (a fact brought painfully to life in the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr) and little prospect for success even against the Polish army, German strategists (Joachim von Stulpnagel more than Seeckt) concentrated on defensive doctrine, hoping to survive an initial attack long enough to organize (perhaps) a guerrilla campaign or to die gloriously in arms.
Based on extensive archival research, Strohn’s book should provoke a conversation among scholars of the German army that will refresh the debate about interwar doctrine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Very little illustrates history as well as the personal story. For all of the wars, deportations and suffering of the mid Twentieth Century, it’s only when there are real people that the figures come alive. Luckily there are some very good books out there that help us get our heads around the otherwise near-incomprehensible, and Matthew Kelly‘s book Finding Poland: From Tavistock to Hruzdowa and Back Again (Jonathan Cape, 2010) can be added to that list.
Matthew’s book is about a family that was finding its feet in inter-war Poland, before history happened to them. First the country was divided between the Nazis and the Soviets, before they were deported to the USSR. The story takes them from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to Persia, India and – finally – Devon, in England’s lush West Country.
Matthew helps us to understand what this remarkable journey was like for those involved – partly because they are his own family. The book is full of personal photographs and letters, which help bring the family to life. It gives insights into historical events, both large (deportations; the formation of General Anders’ Polish army) and small (life for an aspirant Polish family in the east of the country in the 1930s; teenage girls coming of age in a Polish community in British India). Above all, it’s a really enjoyable read. I recommend it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, the day on which we remember those who have fought and died in the service of our country. It’s fitting, then, that we are talking to Adam Hochschild about his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).
The book itself is a memorial of sorts, or rather a reminder of what may, in hindsight, seem to us to have been a kind of collective insanity. The Great Powers fought World War I over nothing in particular. They pursued no great cause, sought to right no terrible injustice. They appear to us, therefore, to have fought for no good reason and to have been, therefore, out of their heads. But here we are wrong, for the combatants were not insane. Not at all. They simply lived in a different world and, therefore, thought differently than we do. They fought, as Adam points out, because they wanted to fight. For them, the bloody struggle of nation against nation was a necessary and salutary phenomenon. War made them who they were; if they did not fight, they were nothing. And so they fought bravely and died in droves over nothing, really, but honor. Of course there were exceptions, people much like us who believed that war was neither necessary nor salutary in any way. Adam sensitively chronicles their (futile) attempts to convince their kin and countrymen that war all bad and no good. They, too, fought bravely and sometimes died. We should remember them, too, on this Memorial Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over this question. He was sure that there was a kind of authority that drew strength from character itself. He called this authority “charismatic,” a type of legitimate political power that rested “on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.” The charismatic leader is not like us. In fact, he is not like anyone. He is sui generis, a mysterious force of nature, a sort of political demiurge.
According to Jonathan Steinberg, Weber may well have had Otto von Bismarck in mind when he defined charismatic authority. In his wonderful Bismarck: A Life (Oxford UP, 2011), Steinberg argues that Bismarck’s successes (and some of his failures) can be largely attributed to the awesome force of his personality. Not “social structures.” Not “historical patterns.” Not “underlying forces.” But charisma pure and simple. Time and again Steinberg finds those around Bismarck attesting to the fact that he just wasn’t like everyone else. He was smarter, wittier, stronger, more willful, more cunning, more temperamental, and in most ways larger than life. And this was the nearly uniform (though not always positive) assessment of the some of the most impressive figures of his day. It’s a compelling case.
And it provokes a question about German political culture, for Bismarck was not the first or the last “genius” to rule some or all of the Reich. Fredrick the Great preceded him, and Hitler followed. What are we to make of that? I’ll leave it to you to decide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits in with the experiences of both Charles Emmerson and myself. Charles’ interest in the Arctic was born from a childhood of staring at those strange names fringing the Arctic Ocean – Novaya Zemlya, Svalbad, Murmansk and Baffin Bay. Look at the far North from a pole-centric map and the whole geography of the Arctic starts to make sense.
Charles’ book, The Future History of the Arctic (Vintage Books, 2010) takes in the entire history and geography of the Arctic in a broad sweep – from the Norwegian explorers and the Alaskan purchase to the past and future hardships of Iceland and the Soviet dreams of expansion and riches. Now, of course, climate change is altering the very geography of the place. But how? The best word that I have for the book is ‘fascinating’. It is a rich subject and this is an excellent guide to a place that is increasing in economic, geopolitical and strategic significance. I thoroughly recommend getting hold of a copy – but first, enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Robert Citino is one of a handful of scholars working in German military history whose books I would describe as reliably rewarding. Even when one quibbles with some of the details of his argument, one is sure to profit from reading his work. When a Citino book appears in print, it automatically goes in my “to read” pile. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (UP of Kansas, 2007), which recently appeared in a paperback edition for the first time, was one of the first books I wanted to review for New Books in Military History. The book is operational history at its best. It is written with both clarity and drama, as good operational history should be; it adds to our understanding of the German war in the East through its careful synthesis of the best research in German and English on the subject in the last ten or fifteen years; it mines Wehrmacht military journals for insights into “the German Way of War” (a topic discussed in an early Citino book of that title – see the interview for more). Even avid readers on the subject will learn much that they did not know about Manstein in Crimea, Rommel in North Africa, Hoth approaching Stalingrad, and many of the other campaigns of 1942. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were ill.” And it explains victory: “We won the war because we, individually and there communally, were healthy.” And it suggests a program for political progress: get healthy and stay that way. It’s an old idea. We find it among the Greeks, the Romans, and throughout the various 19th- and early 20th-century programs for “national renewal” that swept Europe and Asia.
In his excellent book Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford UP, 2010), Erik Jensen explores how Germans of the Weimar era were seduced by this “self-wellness = national-wellness” logic. They’d lost a war, and they couldn’t understand why. They knew that German culture wasn’t the problem. They believed–and with some good reason–that it was the most advanced in the world. So perhaps, they thought, the problem was some failure in themselves. They had grown weak and ill. Yes, that was it. So something had to be done about it. As Jensen shows, it was. And here’s the really interesting part, at least by my lights: it wasn’t done by the state. The Weimar government itself, though hardly disinterested, did not lead the campaign to make the German body well. Rather, “ordinary Germans” did. They began to play and follow sports, and to form countless clubs that played and followed sports. Sports became, well, “progressive” among the “right thinking people.” Rich and poor. Men and women. Everyone played. For Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: supposed fascists are never really fascists–they are just people you don’t like very much. Not so in post-War West Germany. There, too, it was common to call people “fascists. But in the Federal Republic they may well have been fascists, that is, Nazis. Despite the efforts of the most thorough-going de-Nazifiers, post-war West German government, business and society was shot through with ex-Nazis. Young people, and especially university students in the BRD, were keenly aware of this fact, and they wondered how it could be that the so-called “Auschwitz generation” could have changed their tune so quickly. Under the influence of some rather clever left-leaning philosophers (those of the Frankfurt School), some of them came to the conclusion that they hadn’t and that, therefore, Germany was still a fascist state. This conclusion (erroneous as it was) gave them striking moral clarity: there was only one thing to do when faced with fascism–resist it by any means necessary. And that is what they did.
In his enlightening Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (Columbia UP, 2010), veteran journalist and policy analyst Hans Kundnani tells their story. It’s somewhere between a farce and a tragedy, at least in my reading. On the one hand, to think that West Germany was a fascist state, to classify Zionism as a kind of Nazism, and to believe that the leftist students were persecuted “new Jews” is of course absurd. At least some of the West German radicals were so out of touch with reality that it defies understanding. On the other hand, they were in fact surrounded by ex-fascists, keenly aware that Israel was (to put it delicately) “asserting itself” in the middle east, and constantly on the run from Federal authorities. In such a situation I might lose touch with reality too. For the terrorists, who never regained their senses, it all ended badly. But for those whose heads cleared (Joschka Fisher, for example), it ended in power, though a different power than they had imagined in 1968.
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Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It does what all good history books should do–tell you something you thought you knew but in fact don’t–but it does it ON EVERY PAGE. I thought Vermeer was X; now I know he was Y. I thought Vermeer was influenced by X; now I understand he was influenced by Y; I thought Vermeer painted X; now I realize he painted Y. I could go on and on, revelation after revelation. The biggest news–or rather the bit that will get the most press–is that a handful of “Vermeers” were in fact painted by his daughter, Maria. Vermeer’s Family Secrets is remarkably well researched and convincingly argued. It’s also lavishly illustrated. So are a lot of art history books. But this one is also intelligently illustrated: the way the pictures are arrayed serves the book’s many arguments. They are not simply eye-candy; they are also brain-candy. And the book is written in a clever, engaging, dry style. The short “Acknowledgments and Preface” are worth the price of admission. A word about that price. I confess I get all the books I do on this show free, thanks to the publishers. So I don’t know how much they cost. I thought this one, judging by the production value, was going to run somewhere around $100. That’s steep. But my friends, I’m delighted to tell you that you can buy this book for the low, low price of $32.85 from Amazon. It would make a great holiday gift. Since I have a copy on hand, I think I’ll give it to my brother-in-law (don’t tell him…).
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Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yardon which we had recess. We called it a “playground.” But we did not play on it. We did battle.
We did not fight for treats or for love or for sport. These things were trivial to us. No, we fought for honor. One achieved honor not by getting good grades, or by having the best lunch, or by making the most friends. Everyone knew that these things were the spoils of honor, not the causes of it. Rather, one gained honor by physical intimidation and, if necessary, combat. Honor was fair: it paid regard to neither sex, nor race, nor class. Girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich and poor could all have whatever honor they could earn. But honor was also brutal: the strong and brave (or should we say “reckless”) usually had it, while the weak and timid (or should we say “sensible”) usually did not. Interestingly, the former did not “bully” the latter very often. At least at Price Elementary School, humiliating a much weaker opponent was considered, somehow, dishonorable. But among the strong and brave there were constant contests of honor, often violent. The “hegemons,” if we may so speak, enjoyed high honor. But they also suffered from constant fear that they might lose it. And so anxious class champions would challenge one another, fight, and the victor would humiliate the vanquished (“Say ‘uncle’!”). For the defeated party, eager to regain his or her honor, there was only one honorable course: revenge–swift, ruthless, and public.
So it went, day in and day out on the “playground” at Price Elementary School. And so it went, year in and year out, on the battlefields of fifth-century Greece.
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The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epstein’s remarkably detailed, thoroughly researched, and clearly presented Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (Oxford UP, 2010).
Greiser was a totalitarian if ever there were one. He believed in the Nazi cause with his heart and soul. He wanted to create a new Germany, and indeed a new Europe dominated by Germans. As the Gauleiter of Wartheland (an area of Western Poland annexed to the Reich), he was given the opportunity to help realize the Nazi nightmare in the conquered Eastern territories. But, as Epstein shows, he was often hindered both by his own personality and the chaos that characterized Nazi occupation of the East. Grieser emerges from Epstein’s book as someone who wanted to be a “model Nazi,” but couldn’t really manage it because he was a crooked timber working in a crooked system. His personal life was an embarrassing tangle of marriages, affairs, and break-ups that at points threatened his career. His professional life was marked by ambition, ego-mania, and fawning, none of which endeared him to most of his colleagues and superiors. And his murderous attempts to “work toward the Fuhrer” in the Wartheland–by displacing Poles, murdering Jews and other “undesirables,” and populating the East with Germans–were stymied by the cross-cutting jurisdictions, conflicting agendas, and professional jealousies that were one of the hallmarks of Nazi rule. Grieser did his best (or his worst, depending on how you look at it) to Germanize the Wartheland. He improvised, maneuvered, and “worked the system” such as it was in pursuit of the Nazi totalitarian project. Thankfully, he failed, demonstrating again that totalitarian dreams, though they can be horribly distructive, are a far reach from totalitarian realities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, I’ll be really sad. After having read Joyce Salisbury’s eye-opening The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2011), I know now how weird all that is.
People in the Middle Ages did not, so far as we know, love their animals. As Joyce points out, they used them, ate them, and even had sex with them. But they do not seem to have loved them, any of them. They did, or at least some of them, think about animals rather deeply. They wanted to know what animals were, really. They knew animals were God’s creatures. But there were nettlesome questions, like whether animals had souls. Well, probably not. Some of them, however, like lambs, were put forward as models for holy behavior (“the Lamb of God”). So do lambs, unlike all other animals, have souls? Another question: Could you eat animals? If they didn’t have souls, then you certainly could. But which ones? Not clear. The Christian Bible–unlike the Hebrew Bible–is rather short on dietary regulations. Yet another question: Could you have sex with animals? They were, after all, only things, and it didn’t really matter what you did with things (though “spilling your seed” in any case was a no-no). That said, having sex with an animal is rather unseemly. Still another question: If an animal killed someone, was it “guilty.” Aristotle said animals didn’t have reason, so that would suggest that animals couldn’t be “guilty” or “innocent.” Fine, but some animals were awfully smart, like the sly fox that everyone heard about in folk tales. So if some animals have some reason and are therefore human-like, are there some humans who are a touch bestial and therefore animal-like? Where exactly was the line between humans and animals? Thinkers of the Middle Ages had some interesting things to say about all these questions, many of which still have resonance today. Read Joyce’s fine book and learn all about it.
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We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascinating new book The History of White People (Norton, 2010), it wasn’t always so. The Greeks didn’t do it, at least very seriously. The Romans didn’t do it, at least very often. And the folks of the Middle Ages didn’t do it, at least with much gusto. In fact, the people who invented the modern concept of “race” and the classification of people by skin color were Europeans and Americans of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era.
Why then and there? As Painter points out, a number of historical trends coincided to produced “racial science” and its child “whiteness” in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These trends included: the “discovery” of New Worlds (and the people in them) in the Americas, Asia, and Africa; the evolution of the African slave trade and with it the historically novel identification of “negroes” with slavery; the birth of proto-anthoropology and with its ancillary sciences (e.g., “craniometry”); nationalism, and desire of nationalists (especially Germans) to discover the intrinsic “greatness” of particular nations (notably theirs); the massive influx of “undesirable” Irish and Eastern Europeans into the United States; and the “progressive” idea that human populations could be bred for “superior traits,” that is, eugenics. All these things forced European and American elites to think hard about what kind of people they were.
The conclusion they reached was that they were (variously) “Anglo Saxons,” “Nordics,” “Aryans” and eventually just “Whites.” That they believed themselves to be superior to all other “races” should not surprise us (humans being naturally prideful). But the muddle-headed quality of their thought on matters racial should raise some eyebrows, for these people were not dumb. They were, however, afraid, and fear often drives even well-intentioned, intelligent people to say foolish things. This they certainly did. Alas, some people still do. They should read Nell Painter’s fine book.
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Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that more scholarly attention has probably been paid to Hitler than any other figure in modern history. Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin and a few others might give him a run for his money, but I’d bet on Hitler. The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him.
The fact that so much effort has been expended on Hitler presents modern German historians with a problem: it’s hard to say anything new about him.
Surely Thomas Weber knew this when he began to work on Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (Oxford UP, 2010). After all, a new book on Hitler’s wartime experience had come out in 2005. What more is there to say? It turns out that there is quite a lot if you know where to look. And Weber does. He uses an interesting approach to uncover novel information about Hitler. Weber acknowledges that the documentary record relating directly to Hitler’s personal wartime experience is thin (a few letters, some military reports) and, when it is thicker, biased (more than a few axe-grinding memoirs from a much later time). These documents, all of which have been pored over by historians, will not shed any new light on Hitler. So Weber turns to a much larger and more trustworthy body of sources: that produced by the officers and soldiers in Hitler’s unit, the List Regiment. Though these papers usually do not mention Hitler by name, they enable Weber to reconstruct what he must have experienced, to see what was typical and what was not in Hitler’s service record, and, on the basis of this information, judge the veracity of claims made by Hitler, Nazi propagandists, and historians about the impact of World War I on the the Nazi dictator.
The result is a serious revision. Hitler (et al.) said that World War one “made” him the person he became. Weber shows in detail that this claim is false. Fundamental elements of Hitler’s worldview either pre-date the war (his German nationalism) or seem to post-date it (his radical anti-semitism). In fact, the war did two things for Hitler: it gave him credibility he could use as he entered politics and it convinced him that he was an expert in military affairs. He ran for office as a humble Gefreiter (private), a holder of the Iron Cross First Class; and he ran the war as a dilettantish know-it-all, often with disastrous consequences.
The only revelation Hitler had in the trenches was a common one, namely, that war is a very nasty business. That he went on to start another, even bloodier one has less to do with his experience of World War One than the ideas he brought to the conflict and absorbed after it.
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In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but please read the book and judge for yourself) two remarkably insightful theses.
The military industrial complex was born three decades before Eisenhower put a name on it.
The first is that the primary result of the disaster that was World War I was not the even great catastrophe that was World War II, but rather a new kind of state and one that is still with us. Maiolo’s argument goes something like this. World War I caught the Great Powers flatfooted. They did not believe they were going to fight a protracted war; they thought things would be done quickly and with the men and materiel on hand. Instead, things bogged down and a massive war of attrition–something they had no experience with–ensued. In order to fight this war successfully (meaning to stay in it for the long term), the Great Powers had to fundamentally restructure their economies, something no state had ever had to do, at least in modern time. In a word, the government took over production and distribution in order to optimize the flow of arms and supplies. Many statesmen found this move objectionable, but all believed it necessary. Once the war was over, they remained convinced that the only way to deter their enemies and, in the case they couldn’t, fend them off, was to retain control of large segments of the economy and plan to take control of even larger segments. The ability to make war on a World-War-I scale and for a World-War-I duration had to be built into the “plan.” Thus the leaders of all the Great Powers effectively militarized their economies in anticipation of the next great conflict. The military industrial complex was born three decades before Eisenhower put a name on it.
Maiolo’s second insight has to do with the origins of World War II itself. Most historians agree that it was “Hitler’s War.” He planned it, he armed Germany for it, and he started it. Maiolo doesn’t necessarily disagree with this position, but he offers an interesting counter-factual that puts it in a different light. What if there had been no Hitler? Would the statesmen of Europe have avoided a second great conflict? Maiolo suggests not, and for an interesting reason. Several of the Great Powers–the Soviets and Germans in particular–were very dissatisfied with the settlement at Versailles. They would not stand pat in any case. Given what we know about Soviet and German plans for and movements toward rearmament before 1933 (thanks, it should be said, to Maiolo’s own research), it is not clear that leaders other Stalin or Hitler might not have done exactly what Stalin and Hitler did in 1939, that is, take what they felt was rightfully “theirs” by force of arms. And as Maiolo shows, they would have had plenty of arms at their disposal in any case. The Europeans were going to go at again; it was simply a question of when.
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Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, he might well have said war (or at least that war) was the “continuation of politics by any means.” Hitler was terribly specific about this. The Slavs, he said, were Untermenschen (subhumans). The Communists were Judeo-bolschewisten (Jewish Bolsheviks). Soviet soldiers were keine Kameraden (not comrades-in-arms). The East was future German Lebensraum (living space). All this meant that the ordinary rules of armed conflict had to be suspended. The German armed forces were to conduct a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation.
The German military had never been in the business of wanton destruction. On the contrary, it prided itself on being the most professional fighting force in the world. It was admired for many things, but two of them were honor and loyalty. And it was the clash of these two otherwise laudable traits that got the Wehrmacht in deep trouble, for Hitler essentially ask the German military to choose between the two in the East. Would the army uphold the traditional, honorable ideal of civilized military conduct, or would it remain loyal to Hitler and prosecute his Vernichtungskrieg?
As Valerie Hebert shows in her remarkable Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg (University Press of Kansas, 2010), they chose the latter course. At Hitler’s request, they murdered civilians, starved prisoners of war, and enslaved occupied peoples by the millions. So it’s little wonder that after the war the victors called the leaders of the Wehrmacht to account for their thoroughly criminal behavior. And here they behaved no better, for they lamely claimed that they didn’t commit these outrages, didn’t know others were committing them, or were under orders so they had no choice. When they did admit to killing thousands in one or another Aktion, they claimed it was military necessity or that they were forced to be brutal because the Soviets were more brutal still (a pathetic instance of blaming the victim).
Given the setting (their honor and even lives were on the line), it’s not surprising that they lied and rationalized. What is more unsettling is that they showed little or no remorse for what they had done (during or after the trials) and that they enjoyed considerable sympathy within the German population. As Valarie points out, the Germans mounted large campaigns both against the Nuremberg proceedings and for the release of the Wehrmacht-criminals after they had been incarcerated. The former were unsuccessful, though the latter resulted in the premature release of nearly all those convicted in the Wehrmacht trials.
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In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-industrial areas like Paris, left people without the sense of belonging that characterized “traditional” life. Durkheim was not alone in thinking that there was something fundamentally sick-making about modernity. Marx called the modern malady “alienation” (Entfremdung), Weber called it “disenchantment” (Entzauberung), and Freud called it “discontent” (Unbehagen). The more general term used in fin de siecle Europe was “neurasthenia,” a condition of nervous exhaustion caused by the frenetic pace of modern life.
The theory that modernity was pathological was put to the test on several occasions in the early twentieth century. One of the earliest was the Paris flood of 1910. It’s the subject of Jeffrey H. Jackson‘s wonderfully told tale Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010). By Jackson’s revealing lights, social science did not fare very well. When the Seine river literally rose up out of the ground and over its banks, things in Paris did not fall apart as Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Freud might have predicted. Far from it: the Parisians generally pulled together, fought the rising waters, and helped one another. They were not “normless,” “alienated,” “disenchanted,” or “discontented.” They knew just who they were: French citizens. They knew just what to do: lend a hand. And they knew just why they did it: national duty. This isn’t to say that some sort of ideal democracy magically emerged out of the flood waters. It didn’t. As is always the case, people in desperate situations do desperate (and often stupid) things. The deluge ripped the veneer of normalcy from daily life and revealed underlying conflicts. But more than anything else the Paris flood revealed the remarkable strength of modern republican nation-states. Unlike their much praised “traditional” counterparts–the monarchies of early modern Europe–they did not fall apart when put under significant strain. They cohered and even grew stronger.
We shouldn’t think, however, that this solidarity was an entirely good thing. National unity had a much darker side, as would be shown only a few years later. Nations are often very good at helping themselves, as the Paris flood demonstrated. But they are also very good (if “good” is the right word) at fighting other nations, as was demonstrated with horrible clarity in World War I and World War II.
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I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally told the Stasi–the East German secret service–to watch them (which they did). After the fall of the Wall, the Stasi files were opened and my friend requested to see her dossier. I have to say, it was disappointing. For some reason (perhaps having to do with John le Carre), I thought the Stasi was a ruthlessly efficient, super-clandestine, surveillance-repression machine. But I couldn’t find that machine in my friend’s file. It was boring. She did this, did that, she did the other thing. Why would anyone care?
Read Gary Bruce‘s wonderful The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (OUP, 2010) and you can find out why. But don’t expect it to make any sense, because the picture Gary paints is of a kind of Bizarro World. Like their handlers in the Soviet Union, the East German communist party was mindlessly paranoid. They saw–or at least claimed to see–“enemies” under every rock. This (mis)perception was the pretext for the creation of the Stasi: it would protect the revolution from said “enemies.” (It would also prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West, but that was just an added bonus.) How?
First, they needed agents. These weren’t hard to get in the post-war years. There were lots of idealistic communists who were quite willing to go to work for the cause. One of the revelations of Gary’s work is that many (most?) Stasi agents believed in what they were doing. Those that didn’t recognized that the pay was good. Next, you needed your trusty agents to recruit “co-workers,” that is, informants. This was not as easy. Gary’s subjects worried a lot about meeting their recruitment quotas; really good informants were hard to find. But generally they found them (or made them up). Finally, you had to have your agents work their informants, that is, meet with them regularly and pump them for valuable information. This was the hardest job of all. Gary’s work makes clear that most Stasi agents viewed the regular meeting (again, they had quotas) as a hassle. More than that, they were generally seen as completely unproductive. We now know what the Stasi agents could doubtlessly have told us long ago: there were no “enemies.” With the singular exception of Poland, no Eastern Bloc state ever hosted anything like an organized “opposition” to communism or anything else. A lot of folks were unhappy with, for example, Party hypocrisy, the price of sausage, or the inability to travel abroad. But there was no “underground” to go into to fight for, well, whatever one might fight for. This being so, the vast majority of Stasi agents worked for decades without ever turning up anything beyond the occasional extra-marital affair–hardly the kind of thing that would endanger the “republic.”
What they did accomplish, and perhaps what the Stasi itself was meant to accomplish, was to frighten the populace. You don’t need to watch everyone to give the impression that everyone is being watched and, if “seen,” being punished. In the end, the myth of the Stasi was more important for the stability of the East German regime that its practice.
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If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out.
France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic settlement. So which was it to be: France a nation of free-thinking citizens or France a nation of Catholic Frenchmen? The question was not definitively answered during the Dreyfus Affair, but new (and somewhat disturbing) possibilities were sketched out. The analysis of these new paths is one (among many) of the great strengths of Ruth Harris‘s new book Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Henry Holt, 2010) . She shows that both sides–the Dreyfusards (aka “Intellectuals”) and the Anti-Intellectuals–used the Affair to elaborate their visions for France and, in the process, worked themselves into a tizzy. They began to believe things that, well, only a lunatic could believe. French political culture entered a kind of surreal moment (a bit like American political culture during the O.J. trial if you ask me). Alas, the French didn’t quickly come back to reality after the Affair ended. They organized parties and continued to fight. And they are still fighting.
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Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as far as I know). But we might call it an “Easter Rising victory” after the Irish Republican revolt of 1916. The Republicans took over several buildings in Dublin, declared an Irish republic, and then were promptly obliterated by the British Army. Their leaders were executed, their republic disbanded, and their enemies remained in control of the island. They lost. Or did they? Shortly after the disastrous uprising, the Republican cause began to gather force. Its fallen leaders became martyrs to the Irish nation, the idea of a republic grew in popularity, and once moderate Constitutional Nationalists began to fight the British. Within a short three years, the Irish republic was back; in another three years the “Irish Free State”–not exactly independent of London, but much closer than before–was established. In The Rising. Ireland: Easter, 1916 (Oxford, 2010), Fearghal McGarry does a terrific job of describing the complicated ins and outs of the Rising and its impact on Irish politics. The book really shows us the revolt “from below,” that is, from the point of view of those who fought in it. Fearghal is able to gain this perspective because of a remarkable source. In the 1940s, the Irish authorities, knowing that witnesses to the Rising were passing, had the presence of mind to conduct a large survey of participants. They collected well over 1,000 accounts, all of which became available in 2002. Fearghal mines these reports to reconstruct how the men- and women-on-the-street experienced the revolt. The results are remarkable. The Rising appears anew as an event at once tragic, terrifying, and farcical. In hindsight, we can see that the Rising changed Irish politics forever; at the time, amidst the bravery, blood, and rubble, few saw any such thing. Most were just scared.
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You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of the most popular and famous British writers of the early 20th century (the Edwardian Era). He left an enormous body of work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. But Galsworthy was also what we might call a “public humanitarian,” that is, he used his high profile and influence in a great, good cause. The focus of his effort was disabled solders returning from World War I. We, of course, are well acquainted with the remarkable destructive power of modern weaponry. Not a week goes by (alas) in which we do not hear about a soldier being wounded by mines, grenades, artillery fire or bombs (often of the “roadside” variety). But we also have come to expect that soldier, no matter how grievously wounded, will receive medical treatment that will stand at least a fighting chance of saving their lives. And indeed, many wounded soldiers do survive incredibly severe injuries and return to our world. The generation that fought and suffered World War I–or as they called it “The Great War”–were really not familiar with any of this. Europeans and Americans of the nineteenth century were surely used to wars, but they were generally short and decided by pivotal battles (Waterloo, Gettysburg, Sedan). But the Great War was different. Millions of men lived for years at the “front” and under the shells. Many died there and many more were wounded. Thanks to advances in medical knowledge (and particularly the discovery of the germ theory of disease), a goodly proportion of the wounded survived. This presented a new problem: How to re-integrate wounded men into society? This became Galsworthy’s cause. The course of his efforts on the part of wounded soldiers is detailed with great skill and care by Jeffrey Reznick in his John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War (Manchester UP, 2009). Reznick shows us Galsworthy attempting to create the modern infrastructure of veterans’ care: special hospitals, rehabilitation programs, work-transition agencies and so on. And we get to read Galsworthy’s writing on the subject, both non-fiction and fiction. All this give us–or gave me–a new understanding of Galsworthy’s literary work. Galsworthy was a great man. But as it turned out he was greater than I knew. We should thank Jeff for bringing his good-works to our attention.
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I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as closely as a little kid can. I never thought for a moment that “we” could lose. “We” were a great country run by good people; “they” were a little country run by bad people. I spent my time building models of American tanks, planes, and ships. I read a lot of “Sergeant Rock” and watched re-runs of “Combat.” My friends and I played “war” everyday after school. Given all this, you’ll understand that I was bewildered when “we” pulled out of Vietnam. How could “we” lose the war when “we” were bigger, better, and righter? It made no sense. All this came to mind as I read Andrew Donson terrific book Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918 (Harvard UP, 2010). As Andrew points out, German children were taught that their nation was great, their cause was just, and their victory inevitable. Their heads were full of heroic tales of soldiers sacrificing themselves for the good of Germany, and they longed to fight for the Vaterland themselves. So when things began to come apart in 1917, Germany’s young people were deeply disappointed. They would not “get their chance.” Rather, they would suffer hunger, humiliation, and defeat. They had hard questions for their mothers, fathers, and the authorities. How could it happen? Who is at fault? And, most importantly, what should we do? As we know, they answered this final question in different and, as it turned out, radical ways.
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Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the many interesting questions posed by Hilary Earl in her outstanding new book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge UP, 2009). The book is about the trial of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that, in 1941 and 1942, spearheaded the Nazi effort to eradicate the Jewish people. The Einsatzgruppen murdered something on the order of a million people using almost nothing but firearms. In 1947, their commanders were brought to justice in what might be called the “other” (forgotten) Nuremberg Trials. The trial left an enormous body of reasonably fresh-after-the-fact testimony for historians to work with in trying to understand this episode in the Holocaust. Hilary does a masterful job of mining this material. She also points out that the roots of our own understanding of the Holocaust can in large measure be traced to these disturbing trials. The defendants were the first Nazi genocidaires to publicly describe what they had done and why they had done it. To be sure, their testimony was self-serving and is therefore suspect. But–and this is perhaps the most remarkable part–in many instances it was remarkably accurate. They (and Otto Ohlendorf in particular) “told it like it was” because they believed they had not really done anything wrong. Hitler had said that the Jews were the mortal enemies of the Reich; they believed him. Thus when Hitler ordered them to kill the Jews man, woman, and child they were not particularly conflicted–they were simply following orders, orders they believed to be in the objective interest of Germany. Just how they came to hold this completely irrational view is another, and very interesting, question. For those interested in it, I refer you to Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Harvard UP, 2003).
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One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqueville, who was right about almost everything, thought the former: he said that American culture made American government democratic. Neocon theorists, who have been wrong about most things, believe the opposite: that democratic governments can make cultures democratic. Under this theory, we should be able to impose liberal democracy on, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, and thereby make their cultures liberal democratic.
The culture-government question is also central to modern German historiography. It usually takes this form: did German culture produce the Nazis or did Nazis produce German (or rather “Nazi”) culture. In his eye-opening book Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard, 2009), Alan Steinweis succeeds in shedding new light on this subject by carefully studying an old topic–the Nazi pogrom against the Jews in 1938, aka, “Kristallnacht.” He shows that it is difficult to argue that the Nazis alone prosecuted the attack. It would be much more reasonable to say that they “provoked” it or, even better, “unleashed” it. Steinweis points out that what might be called “spontaneous” (or at least not party-directed) assaults on Jews had been occurring with some frequency over the years preceding the Kristallnacht. The Nazis my have facilitated these spasms, but they did not create the paranoia that drove them–that, it seems, was a element of German culture. Importantly, the Nazi leaders–and above all Hitler and Goebbels–knew that all they needed to do was give the word and the anti-Semetic pressure building up within the German public would be released. In November 1936, Herschel Grynspan’s assassination of a low-level German diplomat gave them the pretext they needed to give that word. They did, and the floodgates of Judophobia opened.
The Nazis didn’t create violent German anti-Semitism; they reflected it and took advantage of it. As H.L. Menchen might have said, the Germans got the government they wanted and deserved to get it good and hard.
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Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name (Free Press, 2009). As Toby points out, medieval Europeans thought the earth had three parts–Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem at the dead center and water all around. (And no, they didn’t think the earth was flat…). But in 1507 a peculiar item appeared–the Waldseemuller map— that outlined a fourth part of the world called “America,” with the Atlantic Ocean on the one side and an unnamed ocean on the other. Here’s the really curious thing though: at that time no European had ever seen what we now call the “Pacific Ocean.” Balboa was the first to see it, and he didn’t do so until 1513. So where did Waldseemuller and his colleagues get the idea that there was a continent between Europe and Asia and that an undiscovered ocean separated Asia from it? Was it just a good (educated) guess, or did the mapmakers have information that has not come down to us? You want the answer? Well you can listen to the interview and then go buy the book. All will be reveled!
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Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given at the time was that something called “civil society,” having grown mighty in the 1980s, overthrew it. I’ve always been more than a little uncomfortable with both the idea of “civil society” and this explanation. The former is very difficult to define. Is “civil society” the same as “the opposition?” Is it something like the “public sphere” (another slippery though very popular notion)? Or is it just a trendy synonym for “the people,” as in “of the people, by the people, for the people?” The explanation is theoretically (and politically) comforting, but it doesn’t make much sense empirically. With the exception of Poland, most Eastern European states had minuscule “civil societies” under almost any reasonable definition. And even in Poland, “civil society” did not bring Solidarity to power–bungling Communists did. In Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (The Modern Library, 2009), Stephen Kotkin (with a contribution by Jan Gross) confirms all my suspicions. The Communist Parties of Eastern Europe ruled their territories more or less completely; there was no significant organized opposition in any of them, again, with the exception of Poland. Therefore when we look for reasons for their sudden rupture, we should look at their own doings, since they were in effect the masters of their own fate. Had they succeeded in building wealthy, democratic communist societies–that was, after all, their ostensible aim–they would probably still be in power today. But they failed utterly. Once they came to realize this, they lost faith in their own project and more or less gave it up, though not exactly willingly. Kotkin tells the tale of how they did so in spirited, direct prose. The book a joy to read, the more so because it is brief and often funny. If you are interested in contemporary affairs, you would do well to read it; if you teach contemporary history, you would do well to assign it to your students.
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To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German descent, and they surely thought of themselves as refined, industrious, and orderly. The Nazis, however, seemed un-German in important ways: they were, apparently, racist thugs bent on destroying democracy, conquering Europe, and murdering millions of innocents in the name of “purity.” If the Nazis weren’t Germans, who were they? If the Nazis were Germans–that is, had somehow sprung out of deeply German cultural roots–then who were the Germans?
As Michaela Hoenicke points out in her fascinating book Know Your Enemy. American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2009), Americans high and low thought a lot about these questions before and during the war. Their answers, as you will see, were not entirely consistent. Sometimes the Americans took the “Good German” line seriously and said that the Nazis were insane bandits who had hijacked Germany. Sometimes they identified the Nazis with the Germans, arguing that Nazism had deep roots in German culture. And at still other times they just threw up their hands.The wonderful thing about this book is that it doesn’t pretend there was a monolithic “American view of the Nazis.” Instead, it demonstrates that there were a great variety of competing interpretations.The “American view of the Nazis” depended on the American you asked (FDR or a St. Louis dock worker?), what that American knew (or thought she knew), and when you put the question (1941?, 1942?, 1943?). In hindsight, it seems like “we” (meaning Americans) always understood that the Nazis were evil to the core and enjoyed considerable support among the “Good German” people. But things weren’t so clear in the rush of events between 1933 and 1945.
This is an excellent book, and one that should be widely read by those interested in American foreign policy, American understanding of parts foreign, and World War II.
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There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia), 1789 (The French Revolution), 1848 (The Revolutions of 1848), 1914 (The beginning of World War I), 1933 (Hitler comes to power), and 1945 (The end of World War II). Two decades ago we added another date to the roster of “historical” years–1989. In ’89 the world really did change: the hallmark of an entire historical epoch–the struggle between the Capitalist West and the Communist East–came to a sudden end. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviets withdrew from Eastern Europe, the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe relinquished power, new democratic states emerged, and people danced in the streets. At least for a while. To say that nobody saw ’89 coming would be a bit of an exaggeration: people had been predicting the decline of Soviet power in Eastern Europe for decades. Like all regularly made predictions (“Prices will fall…”), this one eventually came true. Still, the events of ’89 were unexpected. What the heck happened? If anyone knows, it’s Padraic Kenney. Not only has he spent his entire (prodigious) scholarly career studying modern Eastern European history, but he was there when it all happened. He published the classic account of ’89 in ’93 (A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton UP, 2003)) and since then two other books about it as well (The Burdens of Freedom. Eastern Europe Since 1989 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2006); 1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009). In this interview, he tells us how it all went down (or up, depending on your perspective).
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We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going. It was never really an “ordinary” place. In the West but also the East; sovereign but not sovereign; German but not German; poor but rich. I could go on. It was the unnatural product of the Cold War, so when the Cold War ended it ended as well. But it didn’t just blink out of existence. Not at all. For a brief period–roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989 to formal reunification in October, 1990–it continued to exist, a country that was alive and dead. Reporter Stevan Allen was lucky enough to be there and he has written an artful book about it–Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany. At its center is a wonderful literary device: just as East Germany was passing out of existence, so too was an important phase in Allen’s life. The two narratives–that of the “Ossies” and the young journalist–move together, intermingle, and sometimes do battle as Allen tries to get the story and to figure out what he is doing with his life. One of the terrific things about the book is that you get to see the trials of foreign reporting–and its toll on foreign correspondents–from the street itself. Allen pulls no punchs regarding himself or his subjects. He often fails as do they. Sometimes he gets the story, sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes the East Germans help him, sometimes they don’t. This is not a self-congratulatory tale of unending triumph; it’s the story of a man at work, a man living life, a man struggling with himself and his task.
Part personal memoir, part coming-of-age story, part hard-nosed reporting, and part elegy to a youth past, Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany will be a welcome treat for journalists, historians, and anyone interested in a good read about places and pasts that no longer exist, save in memory. If you know a young person who is interested in a career as a journalist, this book would make a terrific gift.
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Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of the Party and believed all it said and some were not and believed none of what it said. True enough, but actually the relationship between the identity “German” and “Nazi” was a bit more complicated than “this” and “that.” The two were mixed, as Peter Fritzsche shows in his fascinating new book Life and Death in the Third Reich (Harvard UP, 2008). Peter looks at the artifacts left to us by ordinary Germans during the Third Reich–memoirs, diaries, letters, and so forth–in order to understand the ways in which their “German” identity was entangled in the Party’s “Nazi” identity. The result is an insightful study of the ways Germans thought about Germanness, about Germany, and about the Party that promised to restore both to greatness. Not surprisingly, different Germans thought about these things in different ways. More surprisingly–at least from my semi-educated standpoint–is that different Germans thought about them in different ways at different times. One of the most original contributions of the book is the documentation of the manner in which German attitudes toward the Nazis and their program evolved as events unfolded. The Germans of 1933 were not the Germans of 1938; and the Germans of 1938 were not the Germans of 1944. This is a terrifically interesting book and should be read by everyone interested in answering the fundamental question about Nazi Germany and its crimes: How could it have happened? Thanks to Peter’s book, we are a lot closer to an answer.
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In the Gospels, the disciples come to Jesus and ask him about the End of Days. He’s got bad news and good. First, everything was going to go hell, so to say: “And Jesus answered . . . many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.” (Mathew 24: 4-8 KJV). But then, Jesus says, things are going to get a lot better for those who hold fast: “But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” (Mathew 24: 13-14 KJV) Now you may think all of this is allegory. But people in the Middle Ages didn’t. They took it to heart and acted on it, most significantly by launching the Crusades (which, as you know, were many). That’s one of the many interesting messages of Brett Whalen‘s new book Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Harvard UP, 2009). The Christians believed that, as Jesus said, the gospel would be preached everywhere before the End. Well circa 1100 it was hardly preached everywhere. It wasn’t even preached in the Holy Land, which was of course held by Infidels. Clearly something had to be done about that. Thus was the Church of Christ turned into the Army of God, all in the name of speeding the End of Time. As Brett points out, things got a little out of hand in the period that followed. Turns out that not having God on your side can mean trouble. Read the book and find out how.
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It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a “breakthrough” that might bring victory. It was simply one long hard slog to nowhere. Why not just give up? Thanks to Alexander Watson’s insightful Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918 (Cambridge, 2008) I now have a better understanding of what allowed the common infantryman to hang on. Watson convincingly explains that the remarkable endurance of soldiers was a function psychological coping mechanisms and leadership. The way the war was fought, Watson argues, was almost uniquely disempowering. In the trenches, men could neither fight nor flee. The shells rained down, and there was nothing they could do about it. They felt powerless and, as a result, anxious. To regain some semblance of control, therefore, they used religion, superstition, humor and, more than anything else, a keen understanding of the risks of life on the line to help them persevere. But these mechanisms were not enough. Leadership was also crucial. The right officer could calm men and help them hold fast. The wrong one could do neither. Both the British and Germans had good junior officiers, but Watson explains that the former had a slight edge. The final part of the book argues persuasively that the German army didn’t “melt away” in 1918 as has been thought. Rather, it was lead into captivity and defeat by officers who knew that further fighting was useless.
This is a terrific book and should be widely read. The paperback edition is coming out soon. Buy it.
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Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinelanders. They even had their own small Weingut where they made a nice Riesling. But they were not originally from the Rhinegau at all. They were from East Prussia, a place where there are no longer any Germans and a place that no longer really exists. They commemorated their erstwhile Heimat by keeping a large, old map of East Prussia on their living room wall. If you’re curious as to how my host family made the trek from Baltic to the Rhine, you’ll want to read Giles MacDonogh’s hair-raising book After the Reich. The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (Basic Books, 2007). The atrocities committed by the Nazis are of course very well known to nearly everyone. But the outrages committed by the Allies in retribution for said crimes are less familiar. Giles sets the record straight by chronicling what can only be seen as an Allied campaign of vengeance. They pillaged and raised much of Germany and they raped, massacred, starved, and deported millions of Germans. The Russians were the greatest offenders, but the Americans, British, and French were hardly guiltless. It’s hard to know what to think about what they did. The Nazis were monsters, and many ordinary Germans were complicit in their crimes. They deserved punishment. But was justice served?
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When I was in high school, I really didn’t go in for reading. Until, that is, I somehow encountered Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I remember hiding in the back of all my classes reading it while my teachers talked about something I know not what. I was hooked on World War I, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The Great War was such a strange and tragic thing. It seems to have been started for no good reason, been fought without reason, and ended unreasonably. It’s just hard to make sense of. Which is why–if you are as confused as I am–you should pick up Norman Stone’s terrific World War One. A Short History (Basic Books, 2009). The book explains the inexplicable in the fewest words imaginable. More than that, it’s wonderfully written. Stone has clearly thought long and hard about the war and he is full of pithy observations, sharp opinions, and harsh verdicts. No one really comes out unscathed, which, given the way the war was started, fought and ended, makes good sense indeed. If you don’t know anything about World War One, you should read this book. There is no better introduction. If you know everything about World War One, you should also read this book. There is no more challenging book on the subject.
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It’s the classic historical question: Why did the Roman Empire fall? There are doubtless lots of reasons. One historian has noted 210 of them. No wonder Gibbon said that we should stop “inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed,” but rather “be surprised that it lasted so long.” Indeed. But 210 reasons do not amount to a satisfying explanation. Historical events are complex, but historical writing must be parsimonious if it is to achieve its primary aim, that is, to make the past clear to us. Happily, Adrian Goldsworthy‘s How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower (Yale UP, 2009) does a marvelous job of boiling it all down. He proposes that structural explanations–governmental inefficiency, economic decline, imperial overstretch and the 207 others–are fine, but they really won’t do the job in this case. The late Roman Empire was ill, but it was hardly on its death bed in the third and fourth centuries. Moreover, even at its weakest moments, the Empire was hugely more powerful than any of its competitors. In order to understand how the Romans managed to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory (or at least survival) Goldsworthy says we need to look at Roman politics, or what I would call Roman “political culture.” In Goldsworthy’s telling, the Roman political elite forgot what the empire was for, that is, to serve the interests of the Romans (the “Res publica”). Instead, up-and-coming Roman leaders were primarily interested in making it to the top and staying there. That meant staying alive, and since many failed do so for very long long-term political instability ensued. Too often the Romans were busy fighting each other instead of fending off their many though relatively weak enemies. It was only a matter of time before they fought each other one too many times and those enemies defeated them.
Goldsworthy also has some interesting things to say about comparisons between the late Roman Empire and the contemporary United States. I won’t give away what he says, but I will tell you he doesn’t like them very much and for what I think are excellent reasons.
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Most people know what “appeasement” is. You know, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Anschluss with Austria, the Sudeten Crisis, Neville Chamberlain, “Peace in Our Time.” The Western democracies went (as Margaret Thatcher might have said) all “wobbly” on Fascism, with tragic results. But not everyone was fooled by the Fascists. Socialist and Communist parties all over the world recognized it as a dire threat as early as the 1920s, and they never wavered in this conviction (until the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact, of course). So as much as we might want to blame the radical left for the many woes of the twentieth century, we should remember to give credit where credit is due. Joel Lewis does in his illuminating new book Youth Against Fascism: Young Communists in Britain and the United States, 1919-1939 (VDM, 2007). In the book, Joel tells the story of the communist youth movement in the UK and US. It’s a fascinating topic, and one that is little understood. Of particular interest is Joel’s excellent treatment of the transition from the Leninist generation of communists (1917-1933) to the Popular Front generation (1934-1941). The switch from the one to the other has too often been seen as entirely directed by Moscow. Joel tells a slightly different tale, one in which pressure from below among young communists played an important role in creating the Popular Front. It’s too bad this pressure wasn’t strong enough to convince the right and center parties to take Hitler more seriously than they did. If they had, World War II might have been avoided. (By the way, the Young Communist League is still around if you want to fight Fascism. And who doesn’t?)
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Gordon Brown, the British PM, came calling to Washington recently. He jumped the pond, of course, to have a chat with his new counterpart, President Barack Obama. They had a lot to talk about, what with the world economy melting down, the Afghan War heating up, and Iraq coming apart. But he had another purpose as well. In his speech before Congress Mr. Brown intoned: “Madam Speaker, Mr Vice-President, I come in friendship to renew, for new times, our special relationship founded upon our shared history, our shared values and, I believe, our shared futures.” The “special relationship,” that’s what Churchill called it and every PM and President since has followed his lead. But what exactly is “special relationship,” and how has it and does it impact British and American politics and policy? The answer is found in Robert Hendershot’s insightful new book Family Spats: Perception, Illusion and Sentimentality in the Anglo-American Special Relationship (VDM Verlag, 2008). Hendershot points out that foreign policy is not only about cold, self-interested costs and benefits–it’s also about feeling. In this case, it’s about the feeling among policy elites and national populations that they enjoy some deep cultural bond. This peculiar attachment mattered: Hendershot shows that even where British and American interests collided (for example in the Suez Crisis and the Vietnam War), British and American politicians were compelled by popular sentiment to downplay their differences. The special relationship–though based on nothing but a kind of transnational camaraderie–has proven remarkably resilient. Even today we can see it in operation, for example in Brown’s speech but more forcefully in the British commitment to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For whatever reason, American and British national identities are intertwined. “We” are the people who love the British and “they” are the people who love the Americans–apparently for better and for worse in sickness and in health, until, well, something really awful happens.
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When we speak of the “Age of Discovery,” we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. But the “Age of Discovery” continued well into the seventeenth century as Europeans continued to travel the globe in search of riches, fame and adventure. And after they made port at home, they often “wrote” books about their travels for readers eager to hear about what was “out there”–or at least what these travelers said was “out there.” Take the subject of Kees Boterbloem new book The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys. A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). Sturys was an illiterate, itinerant, indefatigable Dutch sail maker. He went everywhere, did everything, and when he got back from his adventures he was asked by some profit-seeking Dutch publishers to “contribute” his tales to a book about his travels. Of course Stuys could neither read nor write, but that didn’t stand in the way of the publishers. They assigned him a ghost writer who listened to Struys’ stories and, where he found them wanting, embellished them with material purloined from other travel books. The results were part fact, part fiction, and all international bestseller. It was in such books that Europeans learned about the “discoveries,” and by such books that modern publishing was born. We should thank Kees for telling us the tale in this fascinating account.
By the way, Kees is also editor of The Historian, a journal of popular history that you should really read.
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It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it reminds us of the dangers of ethnic hatred in an era that knows it too well. But in another way the Nazi = Holocaust equation obscures part of the story of Hitler’s insanity and that of all genocidal madness. For as Mark Mazower points out in his excellent new book Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Penguin, 2008), Hitler’s homicidal aims went well beyond the Holocaust. Of course the Jews would have to go. But that was hardly to be the end of it. The Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and other residents of the East would have to go too. They were all to be eliminated and replaced by “Aryan” settlers. That was the goal, anyway. That it went unrealized was not due to any lack of effort or nerve. As Mazower shows, the Nazi occupiers uprooted, enslaved, and murdered millions, often with the slightest moral qualms. They failed because they lost the war. We should have no doubt that had they won it–or even defeated the Soviets and brought the West to a stalemate–the Germans would have tried to obliterate the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe. (Whether they might have succeeded in this effort is a hypothetical better not contemplated.) The Jewish Holocaust, then, was but the first in a planned series of mass slaughters aimed at creating a pan-European Nazi Empire. Thank God–and the Allied armies–that it proved to be the last.
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Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But few understand him, at least as well as John Lukacs. That’s hardly a surprise as Lukacs has been thinking and writing about Churchill for over fifty years. He’s written a wonderful book focusing on one of Churchill’s best known speeches, namely the one he gave upon becoming Prime Minister on May 13, 1940. In it, Churchill uttered the memorable and ringing statement that he had nothing to offer the British people but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Hence the title of Lukacs’ book: Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat. The Dire Warning (Basic Books, 2008). Things were bad, very bad, in May of 1940. Churchill knew it. We, as Lukacs points out, seem to have forgotten it. Britain was not only losing the war, but according to many had already lost it. For most, Churchill included, the question was not simply how to make the best of a bad situation, but whether the UK, the Empire, Europe and the cause of freedom would survive at all. Churchill wanted to tell all who would listen how disastrous and momentous things were. He found just the right words, though people at the time didn’t realize it. Only as the scope of the task became clear did “blood, toil, tears and sweat” gain the reality–and meaning–that they have for us today. We should thank John Lukacs for reminding us of them.
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Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely read historian of Germany, with a particular focus on the Nazi period. He’s the author of a number of path-breaking books, including The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics, 1890-1914 (Sage Publications, 1974), The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1990), and Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2001). Today we’ll be discussing his most recent work Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Richard Pipes says of the book: “A most impressive account of the tragedies that befell the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Not the least merit of the book is that, unlike most historians who treat Lenin as a well-meaning idealist, he places him along side Stalin and Hitler as a founder of modern barbarism.” I couldn’t agree more.
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