Best of
European-History

1985

Last Romantic: A Biography of Queen Marie of Roumania


Hannah Pakula - 1985
    The granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Tzar Alexander II of Russia, at seventeen Marie left the glittering courts of Western Europe to marry the Crown Prince of Roumania. Drawing upon the young queen s diaries and letters, the author describes her struggle to gain an independent footing in the male- dominated court of Roumania, her early years as one of the most admired beauties of Europe, and the decisive period during World War I when she all but ran the Roumanian Government. With the sweep and panache of a great epic, this compelling story is historical biography at its best. This enthralling book is like a huge spicy plum pudding stuffed with juicy fruits Maureen Cleave, Evening Standard

And the Violins Stopped Playing


Alexander Ramati - 1985
    It is the true story of Roman Mirga and his family, Polish Gypsies who have to suffer the affects of the Holocaust. This amazing unique book gives an insight of how the Gypsies were treated under Hitler and the Nazi regime.

This Shining Land


Rosalind Laker - 1985
    In one terrifying night, her gentle life is shattered and her innocence ends. Then she meets Steffen Larsen who ignites in her feelings as fierce as the war raging around them. Risking everything, Johanna joins Steffen in Norway's Resistance and enters a dangerous double life...

The Immortal Ataturk: A Psychobiography


Vamık D. Volkan - 1985
    

We Survived: Fourteen Histories Of The Hidden And Hunted In Nazi Germany


Eric H. Boehm - 1985
    They survived in various ways; some as ordinary citizens taking part in the work-day life, others with fake passports, hidden in cellars, living precariously in all the dark corners of a vigilantly policed country. In fourteen autobiographical accounts, author Eric Boehm offers a cross-section of these heroic personalities. We Survived is itself an historical document, giving a window back into this epoch period during World War II.Now reappearing in print over fifty years after its original publication, We Survived remains as relevant and necessary as ever before - an honest testimony to the strength of the human spirit when it triumphs over adversity.

The Eastern Front: Memoirs of a Waffen SS Volunteer, 1941-1945


Leon Degrelle - 1985
     In a laudatory review appearing in an official US Army Department magazine, US Army Brigadier General John C. Bahnsen wrote: "The pace of the writing is fast; the action is graphic, and a warrior can learn things from reading this book. I recommend its reading by students of the art of war. It is well worth the price." Here is the epic story of the Walloon Legion, a volunteer Belgian unit of the World War II pan-European SS force, as told by the legendary figure whose unmatched frontline combat experience and literary talent made him the premier spokesman for his fallen comrades. Captures the grit, the terror and the glory of Europe's crusade against Communism in absorbing prose. Includes fascinating first-person descriptions of Hitler, Himmler, and other Third Reich personalities. Degrelle vividly describes how he and his comrades endured danger, privation and torrents of shot and shell -- on the sun-baked steppes of Ukraine, at the foothills of the Caucasus, in the depths of bone-chilling winter, through the stinking mud and the flaming hell of Cherkassy, and across the rolling plains of Estonia and the Pomeranian lake country. You’ll learn what moved the 35-year-old Degrelle -- a brilliant intellectual and his country’s most colorful political leader -- to enlist as a private in the volun­teer legion he himself organized to join with Third Reich Germany and its allies in their titanic fight against the Bolshevik enemy.

Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman


Nancy B. Reich - 1985
    At once artist, composer, editor, teacher, wife, and mother of eight children, she was an important force in the musical world of her time. To show how Schumann surmounted the obstacles facing female artists in the nineteenth century, Nancy B. Reich has drawn on previously unexplored primary sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and family papers, as well as concert programs. Going beyond the familiar legends of the Schumann literature, she applies the tools of musicological scholarship and the insights of psychology to provide a new, full-scale portrait.The book is divided into two parts. In Part One, Reich follows Clara Schumann's life from her early years as a child prodigy through her marriage to Robert Schumann and into the forty years after his death, when she established and maintained an extraordinary European career while supporting and supervising a household and seven children. Part Two covers four major themes in Schumann's life: her relationship with Johannes Brahms and other friends and contemporaries; her creative work; her life on the concert stage; and her success as a teacher.Throughout, excerpts from diaries and letters in Reich's own translations clear up misconceptions about her life and achievements and her partnership with Robert Schumann. Highlighting aspects of Clara Schumann's personality and character that have been neglected by earlier biographers, this candid and eminently readable account adds appreciably to our understanding of a fascinating artist and woman.For this revised edition, Reich has added several photographs and updated the text to include recent discoveries. She has also prepared a Catalogue of Works that includes all of Clara Schumann's known published and unpublished compositions and works she edited, as well as descriptions of the autographs, the first editions, the modern editions, and recent literature on each piece. The Catalogue also notes Schumann's performances of her own music and provides pertinent quotations from letters, diaries, and contemporary reviews.

The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation


Ian Kershaw - 1985
    Kershaw expertly synthesizes data and evaluates complex historiography looking at the major themes and debates among scholars about Nazism. Drawing on the findings of a wide range of research, particularly the work of German scholars which has not been widely available in English editions, he uncovers interpretational problems, outlines the approaches taken by various historians, and provides clear evaluations of their positions.This edition reflects current concerns and fresh research and contains substantial revisions to the chapter on "Hitler and the Jews" and an updated survey of recent historical work including Goldhagen's controversial book, Hitler's Willing Executioners.

The Land of the Great Image: Historical Narrative


Maurice Collis - 1985
    This book chronicles the great diplomatic coup of Friar Manrique's career, opening the kingdom of Arakan, now Burma to the Church and to Portuguese trade.

The Seeds Of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine 1919-1939


Robert A. Doughty - 1985
    Book by Doughty, Robert A.

Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps


Robert H. Abzug - 1985
    What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored.

Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century


J.G.A. Pocock - 1985
    Several of the essays have been previously published (though they have not all been widely available), and several appear here for the first time in print.

Frederick The Great: A Military Life


Christopher Duffy - 1985
    In this detailed life of Old Fritz, Christopher Duffy, who has written widely on the army of Frederick and on the armies of his adversaries, Austria and Russia, has produced a definitive account of his military genius. "

Maud: Illustrated Diary


Flora Fraser - 1985
    Maud shares her humorous observations on family life, amateur dramatics, and social life. The images portray a Victorian woman living in semi-fine surroundings and what she finds to do with herself. The book includes stories about her and her family's life, including clippings and photos.

A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections


Marie C. Malaro - 1985
    This second edition is completely revised, expanded, and updated, incorporating into the original format the many legal developments that have occured during the past 13 years.

Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory


Byron Farwell - 1985
    They are: Hugh Gough, Charles Napier, Charles Gordon, Frederick Roberts, Garnet Wolseley, Evelyn Wood, Hector Macdonald, and Herbert Kitchener.

A Financial History of Western Europe


Charles P. Kindleberger - 1985
    Kindleberger offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of money in Western Europe, bimetallism and the emergence of the gold standard, the banking systems of the Continent and the British Isles, and overviews of foreign investment, regional and global financial integration, and private and public finance in Western Europe. The new edition features expanded coverage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and important new material on recent developments in European monetary integration.

Renaissance Essays


Hugh R. Trevor-Roper - 1985
    This volume gathers together pieces on British and European history from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, ending with the Thirty Years War, which Trevor-Roper views as the great historical and intellectual watershed that marked the end of the Renaissance. Covering a wide range of topics, these writings reflect the many facets of Trevor-Roper's interest in intellectual and cultural history. Included are discussions of Renaissance Venice; the arts as patronized by that "universal man," the Emperor Maximilian I; the court of Henry VIII and the ideas of Sir Thomas More; the Lisle Letters and the formidable Cromwellian revolution; the historiography and the historical philosophy of the Elizabethans John Stow and William Camden; religion and the "judicious Hooker," the great doctor of the Anglican Church; medicine and medical philosophy, shaken out of its orthodoxy by Paracelsus and his disciples; literature and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; and the ideology of the Renaissance courts. Trevor-Roper sets his intellectual and cultural history in a context of society and politics: in realization of ideas, the patronage of the arts, the interpretation of history, the social challenge of science, the social application of religion. This volume of essays confirms his reputation as a spectacular writer of history and master essayist.

My Brother's Keeper


Israel Bernbaum - 1985
    The author describes the Holocaust and explains how he tries to tell the story of that catastrophic slaughter of Jews through his art.

Turning Swiss: Cities And Empire, 1450 1550


Thomas A. Brady Jr. - 1985
    The author's main theme is why Germany, unlike the other large European countries, failed to create a centralised dynastic monarchy during the sixteenth century. Two possible paths of political development faced the oligarchical governments of the autonomous towns: either they could support a strong monarchy based on a partnership between Austria and the free cities under Habsburg leadership, or they could try to form federations of self-governing cities with peasant leagues along Swiss lines. Fear of how a wave of liberation might affect the peasantry, and their own lower classes, inclined the oligarchies away from the 'Swiss way', but the Reformation and the distraction by wars and by other imperial concerns of Emperor Charles V and his brother, Archduke Ferdinand, prevented a partnership developing between the cities and the monarchy. In the end, the region went the 'German way' - of aristocratic particularism that dominated the Germanspeaking world until 1871.

Children of the Blitz: Memories of Wartime Childhood


Robert Westall - 1985
    The letters were from people who really were the "children of the Blitz" for whom air raids, bombs, gas masks, and evacuations were both hair-raising and exciting.

The Western Soviets: Workers' Councils Versus Parliament 1915-1920


Donny Gluckstein - 1985
    

When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh


Gwyn Alfred Williams - 1985
    Drawing on myth, legend and poetry and on the talents and ambitions of soldiers, labourers, politicians and churchmen the author tells the story of the Welsh with an understanding of his fellow countrymen.

The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy


Serge Klarsfeld - 1985
    

Never to be Taken Alive: A Biography of General Gordon


Roy MacGregor-Hastie - 1985