Best of
European-History

1992

Europa, Europa


Solomon Perel - 1992
    The whole is moving, and strange beyond belief." --The Times (London)International acclaim for Solomon Perel's Europa Europa"The wrenching memoir of a young man who survived the Holocaust by concealing his Jewish identity and finding unexpected refuge as a member of the Hitler Youth."It is a Holocaust memoir that is moving, straightforward, and quite completely bizarre, unsettling in all kinds of assumptions about identity, responsibility, and guilt." --Glasgow Herald"Perel bares his soul to readers in this fascinating, unusual personal narrative of the Holocaust." --Book Report"Many of the experiences of Holocaust survivors are incredible. None is more incredible than the story of a Jewish boy, Solomon Perel, who escaped from Germany to Russia, served with the Wehrmacht in Russia, was adopted by his commanding officer, and transferred to an elite Hitler Youth school." --London Jewish News"A most remarkable story . . . extraordinary." --The Australian"This book will move human hearts." --Berliner Morgenpost

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580


Eamon Duffy - 1992
    Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system. For this edition, Duffy has written a new Preface reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period.From reviews of the first edition:“A magnificent scholarly achievement [and] a compelling read.”—Patricia Morrison, Financial Times“Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated. . . . Duffy’s analysis . . . carries conviction.”—Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books“This book will afford enjoyment and enlightenment to layman and specialist alike.”—Peter Heath, Times Literary Supplement“[An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.”—Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland


Christopher R. Browning - 1992
    Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs. Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition.  Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work, with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today.

The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II


Edvard Radzinsky - 1992
    Russian playwright and historian Radzinsky mines  sources never before available to create a  fascinating portrait of the monarch, and a minute-by-minute account of his terrifying last days.  Updated for the paperback edition.

The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450


David C. Lindberg - 1992
    In The Beginnings of Western Science, David C. Lindberg provides a rich chronicle of the development of scientific ideas, practices, and institutions from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to the late-medieval scholastics.Lindberg surveys all the most important themes in the history of ancient and medieval science, including developments in cosmology, astronomy, mechanics, optics, alchemy, natural history, and medicine. He synthesizes a wealth of information in superbly organized, clearly written chapters designed to serve students, scholars, and nonspecialists alike. In addition, Lindberg offers an illuminating account of the transmission of Greek science to medieval Islam and subsequently to medieval Europe. And throughout the book he pays close attention to the cultural and institutional contexts within which scientific knowledge was created and disseminated and to the ways in which the content and practice of science were influenced by interaction with philosophy and religion. Carefully selected maps, drawings, and photographs complement the text.Lindberg's story rests on a large body of important scholarship produced by historians of science, philosophy, and religion over the past few decades. However, Lindberg does not hesitate to offer new interpretations and to hazard fresh judgments aimed at resolving long-standing historical disputes. Addressed to the general educated reader as well as to students, his book will also appeal to any scholar whose interests touch on the history of the scientific enterprise.

Nicholas and Alexandra: The Family Albums


Prince Michael of Greece - 1992
    An album that chronicles both a tragic tale of failed leadership and an extraordinary love story compiles more than three hundred family photographs of the last czar, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, their hemophiliac son, and their four daughters.

The Singing Flame


Ernie O'Malley - 1992
    The Singing Flame covers the period 1922-1924, and has been called a "work of great historical importance" -- Irish Independent.

I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance


Adina Blady Szwajger - 1992
    When the hospital was forced to close the children that had survived were taken to the death-camps. Blady-Szwajger became a reluctant courier for the resistance. She left the ghetto and began to carry paper money pinned into her clothing to those in hiding. She and her flat-mate pretended to be good-time girls having fun and threw parties to disguise the coming and going of their male visitors. This heroic memoir pays tribute to all the men and women who paid with their lives for the safety of others.

An Intellectual History of Modern Europe


Marvin Perry - 1992
    The nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries are examined in relation to the Enlightenment.

Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956


Tony Judt - 1992
    He analyzes this intellectual community's most divisive conflicts: how to respond to the promise and the betrayal of Communism and how to sustain a commitment to radical ideals when confronting the hypocrisy in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the new Eastern European Communist states, and in France itself. Judt shows why this was an all-consuming moral dilemma to a generation of French men and women, how their responses were conditioned by war and occupation, and how post-war political choices have come to sit uneasily on the conscience of later generations of French intellectuals.Judt's analysis extends beyond the writings of fashionable "Existentialist" personalities such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir to include a wide intellectual community of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned journalists, literary critics and poets, Communist and non-Communist alike.Judt treats the intellectual dilemmas of the postwar years as an unfinished history. French intellectuals have not fully come to terms with the gnawing sense of what Judt calls the "moral irresponsibility" of those years. The result, he suggests, is a legacy of bad faith and confusion that has damaged France's cultural standing, notably in newly liberated Eastern Europe, and which reflects the nation's larger difficulty in confronting its own ambivalent past.

The World Order: Our Secret Rulers


Eustace Clarence Mullins - 1992
    It also includes some interesting history of the major tax exempt foundations. Unfortunately, this edition does not include footnotes.

Ellis Peters' Shropshire


Ellis Peters - 1992
    In this evocative book, the author takes us into the heart of the county which has been so much a part of her and her writing. Here she vividly describes the Roman Road on the flank of the Long Mountain with its grand stormy view of the river below that she walked so often while writing The Heaven Tree and its sequels. She tells of her connections with the town of Shrewsbury, the setting of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul featured in the Brother Cadfael novels. She traces the history of the country through its border castles, Georgian country houses and old Elizabethan town houses, old monasteries and the modern office blocks of a newly-created town and in doing so recounts her personal connection with the county of her birth, from her childhood spent near Coalbrookdale to her later years in Madeley, Telford.

Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation


Mary Louise Pratt - 1992
    The study of travel writing has, however, tended to remain either naively celebratory, or dismissive, treating texts as symptoms of imperial ideologies.Imperial Eyes explores European travel and exploration writing, in conjunction with European economic and political expansion since 1700. It is both a study in the genre and a critique of an ideology. Pratt examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism, and how they engage metropolitan reading publics with expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few. These questions are addressed through readings of travel accounts connected with particular sentimental historical travel writing. It examines the links with abolitionist rhetoric; discursive reinventions of South America during the period of its independence (1800-1840); and 18th-century European writings on Southern Africa in the context of inland expansion.

East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia


Benson Bobrick - 1992
    It's the greatest pioneering story in history, uniquely combining the heroic colonization of an intractable virgin land, the ghastly dangers & high adventure of Arctic exploration, & the grimmest saga of penal servitude. 400 years of continual human striving chart its course, a drama of unremitting extremes & elemental confrontations, pitting man against nature, & man against man. East of the Sun, a work of panoramic scope, is the 1st complete account of this strange & terrible story. To most Westerners, Siberia is a vast & mysterious place. The richest resource area on the face of the earth, its land mass covers 5 million square miles-7.5% of the total land surface of the globe. From the 1st foray in 1581 across the Ural Mountains by a band of Cossack outlaws to the fall of Gorbachev, East of the Sun is history on a grand scale. With vivid immediacy, Bobrick describes the often brutal subjugation of Siberia's aboriginal tribes & the cultures that were destroyed; the great 18th-century explorations that defined Siberia's borders & Russia's attempt to "extend" Siberia further with settlements in Alaska, California & Hawaii; & the transformation of Siberia into a penal colony for criminal & political exiles, an experiment more terrible than Australia's Botany Bay. There's the building of the stupendous Trans-Siberian Railway across 7 time zones; Siberia's key role in the bloody aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917; & Stalin's dreaded Gulag, which corrupted its very soil. Today, Siberia is the hope of Russia's future, now that all her appended republic have broken away. Its story has never been more timely.

The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution


Christopher R. Browning - 1992
    This authoritative account of the evolution of Nazi Jewish policy from 1939 to 1942 seeks to answer some of the fundamental questions about what actually happened and why, between the outbreak of war and the emergence of the Final Solution. Christopher Browning's account assesses the historians' interpretations and offers his own insights, based on detailed case studies that uncovered important and telling new evidence.

Princesse of Versaille


Charles Elliott - 1992
    Viewed from the perspective of Princesse Marie Adelaide, this book captures the events of the day and the political maneuvering of the times. Photographs.

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke


Conor Cruise O'Brien - 1992
    This unorthodox biography focuses on Burke's thoughts, responses, and actions to the great events and debates surrounding Britain's tumultuous relationships with her three colonies—America, Ireland, and India—and archrival France."In bringing Burke to our attention, Mr. O'Brien has brought back a lost treasure. The Great Melody is a brilliant work of narrative sweep and analytical depth. Conor Cruise O'Brien on Edmund Burke is a literary gift to political thought."—John Patrick Diggins, New York Times Book Review"Serious readers of history are in for a treat: a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived. . . . O'Brien's study is not merely a reconstruction of a fascinating man and period. It is also a tract for the times. . . . I cannot remember another time when I finished a book of more than 600 pages wishing it were longer."—Paul Johnson, The Independent"The Great Melody combines superb biography and fascinating history with a profound understanding of political philosophy."—Former President Richard Nixon

The Village


Alice Taylor - 1992
    The book combines laughter, pathos and innocence with the gossip of a closely-knit community.

The Middle Ages


John Gillingham - 1992
    With contributions by specialist authors and contemporary illustrations of royal heraldry and coats of arms, Antonia Fraser has edited a definitive and entertaining history of one of the most powerful monarchies in the world.

Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450


Antony Black - 1992
    State sovereignty, the separation of church and state, representation, the popular origin of government, and property rights are just a few of the ideas formulated during this time. Political Thought in Europe provides a lucid and accessible introduction to the period in the round, covering both major thinkers such as Aquinas, Marsiglio, Ockham, Wyclif and Cusa, and prevalent notions of church and state, empire and local sovereignty, civic and communal self-government, kingship, the people, parliament, the law and experts (the wise). This is the first overall account to use recent advances in the methodology of the history of ideas.

The Devil's Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwangler


Sam H. Shirakawa - 1992
    But a cloud still hangs over his reputation, despite his undeniable brilliance as a musician, because ofa fatal and tragic decision. Wilhelm Furtw�ngler remained in Germany when thousands of intellectuals and artists fled after the Nazis seized power in 1933. His decision to stay behind earned him lasting condemnation as a Nazi collaborator--The Devil's Music Master. Decades after his death, Furtw�ngler remains for many not only the greatest but also the most controversial musical personality of our time. In The Devil's Music Master, Sam H. Shirakawa forges the first full-length and comprehensive biography of Furtw�ngler. He surveys Furtw�ngler's formative years as a difficult but brilliant prodigy, his rise to pre-eminence as Germany's leading conductor, and his development as a musician, composer, and thinker. Shirakawa also reviews the rich recorded legacy Furtw�ngler documented throughout his forty-year career--such as the legendary Tristan with Kirsten Flagstad and the famous performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1942 and 1951. Equally important, Shirakawa goes backstage and behind the lines to explore how the Nazis seized control of the arts and how Furtw�ngler single-handedly tried to prevent evil characters as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Luftwaffe Chief Hermann G�ring from annihilating Germany's musicallife. He shows how Furtw�ngler, far from being a toady to the Nazis, stood up openly against Hitler and Himmler--at enormous personal risk--to salvage the musical traditions of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Shirakawa also presents moving and overwhelming evidence of Furtw�ngler's astonishingefforts to save the lives of Jews and other persecuted individuals trapped in Nazi Germany--only to be proscribed at the end of the war and nearly framed as a war criminal. But there was more to Furtw�ngler than his politics, or even his music, and we come to know this extraordinary man as a reluctant composer, a prolific essayist and diary keeper, a loyal friend, a formidable enemy when crossed, and an incorrigible philanderer. Numerous musical luminaries sharetheir memories of Furtw�ngler to round out this vivid portrait. Based on dozens of interviews and research in numerous documents, letters, and diaries, many of them previously unpublished, The Devil's Music Master is an in-depth look at the life and times of a unique personality whose fatal flaw lay in his uncompromising belief that music and art must bekept apart from politics, a conviction that transformed him into a tragic figure.

Magellan


Tim Joyner - 1992
    In this stirring account of an epic voyage beset by shipwreck, desertions, scurvy, and hunger, (Magellan) emerges as an all-too-human hero who tested the limits of the possible.--Publishers Weekly.

Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe, 1830-70


Richard Ormond - 1992
    For Queen Victoria alone he painted more than 120 works. This lavish book is the first comprehensive survey of Winterhalter's work, with 246 illustrations, including 91 full-page colorplates.

A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe


Wally Seccombe - 1992
    Responding to feminist critiques of ‘sex-blind’ historical materialism, Seccombe argues that family forms must be seen to be at the heart of modes of production. He takes issue with the mainstream consensus in family history which argues that capitalism did not fundamentally alter the structure of the nuclear family, and makes a controversial intervention in the long-standing debate over European marriage patterns and their relation to industrialization. Drawing on an astonishing range of studies in family history, historical demography and economic history, A Millennium of Family Change provides an integrated overview of the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, illuminating the far-reaching changes in familial relations from peasant subsistence to the making of the modern working class.

Northanhymbre Saga: The History of the Anglo-Saxon Kings of Northumbria


John Marsden - 1992
    

The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal


Richard Jenkyns - 1992
    Students of speech and rhetoric to this day study the works of Cicero for guidance. We find Roman Law setting the model for legal systems from the twelfth century to the present. And Latin itself, far from being a dead language, lives on not only in the Romance languages, but also in English vocabulary and grammar. Rhetoric, language, law--these are just a small part of the great Roman influence that has lasted throughout the centuries. The Legacy of Rome has long been considered the standard introduction to the achievements of the Roman world. Now in a completely new edition, this classic work brings together the latest scholarship in the field from some of the world's leading classical scholars. Unlike the previous version, which focused on such narrow topics as commerce and administration, the new edition broadens the spectrum of influence, showing the impact, for example, of Roman literature, art, politics, law, and language on western civilization. Jasper Griffin, for instance, looks to the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth, among others, to trace the lasting influence of the great Roman poet Virgil on the development of poetic forms such as the pastoral, epitomized by Virgil's Eclogues, and the epic poem, exemplified by the Aeneid. A.T. Grafton shows how Renaissance intellectuals such as Machiavelli and Guicciardini looked to Rome's past for political enlightenment, and found models of military strategy in the works of Tacitus and Livy. Editor Richard Jenkyns dispels the misconception of the Romans as purely imitative of the Greeks; he points out such uniquely Roman concepts as jurisprudence and citizenship, and architecture based on the round arch and the vault, as evidence of Roman innovativeness. Other contributors--George A. Kennedy, Robert Feenstra, and Nicholas Purcell--discuss the importance of the study of Roman rhetoric in preparing speakers for public life, the lasting influence of the Justinian code on Western legal development, and the impact on future civilizations of the romanticized notion of an imperial Rome and its magical ruins. Ranging from the pastoral tradition, to the development of the comedy, to the lasting influence of the Latin language, The Legacy of Rome provides a much-needed new appraisal of the richness of the great civilization which gave rise to a large part of Western heritage.

1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History


Robert Royal - 1992
    Most of these revisionists use the past as a tool by which to advance politically correct goals, particularly in opposition to the US. Through books, lobbying campaigns and protests, they are seeking to turn the anniversary commemoration into an occasion for repentance rather than celebration.

Life and Revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich Volume 2 (with Supplemental Reading: A Brief Life of Christ) [Illustrated]


Carl E. Schmöger - 1992
    K. E. Schmoger, features the complete original text, along with a supplemental reading section entitled "A Brief Life of Christ". We’ve also included unique hand-selected classic artwork for the reader’s enjoyment, exclusive to this eBook edition of "Life and Revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich Volume 2".Life and Revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich Volume 2:Definitive life of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824); a German Augustinian nun- mystic; stigmatist; visionary; prophet; victim soul. Prophecies and amazing revelations on every aspect of the Faith. Extremely edifying; makes the Gospels come alive with details you never knew before! 2 Volume Set.A Brief Life of Christ:Absolutely excellent for students and for adult review. Capsulizes the main events and sayings of Our Lord. Map of the Holy Land. A chronological outline. Perfect for a refresher.

Russian History


Neil M. Heyman - 1992
    Most 4-year colleges and some 2-year colleges offer a survey course,usually 2-semester,on sophomore,junior,and senior levels. Course is taken by history and political science majors; also by significant numbers of business,sociology,economics,and engineering majors. This book provides the essentials of the subject to supplement lecture and text. In view of the vast and dramatic changes taking place in the Soviet Union today,the book should attract general readers as well as students.

The New Model Army in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1645-1653


Ian Gentles - 1992
    Taking his evidence from contemporary sources, Ian Gentles describes its formation under Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, their innovative tactics, the course of its decisive victories over the forces of Charles I, and its ferociously successful campaigns against the Scots and the Irish. As importantly, he examines the motivations and aspirations of the soldiers and their officers. The question of how far the New Model was a revolutionary army and how far a body of men whose religious passion was manipulated for the pragmatic, personal, or even conservative aims of its leaders is one that has occupied the minds of historians for three centuries. Ian Gentles provides a convincing resolution of this debate, raising new evidence to support his argument.

Cafe Berlin


Harold Nebenzal - 1992
    Utterly accurate in its depiction of historical and military events and astoundingly rich in detail, Cafe Berlin is vivid and compelling.

G Company's War: Two Personal Accounts of the Campaigns in Europe, 1944-1945


Bruce E. Egger - 1992
    Bruce Egger and Lt. Lee M. Otts, both of G Company, 328th Regiment, 26th infantry Division.   Bruce Egger arrived in France in October 1944, and Lee Otts arrived in November. Both fought for G Company through the remainder of the war. Otts was wounded seriously in March 1945 and experienced an extended hospitalization in England and the United States. Both men kept diaries during the time they were in the service, and both expanded the diaries into full-fledged journals shortly after the war.    These are the voices of ordinary soldiers—the men who did the fighting—not the generals and statesmen who viewed events from a distance. Most striking is how the two distinctly different personalities recorded the combat experience. For the serious-minded Egger, the war was a grim ordeal; for Otts, with his sunny disposition, the war was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sometimes even fun. Each account is accurate in its own right, but the combination of the two into a single, interwoven story provides a broader understanding of war and the men caught up in it.   Historian Paul Roley has interspersed throughout the text helpful overviews and summaries that place G Company's activities in the larger context of overall military operations in Europe. In addition, Roley notes what happened to each soldier mentioned as wounded in action or otherwise removed from the company and provides an appendix summarizing the losses suffered by G Company. The total impact of the work is to describe the reality of war in a frontline infantry company.

Venantius Fortunatus: A Latin Poet in Merovingian Gaul


Judith W. George - 1992
    During his time, Fortunatus wrote for some central political and ecclesiastical figures, his verse playing not only a personal role in events of national and international significance, but also providing a vivid glimpse into the lives and characters of his various patrons. The first major study of the poet, this book illuminates all aspects of Fortunatus's work and the society in which he lived.

Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy


Thomas Kuehn - 1992
    Kuehn's use of legal sources along with letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts allows him to present a compelling image of the social processes that affected the shape and function of the law. The numerous law courts of Italian city-states constantly devised and revised statutes. Kuehn traces the permutations of these laws, then examines their use by Florentines to arbitrate conflict and regulate social behavior regarding such issues as kinship, marriage, business, inheritance, illlegitimacy, and gender. Ranging from one man's embittered denunciation of his father to another's reaction to his kinsmen's rejection of him as illegitimate, Law, Family, and Women provides fascinating evidence of the tensions riddling family life in Renaissance Florence. Kuehn shows how these same tensions, often articulated in and through the law, affected women. He examines the role of the mundualdus—a male legal guardian for women—in Florence, the control of fathers over their married daughters, and issues of inheritance by and through women. An ambitious attempt to reformulate the agenda of Renaissance social history, Kuehn's work will be of value to both legal anthropologists and social historians. Thomas Kuehn is professor of history at Clemson University.

British History


Harold J. Schultz - 1992
    Each guide features: up-to-date scholarship; an easy-to-follow narrative outline form; specially designed and formatted pages; and much more.