Best of
European-History

1993

Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs


Fanya Gottesfeld Heller - 1993
    From the unrelenting fear of death and gnawing pain of hunger, to the budding relationships of an adolescent girl growing into womanhood during the worst of all times, the author withholds nothing. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's subtle depiction of her parents knowledge that it was a non-Jew's love for their daughter that had moved him to hide them, and their embarrassment and ultimate acceptance of the situation, lead us to wonder how we would have acted under the same circumstances as father, mother, or daughter. Love in a World of Sorrow features Fanya's gripping tale of survival and an updated foreword and epilogue by the author, reflecting more than a decade of experience bearing witness to the Holocaust before hundreds of audiences around the world. On the reading list at Princeton University, the University of Connecticut, and Ben Gurion Univesity of the Negev, among others. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller's book is an indispensable educational tool for teaching future generations about the human potential for both good and evil.

Knight's Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel


David Fraser - 1993
    It is must reading for every aficionado of modern military history.” –San Francisco ChronicleErwin Rommel’s instinct for battle and leadership places him among the great commanders of history. In this definitive biography, David Fraser, an acclaimed biographer and distinguished soldier, looks at Rommel’s career and shows how wild and superficially undisciplined Rommel’s bold style of leadership could be, and how it inspired the men under his command to attack with ferocity and pursue with tenacity—qualities that served him well in his great battles in the North African desert and throughout his entire military career. Fraser also thoroughly explores the question of Rommel’s possible involvement in the plot against Hitler and the reason for his forced suicide, even though there was no criminal evidence against him.Revealing his failings as well as his genius, Knight’s Cross is a fascinating biography of a soldier whose distinguished career has become a part of history.

Boat of Stone: A Novel


Maureen Earl - 1993
    In October 1940, as the storm clouds of World War II gathered, the SS Atlantic set sail for Palestine. A condemned and overcrowded ship, it was overflowing with bedraggled Jewish refugees who, having bought their way out of Nazi Germany and Austria, hoped to find safety from the concentration camps that had begun to claim their brethren. But they were not destined to find the shelter they sought. In this poignant novel, Hanna Sommerfeld recalls her long-ago voyage on the Atlantic—a journey plagued by epidemics and food shortages that led not to freedom but, improbably, to incarceration in a British penal colony off the eastern coast of Africa. For Hanna, it would also lead to a heartbreaking loss. Weaving Hanna’s current life with her son’s family in Haifa, Israel, with her memories of marriage and her coming-of-age in the jungles of Mauritius, Boat of Stone is a unique Holocaust story that not only reveals a little-known chapter of history, but also introduces one of the most unforgettable characters you are likely to meet: a gritty, humorous, wise, and adventurous woman who refuses to become a victim. It is “a splendid novel” from National Book Award finalist Maureen Earl, author of Gulliver Quick (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family


Ron Chernow - 1993
    They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy.Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.

Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44


Mark Mazower - 1993
    The first full account of the experience of occupation, it offers a vividly human picture of resistance fighters and black marketeers, teenage German conscripts and Gestapo officers, Jews and starving villagers. "Fascinating. . . . [Mazower] succeeds in getting under the skin of the occupation. . . . [This book] conjures up, in vivid detail, life under an occupation that had shattered old certainties and replaced them with painful choices, cynical compromises, and hopes undercut by the daily death toll."—Mark Almond, New York Times "A vivid picture of the German occupier’s mind and actions. . . . Mazower’s arguments are always fair."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A superb book on the horrors afflicting wartime Greece. . . . [Mazower] has done vast archival research and emerged with a gripping, readable and human account, setting every moment of a tragic period in appropriate context."—Fritz Stern, Foreign Affairs "[A] sensitive, illuminating and richly textured account of painful, complex experience."—Richard Overy, Observer Mark Mazower is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Dark Continent.

May the Lord in His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast


Tony Parker - 1993
    Few people understand that in one part of the United Kingdom there exists a society where what matters most is religious origin and affiliation; still fewer empathize with the deep-rooted passions aroused by this. Tony Parker spent five months in the heart of Belfast talking to the people who make up this riven and self-destructive society. He interviewed priests and politicians, schoolchildren and students, bus drivers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, shop assistants, community workers, single mothers, soldiers, and police. He earned the trust of prisoners, their parents and children, and, perhaps most remarkably of all, Catholic and Protestant extremists implacably committed to violence as their means of expression. As Mary Loudon wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, "Tony Parker is an interviewer with an extraordinary capacity to filter what people say to him without turning their words his color." Through him the voices of the people of Belfast are heard for the first time, and the effect is devastating.

Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory


Deborah E. Lipstadt - 1993
    Yet there are those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. Forty years ago, such notions were the province of pseudohistorians who argued that Hitler never meant to kill the Jews, and that only a few hundred thousand died in the camps from disease; they also argued that the Allied bombings of Dresden and other cities were worse than any Nazi offense, and that the Germans were the "true victims" of World War II. For years, those who made such claims were dismissed as harmless cranks operating on the lunatic fringe. But over the past decade they have begun to gain a hearing in respectable arenas, and now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how - despite tens of thousands of living witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence - this irrational idea not only has continued to gain adherents but has become an international movement, with organized chapters, "independent" research centers, and official publications that promote a "revisionist" view of recent history. One sign of the movement's disturbing resonance is the rise of such figures as the Holocaust denier David Duke to national prominence. Holocaust deniers have also begun to make common cause with radical Afrocentrists such as Leonard Jeffries of New York's City University, who retells racist myths about the Jews; and a recent campaign of ads in college newspapers calling for "open debate" on "so-called facts" about the Holocaust suggests a bold new bid for mainstream intellectual legitimacy. Lipstadt shows how Holocaust denial thrives in the current atmosphere of value relativism, and argues that this chilling attack on the factual record not only threatens Jews but undermines the very tenets of objective scholarship that support our faith in historical knowledge.

A Wing and a Prayer: The Bloody 100th Bomb Group of the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Action Over Europe in World War II


Harry H. Crosby - 1993
    They flew their "Flying Fortresses" almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the "Bloody Hundredth" a legend.Harry Crosby arrived with the very first crews. After dealing with his fear and acquiring skill and confidence, he was promoted to Group Navigator, surviving hairbreadth escapes and eluding death while leading thirty-seven missions, some of them involving two thousand aircrafts, he left with the very last. Now in a breathtaking and often humorous account, he takes his readers into the hearts and minds of the intrepid airmen to experience the heart-stopping emotions, the triumph and the white-knuckle terror of the war in the skies in a riveting, unforgettable book destined to become a classic.

The Cap: The Price Of A Life


Roman Frister - 1993
    Moving between his childhood in Silesia, adolescence in Nazi concentration camps, postwar career as a journalist in Communist Poland and later in Israel (to which he emigrated in 1957), Frister's nonchronological narrative is carefully structured to slowly reveal the Holocaust's devastating impact on an individual life. Young Roman watches a German officer kill his mother with a single blow, then is forced to lie on her cooling corpse; at 15, he sits by his dying father's bed, thinking only of the half-loaf of bread underneath it: "I was afraid it might crumble before he stopped breathing." Frister does nothing to soften such horrific experiences, nor does he share his emotions. Yet readers will sense the author is not unfeeling, but rather in a state of profound moral shock that endures to scar his adult existence. The "thick layer of callousness" he wrapped around himself in the camps may seem to enfold him still, but it's peeled away by his ferocious passion for truth, however unsavory. As a colleague tells Frister after reading his account of saving his own life by stealing the cap of a fellow prisoner (who was shot), "You've demonstrated what honesty means." --Wendy Smith

Historical Atlas of Central Europe


Paul Robert Magocsi - 1993
    This new edition of the Historical Atlas of East Central Europe, first published in 1993 to great acclaim, incorporates the enormous political changes that have taken place since 1989, taking into account comments from seventy-five reviewers from seventeen countries. The final third of the volume has been completely reconceptualized and reconfigured with new maps, text, and statistical tables. The bibliography has been updated and expanded.New Features:-- Twenty-one new maps-- Forty-one revised maps-- Eleven maps of newly independent countries-- Eleven new chapters-- Eight new thematic maps covering twentieth-century population changes, distribution, education, and Catholic and Orthodox churches

The War of the Austrian Succession


Reed Browning - 1993
    Browning explores the often-changing war aims of the major belligerents-Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Piedmont-Sardinia, and Spain-and links diplomatic and military events to the political and social context from which they arose.

The Black Bull


Patrick Delaforce - 1993
    This book tells the story of the Division in the words of the soldiers who fought with it: of its part in the three ferocious battles in Normandy - Epsom, Goodwood and Bluecoat, the great 'Swan' to Amiens, the taking of Antwerp, right flanking for Market Garden, back-up in the Ardennes and the final slog into Germany across well-defended river barriers, to the liberation of Belsen, Lubeck and the Danish frontier. The Division suffered 10,000 casualties, with almost 2,000 lost in action, and so this is also a story of courage and the hardships of a winter campaign, of being wounded, comradeship and fighting fear. Contributions are included from twelve of the regiments who proudly wore the sign of the Black Bull. Memories from troop commanders and riflemen, bombardiers and signalmen, tank crews, troop leaders and from the dashing GOC are brought together to reveal what life was like at the sharp end. Published in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings, The Black Bull is illustrated with over fifty black and white contemporary photographs showing the Division in action. It will appeal not only to those who still have memories of the battles and to those who fought in the Second World War, but also to readers interested in the day-to-day actions and thoughts of soldiers on the front line for almost a year.

Verdi: A Biography


Mary Jane Phillips-Matz - 1993
    Matz places Verdi against a backdrop of a century of fierce Italian nationalism that dictated that not only musical, but political considerations permeate his life and work. Here too is a glimpse into the composer's personal life--his turbulent relationships with his friends and family, his dedication to his music, his passion for his country. Upon his death in 1901 there were scenes of national mourning for the man whose actions had become a model, and music an inspiration to all of Italy. With an eloquent foreword by Andrew Porter, Verdi: A Biography brilliantly illuminates the life of the composer, patriot, and philanthropist who not only created the operas that would prosper generations after the artist, but who also emboldened the cultural pride of a country fighting for its freedom.

Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet


Otto Friedrich - 1993
    Photographs.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe


Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks - 1993
    Merry Wiesner has updated and expanded her prize-winning study; she has added new sections on topics such as sexuality, masculinity, the impact of colonialism, and women's role as consumers. Other themes investigated include the female life cycle, literacy, women's economic role, artistic creation, female piety--and witchcraft--and the relationship between gender and power. Accessible, engrossing, and lively, this book will be of central importance for those interested in gender history, early modern Europe, and comparative history.

1812: The March on Moscow


Paul Britten Austin - 1993
    The trials and tribulations of the invading force are captured in eye-witness accounts from over 100 of the participants and make this an unforgettable saga of men moving towards disaster.

Franco: A Biography


Paul Preston - 1993
    He is remembered widely as the astute general under whose leadership the Nationalist cause was victorious in the Spanish Civil War and the Communist threat exterminated, and as the head of state who skillfully negotiated safe passage for Spain through World War II, played Hitler off against the Allies, modernized his country, and orchestrated the Spanish economic miracle of the 1960s. By the time of his death in 1975, he had steered a unified Spain to worldwide respectability and envy and deftly schooled the young prince Juan Carlos to be his successor. To many, Franco was Spain incarnate—a heroic figure to match his illustrious—a heroic figure to match his illustrious predecessors El Cid, Charles V, and Philip II.This idealized portrait—still widely accepted today—is now subjected to Paul Preston's penetrating scrutiny. He has written a magnificent, monumental biography that vividly recreates the man and sets before us, unclouded by the prejudices or simplifications of apologists or adversaries, a definitive portrayal of this complex, elusive figure.The controversy about Franco's achievements has raged since his death. Just how good a general was he? Would he have won the civil war without German and Italian help? Can he be blamed for the bombing of Guernica and other atrocities? Did he dupe Hitler during World War II? Were his self-sufficient economic policies directly responsible for ushering in Spain's economic boom? Did he deliberately seek to liberalize the regime in his later years, or was he perhaps losing his grip on the controls? Did Franco preside over another Spanish golden age or did he merely stall and stifle his country's natural growth? How, in the final reckoning, are his achievements to be judged? Preston addresses and resolves, often to startling effect, these pivotal questions, deploying an enormous quantity of new evidence and fresh insights culled from previously inaccessible sources and unexamined witnesses, colleagues, and enemies alike.Paul Preston's credentials as the biographer of France are incomparable. His many books on modern Spain have been acclaimed for their seriousness and their stylishness, and this gloriously engaging biography is, in many ways, the culmination of his work of an intellectual odyssey of twenty-five years' duration, spent in the company of the Caudillo. Paul Preston sits in judgment on this enigmatic dictator, and his verdict will be compelling to anyone interested in the history of modern Spain or, indeed, in the formation of modern Europe.

Wilhelm II: Die Jugend des Kaisers 1859-1888


John C.G. Röhl - 1993
    Its aim is to set the characters on the stage and let them speak for themselves, which in their letters and diaries the Victorians and Wilhelminians did with quite extraordinary clarity and persuasive power. The central theme is the bitter conflict between the handicapped Prince and his liberal parents, and in particular with his mother, the eldest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and the utter failure of a daring educational experiment intended to turn the young Prince into a liberal Anglophile.

The World of the Celts


Simon James - 1993
    For five hundred years they dominated the lands north of the Alps, before being largely absorbed into the Roman Empire. But Celtic culture survived and achieved a glorious flowering in the post-Roman, early Christian era. Today Celtic influence can be found in arts and crafts, in legends, in place names, and even in languages.In this generously illustrated introduction to the world of the Celts, Simon James charts their way of life from farming to feasting, their wars, their gods, and their superb craftsmanship in metal, wood, and stone. He covers the neglected subject of Celtic life under Roman rule, particularly in Gaul and Britain, and the continuing traditions in Ireland after AD 400, when a Celtic renaissance gave birth to heroic tales, masterpieces of enameled metalwork, and renowned illuminated manuscripts.

Athens: A Portrait of the City in its Golden Age


Christian Meier - 1993
    The definitive account of Athens in the age of Pericles, Christian Meier's gripping study begins with the Greek triumph over Persia at the Battle of Salamis, one of the most significant military victories in history. Meier shows how that victory decisively established Athens' military dominance in the Mediterranean & made possible its rise to preeminence in almost every field of human endeavor--commerce, science, philosophy, art, architecture & literature. Within 75 years, Athens had become the most original & innovative civilization the ancient world ever produced. With elegant narrative style, Meier traces the birth of democracy & the flourishing of Greek culture in the 5th century BCE, as well as Athens' slow decline & defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The great figures--from politicians & generals like Themistocles & Alcibiades to the philosophers Socrates & Plato--emerge as flesh-&-blood human beings, firmly rooted in their times & places. This is history in the tradition of Simon Schama & Barbara Tuchman--learned, accessible & beautifully written.

Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science


Laura Dassow Walls - 1993
    Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture.    Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau’s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the “two cultures” we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific approach resulted in not only his “marriage” of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his “The Dispersion of Seeds” since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species.    This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, “organic” Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau’s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today’s “two cultures” in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature.

To Tell At Last: Survival under False Identity, 1941-45


Blanca Rosenberg - 1993
    Though equipped with Aryan false-identity papers, she found life marked by daily threats and the danger of discovery - by the Gestapo, Polish police, extortionists, collaborators, hoodlums, and even former colleagues and acquaintances. Rosenberg's wartime trek took her to Polish cities, German military hospitals, and finally to Heidelberg, Germany, where she worked as a maid in a Nazi household from 1944 until her liberation by American forces. Her story is also a testimony to the power of friendship. Brought together in the ghetto, she and her friend Maria continued to support each other in their ensuing struggle for survival.

Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation


Rosamond McKitterick - 1993
    No such comprehensive survey of this kind exists in any language. The book is the more unusual by departing from the customary stress on the concept of renewal to emphasize the enormous creativity and inventiveness of the Franks. Carolingian culture provided the bedrock for the subsequent development of medieval European culture, and this is demonstrated amply by essays that are planned as a series of introductions to the study of each topic.

The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians


W. Bruce Lincoln - 1993
    Bruce Lincoln details Siberia's role in Russian history, one remarkably similar to that of the frontier in the development of the United States.... It is a big, panoramic book, in keeping with the immensity of its subject.--Chicago TribuneLincoln is a compelling writer whose chapters are colorful snapshots of Siberia's past and present.... The Conquest of a Continent is a vivid narrative that will inform and entertain the broader reading public.--American Historical ReviewThis story includes Genghis Khan, who sent the Mongols warring into Russia; Ivan the Terrible, who conquered Siberia for Russia; Peter the Great, who supported scientific expeditions and mining enterprises; and Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost policy prompted a new sense of 'Siberian' nationalism. It is also the story of millions of souls who themselves were conquered by Siberia.... Vast riches and great misery, often intertwined, mark this region.--The Wall Street JournalStretching from the Urals to the Arctic Ocean to China, Siberia is so vast that the continental United States and Western Europe could be fitted into its borders, with land to spare. Yet, in only six decades, Russian trappers, cossacks, and adventurers crossed this huge territory, beginning in the 1580s a process of conquest that continues to this day. As rich in resources as it was large in size, Siberia brought the Russians a sixth of the world's gold and silver, a fifth of its platinum, a third of its iron, and a quarter of its timber. The conquest of Siberia allowed Russia to build the modern world's largest empire, and Siberia's vast natural wealth continues to play a vital part in determining Russia's place in international affairs.Bleak yet romantic, Siberia's history comes to life in W. Bruce Lincoln's epic telling. The Conquest of a Continent, first published in 1993, stands as the most comprehensive and vivid account of the Russians in Siberia, from their first victories over the Mongol Khans to the environmental degradation of the twentieth century. Dynasties of incomparable wealth, such as the Stroganovs, figure into the story, as do explorers, natives, gold seekers, and the thousands of men and women sentenced to penal servitude or forced labor in Russia's great wilderness prisonhouse.

The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy


Dorit Bader Whiteman - 1993
    The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy is an extraordinary work featuring the stories of 190 escapees, lived through their own eyes and compellingly recollected in their own words. Dorit Bader Whiteman, a clinical psychologist and a refugee herself, depicts the experiences of these escapees: the persecution by citizens and officials; the abrupt confiscation of personal possessions; the raids and arrests; the quest to save the children; the dangers and fortuities in escape and resettlement; and the lasting emotional consequences of these experiences. By the end of the 1930s, European Jews fled to countries worldwide in search of a haven, among them England, Sweden, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States. One of the most moving accounts is that of the Kindertransport of 10,000 Jewish children in 1939 from Nazi-occupied countries to Great Britain in trains so crowded that the smaller children had to be placed in luggage racks above the seats. Dr. Whiteman illustrates the spectrum of foster homes, ranging from the compassionate to the injurious, in which the Kinder, separated from their parents, were placed. It is equally poignant to read of the adult refugees who struggled to resettle in a new land unable to speak the language, without appropriate skills or education, without money or contacts, and filled with uncertainty over the fate of family and friends. The author provides important psychological insights into how these experiences have left the escapees to this very day with strength and with pain. The Uprooted, a landmark testament to the courage and resilience of this unstudied population, will be compelling reading for the lay person, as well as social scientists and historians, and for the survivors and

Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning


David Theo Goldberg - 1993
    Goldberg demonstrates that racial thinking is a function of the transforming categories and conceptions of social subjectivity throughout modernity. He shows that rascisms are often not aberrant or irrational but consistent with prevailing social conceptions, particularly of the reasonable and the normal. He shows too how this process is being extended and renewed by categories dominant in present day social sciences: "the West"; "the underclass"; and "the primitive". This normalization of racism reflected in the West mirrors South Africa an its use and conception of space. Goldberg concludes with an extended argument for a pragmatic, antiracist practice.

A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising


Yitzhak ("Antek") Zuckerman - 1993
    One of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, which led the uprisings, was Yitzhak Zuckerman, known by his underground pseudonym, Antek. Decades later, living in Israel, Antek dictated his memoirs. The Hebrew publication of Those Seven Years: 1939-1946 was a major event in the historiography of the Holocaust, and now Antek's memoirs are available in English.Unlike Holocaust books that focus on the annihilation of European Jews, Antek's account is of the daily struggle to maintain human dignity under the most dreadful conditions. His passionate, involved testimony, which combines detail, authenticity, and gripping immediacy, has unique historical importance. The memoirs situate the ghetto and the resistance in the social and political context that preceded them, when prewar Zionist and Socialist youth movements were gradually forged into what became the first significant armed resistance against the Nazis in all of occupied Europe. Antek also describes the activities of the resistance after the destruction of the ghetto, when 20,000 Jews hid in "Aryan" Warsaw and then participated in illegal immigration to Palestine after the war.The only extensive document by any Jewish resistance leader in Europe, Antek's book is central to understanding ghetto life and underground activities, Jewish resistance under the Nazis, and Polish-Jewish relations during and after the war. This extraordinary work is a fitting monument to the heroism of a people.

Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp


Jules Schelvis - 1993
    Treblinka. The very names of these Nazi camps evoke unspeakable cruelty. Sobibor is less well known, and this book discloses the horrors perpetrated there.Established in German-occupied Poland, the camp at Sobibor began its dreadful killing operation in May 1942. By October 1943, approximately 150,000 people had been murdered there. Sobibor is not well documented, and were it not for an extraordinary uprising in October 1943, we would know little about it. On October 14th, prisoners staged a remarkable uprising in which three hundred men and women escaped. The author identifies only forty-seven who survived the war.Sent in June 1943 to Sobibor, where his wife and family were murdered, Jules Schelvis has written the first book-length, fully documented account of the camp. He details the creation of the killing center, its personnel, the use of railways, selections, forced labor, gas chambers, escape attempts, and the historic uprising.In documenting this part of Holocaust history, this compelling and well-researched account advances our knowledge and understanding of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the European Jews.

Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History


Marshall G.S. Hodgson - 1993
    Hodgson, a former professor of history at the University of Chicago, challenges adherents of both Eurocentrism and multiculturalism to rethink the place of Europe in world history. He argues that the line that connects Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance to modern times is an optical illusion, and that a global and Asia-centered history can better locate the European experience in the shared histories of humanity. In Part Two of the work Hodgson shifts the focus and in a parallel move seeks to locate the history of Islamic civilization in a world historical framework. Finally, in Part Three he argues that in the end there is but one history--global history--and that all partial or privileged accounts must necessarily be resituated in a world historical context. The book also includes an introduction by the editor, Edmund Burke III, contextualizing Hodgson's work in world history and Islamic history.

The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c.1100 - c.1300


Linda M. Paterson - 1993
    There are many books on its troubadours, but this is the first comprehensive study of the society in which they lived. It offers insight into the realities behind their poetic mystique.

Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Facism


Walter L. Adamson - 1993
    As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the history of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure.The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of "toscanita" or "being Tuscan."In their journals--"Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista"--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power.

The Prince and the Law, 1200-1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition


Kenneth Pennington - 1993
    In this masterful history of monarchy, conceptions of law, and due process, Kenneth Pennington addresses that struggle and opens an entirely new vista in the study of Western legal tradition.Pennington investigates legal interpretations of the monarch's power from the twelfth to the seventeenth century. Then, tracing the evolution of defendants' rights, he demonstrates that the origins of due process are not rooted in English common law as is generally assumed. It was not a sturdy Anglo-Saxon, but, most probably, a French jurist of the late thirteenth century who wrote, A man is innocent until proven guilty.This is the first book to examine in detail the origins of our concept of due process. It also reveals a fascinating paradox: while a theory of individual rights was evolving, so, too, was the concept of the prince's absolute power. Pennington illuminates this paradox with a clarity that will greatly interest students of political theory as well as legal historians.

Demythologizing Heidegger


John D. Caputo - 1993
    Caputo addresses the religious significance of Heidegger's thought.

Ballots and Barricades: Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830-1871


Ronald Aminzade - 1993
    A comparative case-study design enables the author to analyze how the complex interaction between industrialization, class relations, and party development fostered revolutionary communes in some cities but not others. Challenging traditional theories of industrialization and revolution, Aminzade innovatively uses narratives to provide a historically grounded analysis of the failed municipal revolutions of 1871 and the triumph of liberal-democratic institutions in France.In each of these cities, distinctive patterns of capitalist industrialization and class restructuring intersected with shifting political opportunities at the national level to produce local republican parties with different ideologies, strategies, and alliances. Focusing on changing relations between republican parties and male workers, whose identities and economic standing were in transition, Aminzade examines struggles within local parties among liberal, radical, and socialist republicans. The outcome of these struggles, he argues, shaped the willingness of workers to embrace the ballot box or take to the barricades.

Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women


Roberta Gilchrist - 1993
    Gender in medieval monasticism influenced landscape contexts and strategies of economic management, the form and development of buildings and their symbolic and iconographic content. Women's religious experience was often poorly documented, but their archaeology indicates a shared tradition which was closely linked with, and valued by local communities. The distinctive patterns observed suggest that gender is essential to archaeological analysis.

Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500-1860


Jan Glete - 1993
    For the first time a broad survey has been made of the size of the navies and the production of warships from the Renaissance to the mid-19th century. The aim of the study is to explain the role of the navies in the process of monopolization of violence to the states, their position as growing organizations within the states and the interplay between dynamics and inertia within established institutions with a long life-span. The method is mainly comparative and as far as possible all European and American navies have been taken into consideration, including oared flotillas. There are extensive appendices and tables on the size and structure of the navies.

Voyagers


Herb Kawainui Kane - 1993
    Long awaited since the first edition, this revised release contains over 140 paintings and drawings, with extremely interesting and well researched text.

In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities After World War II


Jeffry M. Diefendorf - 1993
    At the war's end, observers thought that it would take forty years to rebuild, but by the late 1950s West Germany's cities had risen anew. The housing crisis had been overcome and virtually all important monuments reconstructed, and the cities had reclaimed their characteristic identities. Everywhere there was a mixture of old and new: historic churches and town halls stood alongside new housing and department stores; ancient street layouts were crossed or encircled by wide arteries; old city centers were balanced by garden suburbs laid out according to modern planning principles. In this book, Diefendorf examines the questions raised by this remarkable feat of urban reconstruction. He explains who was primarily responsible, what accounted for the speed of rebuilding, and how priorities were set and decisions acted upon. He argues that in such crucial areas as architectural style, urban planning, historic preservation, and housing policy, the Germans drew upon personnel, ideas, institutions, and practical experiences from the Nazi and pre-Nazi periods. Diefendorf shows how the rebuilding of West Germany's cities after 1945 can only be understood in terms of long-term continuities in urban development.

Medieval Queenship


John Carmi Parsons - 1993
    As these essays show, however, these women did not lack opportunities for power; kings, queens, and observers alike understood medieval queenship as a vital and dynamic force in the life of any kingdom. A wide-ranging analysis of medieval queenship is provided in these ten essays, written by North American and European historians who have mined a rich variety of diplomatic, literary, and archaeological sources. Far more than simple biographical sketches, the essays in this volume examine queenship across a broad geographical and chronological spectrum. Medieval Queenship is a probing investigation of the foundations of queens' power and the means by which they exploited it.

Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime


Richard Pipes - 1993
    This is the final volume in his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution, covering the period from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1918 to Lenin's death in 1924.

Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France


Lester K. Little - 1993
    May their barns be cursed and may their bones be cursed. May the fruit of their loins be cursed as well as the fruit of their lands.' French monks of the Middle Ages hurled curses like these at their enemies, seeking supernatural assistance when no secular judge could help them. In a long-awaited book written with elegance and erudition, Lester Little undertakes the first full-length study of these maledictions.... The book's focus is the way that religious communities--especially the monks who followed Benedict's Rule and hence were known by his name--used liturgical cursing to safeguard their integrity and their possessions, against both laymen and other ecclesiastics. --Journal of Social History

The European Rescue of the Nation State


Alan S. Milward - 1993
    On one level it is an original analysis of the forces which brought the EC together, on another it is an explanation based on historical analysis of the future relationship between nation-state and the European Union. Combining political with economic analysis, and based on extensive primary research in several countries, this book offers a challenging interpretation of the history of the western European state and European integration.

Frail Children of Dust: From Bastogne to Bavaria with the Fourth Armored Division


Charles E. Wilson - 1993
    

The Golden Fleece and Alchemy


Antoine Faivre - 1993
    We follow the changing fashions in the history of initiation as well as in mythology. Faivre connects politics, chivalry, the age of exploration, Renaissance architecture and iconography, the hermeneutics of eighteenth century Germany and France, and modern practitioners of alchemy.This book will be welcomed by modern practitioners of alchemy and the occult as well as by scholars of esotericism.

Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia


Phillip Pulsiano - 1993
    With full-page maps and useful supplementary photos, this acclaimed encyclopedia covers every aspect of Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, including rulers and saints, overviews of the countries, religion, education, politics and law, culture and material life, history, literature, and art. A valuable and absorbing volume for students of the Norse sagas, the Viking age, and Old English history and literature, and for anyone interested in the cultural and historical heritage of Scandinavia. Includes cross-references and comprehensive index.