Vast in scope, exhaustive in original research, written with passion, narrative skill, and human sympathy, A People's Tragedy is a profound account of the Russian Revolution for a new generation. Many consider the Russian Revolution to be the most significant event of the twentieth century. Distinguished scholar Orlando Figes presents a panorama of Russian society on the eve of that revolution, and then narrates the story of how these social forces were violently erased. Within the broad stokes of war and revolution are miniature histories of individuals, in which Figes follows the main players' fortunes as they saw their hopes die and their world crash into ruins. Unlike previous accounts that trace the origins of the revolution to overreaching political forces and ideals, Figes argues that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and that what had started as a people's revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship. A People's Tragedy is a masterful and original synthesis by a mature scholar, presented in a compelling and accessibly human narrative.

    Maass examines how an ordinary Serb could wake up one morning and shoot his neighbor, once a friend--then rape that neighbor's wife. He conveys the desperation that makes a Muslim beg the United States to bomb his own city in order to end the misery. And Maass does not falter at the spectacle of U.N. soldiers shining searchlights on fleeing refugees--who are promptly gunned down by snipers waiting in the darkness. Love Thy Neighbor gives us an unflinching vision of a late-20th-century hell that is also a scathing inquiry into the worst extremes of human nature. Like Michael Herr's Dispatches (also available in Vintage paperback), it is an utterly gripping book that will move and instruct readers for years to come.

    It is the most ambitious history of the continent ever undertaken.

    In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation―the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease." After the liberation of the Lodz Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and studying in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary's young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him. Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid's family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children. The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid's remarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with discomfiting intimacy you begin to experience the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihilated in World War II. Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: "Deportation into lard," he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an underground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto's school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a "professional revolutionary." He owes his strength and life to the care of his family.

    The evolution of the Romanians in the century between the 1770s and the 1860s was marked by a transition from long-established agrarian economic and social structures, locked into an essentially medieval political system, to a society moulded by urban and industrial values and held together by allegiance to the nation-state. This fascinating analysis of the building of a European nation-state is the first detailedf account of the Romanians during this dramatic period.

    Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."

    A brilliant look at alternatives to capitalism

    Paul Robert Magocsi tells its story from the first millennium before the common era to the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, with a balanced discussion of political, economic, and cultural affairs. Tracing in detail the experiences of the Ukrainian people, he gives judicious treatment as well to the other peoples and cultures that developed within the borders of Ukraine, including the Greeks of the Bosporan Kingdom, the Crimean Tatars, and the Poles, Russians, Germans, Jews, and Mennonites all of whom form an essential part of Ukrainian history.

    In exploring the question of why Nazism flourished in the 'Athens of the Isar', David Clay Large has written a compelling account of the cultural roots of the Nazi movement, allowing us to see that the conventional explanations for the movement's rise are not enough. Large's account begins in Munich's 'golden age', four decades before World War I, when the city's artists and writers produced some of the outstanding work of the modernist spirit. He sees a dark side to the city, a protofascist cultural heritage that would tie Adolf Hitler's movement to its soul. Large prowls his volatile world of seamy basement meeting places, finding that attacks on modernity and liberalism flourished, along with virulent anti-Semitism and German nationalism. From the violent experience of the Munich Soviet, through Hitler's failed Beer-Hall Putsch of 1923 and on to his appointment as German chancellor in 1933, Large unfurls a narrative full of insight and implication.

    With Holocaust memories still painfully vivid, a question haunts us: how is this savagery possible? Michael A. Sells answers by demonstrating that the Bosnian conflict is not simply a civil war or a feud of age-old adversaries. It is, he says, a systematic campaign of genocide and a Christian holy war spurred by religious mythologies.This passionate yet reasoned book examines how religious stereotyping—in popular and official discourse—has fueled Serbian and Croatian ethnic hatreds. Sells, who is himself Serbian American, traces the cultural logic of genocide to the manipulation by Serb nationalists of the symbolism of Christ's death, in which Muslims are "Christ-killers" and Judases who must be mercilessly destroyed. He shows how "Christoslavic" religious nationalism became a central part of Croat and Serbian politics, pointing out that intellectuals and clergy were key instruments in assimilating extreme religious and political ideas.Sells also elucidates the ways that Western policy makers have rewarded the perpetrators of the genocide and punished the victims. He concludes with a discussion of how the multireligious nature of Bosnian society has been a bridge between Christendom and Islam, symbolized by the now-destroyed bridge at Mostar. Drawing on historical documents, unpublished United Nations reports, articles from Serbian and Bosnian media, personal contacts in the region, and Internet postings, Sells reveals the central role played by religious mythology in the Bosnian tragedy. In addition, he makes clear how much is at stake for the entire world in the struggle to preserve Bosnia's existence as a multireligious society.

    In the seventy years from 1432 to 1502, some 17,000 men--in a city of only 40,000--were investigated for sodomy; 3,000 were convicted and thousands more confessed to gain amnesty. Michael Rocke vividly depicts this vibrant sexual culture in a world where these same-sex acts were not the deviant transgressions of a small minority, but an integral part of a normal masculine identity.In 1432 The Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Seventy years of denunciations, interrogations, and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which Rocke uses to its fullest in this richly documented portrait. He describes a wide range of sexual experiences between males, ranging from boys such as fourteen-year-old Morello di Taddeo, who prostituted himself to fifty-seven men, to the notorious Jacopo di Andrea, a young bachelor implicated with forty adolescents over a seventeen-year period and convicted thirteen times; same-sex "marriages" like that of Michele di Bruno and Carlo di Berardo, who were involved for several years and swore a binding oath to each other over an altar; and Bernardo Lorini, a former Night Officer himself with a wife and seven children, accused of sodomy at the age of sixty-five. (Mortified, he sent his son Taddeo to confess for him and plead for a discreet resolution of his case.) Indeed, nearly all Florentine males probably had some kind of same-sex experience as a part of their "normal" sexual life.Rocke uncovers a culture in which sexual roles were strictly defined by age, with boys under eighteen the "passive" participants in sodomy, youths in their twenties and older men the "active" participants, and most men at the age of thirty marrying women, their days of sexual frivolity with boys largely over. Such same sex activities were a normal phase in the transition to adulthood, and only a few pursued them much further. Rather than precluding heterosexual experiences, they were considered an extension of youthful and masculine lust and desire. As Niccolo Machiavelli quipped about a handsome man, "When young he lured husbands away from their wives, and now he lures wives away from their husbands." Florentines generally accepted sodomy as a common misdemeanor, to be punished with a fine, rather than as a deadly sin and a transgression against nature. There was no word, in the otherwise rich Florentine sexual lexicon, for "homosexual," nor was there a distinctive and well-developed homosexual "subculture." Rather, sexual acts between men and boys were an integral feature of the dominant culture.Rocke roots this sexual activity in the broader context of Renaissance Florence, with its social networks of families, juvenile gangs, neighbors, patronage, workshops, and confraternities, and its busy political life from the early years of the Republic through the period of Lorenzo de' Medici, Savonarola, and the beginning of Medici princely rule. His richly detailed book paints a fascinating picture of a vibrant time and place and calls into question our modern conceptions of gender and sexual identity.

    Our Bones Are Scattered recounts the bloodiest acts of one of the bloodiest rebellions in history - the siege and massacre of the European garrison at Cawnpore, India, and the terrible retribution that followed. Set in the doomed world of the British East India Company's domain, this riveting saga of folly, bravery, faith, and rage extends to the furthest reaches of human cruelty and strength. Among the extraordinary characters: Nana Sahib, the Mahratta prince whose extravagant hospitality won him the trust and friendship of the very Europeans who would be slaughtered in his name; the maimed and aging warhorse, Major General Sir Hugh Wheeler, who disastrously staked the lives of his Eurasian wife and children on his dream of commanding the Company's army; the brilliant Azimullah Khan, whose struggle from famine waif to Nana Sahib's emissary to London cultivated a genocidal loathing of the British; Jonah Shepherd, the pious Eurasian clerk who escaped the Entrenchment and survived as a prisoner of the rebels; the Mahratta brigadier Tatya Tope, whose resourceful courage as a guerrilla nearly compensated for his complicity in the Cawnpore massacres; Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, who escaped the siege of one entrenchment only to withstand the siege of another; four American missionary families whose harrowing exodus down the Ganges would end in their destruction; Brigadier General James Neill, whose martial audacity was subsumed by an atrocious appetite for vengeance; and the beautiful Amy Horne, who was spared her life only tobecome a trooper's concubine. With a historian's authority and a novelist's empathy, Andrew Ward draws on unpublished letters and documents, years of research, and repeated trips to India and Great Britain to bring this monumental epic to life.

    A product of Northern French provincial society of the 19th century - austere, catholic and nationalist - de Gaulle was, according to Williams, the last great Frenchman. Whatever the arguments concerning de Gaulle's legacy, in his single-minded devotion to his country, and in his skill and strength in pushing it, there would have been no France if there had been no de Gaulle.

    This book traces the parallel development of night bombing within the RAF and that of the Luftwaffe's Night Fighter Force, culminating in the strategic bombing offensive and the German aerial defense against that offensive.

    When living in Los Angeles, the author received phone calls from 1200 people in reaction to a campaign raised to help American Jews and other individuals file claims for property they had lost during the Nazi regime in what would later be Eastern Germany. Many of these phone calls were unrelated to the issue of filing the claims. On many occasions someone simply needed to talk to a complete stranger who lent a listening ear and understood. The conversations were usually long monologues about experiences in concentration camps like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, even Sobibor. The victims talked about their escapes from the hands of the Nazi's, and about their harsh return after the liberation.When the process of filing claims was finished, the author found himself in the possession of a wealth of information, not only about the experiences of Holocaust survivors but also about the post-war generation. The personal, moving and candid witness statements and memories were all transcribed and verified, and provided shocking insights into the psychological aftermath of the first and second generation Holocaust victims.It was felt important to make these stories and memories accessible to a larger audience, especially to young people. The author Simon Hammelburg is a holocaust educator, lecturing in Europe, the United States and Israel. We should never forget what happened during World War II, and how this impacted generations to come. For countless people the war never ended.In this book, the memories of Holocaust survivors and their children have been intelligently woven into characters that play a role in the main storyline; the main character, himself a child from Jewish parents who both survived the Second World War, is trying to come to terms with the loss of a beloved one, Daisy, by traveling back to the place where they first met and were happy together. The book ends with the Kaddish for Daisy, attended by a circle of dear childhood friends, all of them from emotionally damaged and traumatized families. In their youth, they used to escape their homes on Sundays to meet at their Clubhouse from Ichud Habonim, a worldwide Zionist organization. The clubhouse served as a safehaven where they could be children and have fun.Although the tone of the book is generally serious, the author managed to give the book a gentle touch with his dry humor. In The War never Ended - Memories of Holocaust Survivors, Simon Hammelburg shows the trauma’s of his parents’ and of his own generation without ever becoming sentimental. They have been given a voice in an intelligent and natural way. The book is of rare literary quality with some great dialogues; once you start reading, you cannot put it down until you have read the very last page.The War Never Ended – Memories of Holocaust Survivors has been dedicated to Dr Flo Kinsler (1929-2013), a Los Angeles social worker and psychologist specialized in Holocaust trauma’s.

    Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks--ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes--were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society.Nirenberg's readings of archival and literary sources demonstrates how violence set the terms and limits of coexistence for medieval minorities. The particular and contingent nature of this coexistence is underscored by the book's juxtapositions--some systematic (for example, that of the Crown of Aragon with France, Jew with Muslim, medieval with modern), and some suggestive (such as African ritual rebellion with Catalan riots). Throughout, the book questions the applicability of dichotomies like tolerance versus intolerance to the Middle Ages, and suggests the limitations of those analyses that look for the origins of modern European persecutory violence in the medieval past.

    Pavel Machotka has photographed the sites of Cezanne's landscape paintings - whenever possibe from the same spot and at the same time of day that Cezanne painted the scenes. Juxtaposing these colour photographs with reproductions of the paintings, he offers a range of evidence to investigate how the painter transformed nature into works of art.

    Darnton offers a reasoned defense of what the French revolutionaries were trying to achieve and urges us to look beyond political events to understand the idealism and universality of their goals.

    This volume examines the primary themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism and her controversial idea of the "banality of evil" to her classic studies of political action and her final reflections on judgment and the life of the mind. Each essay examines the political, philosophical, and historical concerns that shaped Arendt's thought.

    "A chilling testimony to the evil that executed—and the bungling that coud not pevent—an 'ethnic cleasing' massacre, the single worst atrocity in Europe since World War II."—The New York Times Book Review.

    Noted historian and anthropologist Raphael Patai, himself a native of Hungary, tells in this pioneering study the fascinating story of the struggles, achievements, and setbacks that marked the flow of history for the Hungarian Jews. He traces their seminal role in Hungarian politics, finance, industry, science, medicine, arts, and literature, and their surprisingly rich contributions to Jewish scholarship and religious leadership both inside Hungary and in the Western world. In the early centuries of their history Hungarian Jews left no written works, so Patai had to piece together a picture of their life up to the sixteenth century based on documents and reports written by non-Jewish Hungarians and visitors from abroad. Once Hungarian Jewish literary activity began, the sources covering the life and work of the Jews rapidly increased in richness. Patai made full use of the wealth of information contained in the monumental eighteen-volume series of the Hungarian Jewish Archives and the other abundant primary sources available in Latin, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Turkish, the languages in vogue in various periods among the Jews of Hungary. In his presentation of the modern period he also examined the literary reflection of Hungarian Jewish life in the works of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarian novelists, poets, dramatists, and journalists. Patai's main focus within the overall history of the Hungarian Jews is their culture and their psychology. Convinced that what is most characteristic of a people is the culture which endows its existence with specific coloration, he devotes special attention to the manifestations of Hungarian Jewish talent in the various cultural fields, most significantly literature, the arts, and scholarship. Based on the available statistical data Patai shows that from the nineteenth century, in all fields of Hungarian culture, Jews played leading roles not duplicated in any other country. Patai also shows that in the Hungarian Jewish culture a specific set of psychological motivations had a highly significant function. The Hungarian national character trait of emphatic patriotism was present in an even more fervent form in the Hungarian Jewish mind. Despite their centuries-old struggle against anti-Semitism, and especially from the nineteenth century on, Hungarian Jews remained convinced that they were one hundred percent Hungarians, differing in nothing but denominational variation from the Catholic and Protestant Hungarians. This mindset kept them apart and isolated from the Jewries of the Western world until overtaken by the tragedy of the Holocaust in the closing months of World War II.

    Moreover, the consciousness of our own time was largely formed by those who were given the freedom to express themselves by the rebirth of the arts and sciences of the Renaissance.The Renaissance Reader allows the men and women of that turbulent time of change to speak in their own voices--sane and insane, brilliant and mundane, inspired and possessed, oblivious and decisive. Organized chronologically and covering the fourteenth through seventeeth centuries, the book provides readers with the literary and artistic; social, religious and political; and scientific and philosophic texts that shaped Renaissance thinking from the death of Dante in 1321 to the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare in 1616.Besides selections from such familiar texts as Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier and Miguel de Bervantes' Don Quixote, the book also contains the work of many less familiar writers, including such prominent Renaissance women as Christine de Pizan, Isabella d'Este and Catherine Zell. With the inclusion of such brilliant artists as Giotto, da Vinci, Durer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Brueghal and others, The Renaissance Reader brings the age to life to life with all its vibrance and excitement.

    Her memoir unfolds before us the poignantly familiar picture of a young girl who, even under the most abominable circumstances, engages in intense adolescent friendships, worries with her companions over her looks, and falls in love. Raised a Catholic by secular Jewish parents, she did not even know she was a Jew until the German occupation of her country in 1939 when she was twelve.    Whereas Anne Frank’s diary ends with deportation to a concentration camp, Fortress of My Youth is the story of another young girl who tells us how she and her family were taken to Terezín, what food she ate there, what work she did, how her friends died from disease, how thousands were sent from there to Auschwitz, how her family members were killed, and how she escaped the gas chamber. But she also tells of love, joy, and sacrifice: musicians, writers, and intellectuals among the inmates who were determined to pass on their cultural heritage to the youth in Terezín; a network of Czechs outside the walls who smuggled in food; her singing in performances of Smetana’s Bartered Bride and Verdi’s Requiem, the most profound experiences of her life.

    Geoffrey Wawro describes Prussia's successful invasion of Habsburg Bohemia, and the wretched collapse of the Austrian army in July 1866. Blending military and social history, he describes the panic that overtook Austria's regiments in each clash with the Prussians. He reveals the blundering of the Austrian commandant who fumbled away key strategic advantages and ultimately lost a war--crucial to the fortunes of the Habsburg Monarchy--that most European pundits had predicted they would win.

    His Celtic Women provides a balanced and informed perspective on the position of women in Celtic society and asks how much of this ancient culture has filtered down through the ages. Ellis examines the concept of the "Mother Goddess" origin of the Celts as well as the pantheon of women in Celtic mythology - from Etain and Emer, and Macha and Medb, to Rhiannon and Gwenhwyvar (Guinevere). He also discusses a wide range of important historical personalities. Although Boudicca (Boadicea) is often cited as the most powerful historical Celtic female figure - the one who led southern Britain in insurrection against the Romans - Ellis shows that she was by no means unique. The results of Ellis's engaging study show that Celtic society undoubtedly maintained an order in which women were harmoniously balanced in relation to men. Beside the repressive male dominance of classic Mediterranean society, the position of women in Celtic myth, law, and early history seems to have constituted an ideal. Celtic women could govern; took prominent - sometimes the highest - roles in political, religious, and artistic life; could own property; could divorce; and were even expected to fight alongside men in battles. It was not until the Celts' encounter and conflict with the alien values of the Roman and Germanic cultures and the arrival of Western Christianity that the rights of women began to erode.

    His description of Saint Nicholas personified the jolly old elf known to millions of children throughout the world. However, far from being the offshoot of Saint Nicholas of Turkey, Santa Claus is the last of a long line of what scholars call Wild Men who were worshipped in ancient European fertility rites and came to America through Pennsylvania's Germans. This pagan creature is described from prehistoric times through his various forms--Robin Hood, The Fool, Harlequin, Satan and Robin Goodfellow--into today's carnival and Christmas scenes. In this thoroughly researched work, the origins of Santa Claus are found to stretch back over 50,000 years, jolting the foundation of Christian myths about the jolly old elf.

    

    The authors interviewed Bachner in 1983, and did extensive historical research.

    Broers concentrates on the experience of the peoples of Europe and weaves together a myriad of regional experiences to produce a social history of the Napoleonic Empire with atruly panoramic scope.

    Before that she was acclaimed for her roles in silent feature films, when German cinema was in its artistic heyday in the 1920s. She pioneered the box office success of such classic mountaineering dramas as The White Hell of Piz Palu and then began to direct her own films. The Blue Light was admired by Hitler and led to her filming the Wagnerian Nuremberg Rally of 1934. After the war she was shunned by the film industry, despite a court in 1952 proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Her undoubted charisma led to many affairs and grandiose schemes - deep sea diving in her seventies and still filming wildlife in her nineties. Audrey Salkeld has sifted the fact from the legend and gives us a moving portrait of the great movie `star' who suffered more in the `wilderness' than her enduring fame suggests.

    It has rarely been noticed, however, that at the end of the Enlightenment, German thinkers had already begun a scrutiny of their age so wide-ranging that there are few subsequent criticisms that had not been considered by the close of the eighteenth century. Among the concerns these essays address are the importance of freedom of expression, the relationship between faith and reason, and the responsibility of the Enlightenment for revolutions.Included are translations of works by such well-known figures as Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Georg Hamann, as well as essays by thinkers whose work is virtually unknown to American readers. These eighteenth-century texts are set against interpretive essays by such major twentieth-century figures as Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault.

    Rory Muir looks beyond the purely military aspects of the struggle to show how the entire British nation played a part in the victory. His book provides a total assessment of how politicians, the press, the crown, civilians, soldiers and commanders together defeated France. Beginning in 1807 when all of continental Europe was under Napoleon's control, the author traces the course of the war throughout the Spanish uprising of 1808, the campaigns of the Duke of Wellington and Sir John Moore in Portugal and Spain, and the crossing of the Pyrenees by the British army, to the invasion of southern France and the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Muir sets Britain's military operations on the Iberian Peninsula within the context of the wider European conflict, and examines how diplomatic, financial, military and political considerations combined to shape policies and priorities. Just as political factors influenced strategic military decisions, Muir contends, fluctuations of the war affected British political decisions. The book is based on a comprehensive investigation of primary and secondary sources, and on a thorough examination of the vast archives left by the Duke of Wellington. Muir offers vivid new insights into the personalities of Canning, Castlereagh, Perceval, Lord Wellesley, Wellington and the Prince Regent, along with fresh information on the financial background of Britain's campaigns. This vigorous narrative account will appeal to general readers and military enthusiasts, as well as to students of early nineteenth-century British politics and military history.

    It explores the development, amongst the diverse peoples of the vast landmass between the Carpathians and the Urals, of a society underpinned by a broadly common culture and eventually a common faith, out of which would emerge the future Russia and its neighbours. The book also describes the emergence of a dominant state centred on Kiev and the coming of Christianity to the Slavs. Finally, it shows how the gradual proliferation of new dynastic centres northwards and westwards shifted the power-base of the region into Russi proper, where it would subsequently stay.

    Today's emphasis on the period's complexity—the way ideas, politics, religion, society, art, and science depend upon and affect one another.The Renaissance Complete brings the image to center stage. More than 1,000 illustrations focus on over 100 key topics, including the revival of classical learning, the printing press, the rise of the nation-state, philosophy, and the role of women. The scope is all-embracing: Italy, France, Spain, Britain, Germany, and the northern countries; courts and patrons; painters and sculptors; churchmen and traders; men, women, and children. An impressive information resource provides biographies, timelines, a gazetteer of museums and galleries, and an illustrated glossary.

    During the 15th and 16th centuries, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music underwent an astonishing revival. In this extraordinary book, Holmes charts the spread of this new intellectual and artistic culture across Europe, laying particular emphasis on the city as an agent for cultural innovation. 250 photos, many in color.

    The text gives the reader an understanding of ancient Egypts social, political and spiritual organization. Sacred texts, hieroglyphs, and the daily life of the people are explained, described and illustrated with drawings, charts, diagrams of interiors, maps of ancient sites, a time line of Egyptian history, an illustrated foldout map of the Nile, and throughout, many photographs.

    Ninety-five percent of the Jewish population was restricted to a life of poverty and starvation in the ghetto and barred from schools and universities. Ultimately, four million Jews left Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924, three million of whom settled in America. Monumental though this mass migration was, it is even more surprising to learn that twice as many Jews decided not to leave Eastern Europe, despite the horrid conditions they endured. This puzzling statistic lends even sharper emphasis to the reasons surrounding the biggest movement of people in world history. Milton Meltzer has gathered eyewitness accounts, diaries, letters, documents, songs, maps, poems, and memoirs, weaving them into an historical narrative that details the Jews' motivation to abandon their old world and venture into a new one. It is a story that will at once educate and inspire the reader, delight and disappoint, while restoring a world practically unfathomable to today's American Jews, most of whom can find their roots in that rich and wondrous past.

    In contrast, The King's Army--a meticulously researched analysis of the royal army during the early civil wars--brings warfare back to the center of the picture. The King's Army makes an important contribution to the history of military forces, warfare, religion and society in France, and will be of great interest to those engaged in the debate over the Military Revolution in early modern Europe.

    In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Dane Kennedy explores the development and history of the hill stations of the raj. He shows that these cloud-enshrouded havens were sites of both refuge and surveillance for British expatriates: sanctuaries from the harsh climate as well as an alien culture; artificial environments where colonial rulers could nurture, educate, and reproduce themselves; commanding heights from which orders could be issued with an Olympian authority.Kennedy charts the symbolic and sociopolitical functions of the hill stations over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that these highland communities became much more significant to the British colonial government than mere places for rest and play. Particularly after the revolt of 1857, they became headquarters for colonial political and military authorities. In addition, the hill stations provided employment to countless Indians who worked as porters, merchants, government clerks, domestics, and carpenters.The isolation of British authorities at the hill stations reflected the paradoxical character of the British raj itself, Kennedy argues. While attempting to control its subjects, it remained aloof from Indian society. Ironically, as more Indians were drawn to these mountain areas for work, and later for vacation, the carefully guarded boundaries between the British and their subjects eroded. Kennedy argues that after the turn of the century, the hill stations were increasingly incorporated into the landscape of Indian social and cultural life.

    Why did ancient culture, once so strong and rich, come to an end? Was it destroyed by weaknesses inherent in its nature? Or were mistakes made that could have been avoided--was there a point at which Greco-Roman society took a wrong turn? And in what ways is modern society different? Western history is split into two discontinuous eras, Aldo Schiavone tells us: the ancient world was fundamentally different from the modern one. He locates the essential difference in a series of economic factors: a slave-based economy, relative lack of mechanization and technology, the dominance of agriculture over urban industry. Also crucial are aspects of the ancient mentality: disdain for manual work, a preference for transcending (rather than transforming) nature, a basic belief in the permanence of limits. Schiavone's lively and provocative examination of the ancient world, "the eternal theater of history and power," offers a stimulating opportunity to view modern society in light of the experience of antiquity.

    The legacy of its architecture, politics, culture, and art has survived throughout the centuries and even in today's technological world continues to exert an irresistible appeal. Ancient Rome is a magnificent volume that traces the dramatic history of the Roman Empire, paying particular attention to the rise and fall and its lasting social, cultural, military, and political influence. From great feats and everyday customs, to works of art and household objects, this comprehensive account offers a fascinating insight into the highly complex and sophisticated society that once ruled the world.Authoritative text by Anna Maria Liberati and Fabio Bourbon analyzes the development of the Roman Empire by examining all aspects of the Eternal City including the economic, legal, and military system of the conquered regions; the organization of the most powerful army in the ancient world; the town-planning problems and successes; the construction systems used to erect the great Roman public monuments; and even the smallest curiosities of everyday life. The impressive pictorial documentation of Ancient Rome includes hundreds of full-color images, many of them never before published. Detailed maps, cross-sections, plans, and large reconstruction plates provide fascinating documentary support and present an engaging approach to discovering the world of Ancient Rome and to understanding the origins of Western society as we know it.

    It treats the Balkans as the frontier of the Byzantine empire, and considers imperial relations with the peoples living in the Balkans, including the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Hungarians. It also considers responses to invasions from beyond the frontier: by steppe nomads, from beyond the Danube, and by western powers through Hungary and across the Adriatic sea. The first four crusades, 1095-1204, are considered in some detail, and extensive use is made of archaeology.

    The survey begins with an exploration of national obsessions and attitudes. It considers the tendency to revolution and war, the preoccupation with the idea of a New Order and the deep strain of national paranoia that was to be intensified by the dramatic debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. Robert Tombs then investigates the structures of power and in Part Three he turns his attention to social identities, from the individual and family to the nation at large. When every aspect of the period has been put under the microscope, Robert Tombs draws them all into the broad political narrative that brings the book to its rousing conclusion. Bursting with life as well as learning, this is, quite simply, a tour de force.

    This book examines the use of that supreme sanction in Germany, from the seventeenth century to the present.Richard Evans analyses the system of `traditional' capital punishments set out in German law, and the ritual practices and cultural readings associated with them by the time of the early modern period. He shows how this system was challenged by Enlightenment theories of punishment and broke down under the impact of secularization and social change in the first half of the nineteenth century. The abolition of the death penalty became a classic liberal case which triumphed, if only momentarily, in the 1848 Revolution. In Germany far more than anywhere else in Europe, capital punishment was identified with anti-liberal, authoritarian concepts of sovereignty. Its definitive reinstatement by Bismarck in the 1880s marked not only the defeat of liberalism but also coincided with the emergence of new, Social Darwinist attitudes towards criminality which gradually changed the terms of debate. The triumph of these attitudes under the Nazis laid the foundations for the massive expansion of capital punishment which took place during Hitler's `Third Reich'. After the Second World War, the death penalty was abolished, largely as a result of a chance combination of circumstances, but continued to be used in the Stalinist system of justice in East Germany until its forced abandonment as a result of international pressure exerted in the regime in the 1970s and 1980s.This remarkable and disturbing book casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. Using sources ranging from folksongs and ballads to the newly released government papers from the former German Democratic Republic, Richard Evans scrutinizes the ideologies behind capital punishment and comments on interpretations of the history of punishment offered by writers such as Foucault and Elias. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishement, and to the current debate on the death penalty.

    Between the fall of 1943 and August 1945, Loza fought in the Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. He commanded a tank battalion during much of this period and had three Shermans shot out from under him. Loza’s unit participated in such well-known combat actions as the Korsun-Shevchenkovskiy Operation, the Jassy-Kishenev Operation, and the battles for Budapest, Vienna, and Prague. Following the German surrender, Loza’s unit was sent to Mongolia, where it participated in the arduous trek across the Gobi Desert to attack the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria. This is the first available detailed examination of the Red Army’s exploitation of U.S. war matériel during World War II and one of the first genuine memoirs available from the Russian front. Loza also provides firsthand testimony on tactical command decisions, group objectives and how they were accomplished, and Soviet use of combat equipment and intelligence. Only after the collapse of the USSR and concomitant relaxing of prohibitions against publication of materials related to the Lend-Lease Program there could this account be made available.

    In many ways it was without precedent. Never had the battlefield been so vast, whether in the trenches, in the sky, or on and in the seas. Never had a war reached so deeply into the lives of people so far away from the battlefield. The shock waves generated by this cataclysmic event are felt to this day, as this dramatic narrative makes vividly clear. Here is presented a history of world war in a new way. The military flow of the conflict - from the invasion of Belgium in the summer of 1914 to the collapse of Germany in the autumn of 1918 - is followed throughout. But these epic events are rendered with fresh insights by the interweaving of the cultural history of the time - the hopes and dreams, the ideas and aspirations, the exhilaration and despair, both of those remote from power and of those who led them. This is a journey into the intense personal experiences of people trying to make sense of war on a scale the world had never seen. Like the acclaimed television series that it accompanies, The Great War pays special attention to the troubling aftermath of the war: the emergence of new nations amid old and festering problems; how the victims and survivors dealt with loss and disfigurement, guilt and hatred; and the terrible legacy of brutality that has marked so much of the twentieth century.

    Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War, he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jünger in English, Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writer’s first fifty years, from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jünger, a man who has been extolled, despised, denounced, and admired throughout his lifetime, Ernst Jünger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is, if uncomfortably, represented by him.Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany’s conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler’s assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger’s untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger’s profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism.Winner of Germany’s highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.

    Executioners, skinners, grave-diggers, shepherds, barber-surgeons, millers, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, and bailiffs were among the dishonorable by virtue of their trades. It shows the extent to which dishonor determined the life chances and self-identity of these people. Taking Augsburg as a prime example, it investigates how honorable estates interacted with dishonorable people, and shows how the pollution anxieties of early modern Germans structured social and political relations within honorable society.

    Genealogical information is given on 11 kings and their queens from William the Conqueror through Edward III (d.1377). Included are three generations of the legitimate is

    It also questions the reasons for the failure of Christian's attempts to maintain the prewar status quo in northern Germany and to protect the territorial integrity of Denmark.

    In Allegories of Contamination Patrick Rumble provides an incisive critical and theoretical study of these films and the Marxist filmmaker's complex, original concept of the cinematic medium.With the three films that make up the Trilogy of Life - The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, andThe Arabian Nights - Pasolini attempts to recapture the aura surrounding popular, predominantly oral forms of storytelling through a pro-modern vision of innocent, unalienated bodies and pleasures. In these works Pasolini appears to abandon the explicitly political engagement that marked his earlier works - films that led him to be identified with other radical filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, and Godard. However, Pasolini insisted that these were his 'most ideological films, ' and his political engagement translates into a mannerist, anti-classical style or what he called a 'cinema of poetry.' Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination, ' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics. Aesthetic contamination concerns the mediation between different cultures and different historical moments. Through stylistic experimentation, the Trilogy of Life presents a genealogy of visual codes, an interrogation of the subjectivity of narrative cinema. In these films Pasolini celebrates life, and perhaps therein lies their simple heresy.