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This book presents the stories of six intrepid women of science in eighteenth-century France whose lives and accomplishments — though celebrated in their lifetimes — have been largely written out of the history of their period: mathematician and philosopher Elisabeth Ferrand, astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, field naturalist Jeanne Barret, garden botanist and illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, anatomist and inventor Marie-Marguerite Biheron, and chemist Geneviève d'Arconville. By adjusting our lens we can find them. In a society where science was not yet an established profession for men, much less women, these six audacious and inspiring figures made their mark on their respective fields of science and on Enlightenment society as they defied gender expectations and conventional norms. Their boldness and contributions to science were appreciated by such luminaries as Franklin, the philosophes, and many European monarchs. The book is written in an unorthodox style to match the women's breaking of boundaries.

This book covers the turbulent period from the 1916 Rising to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 — a period which saw the achievement of independence for most of nationalist Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a self-governing province of the United Kingdom. Separatists fought for independence against government forces and, in North East Ulster, armed loyalists. Civilians suffered violence from all combatants, sometimes as collateral damage, often as targets. This book catalogues and analyzes the deaths of all men, women, and children who died during the revolutionary years. The book provides a unique and comprehensive picture of everyone who died: in what manner, by whose hands, and why. Through their stories the reader obtains original insight into the Irish revolution itself.

As official botanist on James Cook's first circumnavigation, the longest-serving president of the Royal Society, advisor to King George III, the “father of Australia,” and the man who established Kew as the world's leading botanical garden, Sir Joseph Banks was integral to the English Enlightenment. Yet he has not received the recognition that his multifarious achievements deserve. This book reveals the true extent of Banks's contributions to science and Britain. From an early age Banks pursued his passion for natural history through study and extensive travel, most famously on the HMS Endeavour. He went on to become a pivotal figure in the advancement of British scientific, economic, and colonial interests. With his enquiring, enterprising mind and extensive network of correspondents, Banks's reputation and influence were global. Drawing widely on Banks's writings, the book sheds light on his profound impact on British science and empire in an age of rapid advancement.

An examination of France’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires through the stories of the little known people who built it. This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These imperial subjects sought new political and legal influence via law courts, with strategies that reflected local and regional priorities, particularly regarding slavery, war, and trade. Laurie M. Wood focuses largely on appellate courts in Martinique and Île de France (now Mauritius) and shows how the courts appealed to French citizens owing to their strategic place at the center of the largest and most dynamic oceanic zones of trade during the early modern era. Through court records and legal documents, she reveals how the courts became liaisons between France and its new colonial possessions, and how subjects used the courtrooms as gateways to other courtrooms in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and in France.

This book describes the experience of Jewish refugees as they fled Hitler to live in limbo in Portugal until they could reach safer havens abroad. As the Nazis launched the Holocaust, Lisbon emerged as the best way station for Jews to escape Europe for North and South America. Jewish refugees had begun fleeing the continent in the mid-1930s from ports closer to home. But after Germany defeated Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, and Italy joined the war, all in the spring of 1940, Lisbon became the port of departure from Europe. Jewish refugees from western and eastern Europe aimed for Portugal. An emotional history of fleeing, the book probes how specific locations touched refugees' inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signaled their liberation.

In this broad yet sympathetic survey — ranging from the Crusades to the modern day — this book explores the social, political, and cultural encounters between Britain and Islam. The book looks, for instance, at how reactions against the Crusades led to Anglo-Muslim collaboration under the Tudors, at how Britain posed as defender of Islam in the Victorian period, and at her role in rearranging the Muslim world after 1918. It argues that, contrary to current assumptions, Islamic groups have often embraced Western ideas, including modernization and liberal democracy. The book shows how the difficulties and Islamophobia that Muslims have experienced in Britain since the 1970s are largely caused by an acute crisis in British national identity. In truth, Muslims have become increasingly key participants in mainstream British society — in culture, sport, politics, and the economy.

This book explores how the French responded to the right of religious choice acquired during the revolutionary era. Religious liberty is usually part of a larger discussion about church-state relations, a context that veils the way it plays out in the lives of individuals. After establishing the legal and cultural framework for religious liberty during the Restoration (1814-1848), Kselman studies a number of prominent converts whose stories are documented in letters, memoirs, novels, and newspapers. These individuals, including Ivan Gagarin, George Sand, and Ernest Renan, moved both into and away from the Catholic Church, revealing the variety and complexity of religious choices in the modern era. Through an examination of their lives the book asks what it means for individuals to be allowed, as a normal aspect of life, to choose their own religious commitments, and how such choices affect personal identity and the process of fashioning a self. This book sheds light on the psychological, social, and religious reasons underlying their decisions to convert, the effects of their conversion on family and community, and how this sense of liberty informs our secular age.

This book tells a sweeping story of how Catholics from France and Poland wrestled throughout the first half of the twentieth century with a series of earth-shattering challenges to their worldview: the Industrial Revolution, the displacement of dynastic empires by democratic republics, republicanism’s subsequent collapse between the world wars, occupation and genocide by Nazi Germany, and the birth and expansion of the Soviet Union and its Communist proxy regimes. Faced with the ascendancy of both nationalism and Marxism across Europe, Catholic intellectuals found common ground in the pursuit of a just society on earth. Catholics on the Barricades reconstructs the projects forged across multiple generations, spanning from the 1890s through the 1950s. Declaring Catholic “revolution,” France’s and Poland’s Catholic intellectuals ended up serving twin evils: first exclusionary (or integral) nationalism, and then Stalinism as well. To explain this paradox, Catholics on the Barricades offers a conceptual history of “revolution.” After World War II, anti-fascist bona fides led these intellectuals to give the benefit of the doubt to Communist regimes in Eastern Europe—if not actively involve themselves in those regimes’ construction. In addition to peace and personhood, French and Polish Catholics were united by a shared fear of Germany. Their anti-Germanism built on, and preserved, long-standing anti-Semitism. Catholic “revolution,” then, was poisoned from the outset. And yet, its legacy ultimately inspired a turn to dialogue and solidarity, which—fleeting though it has proven to be—helped to bring down the Iron Curtain.

This book is the definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, exploring the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich in the service of power. The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. This eye-opening history reveals how the Third Reich's relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.

Not long after the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, Germans rebuilt their shattered country and emerged as one of the leading nations of the Western liberal world. This book analyzes this remarkable turnaround and challenges the widely held perception that the Western Allies—particularly the United States—were responsible for Germany's transformation. Instead, the book shows how common opposition to Adolf Hitler united the fractious groups that had once vied for supremacy under the Weimar Republic, Germany's first democracy (1918–1933). The book's character-driven narrative follows ten Germans of rival worldviews who experienced the breakdown of Weimar society, lived under the Nazi dictatorship, and together assumed founding roles in the democratic reconstruction. While many have imagined postwar Germany as the product of foreign-led democratization, this study highlights the crucial role of indigenous ideas and institutions that stretched back decades before Hitler. Foregrounding the resolution of key conflicts that crippled the country's first democracy, the book presents a new model for understanding the origins of today's Federal Republic.