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Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions

Kenneth Stow

This text presents an historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion. After being ... More

This text presents an historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion. After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors' efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna's powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation in this book of the incident's legal and historical significance. The book's analysis of Anna's dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts—and her brother's later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses—provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe.Less

Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire

Laurie M Wood

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 ... More

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.Less

The Art of Peacemaking: Political Essays by István Bibó

István Bibó

Iván Z. Dénes (ed.)

István Bibó (1911–1979) was a Hungarian lawyer, political thinker, prolific essayist, and minister of state for the Hungarian national government during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This ... More

István Bibó (1911–1979) was a Hungarian lawyer, political thinker, prolific essayist, and minister of state for the Hungarian national government during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This magisterial compendium of Bibó's work introduces the writings of one of the foremost theorists and psychologists of twentieth-century European politics and culture. The chapters in this volume address the causes and fallout of European political crises, postwar changes in the balance of power among countries, and nation-building processes.Less

Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918-1945

Thomas Kühne

No one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust. What enabled millions of Germans to perpetrate or condone the murder of the Jews? This book offers a ... More

No one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust. What enabled millions of Germans to perpetrate or condone the murder of the Jews? This book offers a provocative answer. In addition to the hatred of Jews or coercion that created a genocidal society, it contends, the desire for a united “people's community” made Germans conform and join together in mass crime. Exploring private letters, diaries, memoirs, secret reports, trial records, and other documents, the author shows how the Nazis used such common human needs as community, belonging, and solidarity to forge a nation conducting the worst crime in history.Less

Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism

Aleksandra Shatskikh

Kazimir Malevich's painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of ... More

Kazimir Malevich's painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich's contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art—which he called Suprematism—and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, the author of this book sheds light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde. Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square. To this day, many circumstances and events of the origins of Suprematism have remained obscure, and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries synchronous to the events described has allowed the author to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting.Less

Britain and Islam: A History from 622 to the Present Day

Martin Pugh

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 ... More

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.Less

Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and "Revolution," 1891-1956

Piotr H. Kosicki

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: ... More

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.Less

The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936: Origins of the Civil War

Stanley G. Payne

This book, which focuses on the short but crucial period that led to the collapse of the Spanish Republic and set the stage for the ensuing civil war, details the political shifts which occurred from ... More

This book, which focuses on the short but crucial period that led to the collapse of the Spanish Republic and set the stage for the ensuing civil war, details the political shifts which occurred from 1933 to 1936 and examines the actions and inactions of key actors during these years. Using their own memoirs, speeches, and declarations, it challenges previous perceptions of various major players, including President Alcalá Zamora. The breakdown of political coalitions and the internal rifts between Spain's bourgeois and labor classes sparked many instances of violent dissent in the mid-1930s. The book addresses the election of 1933 and the destabilizing insurrection that followed, Alcalá Zamora's failed attempts to control the major parties, and the backlash which resulted. The alliances of the socialist left with communism and the right with fascism are also explored, as is the role of forces outside Spain in spurring the violence that eventually exploded into war.Less

Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France

Thomas Kselman

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 ... More

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.Less

Diary, 1901-1969

Kornei Chukovsky

Elena Chukovskaya and Victor Erlich (eds)

A perceptive literary critic, a world-famous writer of witty and playful verses for children, a leading authority on children's linguistic creativity, and a highly skilled translator, Kornei ... More

A perceptive literary critic, a world-famous writer of witty and playful verses for children, a leading authority on children's linguistic creativity, and a highly skilled translator, Kornei Chukovsky was a complete man of letters. As benefactor to many writers including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, he stood for several decades at the center of the Russian literary milieu. It is no exaggeration to claim that Chukovsky knew everyone involved in shaping the course of twentieth-century Russian literature. His voluminous diary, which is here translated into English, begins in prerevolutionary Russia and spans nearly the entire Soviet era. It is the candid commentary of a brilliant observer who documents fifty years of Soviet literary activity and the personal predicament of the writer under a totalitarian regime. From descriptions of friendship with such major literary figures as Anna Akhmatova and Isaac Babel to accounts of the struggle with obtuse and hostile censorship, from the heartbreaking story of the death of the daughter who had inspired so many stories to candid political statements, Chukovsky's diary is a unique account of the twentieth-century Russian experience.Less

Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924-1941

Jonathan L. Dekel-Chen

This is the first history of the Jewish agricultural colonies that were established in Crimea and southern Ukraine in 1924 and which, fewer than twenty years later, ended in tragedy. It opens a ... More

This is the first history of the Jewish agricultural colonies that were established in Crimea and southern Ukraine in 1924 and which, fewer than twenty years later, ended in tragedy. It opens a window on Soviet rural life during these turbulent years and documents the relations that developed among the American-Jewish sponsors of the ambitious project, the Soviet authorities, and the colonists themselves. Drawing on extensive and largely untouched archives, and a wealth of previously unpublished oral histories, the book revises what has been understood about these agricultural settlements. It offers new conclusions about integration and separation among Soviet Jews, the contours of international relations, and the balance of political forces within the Jewish world during this volatile period.Less

Genocide on the Drina River

Edina Bećirević

This book examines the genocide committed by Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, drawing on the case studies of seven municipalities in Eastern ... More

This book examines the genocide committed by Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, drawing on the case studies of seven municipalities in Eastern Bosnia to illustrate a pattern of broader Serb genocidal designs. This work is based on extensive primary research, including the analysis of trial transcripts from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and military archives, as well as interviews with witnesses. A significant portion of this book is also rooted in perpetrator-based research; and the examination of recorded parliamentary transcripts, taped conversations, and numerous other authentic documents demonstrates that genocide against Bosnian Muslims was not only planned and implemented under the careful watch of Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, and Ratko Mladić, but also with the full knowledge and participation of a wide circle of Serbian political, security sector, and military actors who remain unaccountable. And so, the book ends with an in-depth discussion of genocide denial and its broader social effects. This book is meant to raise awareness about genocide and the mechanisms of its denial in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the hope that future leaders and citizens will better understand how to build social environments in which genocides are unthinkable. By fluidly linking general theories of genocide with detailed local and regional perspectives, but also managing to illustrate the devastating and dehumanizing effects of genocide on the destinies of everyday people, this book speaks to readers about how the legacy of genocide impacts both the collective and the individual.Less

Guns and Rubles: The Defense Industry in the Stalinist State

Mark Harrison (ed.)

For this book, a team of economists and historians scoured formerly closed Soviet archives to discover how Stalin used rubles to make guns. Focusing on various aspects of the defense industry, a ... More

For this book, a team of economists and historians scoured formerly closed Soviet archives to discover how Stalin used rubles to make guns. Focusing on various aspects of the defense industry, a top-secret branch of the Soviet economy, the book's contributors uncover new information on the inner workings of Stalin's dictatorship, military and economic planning, and the industrial organization of the Soviet economy. Previously unknown details about Stalin's command system come to light, as do insights into the relations between Soviet public and private interests. The authors show that defense was at the core of Stalin's system of rule; single-minded management of the defense sector helped him keep his grip on power.Less

Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal

Marion Kaplan

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 ... More

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.Less

Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

Eric Kurlander

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 ... More

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.Less

Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Their Flight through France and Italy

Susan Zuccotti

This book describes the ever-escalating dangers to which Jewish refugees and recent immigrants were subjected in France and Italy as the Holocaust marched forward. It uncovers a grueling yet complex ... More

This book describes the ever-escalating dangers to which Jewish refugees and recent immigrants were subjected in France and Italy as the Holocaust marched forward. It uncovers a grueling yet complex history of suffering and resilience through historical documents and personal testimonies from members of nine central and eastern European Jewish families displaced to France in the opening years of World War II. The chronicle of their lives reveals clearly that these Jewish families experienced persecution of far greater intensity than citizen Jews or long-time resident immigrants. The odyssey of the nine families took them from hostile Vichy France to the Alpine village of Saint-Martin-Vésubie and on to Italy, where German soldiers, rather than the hoped-for Allied troops, awaited. Those who crossed over to Italy were either deported to Auschwitz or forced to scatter in desperate flight. The book brings to light the agonies of the refugees' unstable lives, the evolution of French policies toward Jews, the reasons behind the flight from the relative idyll of Saint-Martin-Vésubie, and the choices that confronted those who arrived in Italy. Archival evidence frames this history, while firsthand reports underscore the human cost of the nightmarish years of persecution.Less

Italian Venice: A History

Richard Bosworth

This book explores Venice—not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. The book looks at the glamour ... More

This book explores Venice—not the glorious Venice of the Venetian Republic, but from the fall of the Republic in 1797 and the Risorgimento up through the present day. The book looks at the glamour and squalor of the belle époque and the dark underbelly of modernisation, the two world wars, and the far-reaching oppressions of the Fascist regime, through to the “Disneylandification” of Venice and the tourist boom, the worldwide attention of the biennale and film festival, and current threats of subsidence and flooding posed by global warming. It draws out major themes—the increasingly anachronistic but deeply embedded Catholic Church, the two faces of modernisation, consumerism versus culture. The book interrogates not just Venice's history but its meanings, and how the city's past has been co-opted to suit present and sometimes ulterior aims. Venice, it shows, is a city where its histories as well as its waters ripple on the surface.Less

Lenin's Jewish Question

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

In this examination of Lenin's genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, the book reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin's maternal grandfather ... More

In this examination of Lenin's genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, the book reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin's maternal grandfather was a Jew. It examines why and how Lenin's Jewish relatives converted to Christianity, explains how Lenin's vision of Russian Marxism shaped his identity, and explores Lenin's treatment of party colleagues of Jewish origin and the Jewish Question in Europe. The book also uncovers the continuous efforts of the Soviet communists to suppress Lenin's Jewishness and the no less persistent attempts of Russian extremists to portray Lenin as a Jew. The book expands our understanding not only of Lenin, but also of Russian and Soviet handling of the Jewish Question.Less

Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany

Noah Benezra Strote

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 ... More

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.Less

The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin's Dictatorship

Paul Gregory and Norman Naimark (eds)

In this book, Western and Russian scholars examine the “lost” transcripts of the Soviet Politburo, a set of verbatim accounts of meetings that took place from the 1920s to 1938 but remained hidden in ... More

In this book, Western and Russian scholars examine the “lost” transcripts of the Soviet Politburo, a set of verbatim accounts of meetings that took place from the 1920s to 1938 but remained hidden in secret archives until the late 1990s. Never intended for publication or wide distribution, these records (known as stenograms in Russia) reveal the actual process of decision making at the highest levels of the Soviet communist party. The transcripts also provide new, firsthand records of the rise of Stalin's dictatorship. The contributors to the book explore the power struggles among the Politburo members, their methods of discourse and propaganda, and their economic policies. Taken as a whole, the chapters shed light on early Soviet history and on the individuals who supported or opposed Stalin's consolidation of power.Less