New Studies in European History

Series · 27

books · 1999-2019

By Jan de Graaf, Mack P. Holt, Eva Giloi, and more

Books in series

#10

Converting Bohemia

Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation

2009

Prior to the Thirty Years War, almost all of Bohemia's population lay outside the Catholic fold, yet by the beginning of the eighteenth century the kingdom was clearly under Rome's influence. Few regions in Europe's history have ever experienced such a complete religious transformation; because of this, Bohemia offers a unique window for examining the Counter-Reformation and the nature of early modern Catholicism. Converting Bohemia presents a full assessment of the Catholic Church's re-establishment in the Czech lands, arguing that this complex phenomenon was less a product of violence and force than of negotiation and persuasion. Ranging from art, architecture and literature to music, philosophy and hagiography, Howard Louthan's study reintegrates the region into the broader European world where it played such a prominent role in the early modern period. It will be of particular interest to scholars of early modern European history, religion, and Reformation studies.

#14

The Rise of Heritage

Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789–1914

2013

Where does our fascination for 'heritage' originate? This groundbreaking comparative study of preservation in France, Germany and England looks beyond national borders to reveal how the idea of heritage emerged from intense competition and collaboration in a global context. Astrid Swenson follows the 'heritage-makers' from the French Revolution to the First World War, revealing the importance of global networks driving developments in each country. Drawing on documentary, literary and visual sources, the book connects high politics and daily life and uncovers how, through travel, correspondence, world fairs and international congresses, the preservationists exchanged ideas, helped each other campaign and dreamed of establishing international institutions for the protection of heritage. Yet, these heritage-makers were also animated by fierce rivalry as international tension grew. This mixture of international collaboration and competition created the European culture of heritage, which defined preservation as integral to modernity, and still shapes current institutions and debates.

#15

Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy

The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661-1790

1999

This is the first book in English to study the history of the Estates General of Burgundy during the classic period of absolute monarchy. Although not a representative institution in any modern sense, the Estates were constantly engaged in a process of bargaining with the French crown, and this book examines that relationship under the ancien regime. Julian Swann analyses the organisation, membership and powers of the Estates and explores their administration, their struggles for power with rival institutions and their relationship with the crown and with the Burgundian people. The Estates proved remarkably resilient when confronted by the challenges posed by the Bourbon monarchy, and by the reign of Louis XVI they were seemingly more powerful than ever. However the desire to protect their privileges and to extend their authority had not been accompanied by an attempt to forge a meaningful relationship with the people they claimed to serve.

#22

Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950

2011

This innovative book illuminates popular attitudes toward political authority and monarchy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Prussia, and twentieth-century Germany. In a fascinating study of how subjects incorporated the material culture of monarchy into their daily lives, Eva Giloi provides insights into German mentalities toward sovereign power. She examines how ordinary people collected and consumed relics and other royal memorabilia, and used these objects to articulate, validate, appropriate, or reject the state's political myths. The book reveals that the social practices that guided the circulation of material culture – under what circumstances it was acceptable to buy and sell the queen's underwear, for instance – expose popular assumptions about the Crown that were often left unspoken. The book sets loyalism in the everyday context of consumerism and commodification, changes in visual culture and technology, and the emergence of mass media and celebrity culture, to uncover a self-possessed, assertive German middle class.

#23

Making the Soviet Intelligentsia

Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev

2013

Making the Soviet Intelligentsia explores the formation of educated elites in Russian and Ukrainian universities during the early Cold War. In the postwar period, universities emerged as training grounds for the military-industrial complex, showcases of Soviet cultural and economic accomplishments and valued tools in international cultural diplomacy. However, these fêted Soviet institutions also generated conflicts about the place of intellectuals and higher learning under socialism. Disruptive party initiatives in higher education - from the xenophobia and anti-Semitic campaigns of late Stalinism to the rewriting of history and the opening of the USSR to the outside world under Khrushchev - encouraged students and professors to interpret their commitments as intellectuals in the Soviet system in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. In the process, the social construct of intelligentsia took on divisive social, political and national meanings for educated society in the postwar Soviet state.

#24

Paris and the Spirit of 1919

Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism and Revolution

2012

This transnational history of Paris in 1919 explores the global implications of the revolutionary crisis of French society at the end of World War I. As the site of the Peace Conference, Paris was a victorious capital and a city at the centre of the world, and Tyler Stovall explores these intersections of globalisation and local revolution. The book takes as its central point the eruption of political activism in 1919, using the events of that year to illustrate broader tensions in working class, race and gender politics in Parisian, French and ultimately global society which fuelled debates about colonial subjects and the empire. Viewing consumerism and consumer politics as key both to the revolutionary crisis and to new ideas about working class identity, and arguing against the idea that consumerism depoliticised working people, this history of local labor movements is a study in the making of the modern world.

#36

Individuality and Modernity in Berlin

Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall

2012

Moritz Föllmer traces the history of individuality in Berlin from the late 1920s to the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The demand to be recognised as an individual was central to metropolitan society, as were the spectres of risk, isolation and loss of agency. This was true under all five regimes of the period, through economic depression, war, occupation and reconstruction. The quest for individuality could put democracy under pressure, as in the Weimar years, and could be satisfied by a dictatorship, as was the case in the Third Reich. It was only in the course of the 1950s, when liberal democracy was able to offer superior opportunities for consumerism, that individuality finally claimed the mantle. Individuality and Modernity in Berlin proposes a fresh perspective on twentieth-century Berlin that will engage readers with an interest in the German metropolis as well as European urban history more broadly.

#37

Germans to Poles

Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War

2013

At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to 'cleanse' these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as 'native Poles' and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.

#38

West Germany and the Global Sixties

2013

The anti-authoritarian revolt of the 1960s and 1970s was a watershed in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The rebellion of the so-called '68ers' - against cultural conformity and the ideological imperatives of the Cold War; against the American war in Vietnam; in favor of a more open accounting for the crimes of the Nazi era - helped to inspire a dialogue on democratization with profound effects on German society. Timothy Scott Brown examines the unique synthesis of globalizing influences on West Germany to reveal how the presence of Third World students, imported pop culture from America and England and the influence of new political doctrines worldwide all helped to precipitate the revolt. The book explains how the events in West Germany grew out of a new interplay of radical politics and popular culture, even as they drew on principles of direct-democracy, self-organization and self-determination, all still highly relevant in the present day.

#40

Beyond Violence

Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48

2014

This book tells a story of Polish and Slovak Holocaust survivors returning to homes that no longer existed in the aftermath of the Second World War. It focuses on their daily efforts to rebuild their lives in the radically changed political and social landscape of post-war Eastern Europe. Such an analysis shifts the perspective from post-war violence and emigration to post-war reconstruction. Using a comparative approach, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj discusses survivors' journeys home, their struggles to retain citizenship and repossess property, their coping with antisemitism, and their efforts to return to 'normality'. She emphasizes the everyday communal and personal experiences of survivors in the context of their relationships with non-Jews. In essence, by focusing on the daily efforts of Polish and Slovak Jews to rebuild their lives, the author investigates the limits of belonging in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust.

#41

Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France

Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870–1910

2014

This is an innovative study of how race and empire transformed French republican citizenship in the early Third Republic. Elizabeth Heath integrates the histories of the wine-producing department of Aude and the sugar-producing colony of Guadeloupe to reveal the ways in which empire was integral to the Third Republic's ability to stabilize a republican regime that began to unravel in an age of economic globalization. She shows how global economic factors shaped negotiations between local citizens and the Third Republic over the responsibilities of the Republic to its citizens leading to the creation of two different and unequal forms of citizenship that became constitutive of the interwar imperial nation-state and the French welfare state. Her findings shed important new light on the tensions within republicanism between ideals of liberty and equality and on the construction of race as a meaningful social category at a foundational moment in French history.

#42

Export Empire

German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945

2015

German imperialism in Europe evokes images of military aggression and ethnic cleansing. Yet, even under the Third Reich, Germans deployed more subtle forms of influence that can be called soft power or informal imperialism. Stephen G. Gross examines how, between 1918 and 1941, German businessmen and academics turned their nation - an economic wreck after World War I - into the single largest trading partner with the Balkan states, their primary source for development aid and their diplomatic patron. Building on traditions from the 1890s and working through transnational trade fairs, chambers of commerce, educational exchange programmes and development projects, Germans collaborated with Croatians, Serbians and Romanians to create a continental bloc, and to exclude Jews from commerce. By gaining access to critical resources during a global depression, the proponents of soft power enabled Hitler to militarise the German economy and helped make the Third Reich's territorial conquests after 1939 economically possible.

#43

European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957

2016

Who thought of Europe as a community before its economic integration in 1957? Dina Gusejnova illustrates how a supranational European mentality was forged from depleted imperial identities. In the revolutions of 1917 to 1920, the power of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanoff dynasties over their subjects expired. Even though Germany lost its credit as a world power twice in that century, in the global cultural memory, the old Germanic families remained associated with the idea of Europe in areas reaching from Mexico to the Baltic region and India. Gusejnova's book sheds light on a group of German-speaking intellectuals of aristocratic origin who became pioneers of Europe's future regeneration. In the minds of transnational elites, the continent's future horizons retained the contours of phantom empires. This title is available as Open Access.

#44

West Germany, Cold War Europe and the Algerian War

2016

An illuminating and provocative account of Germany's role as sanctuary for Algerian nationalists during their fight for independence from France between 1954 and 1962. The book explores key issues such as the impact of external sanctuaries on French counterinsurgency efforts; the part played by security and intelligence services in efforts to eliminate these sanctuaries; the Algerian War's influence on West German foreign and security policy; and finally, the emergence of West German civic engagement in support of Algeria's independence struggle, which served to shape the newly independent country's perception of its role and place in international society. Mathilde Von Bulow sheds new light on the impact of FLN activities, the role of anti-colonial movements and insurgencies in the developing world in shaping the dynamics of the Cold War, as well as the manner in which the Algerian War was fought and won.

#45

Russia and Courtly Europe

Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725

2016

In this book on early modern diplomacy, Jan Hennings explores the relationship between European powers and Russia beyond the conventional East-West divide from the Peace of Westphalia to the reign of Peter the Great. He examines how, at a moment of new departure in both Europe and Russia, the norms shaping diplomatic practice emerged from the complex relations and direct encounters within the world of princely courts rather than from incompatible political cultures. He makes clear the connections between dynastic representation, politics and foreign relations, and shows that Russia, despite its perceived isolation and cultural distinctiveness, participated in the developments and transformations that were taking place more broadly in diplomacy. The central themes of this study are the interlocking manifestations of social hierarchy, monarchical honour and sovereign status in both text and ritual. Related issues of diplomatic customs, institutional structures, personnel, negotiation practice, international law, and the question of cultural transfer also figure prominently.

#46

Greening Democracy

The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983

2017

Greening Democracy explains how nuclear energy became a seminal political issue and motivated new democratic engagement in West Germany during the 1970s. Using interviews, as well as the archives of environmental organizations and the Green party, the book traces the development of anti-nuclear protest from the grassroots to parliaments. It argues that worries about specific nuclear reactors became the basis for a widespread anti-nuclear movement only after government officials' unrelenting support for nuclear energy caused reactor opponents to become concerned about the state of their democracy. Surprisingly, many citizens thought transnationally, looking abroad for protest strategies, cooperating with activists in other countries, and conceiving of 'Europe' as a potential means of circumventing recalcitrant officials. At this nexus between local action and global thinking, anti-nuclear protest became the basis for citizens' increasing engagement in self-governance, expanding their conception of democracy well beyond electoral politics and helping to make quotidian personal concerns political.

#47

Making Prussians, Raising Germans

A Cultural History of Prussian State-Building after Civil War, 1866–1935

2017

Reframing the German War of 1866 as a civil war, Making Prussians, Raising Germans offers a new understanding of critical aspects of Prussian state-building and German nation-building in the nineteenth century, and investigates the long-term ramifications of civil war in emerging nations. Drawing transnational comparisons with Switzerland, Italy and the United States, it asks why compatriots were driven to take up arms against each other and what the underlying conflicts reveal about the course of German state-building. By addressing key areas of patriotic activity such as the military, cultural memory, the media, the mass education system, female charity and political culture, this book elucidates the ways in which political violence was either contained in or expressed through centre-periphery interactions. Although the culmination of Prusso-German state-building in the Nazi dictatorship represented an exceptionally destructive outcome, the solutions developed previously established Prussian-led Germany as one of the most successful states in recovering from civil war.

#48

The Woman Question in France, 1400-1870

2017

This is a revolutionary reinterpretation of the French past from the early fifteenth century to the establishment of the Third Republic, focused on public challenges and defenses of masculine hierarchy in relations between women and men. Karen Offen surveys heated exchanges around women's 'influence'; their exclusion from 'authority'; the increasing prominence of biomedical thinking and population issues; concerns about education, intellect, and the sexual politics of knowledge; and the politics of women's work. Initially, the majority of commentators were literate and influential men. However, as more and more women attained literacy, they too began to analyze their situation in print and to contest men's claims about who women were and should be, and what they should be restrained from doing, and why. As urban print culture exploded and revolutionary ideas of 'equality' fuelled women's claims for emancipation, this question resonated throughout francophone Europe and, ultimately, across the seas.

#50

Mussolini's Nation-Empire

Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922–1943

2017

Roberta Pergher transforms our understanding of Fascist rule. Examining Fascist Italy's efforts to control the antipodes of its realm - the regions annexed in northern Italy after the First World War, and Italy's North African colonies - she shows how the regime struggled to imagine and implement Italian sovereignty over alien territories and peoples. Contrary to the claims of existing scholarship, Fascist settlement policy in these regions was not designed to solve an overpopulation problem, but to bolster Italian claims to rule in an era that prized self-determination and no longer saw imperial claims as self-evident. Professor Pergher explores the character and impact of Fascist settlement policy and the degree to which ordinary Italians participated in and challenged the regime's efforts to Italianize contested territory. Employing models and concepts from the historiography of empire, she shows how Fascist Italy rethought the boundaries between national and imperial rule.

#51

Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920

2017

Karen Offen offers a magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the debates around relations between women and men, how they are constructed, and how they should be organized, that raged in France and its French-speaking neighbors from 1870 to 1920. The 'woman question' encompassed subjects from maternity and childbirth, and the upbringing and education of girls to marriage practices and property law, the organization of households, the distribution of work inside and outside the household, intimate sexual relations, religious beliefs and moral concerns, government-sanctioned prostitution, economic and political citizenship, and the politics of population growth. The book shows how the expansion of economic opportunities for women and the drop in the birth rate further exacerbated the debates over their status, roles, and possibilities. With the onset of the First World War, these debates were temporarily placed on hold, but they would be revived by 1916 and gain momentum during France's post-war recovery.

#52

Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation

Fragile Loyalties in World War II

2018

In this compelling account of life and death in a Russian province under Nazi occupation, Johannes Due Enstad challenges received wisdom about Russian patriotism during World War II. With the benefit of hindsight, we know how hopelessly destructive Germany's war against the Soviet Union was. Yet ordinary Russians witnessing the advancing German forces saw things differently. For many of them, having lived through collectivization and Stalinist terror in the 1930s, the invasion created hopes of a better life without the Bolsheviks. German policies on land and church helped sustain those hopes for parts of the population. Drawing on Soviet and German archival sources as well as eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Enstad demonstrates the impact of Nazi rule on the mostly peasant population of northwest Russia and offers a reconsideration of the relationship between the Soviet regime and its core Russian population at this crucial moment in their history.

#53

The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France

Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477–1630

2018

In the late fifteenth century, Burgundy was incorporated in the kingdom of France. This, coupled with the advent of Protestantism in the early sixteenth century, opened up new avenues for participation in public life by ordinary Burgundians and led to considerably greater interaction between the elites and the ordinary people. Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes from Burgundy's re-incorporation into France in 1477 until the Lanturelu riot in Dijon in 1630, focusing on the local wine industry. Indeed, the vineyard workers were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the province until 1630 when, following royal attempts to reduce the level of popular participation in public affairs, Louis XIII tried to remove them from the city altogether. More than just a local study, this book shows how the popular classes often worked together with local elites to shape policies that affected them.

#54

The Emotional Politics of the Alternative Left

West Germany, 1968–1984

2018

In the 1970s, a multifaceted alternative scene developed in West Germany. At the core of this leftist scene was a struggle for feelings in a capitalist world that seemed to be devoid of any emotions. Joachim C. Häberlen offers here a vivid account of these emotional politics. The book discusses critiques of rationality and celebrations of insanity as an alternative. It explores why capitalism made people feel afraid and modern cities made people feel lonely. Readers are taken to consciousness raising groups, nude swimming at alternative vacation camps, and into the squatted houses of the early 1980s. Häberlen draws on a kaleidoscope of different voices to explore how West Germans became more concerned with their selves, their feelings, and their bodies. By investigating how leftists tried to transform themselves through emotional practices, Häberlen gives us a fresh perspective on a fascinating aspect of West German history.

#55

Socialism across the Iron Curtain

Socialist Parties in East and West and the Reconstruction of Europe after 1945

2019

This innovative pan-European history of post-war socialism challenges the East-West paradigm that still dominates accounts of post-war Europe. Jan De Graaf offers a comparative study of the ways in which the French, Italian and Polish socialist parties and the Czechoslovakian Social Democratic Party dealt with the problems of socio-economic and political reconstruction. Drawing on archival documents in seven languages, De Graaf reveals the profound divide which existed in all four countries between socialist elites and their grassroots as workers reacted hostilely to calls for industrial discipline and for further sacrifices towards the reconstruction effort. He also provides a fresh interpretation of the political weaknesses of socialist parties in post-war continental Europe by stressing the importance of political history and social structure. By placing the attitudes of the continental socialist parties in their proper socio-historical context he highlights the many similarities across and divergences within the two putative blocs.

#56

Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire

France in the Americas and Africa, c.1750–1802

2019

Exploring the myriad efforts to strengthen colonial empire that unfolded in response to France's imperial crisis in the second half of the eighteenth century, Pernille Røge examines how political economists, colonial administrators, planters, and entrepreneurs shaped the recalibration of empire in the Americas and in Africa alongside the intensification of the French Caribbean plantation complex. Emphasising the intellectual contributions of the Economistes (also known as the Physiocrats) to formulate a new colonial doctrine, the book highlights the advent of an imperial discourse of commercial liberalisation, free labour, agricultural development, and civilisation. With her careful documentation of the reciprocal impacts of economic ideas, colonial policy and practices, Røge also details key connections between Ancien Régime colonial innovation and the French Revolution's republican imperial agenda. The result is a novel perspective on the struggles to reinvent colonial empire in the final decades of the Ancien Régime and its influences on the French Revolution and beyond.

#57

1789

The French Revolution Begins

2018

The French Revolution marks the beginning of modern politics. Using a diverse range of sources, Robert H. Blackman reconstructs key constitutional debates, from the initial convocation of the Estates General in Versailles in May 1789, to the National Assembly placing the wealth of the Catholic Church at the disposal of the nation that November, revealing their nuances through close readings of participant and witness accounts. This comprehensive and accessible study analyses the most important debates and events through which the French National Assembly became a sovereign body, and explores the process by which the massive political transformation of the French Revolution took place. Blackman's narrative-driven approach creates a new path through the complex politics of the early French Revolution, mapping the changes that took place and revealing how a new political order was created during the chaotic first months of the Revolution.

#58

A People's Music

Jazz in East Germany, 1945-1990

2019

A People's Music presents the first full history of jazz in East Germany, drawing on new and previously unexamined sources and vivid eyewitness accounts. Helma Kaldewey chronicles the experiences of jazz musicians, fans, and advocates, and charts the numerous policies state socialism issued to manage this dynamic art form. Offering a radical revision of scholarly views of jazz as a musical genre of dissent, this vivid and authoritative study marks developments in the production, performance, and reception of jazz decade by decade, from the GDR's beginning in the 1940s to its end in 1990, examining how members of the jazz scene were engaged with (and were sometimes complicit with) state officials and agencies throughout the Cold War. From postwar rebuilding, to Stalinism and partition, to d�tente, Ostpolitik, and glasnost, and finally to its acceptance as a national art form, Kaldewey reveals just how many lives jazz has lived.

Authors

Mack P. Holt is Professor of History and received his Ph.D in History from Emory University in 1982. Before coming to George Mason in 1989 he taught at Harvard and Vanderbilt universities. From 1998 to 2002 he was also Director of the Honors Program in General Education, and he served as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies from 2004 to 2010.

Stephen G. Gross is jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU. After working for several years as an economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington DC, he completed his PhD at UC Berkeley where he subsequently lectured with the International and Area Studies Program. In his research and teaching Dr. Gross is interested in 20th century Germany, European unification, European and international political economy, energy policy, and international relations. His first book, Export Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2015. He has also published on a variety of economic themes in German and European history in Central European History, Contemporary European History, German Politics and Society, and Eastern European Politics and Society, as well as in various book chapters. Dr. Gross' first book project—Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945—explores the relationship between imperialism, economic development, and cultural exchange from the perspective of non-state actors such as trade fairs, research institutes, and professional exchange programs. It traces how German business leaders and academics established commercial hegemony in Southeastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Where scholars have used the concept of soft power to describe the foreign policy of liberal states, he concludes that authoritarian Nazi Germany was also able to exercise its own type of soft power, so long as its private institutions retained the space to operate in the interstices of state power. Where his first monograph explores the commercial power that supported Hitler’s racist imperial ambitions, his second book project will trace how, after 1945, Germany crafted an energy policy that suited a nation heavily dependent on foreign oil and foreign multi-national corporations, and that ultimately enabled Germany to become a leader in renewable energies and energy savings technologies. German Energy Policy in the Age of Oil and Atoms, 1945–2010, as the book is tentatively titled, will explore the political economy of energy crises and transition, tracing how this oil-poor yet highly industrial state managed the transition from coal, to oil, to more renewable fuels, how it negotiated the many intense political and social tensions that came with this transition, and how it inaugurated what is now called the German Energiewende, or revolution to Green energy. By combining an exploration of the material interests involved in the energy sector with newly emerging ideas and scientific paradigms that justified renewable energies, the project aims to provide a more complete understanding of current energy policies in Germany and Europe.

Karen Offen (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a historian and independent scholar affiliated as a Senior Scholar with the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University in California. She publishes on the history of Modern Europe, especially France and its global influence; Western thought and politics with reference to family, gender, and the relative status of women; historiography; women's history; the national, regional and global histories of feminism; and comparative history.