Across Russia's easternmost shores and through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how, over 150 years, people turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power. Beginning in the 1840s, capitalism and then communism, with their ideas of progress, transformed the area around the Bering Strait into a historical experiment in remaking ecosystems. Rendered even more urgent in a warming climate, Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the impact that human needs and ambitions have brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet. * Shortlisted for the The Pushkin House Book Prize 2020.

Amanda Glauert revisits Beethoven's songs and studies his profound engagement with the aesthetics of the poets he was setting, particularly those of Herder and Goethe. The book offers readers a rich exploration of the poetical and philosophical context in which Beethoven found himself when composing songs. It also offers detailed commentaries on possible responses to specific songs, responses designed to open up new ways for performing, hearing and appreciating this provocative song repertoire. This study will be of great interest to researchers of Beethoven; German song; aesthetics of words and music.

During the last few decades there has been a growing recognition of the great role that remembering and collective memory play in forming the historical awareness. In addition, the dominant national form of history writing also met some challenges on the side of a transnational approach to the past. In A Nation Divided by History and Memory, a prominent Hungarian historian sheds light on how Hungary's historical image has become split as a consequence of the differences between the historian's conceptualisation of national history and its diverse representations in personal and collective memory. The book focuses on the shocking experiences and the intense memorial reactions generated by a few key historical events and the way in which they have been interpreted by the historical scholarship. The argument of A Nation Divided by History and Memory is placed into the context of an international historical discourse. This pioneering work is essential and enlightening reading for all historians, many sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists and university students.

A widely celebrated intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Anson Rabinbach is one of the most important scholars of National Socialism working over the last forty years. This volume collects, for the first time, his pathbreaking work on Nazi culture, antifascism, and the after-effects of Nazism on postwar German and European culture. Historically detailed and theoretically sophisticated, his essays span the aesthetics of production, messianic and popular claims, the ethos that Nazism demanded of its adherents, the brilliant and sometimes successful efforts of antifascist intellectuals to counter Hitler's rise, the most significant concepts to emerge out of the 1930s and 1940s for understanding European authoritarianism, the major controversies around Nazism that took place after the regime's demise, the philosophical claims of postwar philosophers, sociologists and psychoanalysts-from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt and from Alexander Kluge to Klaus Theweleit-and the role of Auschwitz in European history.

Drawing on an impressive range of archival material, this monograph delves into the careers of two businessmen who worked for Nordic chartered monopoly trading companies to illuminate individual entrepreneurship in the context of seventeenth-century long-distance trade. The study spans the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, examining global entanglements through personal interactions and daily trading activities between Europeans, Asian merchants and African brokers. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of individuals and their networks within the great European trading companies of the early modern period. This unique book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of economic history, business history, early modern global history and entrepreneurship.

Early Medieval Venice examines the significant changes that Venice underwent between the late-sixth and the early-eleventh centuries. From the periphery of the Byzantine Empire, Venice acquired complete independence and emerged as the major power in the Adriatic area. It also avoided absorption by neighbouring rulers, prevented serious destruction by raiders, and achieved a stable state organization, all the while progressively extending its trading activities to most of northern Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. This was not a linear process, but the Venetians obtained and defended these results with great tenacity, creating the foundations for the remarkable developments of the following centuries. This book presents the most relevant themes that characterized Venice during this epoch, including war, violence, and the manner in which 'others' were perceived. It examines how early medieval authors and modern scholars have portrayed this period, and how they were sometimes influenced by their own 'present' in their reconstruction of the past.

Originally published in 1987, this book explores the emergence, structure and ultimate fate of the Viennese Jewish community. Thirteen eminent specialists on Viennese social, political and cultural history combine to cover a wide variety of topics, including the social and psychological causes of the highly successful and intellectually creative position held by the Jewish community as a minority within the larger Viennese society. They also analyse the conservative politics of the pre-1914 Jewish community, and their relationship both to Zionism and to Austro-Marxism. The book also traces the continuities with the past in interwar Austria and analyse the stages leading to the expulsion, expropriation and annihilation of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Austria. The book concludes with an examination of post-Holocaust antisemitism in Vienna.

The second edition of this book frames the Holocaust as a catastrophe emerging from varied international responses to the Jewish question during an age of global crisis and war. The chapters are arranged chronologically, thematically, and geographically, reflecting how persecution, responses, and experience varied over time and place, conveying a sense of the Holocaust's complexity. Fully updated, this edition incorporates the past decade's scholarship concerning perpetrators, victims, and bystanders from political, national, and gendered perspectives. It also frames the Holocaust within the broader genocide perspective and within current debates on memory politics and causation. Global in approach and supported by images, maps, diverse voices, and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal textbook for students of this catastrophic period in world history.

This book is the first account of British Protestant conversion initiatives directed towards continental Europe between 1600 and 1900. Continental Europe was considered a missionary land-another periphery of the world, whose centre was imperial Britain. British missions to Europe were informed by religious experiments in America, Africa, and Asia, rendering these offensives against Europe a true form of "imaginary colonialism". British Protestant missionaries often understood themselves to be at the forefront of a civilising project directed at Catholics (and sometimes even at other Protestants). Their mission was further reinforced by Britain becoming a land of compassionate refuge for European dissenters and exiles. This book engages with the myth of International Protestantism, questioning its early origins and its narrative of transnational belonging, while also interrogating Britain as an imagined Protestant land of hope and glory. In the history of western Christianities, "converting Europe" had a role that has not been adequately investigated. This is the story of the attempted, and ultimately failed, effort to convert a continent.

This book brings together the large volume of work on late Tsarist Russia published over the last 30 years, to show an overall picture of Russia under the last two tsars - before the war brought down not only the Russian empire but also those of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. It turns the attention from the old emphases on workers, revolutionaries, and a reactionary government, to a more diverse and nuanced picture of a country which was both a major European great power, facing the challenges of modernization and industrialization, and also a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empire stretching across both Europe and Asia.

Heresy and Citizenship examines the anti-heretical campaigns in late-medieval Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Strasbourg, and other cities. By focusing on the unprecedented period of persecution between 1390 and 1404, this study demonstrates how heretical presence in cities was exploited in ecclesiastical, political, and social conflicts between the cities and their external rivals, and between urban elites. These anti-heretical campaigns targeted Waldensians who believed in lay preaching and simplified forms of Christian worship. Groups of individuals identified as Waldensians underwent public penance, execution, or expulsion. In each case, the course and outcome of inquisitions reveal tensions between institutions within each city, most often between city councils and local bishops or archbishops. In such cases, competing sides used the persecution of heresy to assert their authority over others. As a result, persecution of urban Waldensians acquired meaning beyond mere correction of religious error. By placing the anti-heretical campaigns of this period in their socio-political and religious context, Heresy and Citizenship also engages with studies of social and political conflict in late medieval towns. It examines the role the exclusion of religiously and socially deviant groups played in the development of urban governments, and the rise of ideologies of good citizenship and the common good. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in medieval urban and religious history, and the history of heresy and its persecution.

This collection of state-of-the-art essays explores conspiracy cultures in post-socialist Eastern Europe, ranging from the nineteenth century to contemporary manifestations. Conspiracy theories about Freemasons, Communists and Jews, about the Chernobyl disaster, and about George Soros and the globalist elite have been particularly influential in Eastern Europe, but they have also been among the most prominent worldwide. This volume explores such conspiracy theories in the context of local Eastern European histories and discourses. The chapters identify four major factors that have influenced cultures of conspiracy in Eastern Europe: nationalism (including ethnocentrism and antisemitism), the socialist past, the transition period, and globalization. The research focuses on the impact of imperial legacies, nation-building, and the Cold War in the creation of conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe; the effects of the fall of the Iron Curtain and conspiracism in a new democratic setting; and manifestations of viral conspiracy theories in contemporary Eastern Europe and their worldwide circulation with the global rise of populism. Bringing together a diverse landscape of Eastern European conspiracism that is a result of repeated exchange with the "West," the book includes case studies that examine the history, legacy, and impact of conspiracy cultures of Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, the former Yugoslav countries, and the former Soviet Union. The book will appeal to scholars and students of conspiracy theories, as well as those in the areas of political science, area studies, media studies, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, and history, among others. Politicians, educators, and journalists will find this book a useful resource in countering disinformation in and about the region.

Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this volume offers the first set of focused and critical commentaries on this classic work of social theory, evaluating its ongoing contribution to scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Addressing the core messages of Modernity and the Holocaust that continue to sound amidst the convulsions of the present, the chapters situate Bauman's volume in the social, cultural and academic context of its genesis, and considers its role in the complex processes of Holocaust memorialisation. Offering extensions of Bauman's thesis to lesser-known and undertheorised events of mass violence, and also considering the significance of Janina Bauman's writings in their own right, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, intellectual history, Holocaust and genocide studies, moral philosophy, memory studies and cultural theory.

This book addresses practices of bordering, debordering and rebordering on the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy after state borders had been remapped on the negotiation tables of the Paris Peace Treaties following the First World War. As life in borderlands did not correspond to the peaceful Europe articulated in the Paris Treaties, a multitude of (un)foreseen complications followed the drawing of borders and states. The chapters in this book include new case studies on the creation, centralization or peripheralization of border regions, such as Subcarpathian Rus, Vojvodina, Banat and the Carpathian Mountains; on border zones such as the Czechoslovakian harbour in Germany; and on cross-border activities. The book shows how disputes over national identities and ethnic minorities, as well as other factors such as the economic consequences of the new state borders, appeared on the interwar political agenda and coloured the lives of borderland inhabitants. The contributions demonstrate the practices of borderland inhabitants in the establishment, functioning, disorganization or ultimate breakdown of some of the newly created interwar nation-states. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, European Review of History.

This book provides a comparative view as well as elaborate case studies for scholars, students, and the public who are interested in learning about how the social sciences and history contribute to our understanding of integration, migrations, and religious coexistence / This book will appeal to all those interested in religious minorities in Early Modern Europe / This book investigates the tensions these groups experienced.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the linguistic situation in Europe was one of remarkable fluidity. Latin, the great scholarly lingua franca of the medieval period, was beginning to crack as the tectonic plates shifted beneath it, but the vernaculars had not yet crystallized into the national languages that they would later become, and multilingualism was rife. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, languages were coming into contact with an intensity that they had never had before, influencing each other and throwing up all manner of hybrids and pidgins as peoples tried to communicate using the semiotic resources they had available. Of interest to linguists, literary scholars and historians, amongst others, this interdisciplinary volume explores the linguistic dynamics operating in Europe and beyond in the crucial centuries between 1400 and 1800. Assuming a state of individual, societal and functional multilingualism, when codeswitching was the norm, and languages themselves were fluid, unbounded and porous, it explores the shifting relationships that existed between various tongues in different geographical contexts, as well as some of the myths and theories that arose to make sense of them.

This new Seminar Study provides students with a rewarding introduction to nineteenth-century Russia. This period of Russian history is, of course, characterised by the flowering of an enormously rich intellectual and cultural life, the origins of which lie in the intelligentsiaA?s opposition to autocratic rule. Here, Professor Offord introduces the reader to the period while focusing particularly on the rise of radicalism. The book opens with two scene-setting chapters: one looking at the political and social structure peculiar to Russia, and the second looking at the cultural and intellectual background. Then, within a chronological framework, the author examines all the great 'events' in the history of Russian radicalism - from the Decembrist Revolt in 1825, to the 'going to the people' in 1874, and the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. However, throughout the text sustained attention is given to the intellectual dimension of nineteenth-century Russian history. Professor Offord examines all the major schools of thought and looks in detail at all the great thinkers of the day, including Chaadaev, Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Bakunin and Tolstoy. This new book will provide essential reading for anyone studying nineteenth-century Russia. Lucid, accessible and immensely readable, it is a formidable achievement.

Historian Michael Enright provides a close-up account of Australian servicemen on the Western Front during WWI. Using many previously unpublished, first-hand materials, the author provides a fresh look at the Great War through the eyes of ordinary servicemen. The scene is set with a brief account of events at Gallipoli, the place where the Australians gained their reputation as fierce fighters, and then the author discusses the reformation of the ANZAC divisions in Egypt and their subsequent movement to France. This leads to previously unpublished personal accounts that give new interpretations of the key battles on the Western Front at Fromelles, Somme, Bullecourt, Messines, Passchendaele, and Villers-Bretonneux, amongst others. Many of these accounts support the particular bravery of the Australian soldier. This work provides a reassessment of the ANZAC legend and mythology based on the personal diaries and memoirs of those who were there.

The book is divided into ecclesiastical, legal, letters, chronicles, biography, conduct books, literary and medical writings to enable students to find sources relevant for their courses by theme. The sources range from well-known texts such as the letters of Abelard and Heloise, Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales to less familiar sources such as Hincmar of Rheims, Gratian, Peter Damian and Gregory IX, Ibn Hazm's The Ring of the Dove and Boccaccio's De mulieribus Claris. Providing students with a range of examples to use in their seminars and essays. This second edition has been revised throughout to include the literature published since the first edition and expanded to include additional material from European, Jewish and Muslim sources as well as additional material on same-sex relations such as the same-sex marriage rituals. Providing students with the latest debates and sources appropriate for how the field has progressed to inspire them in taking the field forward themselves.

This book tells the story of how the "servile arts" turned into the "mechanical arts," which in turn developed into a kind of philosophical apparatus that made modern science possible. Why did the scientific revolution take place in the West and not in China or the Islamic world? How did humanity's progress in science and technology, which had been moving along at a relatively steady pace for tens of thousands of years, end up taking such an unprecedented leap? Subjecting the history of thought and technology to a novel interpretation based on the relationship between theory and practice, Ahmet Selami Caliskan argues that the industrial revolution and modern science-and the scientific revolution that preceded both-did not alone suffice to sort out the philosophical problems of their day or to produce the institutions of the modern age. Both required a new sort of human: Homo economicus faber. Tracing the historical emergence of this figure and its persistence in our own age, this book offers an innovative and holistic assessment of the economic, cultural and political effects of centuries of interaction between East and West and their repercussions in our world today.

The Exorcist of Sombor examines the life course, practice and mentality of an eighteenth-century Franciscan friar, based on his own letters and documentation, creating a frame around the tightly packed history of events that took place between 1766-1769, and analysing the series of exorcism scandals that erupted in the Hungarian town of Sombor, from the perspectives of social history and cultural history. The author employs a method which reflects historical anthropology, the history of ideas and the influence of Italian microhistory. Based on the activity of an exorcist priest in the early modern period, the documents of the ecclesiastical courts and a considerable body of autograph correspondence are thoroughly examined. Analysing these letters gives the reader a chance to come into close proximity with the way of thinking of a person from the eighteenth century. The research questions in connection to the documentation aim to identify the causes for the conflict. How was it possible to have "correct" and "wrong" methods of exorcism within the practice of one and the same church? What sort of criteria were used when certain previously accepted practices were dubbed superstitious in the second half of the eighteenth century? What were the changes that took place in the attitude of priests and friars within the ecclesiastical society of the period? How can a conflict be focussed on a practice (healing by exorcism) which has roots going back thousands of years? How many different variants of demonology existed in the clerical thinking of the age? As a highly accomplished source analysis within microhistory, The Exorcist of Sombor will be of great interest to early modern historians, anthropologists and culture researchers interested in microhistory and themes such as religion, magic, occultism and witchcraft.

A unique and vivid first hand account of a young soldier, one of the millions who fought in World War I. Walter Williams volunteered at age fifteen and after completing his initial training in Shrewsbury, passed through the notorious training camp at Etaples before being plunged into the horrors of trench warfare. He fought in some of the major battles of the war including Passchendaele, the Somme and Vimy Ridge - and was badly wounded during the final attack on the Hindenburg line in September 1918, when he was hit by machine-gun fire from an enemy plane. After spending some months in a French hospital in Dieppe, he was repatriated to England where he made a full recovery. Walter's story was captured on an ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder during long conversations with his two nephews, Michael and Derek, who went on to research and verify the events he described before producing this remarkable story. Walter died in 1998, by which time he was one of the last veterans of World War I.

Russians from all walks of life poured into the streets of the imperial capital after the February Revolution of 1917, joyously celebrating the end of Tsar Nicholas II's monarchy. One year later, with Lenin's Bolsheviks now in power, Petrograd's deserted streets presented a very different scene. No celebrations marked the Revolution's anniversary. Amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight. In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia's revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II's abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar's regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers. The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as "counterrevolutionary activity," to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.