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Books > History > European history
This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about
relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands
separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most
scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative
peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark
Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish
beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He
argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava's coordinated
campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the
Spanish military's efforts to contain Apache aggression,
constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in
northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the
antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting. This
conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had
succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache
groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace,
annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the
loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to
which Mescaleros residing in ""peace establishments"" outside
Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del
Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting
Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal
efficiency as a result of Spain's imperial entanglements. He
examines Nava's yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his
divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the
Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier,
preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin. Santiago
concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly
negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war's
legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and
the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches
in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority.
In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez, the Spaniards had
technically won a ""good war"" against the Mescaleros and went on
to manage a ""bad peace.
For the Honor of Our Fatherland: German Jews on the Eastern Front
during the Great War focuses on the German Jews' role in
reconstructing Poland's war-ravaged countryside. The Germany Army
assigned rabbis to serve as chaplains in the German Army and to
support and minister to their own Jewish soldiers, which numbered
100,000 during the First World War. However, upon the Army's
arrival into the decimated region east of Warsaw, it became
abundantly clear that the rabbis might also help with the
poverty-stricken Ostjuden by creating relief agencies and
rebuilding schools. For the Honor of Our Fatherland demonstrates
that the well-being of the Polish Jewish community was a priority
to the German High Command and vital to the future of German
politics in the region. More importantly, by stressing the
importance of the Jews in the East to Germany's success, For the
Honor of Our Fatherland will show that Germany did not always want
to remove the Jews-quite the contrary. The role and influence of
the German Army rabbis and Jewish administrators and soldiers
demonstrates that Germany intentionally supported the Polish Jewish
communities in order to promote its agenda in the East, even as the
modes for future influence changed. By implementing a philanthropic
agenda in the East, the Germans recognized that its success might
lie in part in enfranchising the Jewish population. Moreover, the
directives of these relief agencies were not only beneficial to the
impoverished Jewish communities, but the German Army had much to
gain from this transnational relationship. The tragic irony was
that Germany returned to the East in the Second World War and
killed millions of Jews.
In this introductory guide, Knud Jespersen traces the process of
disintegration and reduction that helped to form the modern Danish
state, and the historical roots of Denmark's international
position. Beginning with the Reformation in the sixteenth century,
Jespersen explains how the Denmark of today was shaped by wars,
territorial losses, domestic upheavals, new methods of production,
and changes in thought. Focusing on the interplay between history,
politics and economics, this illuminating text offers an insider's
view of Danish identity formation over the last centuries. This
engaging textbook is an ideal resource for undergraduate and
postgraduate students taking courses on Danish, Scandinavian or
Nordic History. Concise and accessible, it will also appeal to
anyone interested in gaining a clear understanding of the
development of Denmark.
In the mid-1780s Bentham drafted his first sustained discussions of
political economy and public finance for Projet Matiere (itself
part of Projet d'un corps de loix complet). Those discussions are
now lost, but the corresponding marginal contents open this volume,
followed by three closely related appendices. The volume continues
with Defence of Usury, first published 1787, which was well
received, quickly translated, and established some reputation for
Bentham in political economy. In 1790, whilst preparing a second
edition, Bentham drafted the raft of additional materials included
here in five appendices. At the same time he began Manual of
Political Economy, an introductory handbook which he never
finished, while the surviving text appears here, supplemented by
seven appendices. In March 1793 Bentham reacted to press reports of
the Irish Budget by composing A Protest against Law Taxes, a
trenchant critique of the taxation of legal proceedings, and the
denial of justice to the poor, which was printed in 1793, published
in 1795, and extended in 1816, and which completes the volume.
Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia examines the
life of the journalist, historian and revolutionary, Vladimir
Burtsev. The book analyses his struggle to help liberate the
Russian people from tsarist oppression in the latter half of the
19th century before going on to discuss his opposition to
Bolshevism following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Robert
Henderson traces Burtsev's political development during this time
and explores his movements in Paris and London at different stages
in an absorbing account of an extraordinary life. At all times
Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for Free Russia sets Burtsev's
life in the wider context of Russian and European history of the
period. It uses Burtsev as a means to discuss topics such as
European police collaboration, European prison systems,
international diplomatic relations of the time and Russia's
relationship with Europe specifically. Extensive original archival
research and previously untranslated Russian source material is
also incorporated throughout the text. This is an important study
for all historians of modern Russia and the Russian Revolution.
French Intellectuals at a Crossroads examines a broad array of
interrelated subjects: the effect of World War I on France's
intellectual community, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise
of international communism, calls for pacifism, the creation of an
"Intellectuals' International of the Mind," the debate over the
myth of the disengaged intellectual, the apolitical group of
"intellectuels non-conformistes," and, finally, the challenges of
surrealism. Together, these developments reflected the diversity of
intellectual commitment in France in the uncertain and troubled
1920s and 1930s. The interwar period also witnessed France's
relative decline, as expressed in a move from a mood of immense
relief coupled with a feeling of debilitating fatigue to an
inward-looking, pessimistic, and defeatist outlook that presaged
World War II and national collapse.
At the end of the 19th century, German historical scholarship had
grown to great prominence. Academics around the world imitated
their German colleagues. Intellectuals described historical
scholarship as a foundation of the modern worldview. To many, the
modern age was an 'age of history'. This book investigates how
German historical scholarship acquired this status. Modern
Historiography in the Making begins with the early Enlightenment,
when scholars embraced the study of the past as a modernizing
project, undermining dogmatic systems of belief and promoting
progressive ideals, such a tolerance, open mindedness and
reform-readiness. Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen looks at how this
modernizing project remained an important motivation and
justification for historical scholarship until the 20th century.
Eskildsen successfully argues that German historical scholarship
was not, as we have been told since the early 20th century, a
product of historicism, but rather of Enlightenment ideals. The
book offers this radical revision of the history of scholarship by
focusing on practices of research and education. It examines how
scholars worked and why they cared. It shows how their efforts
forever changed our relationship not only to the past, but also to
the world we live in.
The year is 1932. In Rome, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini
unveils a giant obelisk of white marble, bearing the Latin
inscription MVSSOLINI DVX. Invisible to the cheering crowds, a
metal box lies immured in the obelisk's base. It contains a few
gold coins and, written on a piece of parchment, a Latin text: the
Codex fori Mussolini. What does this text say? Why was it buried
there? And why was it written in Latin? The Codex, composed by the
classical scholar Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci (1867-1960), presents a
carefully constructed account of the rise of Italian Fascism and
its leader, Benito Mussolini. Though written in the language of
Roman antiquity, the Codex was supposed to reach audiences in the
distant future. Placed under the obelisk with future excavation and
rediscovery in mind, the Latin text was an attempt at directing the
future reception of Italian Fascism. This book renders the Codex
accessible to scholars and students of different disciplines,
offering a thorough and wide-ranging introduction, a clear
translation, and a commentary elucidating the text's rhetorical
strategies, historical background, and specifics of phrasing and
reference. As the first detailed study of a Fascist Latin text, it
also throws new light on the important role of the Latin language
in Italian Fascist culture.
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