For most of the postwar period, the destruction of European Jewry was not a salient part of American Jewish life, and was generally seen as irrelevant to non-Jewish Americans. Survivors and their families tended to keep to themselves, forming their own organizations, or they did their best to block out the past. Today, in contrast, the Holocaust is the subject of documentaries and Hollywood films, and is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. Reluctant Witnesses mixes memoir, history, and social analysis to tell the story of the rise of Holocaust consciousness in the United States from the perspective of survivors and their descendants. The public reckoning with the Holocaust, the book argues, was due to more than the passage of time. It took the coming of age of the "second generation" - who reached adulthood during the rise of feminism, the ethnic revival, and therapeutic culture - for survivors' families to reclaim their hidden histories. Inspired by the changed status of the victim in American society, the second generation coaxed their parents to share their losses with them, transforming private pains into public stories. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find its voice. It tells this story in relation to the changing status of trauma and victimhood in American culture more generally. At a time when a sense of Holocaust fatigue seems to be setting in, and when the remaining survivors are at the end of their lives, it offers a reminder that the ability to speak openly about traumatic experiences had to be struggled for. By confronting traumatic memories and catastrophic histories, the book argues, we can make our world mean something beyond ourselves.

Although millions of Russians lived as serfs until the middle of the nineteenth century, little is known about their lives. Identifying and documenting the conditions of Russian serfs has proven difficult because the Russian state discouraged literacy among the serfs and censored public expressions of dissent. To date scholars have identified only twenty known Russian serf narratives. Four Russian Serf Narratives contains four of these accounts and is the first translated collection of autobiographies by serfs. Scholar and translator John MacKay brings to light for an English-language audience a diverse sampling of Russian serf narratives, ranging from an autobiographical poem to stories of adventure and escape. Autobiography (1785) recounts a highly educated serf s attempt to escape to Europe, where he hoped to study architecture. The long testimonial poem News About Russia (ca. 1849) laments the conditions under which the author and his fellow serfs lived. In The Story of My Life and Wanderings (1881) a serf tradesman tells of his attempt to simultaneously escape serfdom and captivity from Chechen mountaineers. The fragmentary Notes of a Serf Woman (1911) testifies to the harshness of peasant life with extraordinary acuity and descriptive power. These accounts offer readers a glimpse, from the point of view of the serfs themselves, into the realities of one of the largest systems of unfree labor in history. The volume also allows comparison with slave narratives produced in the United States and elsewhere, adding an important dimension to knowledge of the institution of slavery and the experience of enslavement in modern times."

This book examines the refugee phenomenon, specifically refugees in inter-war Europe, and international responses to that phenomenon. In Part I, the causes and consequences of refugee movements throughout this century are explored. In Part II, international responses to European refugee movements from 1919 until 1939 are presented and analysed. In Part III, the impact of international efforts on government policy toward refugees is evaluated. The major argument of this book is that international assistance efforts of the inter-war era composed an international regime, and this regime had - and continues to have - significant impact on refugee policy.

Constructing the Holocaust examines the development of Holocaust historiography in the light of recent critical philosophy of history. It argues that the Holocaust provides both the occasion for, and the ultimate test of, new ways of giving meaning to the past. It also shows that examining our representations of the past is as important as archival research for understanding history.

This is a study of papal bureaucracy during the Renaissance, a time when the Pope was among the most powerful of European rulers. The men who ran the Renaissance Papacy were an important and talented group, including among their number luminaries of Italian humanist literature and scholarship, distinguished church leaders, and statesmen of far-reaching influence. Based on extensive research in Italian archives, The Pope's Men explores the bureaucracy of an early modern state, and the patronage network which permeated and in many ways controlled it. Peter Partner sets the ruling elite of the Renaissance Papacy in its social and political context, and analyses its composition and the ways it operated. He shows the struggle for power in Rome among the competing Italian regions and families. This is a fascinating and scholarly study of men who could be scholars, poets, thinkers, and patrons of the arts, as well as servants of a state of great spiritual and temporal power.

The quality of 'monumentality' is attributed to the buildings of few historical epochs or cultures more frequently or consistently than to those of the Roman Empire. It is this quality that has helped to make them enduring models for builders of later periods. This extensively illustrated book, the first full-length study of the concept of monumentality in Classical Antiquity, asks what it is that the notion encompasses and how significant it was for the Romans themselves in moulding their individual or collective aspirations and identities. Although no single word existed in antiquity for the qualities that modern authors regard as making up that term, its Latin derivation - from monumentum, 'a monument' - attests plainly to the presence of the concept in the mentalities of ancient Romans, and the development of that notion through the Roman era laid the foundation for the classical ideal of monumentality, which reached a height in early modern Europe. This book is also the first full-length study of architecture in the Antonine Age - when it is generally agreed the Roman Empire was at its height. By exploring the public architecture of Roman Italy and both Western and Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire from the point of view of the benefactors who funded such buildings, the architects who designed them, and the public who used and experienced them, Edmund Thomas analyses the reasons why Roman builders sought to construct monumental buildings and uncovers the close link between architectural monumentality and the identity and ideology of the Roman Empire itself.

The End of an Elite is the first scholarly study in English of the bishops of the French church at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The 130 members of the episcopate formed an elite within an elite, the First Estate of France. Nigel Aston explores the role of the episcopate in national and provincial politics in the last years of the ancien regime. He traces the policies and patronage of episcopal ministers such as Lomienie de Brienne and J.-M. Champion de Cice, who were as much politicians as pastors, and examines their relationships with their fellow bishops. Dr Aston emphasizes the leading role of the bishops in the Assemblies of Notables and offers a fresh interpretation of clerical elections to the Estates-General of 1789. This is an intensively researched and immensely readable account, which will be invaluable to all historians of late eighteenth-century France.

The revolutions in the England, North America, and France ushered in the modern political age. Cultural Revolutions analyzes the place of material culture, ritual, and everyday life during these revolutions, providing a fresh and engaging interpretation of the strategies used to transform people from monarchists into republicans.The author shows how, faced with the challenge of persuading large populations to alter their previous convictions and loyalties, revolutionaries in all three countries turned to the power of aesthetics. From the banning of dancing in Cromwell's England, to the 'homespun' clothing of Revolutionary America, to France's new calendar and naming systems, Auslander assesses how daily habits and tastes were altered in the interests of political change.

This is a study of Petrograd in the period immediately following the Russian Revolution. Formerly the imperial capital St. Petersburg, in the years after 1917 Petrograd became a revolutionary citadel. Mary McAuley's political and social history throws into relief the interplay of factors that contributed to the formation of the new Soviet state. Her detailed account of life in the city provides new insights into the progress of the Russian Revolution and the establishment, in 1921, of the Leninist political order. Bread and Justice is based on a wide array of original sources, including newspapers, pamphlets, posters, memoirs, and personal interviews. It paints a multi-dimensional picture of everyday life in post-Revolutionary Petrograd, exploring themes such as violence and unemployment, civic justice and bread rations, political ideas and cultural dreams. This is a book about the people of the city - Bolshevik commissars, imperial princesses, hungry schoolchildren, and theatre artists all make their appearance - and about the impact of the Russian Revolution on their lives. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the revolutionary process and the formation of the Soviet Union.

This study, first published in German in 1975, addresses the need for a comprehensive account of Roman social history in a single volume. Specifically, Alfoeldy attempts to answer three questions: What is the meaning of Roman social history? What is entailed in Roman social history? How is it to be conceived as history? Alfoeldy's approach brings social structure much closer to political development, following the changes in social institutions in parallel with the broader political milieu. He deals with specific problems in seven periods: Archaic Rome, the Republic down to the Second Punic War, the structural change of the second century BC, the end of the Republic, the Early Empire, the crisis of the third century AD and the Late Empire. Excellent bibliographical notes specify the most important works on each subject, making it useful to the graduate student and scholar as well as to the advanced and well-informed undergraduate.

Bentham's writings for the French Revolution were dominated by the themes of rights, representation, and reform. In 'Nonsense upon Stilts' (hitherto known as 'Anarchical Fallacies'), the most devastating attack on the theory of natural rights ever written, he argued that natural rights provided an unsuitable basis for stable legal and political arrangements. In discussing the nature of representation he produced the earliest utilitarian justification of political equality and representative democracy, even recommending women's suffrage.

Our Lady of the Nations is a detailed and scholarly overview of the apparitions of Mary in 20th-century Catholic Europe. Chris Maunder discusses apparitions in general and how they are interpreted in Catholicism by, for example, Karl Rahner and Benedict XVI. The role of women and children as visionaries is considered, including issues concerning changing views of gender, children's spirituality, and the protection of minors. He covers cases that are well known and approved by the Church (Fatima, Beauraing, Banneux, and Amsterdam), others that are well known but not approved (such as Garabandal and Medjugorje), and many that are neither well known nor approved, such as those in Belgian Flanders or Nazi Germany in the 1930s, or in France, Italy, or Germany after the Second World War. Resources include academic studies of particular apparitions, some Catholic theological and devotional literature, and occasionally travel writing. There is also coverage of material in French which is not known to the English reader. Shrines and visionaries are believed to be indicators of the presence of Mary. In the visionary perspective, she has appeared in order to reassure her followers and to warn of divine judgement. Her messages echo doctrinal Catholic Mariology with some innovations, but also express a deep dissatisfaction with the events and trends of the 20th century, from communism to Nazism to liberalism and religious indifference. While the Marian cult evolves according to new templates for apparitions and developments in Mariology, the fundamental message of presence, consolation, and admonition remains constant.

Adolf Hitler is the most notorious political figure of the twentieth century. The story of his life, how he became a dictator, and how he managed to convince so many to follow his cause is a subject of perennial fascination.

Balancing narrative and analysis, this biography employs a chronological approach to describe the main features of Hitler s career. Set against the background of developments in Germany and Europe during his lifetime, the text tells the extraordinary story of how an Austrian layabout rose to become F hrer of the Third Reich.

The chapters incorporate into their narrative the major debates surrounding Hitler s ideas, behaviour and historical significance. Particular attention is paid to his experience as a soldier in 1914 -18 and to the reasons why his original left-wing sympathies transmuted into Nazism. Arguments over the real character of Hitler s dictatorship are analysed and a measured assessment is offered on the disputed issues of how far Hitler initiated the Third Reich s domestic and foreign policies himself and to what extent he was controlled by events. His destructive leadership of wartime Germany is now a subject of close scrutiny among historians and the book s final chapters deal with this theme and offer a set of reflections on Hitler s relationship with the German people and his legacy to the German nation.

Michael Lynch provides a balanced guide to this most difficult of figures that will be enlightening for students and general readers alike

"The book is the product of a protracted, laborious and scrupulous research and draws on a most extensive and varied assembly of documents. But the archival evidence, factual accounts and even personal narratives would have remained remote, dry and cold if not for the author's remarkable gift of empathy. Barbara Engelking gives the witnesses of the Holocaust a voice which readers of this book will understand....Under her pen memories come alive again."--from the Foreword by Zygmunt BaumanOriginally published in Polish to great acclaim and based on interviews with survivors of the Holocaust in Poland, Holocaust and Memory provides a moving description of their life during the war and the sense they made of it. The book begins by looking at the differences between the wartime experiences of Jews and Poles in occupied Poland, both in terms of Nazi legislation and individual experiences. On the Aryan side of the ghetto wall, Jews could either be helped or blackmailed by Poles. The largest section of the book reconstructs everyday life in the ghetto. The psychological consequences of wartime experiences are explored, including interviews with survivors who stayed on in Poland after the war and were victims of anti-Semitism again in 1968. These discussions bring into question some of the accepted survivor stereotypes found in Holocaust literature. A final chapter looks at the legacy of the Holocaust, the problems of transmitting experience and of the place of the Holocaust in Polish history and culture.

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution, the long-established structures and practices of European agriculture and industry were slowly, disparately, but profoundly transformed. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe, first published in 1997, narrates and analyzes the diverse patterns of economic change that permanently modified rural and urban production, altered Europe's economy and geography, and gave birth to new social classes. Broad in chronological and geographical scope and explicitly comparative, the book introduces readers to a wealth of information drawn from thoughout Mediterranean, east-central, and western Europe, as well as to the classic interpretations and current debates and revisions. The study incorporates scholarship on topics such as the world economy and women's work, and it discusses at length the impact of the emergent capitalist order on Europe's working people.

Belief in the Jesuit Conspiracy is one of the most important and enduring conspiracy theories in modern European history, and France was one of its major focuses. In this scholarly and detailed survey, Geoffrey Cubitt examines the range of polemical literature through which the prevalent conviction of Jesuitical plots was expressed, and explores political attitudes both within and outside the Catholic church. Cubitt uses the available evidence to contrast perceptions and reality, and to trace the development of a widespread and powerful myth. The Jesuit Myth offers valuable insights into the political and religious climate of nineteenth-century France.

In the nineteenth century, German Liberalism grew into a powerful political movement vociferous in its demands for the freedom of the individual, for changes to allow the participation of all men in the political system and for a fundamental reform of the German states. As elsewhere in Europe, Liberalism was linked not only with a strong social commitment, but also with the formation of a national state. In this concise and authoritative study of liberalism in German, Dieter Langewiesche analyses the foundation and development of German liberalism from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He takes into account the most recent research and scholarship in this field, examining the role of individual German states, the local roots of liberalism, the links between liberalism and its social bases of support, especially from bourgeois groups, and the forms of political organisation adopted by the liberals. The author addresses issues fundamental to an understanding of liberalism in Germany and the formation of the modern German state.

The Roman empire tends to be seen as a whole whereas the early middle ages tends to be seen as a collection of regional histories, roughly corresponding to the land-areas of modern nation states. As a result, early medieval history is much more fragmented, and there have been few convincing syntheses of socio-economic change in the post-Roman world since the 1930s. In recent decades, the rise of early medieval archaeology has also transformed our source-base, but this has not been adequately integrated into analyses of documentary history in almost any country.
In Framing the Early Middle Ages Chris Wickham aims at integrating documentary and archaeological evidence together, and also, above all, at creating a comparative history of the period 400-800, by means of systematic comparative analyses of each of the regions of the latest Roman and immediately post-Roman world, from Denmark to Egypt (only the Slav areas are left out). The book concentrates on classic socio-economic themes, state finance, the wealth and identity of the aristocracy, estate management, peasant society, rural settlement, cities, and exchange. These are only a partial picture of the period, but they are intended as a framing for other developments, without which those other developments cannot be properly understood.
Wickham argues that only a complex comparative analysis can act as the basis for a wider synthesis. Whilst earlier syntheses have taken the development of a single region as 'typical', with divergent developments presented as exceptions, this book takes all different developments as typical, and aims to construct a synthesis based on a better understanding of difference and the reasons forit. This is the most ambitious and original survey of the period ever written.

This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development of German nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany.'
Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germany into a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.

Calvet's Web is a study of a circle of French antiquarians, naturalists, and bibliophiles in the period 1750-1810. By using the surviving correspondence of its members, Laurence Brockliss assembles a vivid picture of the French Republic of Letters in an era of rapid change, showing how the world of scholarship relates to the movement historians call the Enlightenment and how it is torn apart, then reconstructed, in the social and political turmoil of the French Revolution.

Jean Desmarets, later Sieur de Saint-Sorlin, was a late Renaissance `universal man': first Chancellor and founder-member of the Academie-francaise, last jester of the French royal court and star performer in ballets, novelist, playwright, poet, architect, inventor, and mystic. He was also the first man to publicize the notion of `a century of Louis XIV'. Hugh Gaston Hall's book examines that notion by looking afresh at Desmarets' vigorous career and relating the `century of Louis XIV' to its origins in the reign of Louis XIII. It questions historical misconceptions about Cardinal Richelieu's cultural policies and demonstrates the importance for the Court ballet of his patronage. Giovanni Bernini's illusionist sets and lighting effects for the Grand'Salle, which later became Moliere's theatre and the Opera, are discussed here in English for the first time. Desmarets' many high-level court offices, his family connections, and works - ballets, plays, poems, and religious and polemical pieces - reveal new and important links with contemporary institutions and preoccupations. In particular Dr Hall considers the plays in the light of exemplary eloquence, and considers the intentions of the Academie-francaise, and the Quarrel of the Imaginaires, in relation to royal policy and the Cartesian revolution.

In this classic work which analyzes the context in which thirty years of war and revolution wracked the European continent, the great historian Arno Mayer emphasizes the backwardness of the European economies and their political subjugation by aristocratic elites and their allies. Mayer turns upside down the vision of societies marked by modernization and forward-thrusting bourgeois and popular social classes, thereby transforming our understanding of the traumatic crises of the early twentieth century. The Verso World History Series This series provides attractive new editions of classic works of history, making landmark texts available to a new generation of readers. Covering a timespan stretching from Ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth century, and with a global geographical range, the series will also include thematic volumes providing insights into such topics as the spread of print cultures and the history of money.