Regarded as ancient Greece's greatest orator, Demosthenes lived through and helped shape one of the most eventful epochs in antiquity. His political career spanned three decades, during which time Greece fell victim to Macedonian control, first under Philip II and then Alexander the Great. Demosthenes' resolute and courageous defiance of Philip earned for him a reputation as one of history's outstanding patriots. He also enjoyed a brilliant and lucrative career as a speechwriter, and his rhetorical skills are still emulated today by students and politicians alike. Yet he was a sickly child with an embarrassing speech impediment, who was swindled out of much of his family's estate by unscrupulous guardians after the death of his father. His story is one of triumph over adversity. Modern studies of his life and career take one of two different approaches: he is either lauded as Greece's greatest patriot or condemned as an opportunist who misjudged situations and contributed directly to the end of Greek freedom. This new biography, the first ever written in English for a popular audience, aims to determine which of these two people he was: self-serving cynic or patriot - or even a combination of both. Its chronological arrangement brings Demosthenes vividly to life, discussing his troubled childhood and youth, the obstacles he faced in his public career, his fierce rivalries with other Athenian politicians, his successes and failures, and even his posthumous influence as a politician and orator. It offers new insights into Demosthenes' motives and how he shaped his policy to achieve political power, all set against the rich backdrop of late classical Greece and Macedonia.

In central Brussels stands a statue of a young woman. Built in 1923, it is the first monument to a working-class woman in European history. Her name was Gabrielle Petit. History has forgotten Petit, an ambitious and patriotic Belgian, executed by firing squad in 1916 for her role as an intelligence agent for the British Army. After the First World War she was celebrated as an example of stern endeavour, but a hundred years later her memory has faded. In the first part of this historical biography Sophie De Schaepdrijver uses Petit's life to explore gender, class and heroism in the context of occupied Europe. Petit's experiences reveal the reality of civilian engagement under military occupation and the emergence of modern espionage. The second part of the book focuses on the legacy and cultural memory of Petit and the First World War. By analysing Petit's representation in ceremony, discourse and popular culture De Schaepdrijver expands our understanding of remembrance across the 20th century.

The Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, Andre Gide, and Andre Malraux, and their relationships with communism and the broader anti-fascist movement. In that turbulent decade, Paris also welcomed a growing number of Russian, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, Belgian, German, and German-speaking Central European refugees-activists, writers, and agents, among them Willi Munzenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, Eugen Fried, Ilya Ehrenburg, Manes Sperber, and Arthur Koestler-and Paris once again became a hotbed of international political activism. Events, however, signaled a decline in the high ethical standards set by Emile Zola and the Dreyfusards earlier in the twentieth century, as many pro-communist intellectuals acted in bad faith to support an ideology that they in all likelihood knew to be morally bankrupt. Among them, only Gide rebelled against Moscow, which caused ideological lines to harden to the point where there was little room for critical reason to assert itself.

The history of oil is a chapter in the story of Europe's geopolitical decline in the twentieth century. During the era of the two world wars, a lack of oil constrained Britain and Germany from exerting their considerable economic and military power independently. Both nations' efforts to restore the independence they had enjoyed during the Age of Coal backfired by inducing strategic over-extension, which served only to hasten their demise as great powers. Having fought World War I with oil imported from the United States, Britain was determined to avoid relying upon another great power for its energy needs ever again. Even before the Great War had ended, Whitehall implemented a strategy of developing alternative sources of oil under British control. Britain's key supplier would be the Middle East - already a region of vital importance to the British Empire - whose oil potential was still unproven. As it turned out, there was plenty of oil in the Middle East, but Italian hostility after 1935 threatened transit through the Mediterranean. A shortage of tankers ruled out re-routing shipments around Africa, forcing Britain to import oil from US-controlled sources in the Western Hemisphere and depleting its foreign exchange reserves. Even as war loomed in 1939, therefore, Britain's quest for independence from the United States had failed. Germany was in an even worse position than Britain. It could not import oil from overseas in wartime due to the threat of blockade, while accumulating large stockpiles was impossible because of the economic and financial costs. The Third Reich went to war dependent on petroleum synthesized from coal, domestic crude oil, and overland imports, primarily from Romania. German leaders were confident, however, that they had enough oil to fight a series of short campaigns that would deliver to them the mastery of Europe. This plan derailed following the victory over France, when Britain continued to fight. This left Germany responsible for Europe's oil requirements while cut off from world markets. A looming energy crisis in Axis Europe, the absence of strategic alternatives, and ideological imperatives all compelled Germany in June 1941 to invade the Soviet Union and fulfill the Third Reich's ultimate ambition of becoming a world power - a decision that ultimately sealed its fate.

The course of the French Wars of Religion, commonly portrayed as a series of civil wars, was profoundly shaped by foreign actors. Many German Protestants in particular felt compelled to intervene. In Germany and the French Wars of Religion, 1560-1572 Jonas van Tol examines how Protestant German audiences understood the conflict in France and why they deemed intervention necessary. He demonstrates that conflicting stories about the violence in France fused with local religious debates and news from across Europe leading to a surprising range of interpretations of the nature of the French Wars of Religion. As a consequence, German Lutherans found themselves on opposing sides on the battlefields of France.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics explores the politics of the leader of the Futurist art movement. Emerging in Italy in 1909, Futurism sought to propel Italy into the modern world, and is famously known for outlandish claims to want to destroy museums and libraries in order to speed this transition. Futurism, however, also had a much darker political side. It glorified war as the solution to many of Italy's ills, and was closely tied to the Fascist Regime. In this book, Ialongo focuses on Marinetti as the chief determinant of Futurist politics and explores how a seemingly revolutionary art movement, at one point having some support among revolutionary left-wing movements in Italy, could eventually become so intimately tied to the repressive Fascist regime. Ialongo traces Marinetti's politics from before the foundation of Futurism, through the Great War, and then throughout the twenty-year Fascist dictatorship, using a wide range of published and unpublished sources. Futurist politics are presented within the wider context of developments in Italy and Europe, and Ialongo further highlights how Marinetti's political choices influenced the art of his movement.

An analysis of post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of experiences such as migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, and cultural self-colonization. The book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism, mapping the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art.

Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but others have disappeared altogether. This is clear not only from the improbably large number of books that survive in only one copy, but from many references in contemporary documents to books that cannot now be located. In this volume leading specialists in the field explore different aspects of this poorly understood aspect of book history: classes of texts particularly impacted by poor rates of survival; lost books revealed in contemporary lists or inventories; the collections of now dispersed libraries; deliberate and accidental destruction. A final section describes modern efforts at salvage and restitution following the devastation of the twentieth century.

From the late eighteenth century, Germans increasingly identified the fate of their nation with that of their woodlands. A variety of groups soon mobilized the 'German forest' as a national symbol, though often in ways that suited their own social, economic, and political interests. The German Forest is the first book-length history of the development and contestation of the concept of 'German' woodlands.

Jeffrey K. Wilson challenges the dominant interpretation that German connections to nature were based in agrarian romanticism rather than efforts at modernization. He explores a variety of conflicts over the symbol -- from demands on landowners for public access to woodlands, to state attempts to integrate ethnic Slavs into German culture through forestry, and radical nationalist visions of woodlands as a model for the German 'race'. Through impressive primary and archival research, Wilson demonstrates that in addition to uniting Germans, the forest as a national symbol could also serve as a vehicle for protest and strife.

This compelling book describes how everyday people courageously survived under repressive Communist regimes until the voices and actions of rebellious individuals resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. Part of Greenwood's Daily Life through History series, Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain enables today's generations to understand what it was like for those living in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, particularly the period from 1961 to 1989, the era during which these people-East Germans in particular-lived in the imposing shadow of the Berlin Wall. An introductory chapter discusses the Russian Revolution, the end of World War II, and the establishment of the Socialist state, clarifying the reasons for the construction of the Berlin Wall. Many historical anecdotes bring these past experiences to life, covering all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, including separation of families and the effects on family life, diet, rationing, media, clothing and trends, strict travel restrictions, defection attempts, and the evolving political climate. The final chapter describes Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the slow assimilation of East into West, and examines Europe after Communism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1940.

Barbara Alpern Engel's Marriage, Household and Home in Modern Russia is the first book to explore the intricacies of domestic life in Russia across the modern period. Surveying the period from 1700 right up to the present day, the book explores the marital and domestic arrangements of Russians at multiple levels of society and the impact of broader historical developments, including war and revolution, upon them. It also traces the evolution of marriage, household and home as institutions over three centuries, whilst also highlighting the inter-relationship between public policy and private life, in what is a wholly original historical assessment of domesticity in modern Russia. In the process, the author expertly synthesizes the key works, arguments and discussions in the field, mapping out the historiographical landscape of this compelling aspect of Russian social history. Marriage, Household and Home in Modern Russia is crucial reading for any student or scholar of modern Russian history.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.