The Second World War affected the lives and shaped the experience of millions of individuals in Germany--soldiers at the front, women, children and the elderly sheltering in cellars, slave laborers toiling in factories, and concentration-camp prisoners and POWs clearing rubble in the Reich's devastated cities.
Taking a "history from below" approach, the volume examines how the minds and behaviour of individuals were moulded by the Party as the Reich took the road to Total War. The ever-increasing numbers of German workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht were replaced with forced foreign workers and slave labourers and concentration camp prisoners. The interaction in everyday life between German civilian society and these coerced groups is explored, as is that society's relationship to the Holocaust.
From early 1943, the war on the home front was increasingly dominated by attack from the air. The role of the Party, administration, police, and courts in providing for the vast numbers of those rendered homeless, in bolstering civilian morale with "miracle revenge weapons" propaganda, and in maintaining order in a society in disintegration is reviewed in detail.
For society in uniform, the war in the east was one of ideology and annihilation, with intensified indoctrination of the troops after Stalingrad. The social profile of this army is analysed through study of a typical infantry division. The volume concludes with an account of the various forms of resistance to Hitler's regime, in society and the military, culminating in the failed attempt on his life in July 1944.

This collection seeks to illustrate the ways in which Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain, has been newly construed by some of today's most astute readers in the field of Mann studies. The essays, many of which were written expressly for this volume, comment on some of the familiar and inescapable topics of Magic Mountain scholarship, including the questions of genre and ideology, the philosophy of time, and the ominous subjects of disease and medical practice. Moreover, this volume offers fresh approaches to the novel's underlying notions of masculinity, to its embodiment of the cultural code of anti-Semitism, and to its precarious relationship to the rival media of photography, cinema, and recorded sound.

Markets and fairs played a fundamental part in the commerce of the Mediterranean region in the Roman period. But where were they held, and what commodities were sold there? Using evidence from archaeology, inscriptions, and literary sources, Dr Frayn builds up a detailed and enlivening picture of stalls and stallholders, profiteering, and price control in ancient Italy, and invites comparison with medieval and modern practices. Besides the macella, or permanent markets in towns, Dr Frayn also looks at the much more numerous nundinae, or local markets, held every eight days, and the many fairs and festivals throughout Italy where retailing took place, often associated with shrines and characterized by religious motifs. The book includes a discussion of the economic and social effects of markets and fairs, including their relation to geography, demography, and modern `central place theory'. There is also a chapter on market law, which can be traced from the ius commercii to the supervision of weights, measures, and pricing. As trade contacts widened, and merchandise grew more diverse, markets and marketing evolved with increasing complexity into a highly developed system, which in the wake of conquest came to influence larger areas of inter-regional trade.

See the author featured in the "New Books in History" podcast:
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In Body by Weimar, Erik N. Jensen shows how German athletes reshaped gender roles in the turbulent decade after World War I and established the basis for a modern body and modern sensibility that remain with us to this day. The same cutting-edge techniques that engineers were using to increase the efficiency of factories and businesses in the 1920s aided athletes in boosting the productivity of their own flesh and bones. Sportswomen and men embodied modernity-quite literally-in its most streamlined, competitive, time-oriented form, and their own successes on the playing fields seemed to prove the value of economic rationalization to a skeptical public that often felt threatened by the process. Enthroned by the media as culture's trendsetters, champions in sports such as tennis, boxing, and track and field also provided models of sexual empowerment, social mobility, and self-determination. They showed their fans how to be modern, and, in the process, sparked heated debates over the aesthetics of the body, the limits of physical exertion, the obligations of citizens to the state, and the relationship between the sexes. If the images and debates in this book strike readers as familiar, it might well be because the ideal body of today-sleek, efficient, and equally available to men and women-received one of its earliest articulations in the fertile tumult of Germany's roaring twenties. After more than eighty years, we still want the Weimar body.

Featuring extensive revisions to the text as well as a new introduction and epilogue--bringing the book completely up to date on the tumultuous politics of the previous decade and the long-term implications of the Soviet collapse--this compact, original, and engaging book offers the definitive account of one of the great historical events of the last fifty years.
Combining historical and geopolitical analysis with an absorbing narrative, Kotkin draws upon extensive research, including memoirs by dozens of insiders and senior figures, to illuminate the factors that led to the demise of Communism and the USSR. The new edition puts the collapse in the context of the global economic and political changes from the 1970s to the present day. Kotkin creates a compelling profile of post Soviet Russia and he reminds us, with chilling immediacy, of what could not have been predicted--that the world's largest police state, with several million troops, a doomsday arsenal, and an appalling record of violence, would liquidate itself with barely a whimper. Throughout the book, Kotkin also paints vivid portraits of key personalities. Using recently released archive materials, for example, he offers a fascinating picture of Gorbachev, describing this virtuoso tactician and resolutely committed reformer as "flabbergasted by the fact that his socialist renewal was leading to the system's liquidation"--and more or less going along with it.
At once authoritative and provocative, Armageddon Averted illuminates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing how "principled restraint and scheming self-interest brought a deadly system to meek dissolution."
Acclaim for the First Edition:
"The clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape."
--The New Yorker
"A triumph of the art of contemporary history. In fewer than 200 pagesKotkin elucidates the implosion of the Soviet empire--the most important and startling series of international events of the past fifty years--and clearly spells out why, thanks almost entirely to the 'principal restraint' of the Soviet leadership, that collapse didn't result in a cataclysmic war, as all experts had long forecasted."
-The Atlantic Monthly
"Concise and persuasive The mystery, for Kotkin, is not so much why the Soviet Union collapsed as why it did so with so little collateral damage."
--The New York Review of Books

In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, Inna Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century - Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest in musical drama, as each built theaters, established drama schools, commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and produced musical plays. Naroditskaya examines the creative output of the tsarinas across the contexts in which they worked and lived, revealing significant connections between their personal creative aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices, and the political and state affairs conducted during their reigns. Bewitching Russian Opera ultimately demonstrates that the theater served as an experimental space for these imperial women, in which they rehearsed, probed, and formulated gender and class roles, and enacted on the musical stage political ambitions and international conquests which they would later carry out on the world stage itself.
Beginning with the eighteenth-century imperial court, Naroditskaya illustrates the increased theatricality of the court and the popularity of musical theater among nobles, which occurred alongside an appropriation of folk and court ceremonies into the theater. Through contemporary performance theory, she demonstrates how the opportunity for role-playing and costume-changing in performative spaces allowed individuals to cross otherwise rigid boundaries of class and gender. A close look at a series of operas and musical theater productions - from Catherine the Great's fairy tale operas to Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame - illuminates the transition of these royal women from powerful political and cultural figures during their own reigns, to a marginalized and unreal Other under the patriarchal dominance of the subsequent period. These tsarinas successfully fostered the concept of a modern nation and collective national identity, only to then have their power and influence undone in Russian cultural consciousness through the fairy-tales operas of the 19th century that positioned tsarinas as "magical" and dangerous figures rightfully displaced and conquered--by triumphant heroes on the stage, and by the new patriarchal rulers in the state.

The Greek Wars treats of the whole course of Persian relations with the Greeks from the coming of Cyrus in the 540s down to Alexander the Great's defeat of Darius III in 331 BC. Cawkwell discusses from a Persian perspective major questions such as why Xerxes' invasion of Greece failed, and how important a part the Great King played in Greek affairs in the fourth century. Cawkwell's views are at many points original: in particular, his explanation of how and why the Persian invasion of Greece failed challenges the prevailing orthodoxy, as does his view of the importance of Persia in Greek affairs for the two decades after the King's Peace. Persia, he concludes, was destroyed by Macedonian military might but moral decline had no part in it; the Macedonians who had subjected Greece were too good an army, but their victory was not easy.

This book describes the vibrant activity of survivors who founded Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers in Europe immediately after the Second World War. In the first postwar decade, these initiatives collected thousands of Nazi documents along with testimonies, memoirs, diaries, songs, poems, and artifacts of Jewish victims. They pioneered in developing a Holocaust historiography that placed the experiences of Jews at the center and used both victim and perpetrator sources to describe the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the everyday life and death of European Jews under the Nazi regime.
This book is the first in-depth monograph on these survivor historians and the organizations they created. A comparative analysis, it focuses on France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, analyzing the motivations and rationales that guided survivors in chronicling the destruction they had witnessed, while also discussing their research techniques, archival collections, and historical publications. It reflects growing attention to survivor testimony and to the active roles of survivors in rebuilding their postwar lives. It also discusses the role of documenting, testifying, and history writing in processes of memory formation, rehabilitation, and coping with trauma.
Jockusch finds that despite differences in background and wartime experiences between the predominantly amateur historians who created the commissions, the activists found documenting the Holocaust to be a moral imperative after the war, the obligation of the dead to the living, and a means for the survivors to understand and process their recent trauma and loss. Furthermore, historical documentation was vital in the pursuit of postwar justice and was deemed essential in counteracting efforts on the part of the Nazis to erase their wartime crimes. The survivors who created the historical commissions were the first people to study the development of Nazi policy towards the Jews and also to document Jewish responses to persecution, a topic that was largely ignored by later generations of Holocaust scholars.

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 Life of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus was one of the formative works of Latin hagiography. Yet although written by a contemporary who knew Martin, it attracted immediate criticism. Why? This study seeks an explanation by placing Sulpicius works both in their intellectual context, and in the context of a church that was then undergoing radical transformation. It is thus both a study of Sulpicius, Martin, and their world, and at the same time an essay in the interpretation of hagiography.

By the late 1960s, in a Europe divided by the Cold War and challenged by global revolution in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, thousands of young people threw themselves into activism to change both the world and themselves. This new and exciting study of "Europe's 1968" is based on the rich oral histories of nearly 500 former activists collected by an international team of historians across fourteen countries. Activists' own voices reflect on how they were drawn into activism, how they worked and struggled together, how they combined the political and the personal in their lives, and the pride or regret with which they look back on those momentous years. Themes explored include generational revolt and activists' relationship with their families, the meanings of revolution, transnational encounters and spaces of revolt, faith and radicalism, dropping out, gender and sexuality, and revolutionary violence. Focussing on the way in which the activists themselves made sense of their revolt, this work makes a major contribution to both oral history and memory studies. This ambitious study ranges widely across Europe from Franco's Spain to the Soviet Union, and from the two Germanys to Greece, and throws new light on moments and movements which both united and divided the activists of Europe's 1968.

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.

Religion is a particularly useful field within which to study Roman self-definition, for the Romans considered themselves to be the most religious of all peoples and ascribed their imperial success to their religiosity. This study builds on the observation that the Romans were remarkably open to outside influences to explore how installing foreign religious elements as part of their own religious system affected their notions of what it meant to be Roman. The inclusion of so many foreign elements posed difficulties for defining a sense of Romanness at the very moment when a territorial definition was becoming obsolete. Using models drawn from anthropology, this book demonstrates that Roman religious activity beginning in the middle Republic (early third century B.C.E.) contributed to redrawing the boundaries of Romanness. The methods by which the Romans absorbed cults and priests and their development of practices in regard to expiations and the celebration of ludi allowed them to recreate a clear sense of identity, one that could include the peoples they had conquered. While this identity faced further challenges during the civil wars of the Late Republic, the book suggests that Roman openness remained a vital part of their religious behavior during this time. Foreign Cults in Rome concludes with a brief look at the reforms of the first emperor Augustus, whose activity can be understood in light of Republican activity, and whose actions laid the foundation for further adaptation under the Empire.

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.

The "Short Oxford History of Italy" series, in seven volumes, offers a complete History of Italy from the early Middle Ages to the present and, in each period, presents the most recent historical perspectives on Italian history. This means setting Italian history in the broader context of European history as a whole. It also means questioning accepted interpretations of Italian history in each of these periods and, in particular, the idea that Italy's history has been significantly different from that of the rest of Europe. Each volume emphasizes how developments in Italy in each period are best understood as variants on broader European patterns of political, economic social and cultural change This volume sets in context the tremendous changes that Italy has undergone since 1945. In place of the land of pizza, sunshine, and soccer, McCarthy describes a developing nation: an economy that has found its own road to success via the piccole imprese with an increasingly strong stockmarket and more sophisticated banking; a dynamic, traditional, family centred society; and a political system struggling to modernize after 40 years of Christian Democrat rule and Communist opposition. McCa

Much of the discussion of Russia's recent post-Communist history has amounted, both in Russia and the West, to a series of monologues by strong-minded people with starkly divergent views. In contrast, Padma Desai's conversations with influential, intelligent participants and observers provide the reader with a broad, nuanced view of what has and has not happened in the last fourteen years, and why. Conversations from Russia will thus serve as a much-needed reference volume, both for academics who study Russia and for laypeople who only have vague perceptions of what has occurred in Russia since the collapse of Communism.
In conversations with important figures like Boris Yeltsin, George Soros, Anatoly Chubais, and Yegar Gaidar, Desai considers questions like why the Soviet Union fell apart under Gorbachev, what went wrong with economic reforms after Gorbachev, whether the privatization of Russian assets could have been managed differently, and what the prospects are for the Russian economy in the near future. Desai, a recognized expert in the field of Soviet studies, ties the interviews together with an introduction, ultimately reaching her own judgment on each issue considered in the conversations. This book will appeal to researchers and students in developmental economics, political economy, and Soviet studies, and educated laypeople interested in Russia.

In Reforming Saints, David J. Collins explains how and why Renaissance humanists composed Latin hagiography in Germany in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Contrary to the traditional wisdom, Collins's research uncovers a resurgence in the composition of saints' lives in the half century leading up to 1520. German humanists, he finds, were among the most active authors and editors of these texts.
Focusing on forty Latin depictions of German saints written between 1470 and 1520, Collins finds patterns both in how these humanists chose their subjects and how they presented their holiness. He argues that the humanist hagiographers took up the writing of saints' lives to investigate Germany's medieval past, to reconstruct and exalt its greatness, and to advocate programs of religious and cultural reform. This literature, says Collins, left a legacy that polemicists and philologists in Catholic Europe would be using for their own purposes by the end of the sixteenth century. These hagiographic writings are thus both reflective and formative of the religious and cultural conflicts that defined this period of European history. To bolster his case, Collins draws not only on the Latin saints' lives, but also on vernacular lives, maps and chorographic documents, personal and professional letters, papal, urban, and municipal archives, painting, sculpture and broadside print, and medieval and early modern histories and chronicles. The result is a fresh, new portrait of the humanism of Renaissance Germany.
With his surprising and insightful conclusions, Collins sheds new light on humanism's appropriation in Germany, particularly in its religious aspect. He approaches the humanists'writings on their own terms and recaptures the creative energy the humanists brought to the task of revising the legends of the saints. His scholarly perspective includes the roles of emperors, princes, abbots, city councilmen, artists, librarians, soldiers, peasants, and pilgrims, showing how humanists reached larger and less learned audiences than many other kinds of writing ever could. The cult of the saints and Renaissance humanism are two topics that have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Reforming Saints considers them as seldom before -- at their intersection.

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.

This study of six historians from the edges of the Roman world at the end of the Republic--the author of I Maccabees, Posidonius, Diodorus Siculus, Pompeius Trogus, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Memnon of Heraclea--combines discussion of their biographical details, the intellectual and elite< br> culture in which they composed, and the methodological difficulties of interpreting fragmentary texts, with textual analysis of their representations of Rome. These authors show remarkable unity in their acceptance of Roman hegemony. Nevertheless, their interpretations of Roman rule assume political< br> significance in the light of their intentions in writing and the audiences whom they addressed. They therefore provide a unique insight into the minds of the conquered peoples and the intellectual culture which allowed them to influence their conquerors.

The widespread and long-held preconception that all Jews lived in ghettos and were relentlessly subject to discrimination prior to the Enlightenment has only slowly eroded. Geographically speaking, Jews rarely lived in ghettos and have never been confined within the borders of one nation or country. Power struggles and wars often led to the creation of new national borders that divided communities once united. But if identity formation is subject to change and negotiation, it does not depend solely on shifting geographical borders. A variety of boundaries were and are still being constructed and maintained between ethnic and other collective identities. The contributors to this book, like other post-modernist historians, turn their gaze to a wide range of identities once taken for granted, identities located on the border lines between one country and the next, between Jews and non-Jews as well as on those between one group of Jews and another.

Although the name Caucasus has been around for some 2000 years, and may suggest unity and coherence, the region these days is best known for the ethnic and religious divides resulting in recurrent bloody conflicts between the various minorities and the post-Soviet independent states. Geographically, the Caucasus has traditionally been a buffer between Russia, Turkey and Iran. Part Russian Federation, part Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the area has a tradition of fast-shifting partnerships, of rich and varied cultural heritage, and fierce ethnic tensions going back centuries. This fascinating volume creates an illuminating perspective on the politics, history and culture of the Caucasus: it includes an account of how several 19th century Hungarian linguists fascinated by the region's famously difficult languages conducted field research still used by politicians to prove or disprove ethnic links ; an analysis of the recurring forcible movements of the people; a study of the region's Russian Imperial past; an exploration of the Muslim North/Christian South division in the context of the recent conflicts and their international ramifications; the elite-driven nature of the region's politics; finally, the role of art as a medium of freedom in the war-torn zones of the region. Necessary reading for everyone with an interest in the history of one of the world's tinderboxes.

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 Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies presents discussions by leading experts on all significant aspects of this diverse and fast-growing field. The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies deals with the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Late Roman Empire, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. Its centre was the city formerly known as Byzantium, refounded as Constantinople in 324 CE, the present-day Istanbul. Under its emperors, patriarchs, and all-pervasive bureaucracy Byzantium developed a distinctive society: Greek in language, Roman in legal system, and Christian in religion. Byzantium's impact in the European Middle Ages is hard to over-estimate, as a bulwark against invaders, as a meeting-point for trade from Asia and the Mediterranean, as a guardian of the classical literary and artistic heritage, and as a creator of its own magnificent artistic style.

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.

The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, in the city of Rome mansions were besieged, and bounty-hunters searched the streets for "public enemies." Among the astonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the violence engulfing Italy. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father's estate. Despite an acute currency shortage, she raised money to help her fiance in exile. And when several years later, her husband, back in Rome, was declared an outlaw, she successfully hid him, worked for his pardon, and joined other Roman women in staging a public protest. The wife's tale is known only because her husband had inscribed on large slabs of marble the elaborate eulogy he gave at her funeral. Though no name is given on the inscriptions, starting as early as the seventeenth century, scholars saw saw similarities between the contents of the inscription and the story, preserved in literary sources, of one Turia, the wife of Quintus Lucretius. Although the identification remains uncertain, and in spite of the other substantial gaps in the text of the speech, the "Funeral Speech for Turia" (Laudatio Turiae), as it is still conventionally called, offers an extraordinary window into the life of a high-ranking woman at a critical moment of Roman history. In this book Josiah Osgood reconstructs the wife's life more fully than it has been before by bringing in alongside the eulogy stories of other Roman women who also contributed to their families' survival while working to end civil war. He shows too how Turia's story sheds rare light on the more hidden problems of everyday life for Romans, including a high number of childless marriages. Written with a general audience in mind, Turia: A Roman Woman's Civil War will appeal to those interested in Roman history as well as war, and the ways that war upsets society's power structures. Not only does the study come to terms with the distinctive experience of a larger group of Roman women, including the prudence they had to show to succeed , but also introduces readers to an extraordinary tribute to married love which, though from another world, speaks to us today.