This work addresses a central but often ignored question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: how did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a civilizing ideology with distinct racist overtones? By focusing on a particular group of colonial officials in a specific setting the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to 1930 the author argues that the ideal of a special civilizing mission had a decisive impact on colonial policymaking and on the evolution of modern French republicanism generally. French ideas of civilization simultaneously republican, racist, and modern encouraged the governors general in the 1890 s to attack such feudal African institutions as aristocratic rule and slavery in ways that referred back to France s own experience of revolutionary change. Ironically, local administrators in the 1920 s also invoked these same ideas to justify such reactionary policies as the reintroduction of forced labor, arguing that coercion, which inculcated a work ethic in the lazy African, legitimized his loss of freedom. By constantly invoking the ideas of civilization, colonial policy makers in Dakar and Paris managed to obscure the fundamental contradictions between the rights of man guaranteed in a republican democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire that violates those rights.

In response to Soviet advances in science and engineering education, the country’s top scientists with the support of the federal government in 1956 launched an unprecedented program to reform pre-college science education in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, John Rudolph traces the origins of two of the leading projects in this movement in high school physics and biology. Rudolph describes how the scientists directing these projects drew on their wartime experiences in weapons development and defense consultation to guide their foray into the field of education and he reveals how the broader social and political conditions of the 1950s Cold War America fundamentally shaped the nature of the course materials they eventually produced.

It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with Important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black German subjects for her book. In the end the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities? The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as raclally impure at best.