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Books > History > European history > General
East-West detente was hotly debated during its heyday in the 1970s.
Critics saw it as a form of appeasement which, they claimed,
strengthened communism while weakening the West. Supporters saw it
variously as a means of reducing the danger of war, subverting
communism and, in Europe, bridging the division of the continent.
This book presents a balanced assessment of the reality of detente,
and of the different interests involved, looking back through the
eyes of expert contributors from Britain, Germany, France, Italy,
Poland, Hungary and Austria. It takes a particularly close look at
the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which
produced the Helsinki Final Act and a series of follow-up measure
that continue to evolve to the present day. It argues that, in
negotiating the text of the Final Act, the West won a victory that
was insufficiently recognized at the time. Davy concludes that
detente was ambiguous, conferring short-term political and economic
benefits on East European regimes while at the same time weakening
their foundations and contributing to their collapse in 1989.
European Detente will be of interest to students, academics and
practitioners in international relations, strategic studies and
international politics, particularly those specializing in Eastern
Europe.
A gripping first hand account of how Soviet Communism impacted on
those who had to live their daily lives under its rule.
This work explores the value of the motorcycle to communications,
and how the despatch rider helped prevent German victory.
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The Ruin of Kasch
(Paperback)
Roberto Calasso; Translated by Richard Dixon
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While the French Revolution has been much discussed and studied,
its impact on religious life in France is rather neglected. Yet,
during this brief period, religion underwent great changes that
affected everyone: clergy and laypeople, men and women, Catholics,
Protestants and Jews. The "Reigns of Terror" of the Revolution
drove the Church underground, permanently altering the relationship
between Church and State. In this book, Nigel Aston offers a guide
to these tumultuous events. While the structures and beliefs of the
Catholic Church are central, it does not neglect minority groups
like Protestants and Jews. Among other features, the book discusses
the Constitutional Church, the end of state support for
Catholicism, the "Dechristianization" campaign and the Concordat of
1801-2. Key themes discussed include the capacity of all the
Churches for survival and adaptation, the role of religion in
determining political allegiances during the Revolution, and the
turbulence of Church-State relations. In this study, based on the
latest evidence, Aston sheds new light on a dynamic period in
European history and its impact on the next 200 years of religious
life in France.
In an era when women were supposed to be disciplined and obedient, Anna proved to be neither. Defying 16th-century social mores, she was the frequent subject of gossip because of her immodest dress and flirtatious behavior. When her wealthy father discovered that she was having secret, simultaneous affairs with a young nobleman and a cavalryman, he turned her out of the house in rage, but when she sued him for financial support, he had her captured, returned home and chained to a table as punishment. Anna eventually escaped and continued her suit against her father, her siblings and her home town in a bitter legal battle that was to last 30 years and end only upon her death. Drawn from her surviving love letters and court records, The Burgermeister's Daughter is a fascinating examination of the politics of sexuality, gender and family in the 16th century, and a powerful testament to the courage and tenacity of a woman who defied the inequalities of this distant age.
Accompanying this wealth of detailed information are over 100 black
and white photographs, illustrations and maps, plus a list of
Azerbaijani proverbs, suggestions for further reading, a chronology
of Azerbaijani historical events, and a discography.
Riche de ses editeurs scolaires et de ses collections enfantines,
le dix-neuvieme siecle a-t-il invente le marche du livre pour
enfants? Dans la France du dix-huitieme siecle, de nombreux acteurs
s'efforcent deja de separer, au sein de la librairie, les lectures
adaptees aux enfants et aux jeunes gens. Les rituels pedagogiques
des colleges et des petites ecoles, les strategies commerciales des
libraires, les preoccupations des Eglises, les projets et les
politiques de reforme scolaire, tous pousses par la fievre
educative de la noblesse et de la bourgeoisie, produisent alors
d'innombrables bibliotheques enfantines, plurielles et plastiques,
avec ou sans murs. Cet ouvrage montre comment, a un ordre des
livres domine par les logiques des institutions scolaires et des
metiers du livre, se surimpose a partir des annees 1760 une
nouvelle categorie, celle du " livre d'education ", qui ne
s'identifie plus a un lieu, mais a un projet de lecture, et
s'accompagne de l'emergence de nouvelles figures d'auteurs. Alors
que les etudes sur la litterature de jeunesse poursuivent partout
leur developpement et leur structuration, ce livre dialogue avec
les dernieres recherches europeennes sur la question. A l'inverse
des travaux litteraires, il part, non des auteurs et des textes,
mais des objets et de leurs manipulations. Son originalite est
d'apporter un regard historien sur ces questions, en articulant
histoire du livre et de la librairie, histoire de l'education,
histoire des milieux litteraires et de la condition d'auteur. ---
With its wealth of educational publishers and children's
collections, did the nineteenth century invent the children's book
market? In eighteenth-century France, many people were already
trying to separate the literature suitable for children and young
people within the bookstore. The pedagogical rituals of colleges
and small schools, the commercial strategies of booksellers, the
concerns of the churches, the projects and policies of school
reform, all driven by the educational fever of the nobility and the
bourgeoisie, produced countless children's libraries, plural and
plastic, with or without walls. At the beginning of the century,
the ordering of books was dominated by the rationale of educational
institutions and the book trade: this book shows how a new category
emerged from the 1760s onwards, that of the "educational book",
which was no longer identified with a place, but with a literacy
project, and which was accompanied by the emergence of new authors.
As studies on children's literature continue to be developed and
shaped in many areas, this book is in dialogue with the latest
European research on the subject. In contrast to literary studies,
this research does not start from authors and texts, but from
objects and their uses. Its originality lies in the fact that it
provides a historical perspective on these issues, articulating the
history of books and bookshops, the history of education, the
history of literary circles and the status of the author.
Exam Board: Edexcel Level: A level Subject: History First teaching:
September 2015 First exams: June 2017 This book: covers the
essential content in the new specifications in a rigorous and
engaging way, using detailed narrative, sources, timelines, key
words, helpful activities and extension material helps develop
conceptual understanding of areas such as evidence,
interpretations, causation and change, through targeted activities
provides assessment support for both AS and A level with sample
answers, sources, practice questions and guidance to help you
tackle the new-style exam questions. It also comes with three
years' access to ActiveBook, an online, digital version of your
textbook to help you personalise your learning as you go through
the course - perfect for revision
As early as the third century, St Maurice-an Egyptian-became leader
of the legendary Roman Theban Legion. Ever since, there have been
richly varied encounters between those defined as 'Africans' and
those called 'Europeans'. Yet Africans and African Europeans are
still widely believed to be only a recent presence in Europe.
Olivette Otele traces a long African European heritage through the
lives of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary. She uncovers
a forgotten past, from Emperor Septimius Severus, to enslaved
Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance, and all the way
to present-day migrants moving to Europe's cities. By exploring a
history that has been long overlooked, she sheds light on questions
very much alive today-on racism, identity, citizenship, power and
resilience. African Europeans is a landmark account of a crucial
thread in Europe's complex history.
A gripping eyewitness account of a major 20th-century military
conflict by the UK's most popular writer on geopolitics; The
shattering of Yugoslavia in the 1990s showed that, after nearly 50
years of peace, war could return to Europe. It came to its bloody
conclusion in Kosovo in 1999.; Tim Marshall, then diplomatic editor
at Sky News, was on the ground covering the Kosovo War. This is his
illuminating account of how events unfolded, a thrilling
journalistic memoir drawing on personal experience, eyewitness
accounts, and interviews with intelligence officials from five
countries.; Twenty years on from the war's end, with the rise of
Russian power, a weakened NATO and stalled EU expansion, this story
is more relevant than ever, as questions remain about the
possibility of conflict on European soil. Utterly gripping, this is
Tim Marshall at his very best: behind the lines, under fire and
full of the insight that has made him one of Britain's foremost
writers on geopolitics.
For centuries the society and politics of Old Regime Europe relied
on the strong connection between past, present, and future and on a
belief in the unstoppable continuity of time. What happened during
the eighteenth century when the Age of Revolutions claimed to
cancel the previous social order and announced the dawn of a new
era? This book explores how antiquarianism provided new political
bodies with allegedly time-hallowed traditions and so served as a
source of legitimacy for reshaping European politics. The love for
antiquities forged a common language of political communication
within a burgeoning public sphere. To understand why this happened,
Marco Cavarzere focuses on the cultural debates taking place in the
Italian states from 1748 until 1796. During this period,
governments tried to establish regional "national cultures" through
erudite scholarship, with the intent of creating new administrative
and political centralization within individual Italian states.
Meanwhile, other sectors of local societies used the tools of
antiquarianism in order to offer a counter-narrative on these
political reforms. Ultimately, this book proposes a localized way
of reading antiquarian texts. Far from presenting timeless
knowledge, erudition in fact gave voice to specific tensions which
were linked to restricted political arenas and regional public
opinion.
1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world
rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other
concerns. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian cafe for
his first date with no-show Simone de Beauvoir. Marlene Dietrich
slips from her loveless marriage into the dive bars of Berlin.
Father and son Thomas and Klaus Mann clash over each other's
homosexuality. And Vladimir Nabokov lovingly places a fresh-caught
butterfly at the end of Vera's bed. Little do they all know, the
book burning will soon begin. Love in a Time of Hate skilfully
interweaves some of the greatest love stories of the 1930s with the
darkening backdrop of fascism in Europe, in an irresistible journey
into the past that brings history and its actors to vivid life.
From the time Catterina Vizzani, a young Roman woman, began wooing
the woman she was attracted to, she did so dressed as a man.
Fleeing Rome to avoid a potential trial for sexual misdeeds, she
became Giovanni Bordoni, transitioning and becoming a male in
spirit, deed, and body, through what was the most complete physical
change possible in the eighteenth century. This volume features
Giovanni Bianchi's 1744 Italian account of Vizzani/Bordoni,
published for the first time together with a modern English
translation, making available to an English-speaking audience the
objective, scientific exploration of gender conducted by Bianchi.
John Cleland's well-known, albeit fanciful, 1751 version of the
story has also been reproduced here, shedding light on the
divergent sexual politics driving Bianchi's Italian original and
Cleland's greatly embellished English translation. Through a close
examination of Bianchi's work as anatomical practitioner and
scholar, Clorinda Donato traces the development of his advocacy for
tolerance of all sexual orientations. Several chapters address the
medical and philosophical inquiry into sexual preference,
reproduction, sexual identity, and gender fluidity which
Enlightenment anatomists from Holland to Italy engaged with in
their research concerning the relationship between the mind and the
reproductive organs. Meanwhile, it is the social implications of
gender ambiguity which may be analysed in Cleland's condemnation of
women who "pass" as men. Drawing on the biographies produced by
Bianchi and Cleland, the volume reflects on the motivation of each
author to tell the story of Vizzani/Bordoni either as a narration
of empowerment or a cautionary tale within the European context of
evolving sexual opinions, some based on scientific research, others
based on social practice and cultural norms.
Was the outcome of the First World War on a knife edge? In this
major new account of German wartime politics and strategy Holger
Afflerbach argues that the outcome of the war was actually in the
balance until relatively late in the war. Using new evidence from
diaries, letters and memoirs, he fundamentally revises our
understanding of German strategy from the decision to go to war and
the failure of the western offensive to the radicalisation of
Germany's war effort under Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the
ultimate collapse of the Central Powers. He uncovers the struggles
in wartime Germany between supporters of peace and hardliners who
wanted to fight to the finish. He suggests that Germany was not
nearly as committed to all-out conquest as previous accounts argue.
Numerous German peace advances could have offered the opportunity
to end the war before it dragged Europe into the abyss.
Iran and a French Empire of Trade examines the understudied topic
of Franco-Persian relations in the long eighteenth century to
highlight how rising tensions among Eurasian empires and
revolutions in the Atlantic world were profoundly intertwined.
Conflicts between Persia, Turkey, India and Russia, and European
weapons-dealing with these empires occurred against a backdrop of
climate change and food insecurities that destabilized markets.
Takeda shows how the French state relied on "entrepreneurial
imperialism" to extend commercial activities eastwards beyond the
Mediterranean during this time, from Louis XIV's reign to Napoleon
Bonaparte's First Empire. Organized as a collection of
microhistories, her study showcases a colourful set of
characters-rogue merchants from Marseille, a gambling house madam,
a naturalized Greek-French drogman, and a bi-cultural
Genevan-Persian consul, among others-to demonstrate how individuals
on the fringes of French society spearheaded projects to foster
ties between France and Persia. Considering the Enlightenment as a
product of a connected world, Takeda investigates how
trans-imperial adventurers, merchants, consuls, and informants
negotiated treaties, traded commodities and arms, transferred
knowledge, and introduced industrial practices from Asia to Europe.
And she shows the surprising ways in which Enlightenment debates
about regime changes from the Safavid to Qajar dynasties and
Persia's borderland wars shaped French ideas about revolution and
policies related to empire-building.
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