Today Europe stands at a crossroads unlike any it has faced since 1945. Since the 2008 financial crash, Europe has weathered the Greek debt crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis, and the identity crisis brought about by Brexit in 2016. The future of the European project is in doubt. How will Europe respond? Reform and revolution have been two forms of response to crisis that have shaped Europe's history. To understand Europe's present, we must understand that past. This interdisciplinary book considers, through the prism of several landmark moments, how the dynamics of reformation and revolution, and the crises they either addressed or created, have shaped European history, memory, and thought.

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers. This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold's reign whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La Specola.

For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is widely regarded as one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment period. Best-known for his founding work of economics, The Wealth of Nations, Smith engaged equally with the nature of morality in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. He also gave lectures on literature and jurisprudence, and wrote papers on art and science. In this outstanding philosophical introduction Samuel Fleischacker argues that Smith is a superb example of the broadly curious thinkers who flourished in the Enlightenment-for whom morality, politics, law, and economics were just a few of the many fascinating subjects that could be illuminated by naturalistic modes of investigation. After a helpful overview of his life and work, Fleischacker examines the full range of Smith's thought, on such subjects as: epistemology, philosophy of science, and aesthetics the nature of sympathy moral approval and moral judgement virtue religion justice and jurisprudence governmental policy economic principles liberalism. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary, Adam Smith is essential reading for those studying ethics, political philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the Enlightenment, as well as those reading Smith in related disciplines such as economics, law, and religion.

The racist legacy behind the Western idea of freedom The era of the Enlightenment, which gave rise to our modern conceptions of freedom and democracy, was also the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. America, a nation founded on the principle of liberty, is also a nation built on African slavery, Native American genocide, and systematic racial discrimination. White Freedom traces the complex relationship between freedom and race from the eighteenth century to today, revealing how being free has meant being white. Tyler Stovall explores the intertwined histories of racism and freedom in France and the United States, the two leading nations that have claimed liberty as the heart of their national identities. He explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. Taking readers from the Age of Revolution to today, Stovall challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty. Throughout the history of modern Western liberal democracy, freedom has long been white freedom. A major work of scholarship that is certain to draw a wide readership and transform contemporary debates, White Freedom provides vital new perspectives on the inherent racism behind our most cherished beliefs about freedom, liberty, and human rights.

The French emigration was an exilic movement triggered by the 1789 French Revolution with long-lasting social, cultural, and political impacts that continued well into the nineteenth century. At times paradoxical, the political and legal implications of being an emigre are detangled in this edited collection, thus bringing to light unexpected processes of tensions and compromises between the exiles and their host societies. The refugee/host contact points also fostered a series of cultural transfers. This book argues that the French emigration ought to be seen within the broader context of an 'Age of Exile', a notion that better encompasses the dynamics of migration that forced many to re-imagine their relation to a nation and define their displaced identities. Revisiting the historiography of the last twenty years from an interdisciplinary perspective, this volume challenges pre-existing beliefs on the journeys and re-settlements - in Europe and beyond - of the French emigre community.

Contact, Conquest and Colonization brings together international historians and literary studies scholars in order to explore the force of practices of comparing in shaping empires and colonial relations at different points in time and around the globe. Whenever there was cultural contact in the context of European colonization and empire-building, historical records teem with comparisons among those cultures. This edited volume focuses on what historical agents actually do when they compare, rather than on comparison as an analytic method. Its contributors are thus interested in the 'doing of comparison', and explore the force of these practices of comparing in shaping empires and (post-)colonial relations between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to students and scholars of global history, as well as those interested in cultural history and the history of colonialism.

This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries. The book reads the period against spatial thought's history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture. It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe's overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging's expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom's expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought's exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, namely, that too little skepticism toward one's own certainties makes one a danger to others. Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.

This book explores the main currents of European thought between 1350 and 1992, which it approaches in two principal ways: culture as produced by place and the progressive unmooring of thought from previously set religious and philosophical boundaries. The book reads the period against spatial thought's history (spatial sciences such as geography or Euclidean geometry) to argue that Europe cannot be understood as a continent in intellectual terms or its history organized with respect to traditional spatial-geographic categories. Instead we need to understand European intellectual history in terms of a culture that defined its own place, as opposed to a place that produced a given culture. It then builds on this idea to argue that Europe's overweening drive to know more about humanity and the cosmos continually breached the boundaries set by venerable religious and philosophical traditions. In this respect, spatial thought foregrounded the human at the unchanging's expense, with European thought slowly becoming unmoored, as it doggedly produced knowledge at wisdom's expense. Michael J. Sauter illustrates this by pursuing historical themes across different chapters, including European thought's exit from the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, and war and culture, offering a thorough overview of European thought during this period. The book concludes by explaining how contemporary culture has forgotten what early modern thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne still knew, namely, that too little skepticism toward one's own certainties makes one a danger to others. Offering a comprehensive introduction to European thought that stretches from the late fourteenth to the late twentieth century, this is the perfect one-volume study for students of European intellectual history.

This book investigates the transnational dimensions of European cultural memory and how it contributes to the construction of new non-, supra, and post-national, but also national, memory narratives. The volume considers how these narratives circulate not only within Europe, but also through global interactions with other locations. The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures responds to recent academic calls to break with methodological nationalism in memory studies. Taking European memory as a case study, the book offers new empirical and theoretical insights into the transnational dimensions of cultural memory, without losing sight of the continued relevance of the nation. The articles critically examine the ways in which various individuals, organizations, institutions, and works of art are mobilizing future-oriented memories of Europe to construct new memory narratives. Taking into account the heterogeneity and transnational locations of commemorative groups, the multidirectionality of acts of remembrance, and a variety of commemorative media such as museums, film, photography, and literature, the volume not only investigates how memory discourses circulate within Europe, but also how they are being transferred, translated, or transformed through global interactions beyond the European continent.

De-Illustrating the History of the British Empire aims to offer a timely and inclusive contribution to the evolving cross-disciplinary scholarship that connects visual studies with British imperial historiography. The key purpose of this book is to introduce scholars and students of British imperial and Commonwealth history to a clearly presented and diversely themed evaluation of several "visual manuscripts" - images of all genres depicting particular events, personalities, social and cultural contexts - that document the development of some of the British imperial and post-colonial visual literacies history. The concept of "visual manuscripts" alongside theories of visual anthropology and memory studies are addressed across the entire volume thus allowing the readers to approach with greater ease the discourse on imperial iconography and historiography.

Elie Wiesel: Humanist Messenger for Peace is part biography and part moral history of the intellectual and spiritual journey of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, human rights activist, author, university professor, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. In this concise text, Alan L. Berger portrays Wiesel's transformation from a pre-Holocaust, deeply God-fearing youth to a survivor of the Shoah who was left with questions for both God and man. An advisor to American presidents of both political parties, his nearly 60 books voiced an activism on behalf of oppressed people everywhere. The book illuminates Wiesel's contributions in the areas of religion, human rights, literature, and Jewish thought to show the impact that he has had on American life. Supported by primary documents about and from Wiesel, the volume gives students a gateway to explore Wiesel's incredible life. This book will make a great addition to courses on American religious or intellectual thought.

Alva and Gunnar Myrdal are the only couple ever awarded Nobel prizes as individuals: Gunnar won the prize in Economics in 1974, and Alva won the Peace Prize in 1982. This dual biography examines their work as architects of the modern welfare state and probes the connections between the public and private dimensions of their lives. Drawing on their extensive personal correspondence and diaries between their electrifying first meeting in 1919 and their protracted marital crisis in the early 1940s, this book presents the psychologist and the economist as they sought to combine love and work in an equal partnership. Alva and Gunnar simultaneously experimented with a new kind of intimate relationship and designed the social supports necessary for women both to bear and raise children and to contribute their talents and energies to society. Like all genuine revolutionaries, they struggled to free themselves from the burdens of their upbringings; to evaluate their own actions with what they called "unsparing honesty," and to test their policy recommendations in practice, measuring everything against the values they shared.

Following the work of prominent object relations theorists, such as Fairbairn, Suttie and Winnicott, Gal Gerson explores the correlation between analytical theory and intellectual environment in two ways. He notes the impact that the British object relations school had on both psychology and wider culture, and suggests that the school's outlook involved more than a clinical choice. Gerson first interprets the object relations model as a political theory that completes a certain internal development within liberalism. He later outlines the relationship between the analytical theory and the historical setting in which it formed and took root. By engaging with these questions, Gerson demonstrates the deeper structure and implications of object relation theory for social philosophy. This allows him to answer questions such as: 'What kind of social arrangements do we endorse when we accept object relations theory as a fair description of mind?'; 'What beliefs about power, individuality, and household structure do we take in? What do we give up when doing so?'; and, lastly, 'What does it say about contemporary advanced societies that they have taken in much of the theory's content?' Proposing a novel rethinking of human nature, Individuality and Ideology in British Object Relations Theory provides much-needed insight into how this school of psychoanalytic theory has impacted contemporary social and political life.

Drawing on sixteenth- to twenty-first-century American, British, French, German, Polish, Norwegian and Russian literature and philosophy, this collection teases out culturally specific conceptions of old age as well as subjective constructions of late-life identity and selfhood. The internationally known humanistic gerontologist Jan Baars, the prominent historian of old age David Troyansky and the distinguished cultural historian and pioneer in the field of literature and science George Rousseau join a team of literary historians who trace out the interfaces between their chosen texts and the respective periods' medical and gerontological knowledge. The chapters' in-depth analyses of major and less-known works demonstrate the rich potential of fiction, poetry and autobiographical writing in the construction of a cultural history of senescence. These literary examples not only bear witness to longue duree representations of old age, and epochal transitions regarding cultural attitudes to the aged; they also foreground the subjectivities that produced some of these representations and that continue to communicate with readers of other times and places. By casting a net over a variety of authors, genres, periods and languages, the collection gives a broad sense of how literature is among the richest and most engaging sources for historicizing the ageing self.

Approaching Recent World History Through Film: Context, Analysis, and Research explores the relationships between twentieth-century world history and film by providing analysis of a diverse range of films organized by global history topics, including war and conflict, decolonization, political economy, and long-distance travel. This insightful text describes how to analyze films as original historical sources and how to carry out research projects using films. The text provides guidance on the types of world history films, their conventions, and how to analyze the historical arguments in movies. Scott C.M. Bailey incorporates in-depth discussions of the historical content and context of a wide range of international films connected with important twentieth-century global history topics. The book also offers many prompts for discussion, historical timelines, and suggestions for further reading and viewing, as well as instructions on how to construct research papers and projects which employ the use of films as historical sources. This book will be of interest to students in world history and film history courses.

Approaching Recent World History Through Film: Context, Analysis, and Research explores the relationships between twentieth-century world history and film by providing analysis of a diverse range of films organized by global history topics, including war and conflict, decolonization, political economy, and long-distance travel. This insightful text describes how to analyze films as original historical sources and how to carry out research projects using films. The text provides guidance on the types of world history films, their conventions, and how to analyze the historical arguments in movies. Scott C.M. Bailey incorporates in-depth discussions of the historical content and context of a wide range of international films connected with important twentieth-century global history topics. The book also offers many prompts for discussion, historical timelines, and suggestions for further reading and viewing, as well as instructions on how to construct research papers and projects which employ the use of films as historical sources. This book will be of interest to students in world history and film history courses.

This text argues that Nietzsche's idea of invalid policy that is believed to be valid and Heidegger's concept of doubt as the reason for a representation are essentially the same idea. Using this insight, the text investigates vignettes from colonial occupation in Southeast Asia and its protest occupations to contend that untruth, covered in camouflages of constancy and morality, has been a powerful force in Asian history. The Nietzschean inflections applied here include Superhumanity, the eternal return of trauma, the critiques of morality, and the moralisation of guilt. Many ideas from the Heideggerian canon are used, including the struggle for individual validity amidst the debasement and imbalance of Being. Concepts such as thrownness, finitude and the remnant cultural power of Christianity, are also deployed in an expose of colonial practices. The book gives detailed treatment to post-colonial Malaya (1963), Japanese occupied Hong Kong (1941-1945), and the tussle with communism in Cold War Singapore and Malaya, as well as the question of Kuomintang KMT validity in Hong Kong (1945-1949) and British Malaya (1950- 1953). The book explains the struggles for identity in the Hong Kong protest movement (2014-2020) by showing how economic distortion caused by landlordism has been covered by aspirations for freedom.

Concentrating on the rivalry between the formal and informal empires of Great Britain, Japan and the United States of America, this book examines how regional relations were negotiated in Asia and the Pacific during the interwar years. A range of international organizations including the League of Nations and the Institute of Pacific Relations, as well as internationally minded intellectuals in various countries, intersected with each other, forming a type of regional governance in the Asia-Pacific. This system transformed itself as post-war decolonization accelerated and the United States entered as a major power in the region. This was further reinforced by big foundations, including Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford. This book sheds light on the circumstances leading to the collapse of formal empires in the Asia-Pacific alongside hitherto unknown aspects of the region's transnational history. A valuable resource for students and scholars of the twentieth century history of the Asia-Pacific region, and of twentieth century internationalism

The book describes humanism in a systematic and historical perspective. It analyzes its manifestation and function in cultural studies and its role in the present. Within the book, special attention is given to the intention of contemporary humanism to overcome ethno-centric elements in the cultural orientation of contemporary living conditions and to develop humane dimensions of this orientation. This is linked to a fundamental critique of the current post-human self-understanding of the humanities. Furthermore, the intercultural aspect in the understanding of humanism is emphasized; for non-Western cultures also have their own humanistic traditions. Two further aspects are also addressed: the Holocaust as the most radical challenge to humanistic thinking and the relationship of humanism to nature. Sitting at the intersection of history and philosophy, the book is perfect for those exploring humanism from an historical perspective.

Historians of late premodern Korea have tended to regard it as a hermit kingdom, isolated from its neighbours and the wider world. In fact, as Ro argues in this book, Korean intellectuals were heavily influenced by both Chinese Neo-Confucianism and the European Enlightenment in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In the late Choson period the regime felt threatened by the new, more empirical, approaches to knowledge emerging from both the East and the West. For this reason many Korean intellectuals felt it necessary to work in the shadows and formed secret societies for the study of nature. Because of the secrecy of these societies, much of their work has remained unknown even in Korea until recent years. Ho looks at the work of these intellectuals and analyses the impact their thinking and experimentation had on knowledge production in Korea. A fascinating insight into the largely overlooked story of how globalization affected intellectual life in Korea before the 20th century. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Korean history and of Asian intellectual history more broadly.

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) occupies a unique place in 20th-century philosophy. His view that human beings are not rational but symbolic animals and his famous dispute with Martin Heidegger at Davos in 1929 are compelling alternatives to the deadlock between 'analytic' and 'continental' approaches to philosophy. An astonishing polymath, Cassirer's work pays equal attention to mathematics and natural science but also art, language, myth, religion, technology, and history. However, until now the importance of his work has largely been overlooked. In this outstanding introduction Samantha Matherne examines and assesses the full span of Cassirer's work. Beginning with an overview of his life and works she covers the following important topics: Cassirer's neo-Kantian background Philosophy of mathematics and natural science, including Cassirer's first systematic work, Substance and Function, and subsequent works, like Einstein's Theory of Relativity The problem of culture and the ground-breaking The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer's ethical and political thought and his diagnosis of fascism in The Myth of the State Cassirer's influence and legacy. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary of terms, this is an ideal introduction to Cassirer's thought for anyone coming to his work for the first time. It is essential reading for students in philosophy as well as related disciplines such as intellectual history, art history, politics, and literature.

According to Voltaire's Candide, Admiral John Byng's 1757 execution went forward to 'encourage the others'. Of course, the story is more complicated. This microhistorical account upon a macro-event presents an updated, revisionist, and detailed account of a dark chapter in British naval history. Asking 'what was Britain like the moment Byng returned to Portsmouth after the Battle of Minorca (1756)?' not only returns a glimpse of mid-eighteenth century Britain but provides a deeper understanding of how a wartime admiral, the son of a peer, of some wealth, a once colonial governor, and sitting member of parliament came to be scapegoated and then executed for the failings of others. This manuscript presents a cultural, social, and political dive into Britain at the beginning of the Seven Years' War. Part 1 focuses on ballad, newspaper, and prize culture. Part 2 makes a turn towards the social where religion, morality, rioting, and disease play into the Byng saga. Admiral Byng's record during the 1755 Channel Campaign is explored, as is the Mediterranean context of the Seven Years' War, troubles elsewhere in the empire, and then the politics behind Byng's trial and execution.

Concentrating on the rivalry between the formal and informal empires of Great Britain, Japan and the United States of America, this book examines how regional relations were negotiated in Asia and the Pacific during the interwar years. A range of international organizations including the League of Nations and the Institute of Pacific Relations, as well as internationally minded intellectuals in various countries, intersected with each other, forming a type of regional governance in the Asia-Pacific. This system transformed itself as post-war decolonization accelerated and the United States entered as a major power in the region. This was further reinforced by big foundations, including Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford. This book sheds light on the circumstances leading to the collapse of formal empires in the Asia-Pacific alongside hitherto unknown aspects of the region's transnational history. A valuable resource for students and scholars of the twentieth century history of the Asia-Pacific region, and of twentieth century internationalism

This volume takes an important step towards developing global perspectives on the history of national history writing. With chapters spanning all five continents, contributors address a common framework which has been developed by the editor as part and parcel of his five-year European Science Foundation-funded project on the writing of national histories in Europe. Here the question is how and in which way European national histories may be compared to non-European national histories. In addition the volume pursues the question of the many influences, transfers, adaptations and interrelations between national historiographies in different parts of the globe.