Browse

The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire has often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon of anti-racism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to ... More

In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire has often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon of anti-racism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to French Jews, Grégoire has been particularly celebrated since 1989, when the French government placed him in the Pantheon as a model of ideals of universalism and human rights. In this biography, based on newly discovered and previously overlooked material, we gain access to the full complexity of Grégoire's intellectual and political universe as well as the compelling nature of his persona. His life offers an extraordinary vantage from which to view large issues in European and world history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides provocative insights into many of the prevailing tensions, ideals, and paradoxes of the twenty-first century. Focusing on Grégoire's idea of “regeneration,” that people could literally be made anew, the book argues that revolutionary universalism was more complicated than it appeared. Tracing the French Revolution's long-term legacy, it suggests that while it spread concepts of equality and liberation throughout the world, its ideals also helped to justify colonialism and conquest.Less

Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist

Robert Levy

In her own day, Ana Pauker was named “The Most Powerful Woman in the World” by Time magazine. Today, when she is remembered at all, she is thought of as the puppet of Soviet communism in Romania, ... More

In her own day, Ana Pauker was named “The Most Powerful Woman in the World” by Time magazine. Today, when she is remembered at all, she is thought of as the puppet of Soviet communism in Romania, blindly enforcing the most brutal and repressive Stalinist regime. This biography changes the picture dramatically, revealing a woman of remarkable strength, dominated by conflict and contradiction far more than by dogmatism. Telling the story of Pauker's youth in an increasingly anti-Semitic environment, her commitment to a revolutionary career, and her rise in the Romanian Communist movement, this book makes no attempt to whitewash Pauker's life and actions, but rather explores every contour of the complicated persona found expressed in masses of newly accessible archival documents.Less

Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831

Ian Coller

Many think of Muslims in Europe as a twentieth-century phenomenon, but this book brings to life a lost community of Arabs who lived through war, revolution, and empire in early nineteenth-century ... More

Many think of Muslims in Europe as a twentieth-century phenomenon, but this book brings to life a lost community of Arabs who lived through war, revolution, and empire in early nineteenth-century France. The book uncovers the surprising story of the several hundred men, women, and children—Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, and others—who followed the French army back home after Napoleon's occupation of Egypt. Based on research in neglected archives, on the rediscovery of forgotten Franco-Arab authors, and on a diverse collection of visual materials, the book builds a rich picture of the first Arab France—its birth, rise, and sudden decline in the age of colonial expansion. As it excavates a community that was nearly erased from the historical record, the book offers a new account of France itself in this pivotal period, one that transcends the binary framework through which we too often view history by revealing the deep roots of exchange between Europe and the Muslim world, and showing how Arab France was in fact integral to the dawn of modernity.Less

At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000

David Levine

Looking at a neglected period in the social history of modernization, this book investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. New commercial ... More

Looking at a neglected period in the social history of modernization, this book investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. New commercial routines, new forms of agriculture, new methods of information technology, and increased population densities all played a role in the prolonged transition away from antiquity and toward modernity. The book highlights both “top-down” and “bottom-up” changes that characterized the social experience of early modernization. In the former category are the Gregorian Reformation, the imposition of feudalism, and the development of centralizing state formations. Of equal importance to this book's portrait of the emerging social order are the bottom-up demographic relations that structured everyday life, because the making of the modern world, in the book's view, also began in the decisions made by countless men and women regarding their families and circumstances. The book ends its story with the cataclysm unleashed by the Black Death in 1348, which brought three centuries of growth to a grim end.Less

Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity

Andreas Killen

This book ties the German discourse on nervousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Berlin's transformation into a capital of the second industrial revolution. Focusing on ... More

This book ties the German discourse on nervousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Berlin's transformation into a capital of the second industrial revolution. Focusing on three key groups—railway personnel, soldiers, and telephone operators—the book traces the emergence in the 1880s and then later decline of the belief that modernity caused nervous illness. During this period Berlin became arguably the most advanced metropolis in Europe. A host of changes, many associated with breakthroughs in technologies of transportation, communication, and leisure, combined to alter radically the shape and tempo of everyday life in Berlin. The resulting consciousness of accelerated social change and the shocks and afflictions that accompanied it found their consummate expression in the discourse about nervousness. This book offers a wealth of new insights into the nature of the modern metropolis, the psychological aftermath of World War I, and the operations of the German welfare state. The book also explores cultural attitudes toward electricity, the evolution of psychiatric thought and practice, and the status of women workers in Germany's rapidly industrializing economy. Ultimately, it argues that the backlash against the welfare state that occurred during the late Weimar Republic brought about the final decoupling of modernity and nervous illness.Less

Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond

Veronika Fuechtner

One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside ... More

One hundred years after the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was established, this book recovers the cultural and intellectual history connected to this vibrant organization and places it alongside the London Bloomsbury group, the Paris Surrealist circle, and the Viennese fin-de-siècle as a crucial chapter in the history of modernism. Taking us from World War I Berlin to the Third Reich and beyond to 1940s Palestine and 1950s New York — and to the influential work of the Frankfurt School — the book traces the network of artists and psychoanalysts that began in Germany and continued in exile. Connecting movements, forms, and themes such as Dada, multi-perspectivity, and the urban experience with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, it illuminates themes distinctive to the Berlin psychoanalytic context such as war trauma, masculinity and femininity, race and anti-Semitism, and the cultural avant-garde. In particular, it explores the lives and works of Alfred Döblin, Max Eitingon, Georg Groddeck, Karen Horney, Richard Huelsenbeck, Count Hermann von Keyserling, Ernst Simmel, and Arnold Zweig.Less

Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia

Benjamin Nathans

A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, “beyond the Pale” of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the ... More

A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, “beyond the Pale” of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. Thanks to the availability of long-closed Russian archives, along with a wide range of other sources, this book reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter. In the wake of Russia's “Great Reforms”, it states, a policy of selective integration stimulated social and geographic mobility among the empire's Jews. The reaction that culminated, toward the turn of the century, in ethnic restrictions on admission to universities, the professions, and other institutions of civil society reflected broad anxieties that Russians were being placed at a disadvantage in their own empire.Less

Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany

Helmut Lethen

This book presents an interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. The book tells of “cool conduct” ... More

This book presents an interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. The book tells of “cool conduct” as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way of burying shame and animosity that might otherwise make social contact impossible.Less

The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality

Michael Berkowitz

This book investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality. ... More

This book investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the Holocaust: the association of Jews with criminality. Drawing from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, the author traces the myths and realities pertinent to the discourse on “Jewish criminality” from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic, into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews, and extending into postwar Europe.Less

Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine, and Nation-Building on the Fringe of Empire

Matthew Kraig Kelly

The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born in the Great Revolt of 1936–39, a period of sustained Arab protest against British policy in ... More

The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born in the Great Revolt of 1936–39, a period of sustained Arab protest against British policy in Palestine. In this book, Matthew Kraig Kelly makes the novel case that the key to understanding the rebellion lies in the "crimino-national" domain—a hitherto neglected area of overlap between criminological and nationalist discourses, and the primary terrain upon which the war of 1936–39 was fought. As Kelly elaborates, apart from national autonomy, the Palestinian rebels’ primary objective was to repudiate the British framing of their national movement as a criminal enterprise. The rebels therefore appropriated the institutions and even the aesthetics that betokened London’s legal title to Palestine, donning rank-specific uniforms and erecting their own postal, prison, and justice systems. In thus establishing the rudiments of a state, Palestinians shifted the criminal mantle onto their opponents: the British and the Zionists. Crime, in this sense, was the central preoccupation of the Palestinian national project, as it likely was of other such projects on the fringe of empire. Kelly's analysis amounts to a new history of the rebellion, and it offers important lessons for studies of interwar nationalism and insurgency more broadly.Less

Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany

Bernd Widdig

For many Germans the hyperinflation of 1922 to 1923 was one of their most decisive experiences of the twentieth century. This book investigates the effects of that inflation on German culture during ... More

For many Germans the hyperinflation of 1922 to 1923 was one of their most decisive experiences of the twentieth century. This book investigates the effects of that inflation on German culture during the Weimar Republic. It argues that inflation, with its dynamics of massification, devaluation, and the rapid circulation of money, is an integral part of modern culture and intensifies and condenses the experience of modernity in a traumatic way.Less

The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s-1820s

Ian McNeely

This book studies writing in its connection to bureaucracy, citizenship, and the state in Germany. Stitching together micro- and macro-level analysis, it reconstructs the vibrant, textually saturated ... More

This book studies writing in its connection to bureaucracy, citizenship, and the state in Germany. Stitching together micro- and macro-level analysis, it reconstructs the vibrant, textually saturated civic culture of the German southwest in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasions. The book reveals that Germany's notoriously oppressive bureaucracy, when viewed through the writing practices which were its lifeblood, could also function as a site of citizenship. Citizens, acting under the mediation of powerful local scribes, practiced their freedoms in written engagements with the state. Their communications laid the basis for civil society, showing how social networks commonly associated with the free market, the free press, and the voluntary association could also take root in powerful state institutions.Less

The Emerging Female Citizen: Gender and Enlightenment in Spain

Theresa AnnSmith

Eighteenth-century Spanish women were not idle bystanders during one of Europe's most dynamic eras. As this book demonstrates, Spanish intellectuals, calling for Spain to modernize its political, ... More

Eighteenth-century Spanish women were not idle bystanders during one of Europe's most dynamic eras. As this book demonstrates, Spanish intellectuals, calling for Spain to modernize its political, social, and economic institutions, brought the question of women's place to the forefront, as did women themselves. In explaining how both discourse and women's actions worked together to define women's roles in the nation, this book not only illustrates the rising visibility of women, but also reveals the complex processes that led to women's relatively swift exit from most public institutions in the early 1800s. As artists, writers, and reformers, Spanish women took up pens, joined academies and economic societies, formed tertulias—similar to French salons—and became active in the burgeoning public discourse of Enlightenment. In analyzing the meaning of women's presence in diverse centers of Enlightenment, the book offers a new interpretation of the dynamics among political discourse, social action, and gender ideologies.Less

Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914

Martin Thomas

How did Great Britain and France, the largest imperial powers of the early twentieth century, cope with mounting anti-colonial nationalism in the Arab world? What linked domestic opponents and ... More

How did Great Britain and France, the largest imperial powers of the early twentieth century, cope with mounting anti-colonial nationalism in the Arab world? What linked domestic opponents and foreign challengers in the Middle East and North Africa—Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt—as inhabitants attempted to overthrow the European colonial order? What strategies did the British and French adopt in the face of these threats? This book, the first study of colonial intelligence services to use recently declassified reports, argues that colonial control in the British and French empires depended on an elaborate security apparatus. It shows for the first time the crucial role of intelligence gathering in maintaining imperial control in the years before decolonization.Less

Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

This book's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad ... More

This book's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. The book shows that—at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities—Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. It demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.Less

The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France

Carolyn Dean

Kai-Wing Chow (ed.)

Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there—journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others—worked to rehabilitate what was ... More

Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there—journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others—worked to rehabilitate what was perceived as an unhealthy social body. This book shows how these critics attempted to reconstruct the “bodily integrity” of the nation by pointing to the dangers of homosexuality and pornography. It demonstrates the importance of this concept of bodily integrity in France and shows how it was ultimately used to define first-class citizenship. The book presents fresh historical material—including novels and medical treatises—to show how fantasies about the body-violating qualities of homosexuality and pornography informed social perceptions and political action. Although it focuses on the period from 1890 to 1945, the book also establishes the relevance of these ideas to current preoccupations with pornography and sexuality in the United States.Less

France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times

Raymond Jonas

This book tells the little-known story of the Sacré-Coeur, or Sacred Heart. The highest point in Paris and a celebrated tourist destination, the white-domed basilica of Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre is a ... More

This book tells the little-known story of the Sacré-Coeur, or Sacred Heart. The highest point in Paris and a celebrated tourist destination, the white-domed basilica of Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre is a key monument both to French Catholicism and to French national identity. The book reconstructs the history of the devotion responsible for the basilica, beginning with the apparition of the Sacred Heart to Marguerite Marie Alacoque in the seventeenth century, through the French Revolution and its aftermath, to the construction of the monumental church that has loomed over Paris since the end of the nineteenth century. It focuses on key moments in the development of the cult: the founding apparition, its invocation during the plague of Marseilles, its adaptation as a royalist symbol during the French Revolution, and its elevation to a central position in Catholic devotional and political life in the crisis surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. The book draws on a wealth of archival sources to produce a narrative that encompasses a remarkable sweep of French politics, history, architecture, and art.Less

From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990

Rudy Koshar

This book provides a powerful framework in which to examine the subject of German collective memory, which for more than a half century has been shaped by the experience of Nazism, World War II, and ... More

This book provides a powerful framework in which to examine the subject of German collective memory, which for more than a half century has been shaped by the experience of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Finding the assumptions of many writers and scholars shortsighted, the author surveys the evidence of postwar German memory in the context of previous traditions. The book follows the evolution of German “memory landscapes” all the way from national unification in 1870–71 through the world wars and political division to reunification in 1990. The memory landscapes of any society may incorporate monuments, historical buildings, memorials and cemeteries, battlefields, streets, or natural environments that foster shared memories of important events or personalities. They may also be designed to divert public attention from embarrassing or traumatic histories. The author argues that in Germany, memory landscapes have taken shape according to four separate paradigms—the national monument, the ruin, the reconstruction, and the trace—which he analyzes in relation to the changing political agendas which have guided them over time. Despite the massive ruptures of Germany's history, we see that significant continuities have served to counterbalance the traumas of the German past.Less

The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image

Immanuel Etkes

A legendary figure in his own lifetime, Rabbi Eliahu ben Shlomo Zalman (1720–1797) was known as the “Gaon of Vilna”. He was the acknowledged master of Talmudic studies in the vibrant intellectual ... More

A legendary figure in his own lifetime, Rabbi Eliahu ben Shlomo Zalman (1720–1797) was known as the “Gaon of Vilna”. He was the acknowledged master of Talmudic studies in the vibrant intellectual center of Vilna, revered throughout Eastern Europe for his learning and his ability to traverse with ease seemingly opposed domains of thought and activity. After his death, the myth that had been woven around him became even more powerful and was expressed in various public images. The formation of these images was influenced as much by the needs and wishes of those who clung to and depended on them as by the actual figure of the Gaon. This book sheds light on aspects of the Vilna Gaon's “real” character and traces several public images of him as they have developed and spread from the early nineteenth century until the present day.Less

God, Humanity, and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives

Robert Chazan

Helen F. Siu and Donald Sutton (eds)

Although closely focused on the remarkable Hebrew First-Crusade narratives, this book's new interpretation of these texts is anything but narrow, as the title strongly suggests. The three surviving ... More

Although closely focused on the remarkable Hebrew First-Crusade narratives, this book's new interpretation of these texts is anything but narrow, as the title strongly suggests. The three surviving Hebrew accounts of the crusaders' devastating assaults on Rhineland Jewish communities during the spring of 1096 have been examined at length, but only now can we appreciate the extent to which they represent their turbulent times. After a close analysis of the texts themselves, the book addresses the objectives of the three narratives. It compares these accounts with earlier Jewish history writing and with contemporary crusade historiography. It is in their disjuncture with past forms of Jewish historical narration and their amazing parallels with Latin crusade narratives that the Hebrew narratives are most revealing. We see how they reflect the embeddedness of early Ashkenazic Jewry in the vibrant atmosphere of late-eleventh- and early-twelfth-century northern Europe.Less