Latest posts
Paul Mojzes, “Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in Genocide Studies] I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more about the region than most people in t...
John E. Joseph, “Saussure”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in Language] Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony...
Steven Hill, “Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in Politics] What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shar...
Alexandra Hui, “The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910″
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history...
Richard Rashke, “Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in History] You may have heard of a fellow named Ivan or John Demjanuik. He made the news–repeatedly over a 30 year period– because he was, as many people probably remember, a Nazi war criminal nick-...
John Dickie, “Blood Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in Terrorism and Organized Crime] John Dickie is an historian of Italian organized crime who has a fairly unique perspective as he writes in English but is able to read the Italian sources. This allows him to br...
Stanley Payne, “The Spanish Civil War”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in Military History] The Spanish Civil War is one of those events that I have always felt I should know more about. Thanks to Stanley Payne’s concise, lucid new work on the subject, I feel less that w...
Joy Wiltenburg, “Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in History] Many people complain about sensationalism in the press. If a man slaughters his entire family, a jilted lover kills her erstwhile boyfriend, or a high school student murders several of his classmates, it&...
R. M. Douglas, “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in History] I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive numbers of Slavs, Jews, and Gypsies. The results, of cour...
Mary Fulbrook, “A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in History] The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well studied and so it’s hard to say anything new...
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in History] On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross published a book ab...
Minsoo Kang, “Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination”
NEW
[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] From artificial talking heads to the famed defecating duck and beyond, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2011)...
Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward, “London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750″
NEW
Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was the true ‘World City’. We threw around a couple of ideas – it seems obligatory to me...
Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace”
NEW
One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s ad...
Philip Oltermann, “Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters”
NEW
Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a German journalist who came to England while a teenager, and who has lived here and worked here ever since...
David Edgerton, “Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War”
NEW
My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory in Newcastle. He ended up making the parts of...
Robert Holland, “Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800″
NEW
I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit – as being founded upon the open ocean: unconfined, stormy and there to be mastered.
Simon Winder, “Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History”
NEW
When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead of me full of verb tables and conjugations. The choice was between pain in French or pain in German.
Andrew Wilson, “Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship”
NEW
A couple of weeks ago I took a bus from Warsaw and travelled east across the River Bug. The border took a long time to cross, but then this was no ordinary border – it was the border between the Europe of the modern world, of the EU (with all o...
Elizabeth Gowing, “Travels in Blood and Honey: Becoming a Beekeeper in Kosovo”
NEW
The hardest part of living in a foreign land is crossing that invisible divide between being an outsider and getting to know a country properly. An old foreign correspondent friend of mine said that the newspaper standard was that it always took at l...
