New Books in Western European 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 the US about the region. Yet I was just as surprised as anyone else at the scale of the hatred and violence that erupted. With the part of the world I studied enduring atrocity after atrocity, I spent quite a bit of t...

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 and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the f...

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-shared prosperity. First known for his work on electoral reform in the United States, Hill began travelling through Europe in the late 90’s to study the use of proportional representation (PR) in European electi...

In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and discip...

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 bring new points of view and information to Anglo-American audiences. His new book is Mafia Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias (Septre, 2012). This book builds on his previous work Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sici...

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he...

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life(Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, w...

Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, the shirtless Duce, Ferraris, Vespas, doping scandals, World Cup celebrations, Serie A officials on the take, Il Grande Torino, and the barefoot marathoner Abebe Bikila. You find all this and more in Simon Martin‘s history of Italian sports, Sport Ital...

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science...

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from thei...

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 way. I do not exaggerate when I say that Payne, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, is the nation’s foremost expert on Spanish history and on historical fascism in general. That expertise shines in this bo...

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’s going to be “all over the news.” But it’s hard to blame the press, exclusively at least. Joy Wiltenburg‘s Crime & Culture in Early Modern Germany (University of Virginia Press, 2012) suggests (t...

The Republic of Ireland (aka The Irish Free State, Eire) declared neutrality during the Second World War. That wasn’t particularly unusual: Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland did too. Yet around 60,000 “neutral” Irish volunteered to fight on one side (with the Allies, in this case). That was unusual. After the war, most of the Irish volunteers remained in the UK. But 12,000 of them came back...

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and...

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 course, were catastrophic. Fewer listeners are probably well informed about the Allied effort after the War to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling massive numbers of Germans. The results, a...

The end of the Cold War dramatically changed research into the Holocaust. The gradual opening up of archives across Eastern Europe allowed a flood of local and regional studies that transformed our understanding of the Final Solution. We now know much more about the mechanics of destruction in the East, about the interaction between center and periphery in planning and carrying out mass killings,...

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 about it. But Mary Fulbrook has done precisely that in A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2012). In the book she examines the career of a single Nazi administrato...

Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts.  Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern per...

Sanjay Subrahmanyam‘s new book explores translations across texts, images, and cultural practices in the early modern world. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2012) uses three key themes in early modern history – diplomacy, warfare, and visual representation – to show how commensurability across cultures, rather than existin...

This past September an independent panel commissioned in 2009 by the British government released its 395-page report on the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of April 1989. The published findings and the accompanying release of documents confirmed what had long been charged: the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at the grounds in Sheffield were the result of unsafe stadium design, insufficient crowd managem...

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 about the subject that, very shortly thereafter, started a huge controversy about Polish participation in the Holocaust. In the furor that followed, many simply took it for granted that Gross’s...

Pamela O. Long‘s clear, accessible, and elegantly written recent book explores the ways that artisan/practitioners influenced the development of the new sciences in the years between 1400 and 1600. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011) introduces the notion of a “trading zone,” building on the articulation of the concept in anthropo...

At the end of World War II, the Western Allies seized pretty much every official German document they could find and moved the lot out of Germany and often overseas. They had, effectively, taken the German past. And they kept it for the better part of a decade. Why did they take the records and why did they eventually return them? In her fascinating book The Struggle for the Files: The Western All...

When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and be seen by my peers. As Jennifer Hall-Witt explains in her fascinating book Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (University of N...

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) offers readers an intellectual and cultural history of Europe on the mechanical wings and flexing backs of its automata. Balancing a cognitive argument with careful historical contextualization, Minsoo Kang maps the lan...