New Books in Western European Studies

The role of music during the German occupation of Norway (1940-45) proves to be an exceptional case for cultural opposition in a dictatorship. Few famous musicians, some local celebrities and innumerous hardly known activists preferred artistic instead of militant means to demonstrate reluctance, spread information, contradict the legitimacy of the German occupants and raise the moral strength of...

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2023) investigates how northern French vernacular poets and musicians writing in the late middle ages expressed relationships between people and their environments. It explores medieval French song through the critical and disciplinary lenses of ecocriticism and environmental histor...

Maps are essential tools in finding our way around, but they also tell stories and are great depositories of information. Until the twentieth century and the arrival of aerial images, a map was the best way of getting a sense of what a city looked like on the ground. Dublin: Mapping the City (Birlinn, 2023) by Dr. Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson presents a carefully chosen selection of maps that tr...

Leonie Hannan's book Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth Century Home (Manchester University Press, 2023) explores the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the eighteenth-century home. While histories of science have identified the genteel household as an important site for scientific experiment, they have tended to do so via biographies of important men of science. Using...

How do migrants make sense of migration? In Coloniality and Meritocracy in unequal EU migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration (Bristol UP, 2023), Simone Varriale, Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University, explores the experiences of Italian migrants to Britain to critique notions of meritocracy. Combining a rich set of interview data with a deep understanding o...

Frames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps (Brill, 2023) is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols con...

Children's leisure lives are changing, with increasing dominance of organised activities and screen-based leisure. These shifts have reconfigured parenting practices, too. However, our current understandings of these processes are race-blind and based mostly on the experiences of white middle-class families. Drawing on an innovative study of middle-class British Indian families, this book brings c...

Through the colorful world of Berlin’s grand hotels, this book charts a new history of German liberalism and explores the changing relationships among big business, society, and politics.  Behind imposing facades, managers and workers were often the picture of orderly and harmonious service, despite living in sometimes uncomfortable proximity. Then, during World War I, class tensions rose to the s...

Mariana-Cecilia Velazquez's book Cultural Representations of Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean: Travelers, Traders, and Traitors, 1570 to 1604 (Routledge, 2023) examines the concept of piracy as an instrument for the advancement of legal, economic, and political agendas associated with early modern imperial conflicts in the Caribbean. Drawing on historical accounts, literary texts, legal...

During the Last Ice Age, Europe was a cold, dry place teeming with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, bison, cave bears, cave hyenas, and cave lions. It was also the home of people physically indistinguishable from humans today, commonly known as the Cro-Magnons. Our knowledge of them comes from either their skeletons or the tools, art, and debris they left behind. Cro-Magnon: The Story of t...

When the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (U Toronto Press, 2022) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941. Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish me...

Fashion for the royal family has long been one of their most powerful weapons. Every item of their clothing is imbued with meaning, history and majesty, telling a complex tale of the individuals who wore them and the houses they represented. The Royal Wardrobe: Peek Into the Wardrobes of History's Most Fashionable Royals (Headline, 2023) by Rosie Harte introduces readers to this world. From the dr...

What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? Can it be both? Fascism is notoriously hard to define. How do we make sense of an ideology that appeals to streetfighters and intellectuals alike? That calls for a return to tradition while maintaining a fascination with technology? And that preaches violence in the name of an ordered society? In Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford...

The first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany's largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies: Memory and Nature Conservation along the Former Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) by Dr. Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War's end in 1989, German conse...

Today we are joined by Corry Cropper, a Professor of French at Brigham Young University, and one of two authors, alongside Seth Whidden, of Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France (Bucknell University Press, 2023). In our conversation we discussed the origin of the velocipede and how it illuminated the paradoxes of cultural life in Second Empire France. In Velocipedomania,...

In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke UP, 2023), Grant Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces whil...

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the nineteenth century. In the first book-length study of the topic, Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule...

In this episode I interview Elena Serrano, a research member of the Project Cirgen at the Universitat de València and Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona). She trained in the former Centre for the History of Science in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in the History of Science and Philosophy Department in Cambridge Universit...

World War I was the first great general conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods over land and sea. Yet the armies of the war were too vast in scale, their movements too complex, and the infrastructure upon which they depended too specialized to be operated by professional soldiers alone. In Civilian Specialists at War:...

The Tudor period remains a source of timeless fascination, with endless novels, TV programmes and films depicting the period in myriad ways. And yet our image of the Tudor era remains overwhelmingly white. This ground-breaking and provocative new book seeks to redress the balance: revealing not only how black presence in Tudor England was far greater than has previously been recognised, but that T...

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showi...

Today I talked to Tom Gallagher about his new book Europe's Leadership Famine: Portraits of Defiance and Decay 1950-2022 (Scotview, 2023). Representative democracy endured in Europe because its political leaders’ deviousness and self-advancement were balanced by altruism, fortitude and civic virtue. However, in this century, the reputation and calibre of politicians has slumped in country after co...

In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more than 700,000 people in the British colonies remained enslaved. And when a renewed abolitionist campaign was mounted, making slave ownership the defining political and moral issue of the day, emancipation was fiercely resisted by the powerful 'West In...

In The Lost Princess: Women Writers and the History of Classic Fairy Tales (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. Anne Duggan presents a recovery of the lost, plucky heroines of historic fairy tales. People often associate fairy tales with Disney films, and with the male authors from whom Disney often drew inspiration – notably Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In these portrayals t...

"Within our mandate, the [European Central Bank] is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough". With those three words delivered in London on 26 July 2012, Mario Draghi - the ECB's president from 2011-2019 - stopped a contagious collapse of Europe's common currency after just one decade. Jana Randow and Alessandro Speciale write in Mario Draghi: The True...