New Books in Western European Studies

According to a popular saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” As concernswhat economists and political scientists call “development”–that is, progress towards libertyand prosperity–the saying seems to be true. As a general rule, the countries that were relatively free and relatively prosperous 100 years ago are the ones that are relatively free and relatively prosperous today.200 years ago? Yes,...

In 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle cried out “Vive le Quebec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall. The controversial moment became a myth almost instantly. The four words De Gaulle uttered remain emblematic of an extremely important moment in the histories of Quebec and Canada. Illustrative of the General’s penchant for political provocation and spectacle, they also hold a spe...

I have really enjoyed Michael Leggiere‘s earlier work, including the excellent Napoleon and Berlin : The Franco-Prussian War in North Germany, 1813 (2002), like this work, part of the Campaigns and Commanders series at the University of Oklahoma Press. In Blucher: Scourge of Napoleon (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), Leggiere rescues Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher from the shadow cast by Wellin...

Despite being Germany’s most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from his patron the duke Karl August). InThe Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (Princeton University Press, 2006), Michael Gorra takes the reader on a reverse journey, for it is by slipping in “...

Hugo Frey‘s new book, Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995 (Berghahn Books, 2014) distinguishes between a national cinema (films made in France) and a nationalist cinema motivated by the specific agenda to promote une certaine idee de la France. Working with ideas about “political mythology” and the “film event,” Frey analyses a series of films and...

Aristotle Tziampiris is The Emergence of Israeli-Greek Cooperation (Springer, 2015). Tziampiris is Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International and European Affairs at the Department of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus. The recent fiscal debt crisis in Greece has drawn world attention to the country’s position in global...

I won’t speak for you, but I find it utterly remarkable that the British were able to “rule” India. Britain, of course, is a small island off a small continent some significant distance from most of its colonies. India, in contrast, is essentially a continentunto itself and the home of an ancient, sophisticated civilization. How could the tiny UK “rule” an entire continental civilization? Happily,...

Nick Wilding‘s new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar w...

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows anything about European history–and European diplomatic history in particular–who doesn’tknow a little something about the Congress of Vienna. That “little something” is probably that the Congress fostered a post-war (Napoleonic War, that is) settlement called the “Concert of Europe” that lasted, roughly, until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Tha...

In the annals of cold war history Italy is rarely seen as a crucial locale.  In his stimulating new book, The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Kaeten Mistry reveals how events in Italy proved surprisingly crucial in defining a conflict that dominated much of the twentieth century.  For the United States, it marked the f...

In Muslims in the Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), Sophia Rose Arjana explores a variety of creative productions–including art, literature, film–in order to tell a story not about how Muslims construct their own identities but rather about how Western thinkers have constructed ideas about Muslims and monsters. To what extent are these imaginary constructs real? Is it possible f...

American policymakers and scholars alike have looked to the rapid transformation of Germany, specifically West Germany, from a defeated Nazi state into a thriving democracy as one of the most successful postwar reconstructions of the twentieth century. Scholars have variously credited an influential U.S. occupation or Germans’ own revulsion at their Nazi past as the cause of the success. Udi Green...

Akwugo Emejulu has written Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies, and Politics in America and Britain (Policy Press, 2015). Emejulu is a lecturer at the Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, and co-director of the Center for Education for Racial Equality. What is community development exactly? Emejulu’s book integrates historical, theoretical, and...

Nicolas Kenny‘s new book, The Feel of the City: Experiences of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014) explores the sensory histories and urban development of Montreal and Brussels from the 1880s to 1914. We’ve read about Paris, London, New York, and Berlin, but what of the middle-sized cities in Europe and North America where so many turn-of-the-century dwellers saw, smelled, hea...

Alon Confino‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of Fürth on November 10, 1938: Jews are forced from their homes and assembled in the main square. Many are made to stand for hours at the local community center; the men are beaten, humiliated, and transported to Da...

Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can significantly inform how we see its art, literature, medicine, architecture, and more, Tweeting Da Vinci (Da Vinci Press, 2014) takes a deeply interdisciplinary approach to engaging the cultural history...

“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95),...

As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day. The first genocidal conflict covered in real time, dozens of reporters covered the war from the front lines or from a Sarajevo under siege. Not surprisingly, the media coverage was accompanied by a flood of memoirs...

What is Ska music? This is a deceptively complicated question. In this podcast Heather Augustyn, the author of Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation(Scarecrow Press, 2013) discusses ska’s journey from a local music in 1950s and 1960s Jamaica, its journey to Great Britain and its fusion with punk and other 1970s musical forms, and then its arrival and dissemination across the United States in the 1980s and...

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the...

The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world’s great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equality, a vibrant public sphere, and perhaps most important–political participation–defines the country’s self-image. It was not ever so. In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, literally, not to mention ethically a...

Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of w...

Since the political left and right first arose during the French Revolution, Catholics have been categorized as either conservatives or liberals, and most Catholics of the French nineteenth century are assumed to have been conservatives. In Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Cornell University Press, 2014), Carol E. Harrison goes beyond this fami...

Jan Lemnitzer‘s new book Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Palgrave, 2014) offers an exciting new take on the relationship between law and power, exposing the delicate balance between great powers and small states that is necessary to create and enforce norms across the globe. The 1856 Declaration of Paris marks the precise moment when international law became universal, and is the template...

Michael Kwass‘s new book, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground is much more than an exciting biography of the notorious eighteenth-century smuggler whose name remains legendary in contemporary France. Focusing on the rise and fall of a mythic, early-modern French bandit, Kwass’s study moves between the micro- and the macro-historical, revealing the crucial role that smu...