New Books In European Studies

Belief in magic was pervasive in Greco-Roman times, persisted through the Renaissance, and then fell off the map of intellectual respectability in the Enlightenment. What happened? Why did it become embarrassing for Isaac Newton to have sought the philosopher’s stone, and for Robert Boyle to have urged the British Parliament to repeal a ban on transmuting base metals into silver and gold? In Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Brian P. Copenhaver shows that for millenia magic was taken seriously by the learned classes, sustained by a philosophical foundation drawn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this fascinating account of the historical conceptual framework of magic, Copenhaver, who is distinguished professor of philosophy and history at UCLA, explains the difference between good and bad magic, why Catholic Church fathers endorsed some magical beliefs (but drew the line at amulets and talismans), and how the rise of mechanistic phi

In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, tells the relatively unknown story of the Nazi pre-war concentration camps. From 1933 to 1939, these sites of terror isolated, ostracized, and excluded Jews from German society. Drawing on a range of unexplored archives, Wunschmann explores the evolution and systematization of the concentration camp system.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014), Maud S. Mandel, Dean of the College at Brown University, challenges the view that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead, Mandel argues that the Muslim-Jewish conflict in France has been shaped by local, national, and international forces, including the decolonization of French North Africa. Looking at key moments, from Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, to the 1968 student riots, to France’s experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s, Mandel poses a challenge to the reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A historiographical paradigm opened in the late 1970s with groundbreaking works on nationalism. To a large extent these were constructivist interpretations, which drew heavily on literary criticism. Since then it is commonplace to speak of national myths and master narratives. If it is true that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, then the appearance of Stefan Berger‘s masterful survey of national history writing in Europe may indicate that we have reached the end of this critical project. His book The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) certainly attempts a summation. As Berger argues, the nation has formed the key framework of modern history writing. Because his book discusses most of the best known European historians of the past three centuries, it will be of interest to a broad range of readers. It is fitting to discuss this work in “New Books in Intellectual History” because its aim is not to correct the errors of pa

As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her new book Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the majority of Caribbean states are in fact non-sovereign. Moreover, even for those nations that are nominally independent, their sovereignty is nonetheless continually compromised by the foreign influence that comes with globalization. Thus, the Caribbean as a whole is a region where non-sovereignty is the dominant political status, requiring alternative political frameworks that move beyond identifying sovereignty as the inevitable and necessary result of decolonization. Bonilla calls this process of imagining and testing out these new frameworks “non-sovereign politics.” Non-Sovereign Futures examines the emergence of non-sovereign politics through an ethnography of labor acti

In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspective to the history of Algerian Jews, looking at the Saharan Jews to south of the larger, coastal communities.  Saharan Jews received different treatment from French authorities, asking us to rethink the story we tell about colonialism and decolonization and Jewish history. Stein draws on materials from thirty archives across six countries to shed light on this small, but revealing, community that has not received its due attention until now.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fighting in France or Russia, women working to support the war effort, or mothers or fathers worrying about their children) experience the war? Nicholas Stargardt‘s new book The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2015) sets out to answer these questions. The book is a delight. Stargardt approaches his subject with a depth of feeling and of insight that all historians aspire to. His analysis is careful, measured and nuanced, shedding new light on a variety of important questions. But the book’s strength lies in the way it immerses itself into the lives of ordinary Germans. Stargardt’s retelling of their stories is compassionate and empathetic. It is the nature of the lives of his subjects that many of his stories end sudde

Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new introduction in which Bourdon explores the historiography of the medium in the years since the book’s original publication. A history of television that is also a history of the De Gaulle presidency and the early years of the Fifth Republic, Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle examines a range of issues, from government legislation to programming and content, to the variety of personnel (directors, producers, technicians, administrators) who made television happen during this “era of professionalization.” Exploring the medium as both information and entertainment, the book considers the relationship between television and the cinema, situating television within the broader cultural and political history of France during this critical period. Covering key events and turning points, inclu

The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relevant for the consideration of “the ecological question.” Based on a doctoral thesis written under Badiou’s supervision, Am Johal‘s new book, Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene(Atropos Press, 2015) is a thinking through and with Badiou’s work while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of our time: the relationship between human beings, technology, and nature; the meaning of change; and the possibilities of democratic politics and resistance. This, during an era that many now refer to as the “Anthropocene,” a period in which the impact of human beings on geological conditions and change has become unmistakable. Ecological Metapolitics is a work of engaged philosophy that will illuminate readers’ understanding of Badiou’s oeuvre. The

Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, one of the largest and longest lasting fascist social movements in Europe. Drawing on oral interviews, memoirs and the archives of the Romanian secret police, Roland Clark reveals the contribution of seemingly contradictory practices – deadly violence and charitable activities, intellectual and manual labor, political action and religious rituals – to fascist subjectivities in interwar Romania. Arguing against fascism as primarily an ideology, Clark focuses on everyday practices through which young men and women “became fascist.” As he explores the rise and fall of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Clark places it in the broader political and social context of Romanian nationalism, 19th-century state-building and interwar European fascist movements.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Published by Palgrave in 2015, Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives brings together scholars from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, the US, Germany, and Denmark. Through a set of wide-ranging essays, the authors collectively tackle a major question: how were emotions conceptualised and practised in Christian missions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries? Case studies take up sites in North America, the Philippines, India, China, the Congo, Germany, Papua New Guinea, Greenland and Australia in order to show how emotional practices such as prayer, tears, shouting, and feelings of joy or frustration, shaped relationships between missionaries, prospective converts, and supporters at home. Claire McLisky, one of the volume editors, speaks to NBIR from Brisbane, Australia where she is a research fellow at Griffith University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Malick Ghachem‘s recent book The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012) takes a long look at Haiti’s colonial history on the legal questions around slavery. In particular, he traces the implementation of the Code Noir, France’s earliest attempt to impose a legal structure on its American colonies’ plantation system. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Code ostensibly regulated how masters and slaves related to one another. Provisions in the Code sought to keep a strong colonial economy going, which meant limiting how much control an owner had over enslaved people. This produced areas of tension between imperial officials wanting to rein in abuse, and planters desire for total control over their laborers. At the same time, it created a legal consciousness for enslaved people who would eventually use the terms of the Code Noir in their insurgency turned revolution. Ghachem’s account adds rich complexity to our understanding of why the Ha

“Life must have a father and mother…Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!” The author of the line above – who scrawled it in his private diary in the midst of a series of experiments in which he thought he was creating structures that were some kind of transitional stage between the living and nonliving – had quite a life. A “midwife to the sexual revolution of the 1960s” who was famed for his work on the science of orgasm, was widely maligned as a charlatan and pseudoscientist, did extensive work on the science of cancer, had his books and instruments publicly burned by the US government, and died in prison: it’s hard not to find Wilhelm Reich fascinating. In his new book, James E. Strick reminds us that Reich was also a diligent and accomplished laboratory scientist whose work has potentially important implications for the modern biosciences. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Harvard University Press, 2015) takes readers into the making of this moder

“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic’s first two decades. What made certain sounds “French,” and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Francoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book considers French musical production and consumption in global cultural context. Exploring the relationship between audio and national identities and communities, Briggs tracks both the influences from outside France on a range of scenes in and beyond Paris, and the reach of “French” sounds beyond the nation’s borders. Sounds French is a book that examines the contributions of artists and listeners, reading “the noise” of (and surrounding) the music treated in its

In the conventional narratives of Communist Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, student activism tends to get short shrift. While the role of students in 1956 is unavoidable and widely acknowledged, after that their role and their relationship to the society at large has been minimized. The famous Kuron-Modzielewski letter of 1964 is treated first and foremost as an intra-elite affair, while the failure of the student protests in 1968 to provoke a broader movement as well as students’ subsequent lack of involvement in the protests of December 1970 have been taken as evidence of students’ lack of connection to broader society. Only in the late 1970s did was that gap bridged, first with founding of KOR after the strikes of 1976 and then during the Solidarity era. This account has been pervasive since the 1970s, and even people with only passing knowledge of Polish history have been exposed to it through Andrzej Wajda’s 1981 film “Man of Iron.” There the student turned fact

In Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Jeffrey S. Shoulson, the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut, argues that the promise and peril of conversion was projected onto the figure of the Jew, the ultimate religious “other” in English society. Shoulson looks at English writings on religious conversion and how conversion became a means through which other “technologies of transformation” were figured. His reading of diverse texts, from the translated King James Bible to the poetry of Milton, helps us understand the ways in which the figure of the Jew could serve a variety of purposes in the early modern English imagination.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died alone and whose bodies were never claimed. Known as the “forgotten,” their stories are at the heart of Richard C. Keller‘s fascinating new book Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Official narratives of the disaster focused narrowly on the problem of the elderly who died alone, seemingly because their families were too busy vacationing to check in or claim their relatives. Yet, as Keller shows, these official narratives were incomplete and often incorrect. Moreover, by focusing so intently on elderly victims, these narratives have shaped subsequent public health initiatives, which have collectively identified the elderly as the most vulnerable population in the event of heat, all the while ignoring other similarly vulnerable groups

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museums’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women’s camp of Ravensbruck, Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system and Dan Stone about the liberation of the camps. Today I’ll conclude the series with an interview with Shelly Cline about female guards in the camps. This is something of a departure for the podcast, which usually focuses on the authors of published books. But Shelly’s dissertation “Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust” (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014) is a perfect conclusion to the series. It examines carefully

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were

John McMillian‘s Beatles vs. Stones (Simon and Schuster, 2013) presents a compelling composite biography of the two seminal bands of the 1960s, examining both the myth-making and reality behind the great pop rivalry. More than just a history of the bands, Beatles vs. Stones explores the complex role both groups played in popular culture during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. Although the “feud” was initially fodder for fan magazines and publicity stunts, as the bands and their audiences matured musically and politically, the divide came to reflect many of the key cultural divisions of the age. McMillian charts the makeover of the leather-clad Beatles from their early days in Germany to the “four loveable lads” who became an international sensation, and then that of the Rolling Stones, initially styled similarly to the Beatles, but quickly rebranded as their bad-boy antithesis. Beatles vs. Stones takes a critical look at both the actual artists and the image they portrayed, de