New Books In European Studies

In his second book, author Terrance J. Finnegan describes America’s early experience fighting the Germans during World War I. Finnegan’s A Delicate Affair on the Western Front: America Learns How to Fight a Modern War in the Woevre Trenches (The History Press, 2015) provides in-depth research and a great deal of context to portray the 26th Infantry Division’s desperate defense of the Woevre sector in April 1918. Relying on meticulous mining of primary documents, the author describes the leaders, tactical doctrine, weaponry, and intelligence processes of the French, German, and new American forces fighting near Seicheprey in northeastern France. Finnegan also builds on research from his first book, Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance and Photographic Interpretation on the Western Front–World War I, to carefully explain intelligence collection on both sides of the trenches. In a lively interview, Finnegan explains how the action near Seicheprey–sometimes called a t

When ESPN anchor Stuart Scott passed away from cancer this past January, he was widely hailed for his innovative style, which mixed heavy does of African American slang and pop culture references. His signature phrases are now commonly used terms in the American lexicon: “As cool as the other side of the pillow” and, of course, “Boo-Yah!” After the announcer’s death, Barack Obama remarked that Scott “helped usher in a new way to talk about our favorite teams and the day’s best plays.” No disrespect to America’s Sports Fan-in-Chief, but already a century before Stuart Scott was dropping quotes from Shakespeare and Tupac Shakur in his game summaries, Pierce Egan was mixing the Bard and street slang into his sports writing. An Irish-born printshop worker, Egan moved from manning the presses to take up the pen, writing sketches about life in early-nineteenth-century London. In particular, Egan wrote about the world of boxing, an illegal activity that brought t

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

Tabetha Ewing‘s Rumor, Diplomacy and War in Enlightenment Paris (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014) is all about the on dit, the word on the street that everyday Parisians might have picked up, and/or spread around town in the 1740s. Focused on rumor during the War of Austrian Succession that lasted from 1740-1748, Ewing’s is a book that examines a range of urban voices and opinions across a pivotal decade of the Enlightenment. Taking very seriously the landscapes of gossip and fantasy, Rumor, Diplomacy, and War is intriguing in its subject matter and its methodology. Interested in the circulation of speech and ideas, Ewing tracks a variety of bruits–open and clandestine media, royal efforts to release and police information about matters of state and military conflict, and oral and written forms of communication. All this, with the aim of exploring a distinctively early-modern brand of political participation, and an “inchoate citizenship” that existed in the

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were “enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally.” As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer’s account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

Every year I ask my students to tell me when the Holocaust ended. Most of them are surprised to hear me say that it has not yet. Today’s podcast is the fourth of a summer long series of podcasts about the system of camps and ghettos that pervaded Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah Helm about the women’s camp of Ravensbruck and Nik Wachsmann about the evolution of the concentration camp system. I’ll conclude the series in a few weeks with an interview with Shelly Cline about the female guards who staffed some of the camps. In this fourth episode, Dan Stone makes a convincing case that the Holocaust reverberated for years after the war came to a close. The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2010),is slender but packed with information and insights. It certainly provides a top-down dis

Christine Desan, teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory at Harvard Law School. In this podcast we discuss her new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Per the books jacket, “Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money’s design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money’s creation. The Crown sol

Before I read this excellent book, I had no idea that Rome–that is, the Roman Empire–ever had an empress. But, as Joyce E. Salisbury tells us in Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), it did. And she was a very good one. Galla Placidia ruled in tough times for the Empire.She had to govern arealmwith two capitals, preside over endless debates about what being a Christian really meant, deal with several varieties of hostile (though not only) “barbarians,” reshape the imperial office she held, and make sure her son followed her in that office. Moreover, she had to do it all in a metaphorical snake pit. As Joyce points out, she was up to it all. Alas, her successors were not, and the empire she nurtured so well soon “fell” (or, as Joyce has it, “was pushed”). Listen in to hear the whole story!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Notre Dame University. His book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2014) recovers the significance of philology, the study of language, that for centuries was synonymous with humanistic intellectual life. Turner provides a detailed and fascinating study that traces philology’s beginning in Greek and Roman speculation about language and follows it to the early twentieth century. At the library in Alexandria, Greeks speculated about language, invented rhetoric, analyzed texts and created grammar. Roman diffusion and Christian adaptation spread the influence of philology. The medieval scholars kept it alive until the Renaissance when humanist gave it new life only to escape the most toxic aspects of the Reformation. By the nineteenth century, philology covered three distinct modes of inquiry: textual philology included the study of ancient and biblical literature, language theories of origin,

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm about her book on Ravensbruc. Later, I’ll talk with Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today I had the great pleasure to chat with Nikolaus Wachsmann about his new book titled KL:A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015).Nik began his career interested in justice and prisons in Nazi Germany. Having published a book on that subject, he made the natural jump to the concentration camp system. After pushing the research further as editor of three compilations of essays, he has now published a comprehensive survey of the camp system.The book is tremendous: a well-conceived mixture of institutional history, narrative storytelling and careful analysis. It’s not always easy to read–I read it on my Kindle as I le

Lisa Moses Leff joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss her new book, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). In the aftermath of the Holocaust, wracked by grief and determined to facilitate the writing of an objective history of catastrophe, the historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered evidence of the persecution from Jewish leaders in Paris and from the wreckage of bombed-out buildings in Berlin. Many Jews in France and the United States saw his collecting of those papers as a heroic effort; however, in time, this “rescuer” became a thief. Most of the documents he acquired in the 1950s–mostly pertaining to Jewish history in France since the seventeenth century–he stole from the archives. After World War II ended, Szajkowski married and worked at YIVO (also known as the Jewish Scientific Institute), where his prickly personality and unorthodox methods now needed to be curbed, leading to a temporary split from

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later, I’ll talk with Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today, however, I got the chance to talk with Sarah Helm. Sarah has written a tremendous book titled Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (Nan A. Talese, 2015). The books is at turns grim, touching and, just occasionally, inspiring. It’s one of the most accessible of the many books I’ve read about the concentration camp system. And it focuses on on of the under-served groups of victims of the genocide: women.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one encounters tangible pieces of the subject’s life- letters, diaries, receipts, knick-knacks; one never knows what one will find. But how to incorporate that experience into a book? This is one of many compellingly original angles that Daisy Hay brings to the story of Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli in her new book, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015) The story of Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli occurs in a moment of changing attitudes towards marriage, celebrity and love- a moment more often seen through the eyes of men and viewed in terms of “history.” Using the Mary Anne Disraeli archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford- assembled by Mrs. Disraeli herself- Hay opens up this story in two ways: by bringing the voices and experiences of women into it, and by considering the Disraeli’s as “bor

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this oversight, turning our attention to the importance of biological field stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in generating new scientific practices, theories, and networks. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the German- and French-speaking scientific community in Europe, looking at a number of influential case studies that collectively embody what de Bont calls a “station movement” in this period. Exploring the relationship between these field stations and a notion of “experimentalism” embraced therein, de Bont usefully undermines a tendency to focus on laboratories as sites of experimentation in the history of science. The stations ranged in kind from very technologically sophistic

Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand. When I tell them that the true number is above 40,000, I get astonished stares and a barrage of ‘your kidding’ (and stronger words). The camps and ghettos were an essential part of the Nazi system.So today we’re beginning a five part series dedicated to the camps and ghettos in Germany, the areas Germany controlled and in Germany’s allies. Later this summer we’ll hear from Sarah Helms, Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. The series starts, however, with an interview with Geoff Megargee. Geoff is the general editor of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (Indiana University Press 2009-).This is a monumental project. Each of the first two volumes runs well over 1000 pages and includes an enormous amount of

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old Europe? Weed-smoking drug dealers rolling across Eurasia in a cannabis-induced haze? Or slow-moving but inexorable farmers from Anatolia? These are just some of the many possibilities discussed in the scholarly literature. But in 2012, a New York Times article announced that the problem had been solved, by a team of innovative biologists applying computational tools to language change. In an article published in Science, they claimed to have found decisive support for the Anatolian hypothesis. In their book, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis make the case that this conclusion is premature, and based on unwarranted assumptions. In this interview, Asya and Martin talk to me about the history of the Indo-European homeland question, the problems they see

The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world. A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’

According to sixteenth-century writer Moderata Fonte, the untapped potential of women to contribute to the liberal arts was “buried gold.” Exploring the work of Fonte and that of many other incredible women, Meredith K. Ray‘s new book explores women’s contributions to the landscape of scientific culture in early modern Italy from about 1500 to 1623. Women in this period were engaging with science in the home, at court, in vernacular literature, in academies, in salons, and in letters, and Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015) looks both at women’s practical engagements with science and with their literary engagements with natural philosophy. Ch. 1 brings us to the Romagna, and to the formidable Caterina Sforza’s experiments with alchemical recipes as compiled in a manuscript that exists today in only a single manuscript copy. Both recipes and secrets were forms of currency in this context, and Ch. 2 looks a

Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000 (De Gruyter, 2014), Kocku von Stuckrad, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, demonstrates how the construction of what constitutes ‘religion’ and ‘science’ was a relational process that emerged with the competition between various systems of knowledge. In this book, von Stuckrad traces the transformation and perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses. In the first half of the book, he presents the discursive constructions of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ through the disciplines of astrology, astronomy, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, and scientific experimentation more generally. The second half of the book explores the power of academic l

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) together. His instinct was sound. While they deal with different subjects, they share a common approach and structure that casts new light on each subject individually and on the war more generally. Often, works on the Holocaust focus on Germany, Poland and the USSR while marginalizing smaller and weaker countries. The two books here certainly address these countries. But they do the topic a great service by bringing other areas to the forefront. Each book is structured geographically, with contributors examining the course of racial science or the genocide of the Roma in a specific country. This allows the authors to look in depth at the historical context that led to different decisions an