New Books In European Studies

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) is a fascinating exploration of books and their readers during a moment of intense transformation in British society. Secord brings us into a period of the nineteenth century when transformations in publishing and an expanded reading public helped create a wide-ranging conversation about science and its possible futures. Out of this utopian moment several works emerged that reflected on the practices and prospects of science, and Secord guides us through seven of them in turn: the dialogues of Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel, the polemic of Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, John Herschel’s moralizing Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Mary Somerville

A recent book review I read began with the line “borderlands are back.” It’s certainly true that more and more historians have used borderland regions as the stage for some excellent work on the construction of national identities (or indifference to them) in recent years. J. Laurence Hare, Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, makes a novel and highly compelling contribution to that literature with Excavating Nations: Archaeology, Museums, and the German-Danish Borderlands (University of Toronto Press, 2015). As the title suggests, the book looks at the role of antiquities and archaeology in the creation of Danish and German national identities from the early nationalist period through the twentieth century. The region between Denmark and Germany is perhaps not the place many Americans think of when they think of Scandinavia (home of wind-swept islands and fjords) or Germany (with its forests and Alpine vistas). Yet the German-Danish borderland has a very distinctive

Gary Wilder‘s new book, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke University Press, 2015) builds upon the work he began in The French Imperial Nation State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Freedom Time considers the politics and poetics of Aimee Casaire and Leopold Senghor during the period 1945-1960, “thinking with” and “working through” the ways these figures anticipated a post-imperial world. The book explores notions of liberation and temporality, considering the alternatives to nationalism and the nation-state that these thinkers imagined as they looked forward to a more democratic, autonomous future on the other side of colonialism. While The French Imperial Nation State asked readers to “rethink France,” the project here is, in the author’s own words, to “unthink France”. Indeed, France, decolonization, and even liberation itself, are all interroga

Who is David Bowie? Fans and critics have debated this question throughout his lengthy and storied career. Chris O’Leary, in his new book Rebel Rebel (Zero Books, 2015) meticulously examines Bowie’s earliest recordings and provides crucial insight into how Bowie wrote and recorded these songs. O’Leary considers Bowie’s influences and how his desire for commercial success caused him to experiment with a wide range of styles. These early years provide crucial clues of understanding who Bowie is. The podcast explores these questions and more. O’Leary also recommends a number of “lost” Bowie songs that are worth a listen. Chris O’Leary is a writer and editor. He also writes a blog dedicated to David Bowie.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. Following the choreography and performances of key figures from the hip hop world in France, McCarren’s is a history that pays close attention to dancers and their moves, and especially to the ways in which contemporary dance is informed by-and responsive to-social and political concerns and change. Tracing the history of le hip hop as a form that arrived in France from the United States in the 1980s, French Moves examines the ways this cultural import came to “speak French”. Dance has occupied a privileged place in French national culture historically.French hip hop benefited from the outset from the support of a Socialist government interested in encouraging this meeting of street and stage in performances that embody youth, cultural diversity, and a mouvement social on a number of levels.

As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli, it’s a sentence many people might assume was being applied to Coco Chanel, for Chanel looms large as the fashion designer of the last century. But Schiaparelli was, as Secrest reveals, more than a fashion designer: she was an artist. And, through her collaborations with SalvadoreDali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others, she was in the vanguard of surrealism and transformed women’s fashions into an art form. Who was Schiap? It’s hard to know. But then we can never know everything about another person, which iswhat makes reading biography so beguiling: the illusion that we could. It’s a circumstance Secret openly acknowledges. “A great many aspects of Elsa Schiaparelli’s life will probably never be known,” Secres

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for an

In The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a village perched above the sea in northeastern Scotland. It’s a place of great wealth and also poverty, a place of staunch Protestantism among many of the older people and reckless abandon or religious unconcern among the young and “incomers” – that is, new arrivals in the village. By tracing the millennialist faith of the village’s many Presbyterian and Brethren churches, this careful ethnography calls into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern societies. It asks, how do the fishermen of Gamrie experience life as both modern and enchanted? Joseph Webster is Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. The Anthropology of Protestantism comes out in paperback in June 2015.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch ateliers in which exotic geography was produced by bookmakers, paying special attention to frontispieces and other paratexts through which these editor-printer-booksellers created a new way of looking at the world. Picturing, here, was a kind of performance. Schmidt considers how the exotic, non-European body was produced not just in texts and pictures but also in a range of material arts that depicted the body experiencing pleasure and pain. The book concludes by looking ahead to the middle of the eighteenth century, when there was a backlash against exotic geography, and a call

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, more or less. 300 years ago? Well, probably. 400 years ago? A good argument could be made… Why? According to one argument, the difference is caused by the rich praying on the poor. In a word, imperialism. But if you survey countries around the world, it’s not clear whether imperialism (and colonization) hurt or helped development. The Spanish thoroughly imperialized Mexico, and it’s pretty prosperous; no one really got into the interior of Africa and it’s not.  And what are we to make of developmental differences within, say, prosperous Europe? No real impe

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 special place in his dramatic biography. David Meren‘s With Friends Like These: Entangled Nationalisms in the Canada-Quebec-France Triangle, 1944-1970(University of British Columbia Press, 2012), is anchored by President de Gaulle’s famous cri du balcon. Situating the incident within the broader context of a complex “triangle” of relations between Canada, Quebec, and France, the book deepens our understanding of what De Gaulle said and the meanings his exclamation have carried since. At the same time, the book develops a much broader and richer historical picture of the re

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 Wellington (and Wellington’s many and prolific admirers). It was Blucher, argues Leggiere, who continually bedeviled Napoleon after 1812 and who created the conditions for the Emperor’s few but decisive defeats, including Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815) – hence the subtitle. Partly because of the focus on Wellington, partly because of myth-making on the part of German nationalists and military leaders, Blucher is too often presented as a strategic imbecile, a mere hard-charging hussar, deserving of the label applied by his troops: “Marshal Forward.” But Leggiere highlights BlucherR

Thomas Kemple‘s new book is an extraordinarily thoughtful invitation to approach Max Weber (1864-1920) as a performer, and to experience Weber’s work by attending to his spoken and written voice. Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) looks carefully at the literary structure and aesthetic elements of Weber’s arguments, considering how the texts offer an “allegorical resource for thinking sociologically.” Kemple argues that the formal structure of Weber’s ideas is inseparable from the content, and that understanding one is crucial for understanding the other. As a way into that formal structure, in each chapter Kemple offers an ingenious visual diagram that acts as a kind of “talking picture,” simultaneously evoking the cinematic elements of Weber’s own work and giving readers another tool for engaging the performative aspects of it. Kemple’s book is particularly attentive to the ways that Web

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 “incognito” that we will begin to find Germany in all its imponderables. The result of a year’s sabbatical residence in Hamburg, this book is a deep and discursive exploration of a country with millennia of history, and it explores how Germany’s dark role during the twentieth century weaves in and out of the everyday in the twenty-first. The travel companions Gorra invites along are an exceptional group: Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin. They all have looked at traveling through a kaleidoscopic lens and do not follow the linear as much as channel the essence of ph

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 filmmakers, including: Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, and Francois Truffaut. Contributing to a vast and complex field of work on the cinema in France since 1945, Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers readers an analysis of French “metafilms” (films about film and filmmaking) in the postwar period; the representation of French history and modernity; the conversation between French cinema and Hollywood  (and France and the United States more generally); the complex relationship between Fren

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 affairs. Rather than pursue the financial situation, Tziampiris investigates the foreign policy making of Greece, particularly its changing relationship with Israel and Turkey. Greece and Israel have had a distant relationship for much of the last 50 years, but recent politics for both countries have moved the two toward a budding friendship. Tziampiris bases his argument and key findings on high-level original interviews which lend the book a degree of legitimacy and significance. Based on these conversations with Greek and Israeli diplomats, he points to the Gaza Freeodm Flotilla as the point where leaders fr

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, Dhara Anjaria gives us some answers in her excellent Curzon’s India: Networks of Colonial Governance, 1899-1905 (Oxford University Press, 2014).In a word, the Brits didn’t rule Indiaalone, at least when they were ruling India well. Through the lens ofGeorge Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Anjaria tells the tale.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequen

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. That’s a good sound bite. But, as Brian Vick shows in his lively, fascinating bookThe Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014), a lot more than diplomatic toing-and-froing went on in Vienna. The diplomats and their huge entourages, well, partied a lot. The ate (generally well), drank (often too much) and “consorted” (to put it diplomatically). As Vick demonstrates, this setting has a distinct impact on the negotiations and their eventual outcome. In vino veritas? Listen in.Learn more about your ad choices. Vis

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 first intervention in the postwar era to influence events abroad through political warfare, the use of all measures ‘short of war’ in foreign affairs.  Drawing particular attention to the Italian election of 18 April 1948, he explains how the campaign for the first national election of the newfound Italian republic marked a critical defeat for communism in the early cold war.  The United States utilized a range of overt and covert methods against Marxist political and social power.  Political warfare seemingly outlined a way to tackle communist strength more widely. Analyzing American political warfare eff