Departments

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European history

  • SOURCE: Cabinet
    9/9/2021

    Melcher's Ghosts

    by Monica Black

    "Denazification prompted less soul-searching than resentment and anxiety among the German population. People worried that their prior affiliations and involvement in everything from war crimes to far less nefarious acts—like having obtained property illegally during the Nazi years—would be revealed."

  • SOURCE: History.com
    4/28/2021

    How World War I Fueled the Russian Revolution

    Stephen Miner of Ohio University says that while the collapse of Czarist Russia was likely without the first world war, the conflict made it virtually inevitable. Lynne Hartnett of Villanova says war exposed the weaknesses of the regime. 

  • 4/11/2021

    Making Religious Peace in Afghanistan

    by Wayne Te Brake

    American policymakers must recognize the distinctly religious components of the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan, and learn from European wars of religion: the key to ending war is brokering a political agreement that protects religious diversity. 

  • SOURCE: Public Seminar
    4/8/2021

    Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror

    by Helmut Smith

    Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider" became a key text for understanding the Weimar era as an allegory for understanding political conflict when it was published in 1968. But his psychoanalytical approach can be an impediment to understanding the historical specificity of the era. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    1/11/2021

    Ex-Friends: Anne Applebaum and the Crisis of Centrist Politics

    Critic David Klion considers the unexamined relationship between the late 20th Century rise of market-oriented liberalism and the 21st century rise of authoritarian nationalism (or, "why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to be fascists").

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    12/8/2020

    Europe’s Most Terrible Years

    World War II was bookended by the infliction of mass suffering on Poles at the war's beginning and on German civilians at the war's end, with the worst years of Europe's history in between. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    11/2/2020

    Searching for Refuge After the Second World War

    New books by David Nasaw and Paul Betts examine the uncertain fate of Jewish Holocaust survivors in postwar Europe, the problem of massive human displacement, and the tension between interpreting Europe's refugee problem in universal terms or focusing on the specific consequences of anti-Jewish policies and prejudice. 

  • 10/18/2020

    Fraught Family Reunification After the Holocaust

    by Rebecca Clifford

    "A tenth of Europe's pre-war population of Jewish children survived the Holocaust. Many sought and achieved reunification with their families, but reunification did not usually end the trauma endured by this "fragment of an entire generation."

  • SOURCE: Datebook
    10/1/2020

    Teaching the Racism of European Art Head-On

    by Letha Ch'ien

    "Race and European Art set out to examine our racial history clearly, without sidestepping  the ugly and uncomfortable parts of our heritage. I got lucky, because the students who signed up wanted to do the same work. And boy, was it depressing. I joked that I had become the professor of 'Bum You Out Studies'."

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    9/8/2020

    Centrists Are Pining for a Golden Age that Never Was (Review)

    A review of Anne Applebaum's "Twilight of Democracy" argues that the author focuses on the role of nostalgia and personality in driving authoritarianism and breaking up the center-right coalition, but ignores the fact that that the center failed to deliver an improved standard of living to the broad public.