Title: A nation of provincials: the German idea of Heimat 
Author: Applegate, Celia
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European  History | German Studies
Publisher's Description: At the center of this pioneering work in modern European history is the German word Heimat - the homeland, the local place. Translations barely penetrate the meaning of the word, which has provided the emotional and ideological common ground for a variety of associations and individuals devoted to the cause of local preservation. Celia Applegate examines at both the national and regional levels the cultural meaning of Heimat and why it may be pivotal to the troubled and very timely question of German identity.The ideas and activities clustered around Heimat shed new light particularly on problems of modernization. Instead of viewing the Germans as a dangerously anti-modern people, Applegate argues that they used the cultivation of Heimat to ground an abstract nationalism in their attachment to familiar places and to reconcile the modern industrial and urban world with the rural landscapes and customs they admired. Primarily a characteristic of the middle classes, love of Heimat constituted an alternative vision of German unity to the familiar aggressive, militaristic one. The Heimat vision of Germany emphasized cultural diversity and defined German identity by its internal members rather than its external enemies.Applegate asks that we re-examine the continuities of German history from the perspective of the local places that made up Germany, rather than from that of prominent intellectuals or national policymakers. The local patriotism of Heimat activists emerges as an element of German culture that persisted across the great divides of 1918, 1933, and 1945. She also suggests that this attachment to a particular place is a feature of Europeans in general and is deserving of further attention.   [brief]
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Title: Columbus and the ends of the earth: Europe's prophetic rhetoric as conquering ideology 
Author: Kadir, Djelal
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | European  History | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Columbus is the first blazing star in a constellation of European adventurers whose right to claim and conquer each land mass they encountered was absolutely unquestioned by their countrymen. How a system of religious beliefs made the taking of the New World possible and laudable is the focus of Kadir's timely review of the founding doctrines of empire.The language of prophecy and divine predestination fills the pronouncements of those who ventured across the Atlantic. The effects of such language and their implications for current theoretical debates about colonialism and decolonization are legion. Kadir suggests that in this supposedly postcolonial era, richer nations and the privileged still manipulate the rhetoric of conquest to justify and serve their own worldly ends. For colonized peoples who live today at the "ends of the earth," the age of exploitation may be no different from the age of exploration.   [brief]
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Title: The courtier and the King: Ruy Gómez de Silva, Philip II, and the court of Spain 
Author: Boyden, James M 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European  History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Ruy Gómez de Silva, or the prince of Eboli, was one of the central figures at the court of Spain in the sixteenth century. Thanks to his oily affability, social grace, and an uncanny knack for anticipating and catering to the desires of his prince, he rose from obscurity to become the favorite and chief minister of Philip II.From the scattered surviving sources James Boyden weaves a vivid, compelling narrative: one that breathes life not only into Ruy Gómez, but into the court, the era, and the enigmatic character of Phillip II as well. Elegantly written and highly readable, this book discovers in the career of Gómez the techniques, aspirations, and mentality of an accomplished courtier in the age of Castiglione.   [brief]
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Title: "Beyond reasonable doubt" and "probable cause": historical perspectives on the Anglo-American law of evidence 
Author: Shapiro, Barbara J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European  History | United States History | Rhetoric | Law
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Title: Seducing the French: the dilemma of Americanization 
Author: Kuisel, Richard F
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European  History | Popular Culture | French Studies
Publisher's Description: When Coca-Cola was introduced in France in the late 1940s, the country's most prestigious newspaper warned that Coke threatened France's cultural landscape. This is one of the examples cited in Richard Kuisel's engaging exploration of France's response to American influence after World War II. In analyzing early French resistance and then the gradual adaptation to all things American that evolved by the mid-1980s, he offers an intriguing study of national identity and the protection of cultural boundaries.The French have historically struggled against Americanization in order to safeguard "Frenchness." What would happen to the French way of life if gaining American prosperity brought vulgar materialism and social conformity? A clash between American consumerism and French civilisation seemed inevitable.Cold War anti-Communism, the Marshall Plan, the Coca-Cola controversy, and de Gaulle's efforts to curb American investment illustrate ways that anti-Americanization was played out. Kuisel also raises issues that extend beyond France, including the economic, social, and cultural effects of the Americanized consumer society that have become a global phenomenon.Kuisel's lively account reaches across French society to include politicians, businessmen, trade unionists, Parisian intelligentsia, and ordinary citizens. The result reveals much about the French - and about Americans. As Euro Disney welcomes travellers to its Parisian fantasyland, and with French recently declared the official language of France (to defend it from the encroachments of English), Kuisel's book is especially relevant.   [brief]
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Title: Territories of grace: cultural change in the seventeenth-century Diocese of Grenoble 
Author: Luria, Keith P
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European  History | Christianity | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Territories of Grace offers a sophisticated model of cultural change in early modern rural society, by examining the religion of villagers in the French diocese of Grenoble during the Counter-Reformation. Keith P. Luria describes the encounter of village and official forms of piety, arguing that historians have oversimplified the struggle between high and low culture in early modern Europe. He shows how religion was constructed in a complex relationship between villagers, concerned with creating their own religion, and a bishop, intent on cultivating in his flock a Counter-Reformation style of worship and a new standard of social behavior.Luria analyzes records of pastoral visits, examines forms of devotion to saints, and undertakes an ethnographic investigation of one community, to illustrate this interaction. He uncovers a process of cultural change in which villagers and reformers alike took an active role in creating their own culture by adopting, adapting, or resisting the symbols, practices, and meanings of others. The theoretical insights of his study will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and others concerned with rural society, comparative religion, and questions of cultural change.   [brief]
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Title: In a cold crater: cultural and intellectual life in Berlin, 1945-1948 
Author: Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | German Studies | European  History | Literature | Film | Music
Publisher's Description: Although the three conspicuous cultures of Berlin in the twentieth century - Weimar, Nazi, and Cold War - are well documented, little is known about the years between the fall of the Third Reich and the beginning of the Cold War. In a Cold Crater is the history of this volatile postwar moment, when the capital of the world's recently defeated public enemy assumed great emotional and symbolic meaning.This is a story, not of major intellectual and cultural achievements (for there were none in those years), but of enormous hopes and plans that failed. It is the story of members of the once famous volcano-dancing Berlin intelligentsia, torn apart by Nazism and exile, now re-encountering one another. Those who had stayed in Berlin in 1933 crawled out of the rubble, while many of the exiles returned with the Allied armies as members of the various cultural and re-educational units. All of them were eager to rebuild a neo-Weimar republic of letters, arts, and thought. Some were highly qualified and serious. Many were classic opportunists. A few came close to being clowns. After three years of "carnival," recreated by Schivelbusch in all its sound and fury, they were driven from the stage by the Cold War.As Berlin once again becomes the German capital, Schivelbusch's masterful cultural history is certain to captivate historians and general readers alike.   [brief]
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Title: Displaying the Orient: architecture of Islam at nineteenth-century world's fairs 
Author: Çelik, Zeynep
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Architecture | European  History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Gathering architectural pieces from all over the world, the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867 introduced to fairgoers the notion of an imaginary journey, a new tourism en place . Through this and similar expositions, the world's cultures were imported to European and American cities as artifacts and presented to nineteenth-century men and women as the world in microcosm, giving a quick and seemingly realistic impression of distant places.Çelik examines the display of Islamic cultures at nineteenth-century world's fairs, focusing on the exposition architecture. She asserts that certain sociopolitical and cultural trends now crucial to our understanding of historical transformations in both the West and the world of Islam were mirrored in the fair's architecture. Furthermore, dominant attitudes toward cross-cultural exchanges were revealed repeatedly in Westerners' responses to these pavilions, in Western architects' interpretations of Islamic stylistic traditions, and in the pavilions' impact in such urban centers.Although the world's fairs claimed to be platforms for peaceful cultural communication, they displayed the world according to a hierarchy based on power relations. Çelik's delineation of this hierarchy in the exposition buildings enables us to understand both the adversarial relations between the West and the Middle East, and the issue of cultural self-definition for Muslim societies of the nineteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: Holland under Habsburg rule, 1506-1566: the formation of a body politic 
Author: Tracy, James D
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European  History | Politics | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Under what conditions were limited forms of self-government possible in medieval and early modern Europe? While many historians have sought an answer by focusing on the development of parliamentary institutions in emerging national monarchies, or investigating the wider autonomy enjoyed by various city-states within their own borders, James Tracy looks instead at an intermediate level of political organization, the self-governing province. Readers of medieval and early modern European history will learn here how the province of Holland, during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II (1506-1566), effectively underwent an apprenticeship in self-government.   [brief]
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Title: Rome before Avignon: a social history of thirteenth-century Rome 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European  History | Medieval History | Religion | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Robert Brentano evokes papal Rome in all its paradox and complicated brilliance. From a detailed re-creation of the physical "town" with its series of brick campanili and green and purple mosaic floors, to the intrigues of the great families, like the Orsini and Colonna, the reader is guided through complex and fascinating culture. Brentano's skill lies in his ability to combine the story of the vaulting ambition of the great families, only mildly tempered by their very real religious piety, with a vivid reconstruction of everyday life in postclassical Rome.   [brief]
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Title: A buccaneer's atlas: Basil Ringrose's South Sea waggoner: a sea atlas and sailing directions of the Pacific coast of the Americas, 1682 
Author: Ringrose, Basil d. 1686
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | European  History | Geography
Publisher's Description: On July 29, 1681, a band of English buccaneers that had been terrorizing Spanish possessions on the west coast of the Americas captured a Spanish ship, from which they obtained a derrotero , or book of charts and sailing directions. When they arrived back in England, the Spanish ambassador demanded that the buccaneers be brought to trial. The derrotero was ordered to be brought to King Charles II, who apparently appreciated its great intelligence value. The buccaneers were acquitted, to the chagrin of the king of Spain, who had the English ambassador expelled from the court at Madrid on a seemingly trumped-up charge.The derrotero was subsequently translated, and one of the buccaneers, Basil Ringrose, added a text to the compilation and information to the Spanish charts. The resulting atlas, consisting of 106 pages of charts and 106 pages of text, is published in full for the first time in this volume. Covering the coast from California to Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, and Juan Fernandes, Basil Ringrose's south sea waggoner is a rich source of geographical information, with observations on navigational, physical, biological, and cultural features as well as on ethnography, customs, and folklore.After almost exactly three hundred years, this secret atlas is now made available to libraries and individuals. The editors have provided an extensive introduction on historical, geographical, and navigational aspects of the atlas, as well as annotations to the charts and text, and they have plotted the coverage of the charts on modern map bases.   [brief]
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Title: Konspira: Solidarity underground 
Author: Łopiński, Maciej
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Russian and Eastern European Studies | European  History
Publisher's Description: Konspira bares the soul and mind of Solidarity not long before the movement's stunning emergence as Poland's political vanguard. Written while martial law still gripped the country, Konspira tells the inside story of this inspiring contemporary workers' movement. The authors taped, then consolidated, over a hundred hours of secret interviews. Their subjects were eight of the most prominent Solidarity union leaders, gone into hiding as the result of a nationwide police-military crackdown by the Polish government.Solidarity activists were either locked up in internment camps or forced underground, where they coordinated a clandestine network to sustain their organization. This compelling account of a crucial episode in the history of the Solidarity movement is both intimate and representative of the growing opposition to entrenched Communist regimes in East-Central Europe. This volume has benefited from the collegial support of The Wake Forest University Studium.   [brief]
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Title: Crescendo of the virtuoso: spectacle, skill, and self-promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution 
Author: Metzner, Paul 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European  History | French Studies | European Studies
Publisher's Description: During the Age of Revolution, Paris came alive with wildly popular virtuoso performances. Whether the performers were musicians or chefs, chess players or detectives, these virtuosos transformed their technical skills into dramatic spectacles, presenting the marvelous and the outré for spellbound audiences. Who these characters were, how they attained their fame, and why Paris became the focal point of their activities is the subject of Paul Metzner's absorbing study. Covering the years 1775 to 1850, Metzner describes the careers of a handful of virtuosos: chess masters who played several games at once; a chef who sculpted hundreds of four-foot-tall architectural fantasies in sugar; the first police detective, whose memoirs inspired the invention of the detective story; a violinist who played whole pieces on a single string. He examines these virtuosos as a group in the context of the society that was then the capital of Western civilization.   [brief]
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Title: The widening gate: Bristol and the Atlantic economy, 1450-1700 
Author: Sacks, David Harris 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | European  History | United States History
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Title: Peasants and king in Burgundy: agrarian foundations of French absolutism 
Author: Root, Hilton L
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | European  History | Politics | French Studies
Publisher's Description: The example of Old Regime France provides a source for many of the ideas about capitalism, modernization, and peasant protest that concern social scientists today. Hilton Root challenges traditional assumptions and proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between state and society.
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Title: Printed poison: pamphlet propaganda, faction politics, and the public sphere in early Seventeenth-century France 
Author: Sawyer, Jeffrey K
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European  History | Print Media | Politics | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Combining a broad analysis of political culture with a particular focus on rhetoric and strategy, Jeffrey Sawyer analyzes the role of pamphlets in the political arena in seventeenth-century France. During the years 1614-1617 a series of conflicts occurred in France, resulting from the struggle for domination of Louis XIII's government. In response more than 1200 pamphlets - some printed in as many as eighteen editions - were produced and distributed. These pamphlets constituted the political press of the period, offering the only significant published source of news and commentary.Sawyer examines key aspects of the impact of pamphleteering: the composition of the targeted public and the ways in which pamphlets were designed to affect its various segments, the interaction of pamphlet printing and political action at the court and provincial levels, and the strong connection between pamphlet content and assumptions on the one hand and the evolution of the French state on the other. His analysis provides new and valuable insights into the rhetoric and practice of politics.Sawyer concludes that French political culture was shaped by the efforts of royal ministers to control political communication. The resulting distortions of public discourse facilitated a spectacular growth of royal power and monarchist ideology and influenced the subsequent history of French politics well into the Revolutionary era.   [brief]
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Title: The beast in the boudoir: petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris 
Author: Kete, Kathleen
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European  History | French Studies | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliché of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie.Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding - all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more manageable version of the world - it relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. The faithful, affectionate family dog became a counterpoint to the isolation of individualism and lack of community in urban life. By century's end, however, animals no longer represented the human condition with such potency, and even the irascible, autonomous cat had been rehabilitated into a creature of fidelity and affection.Full of fascinating details, this innovative book will contribute to the way we understand culture and the creation of class.   [brief]
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Title: Wondrous in his saints: counter-Reformation propaganda in Bavaria 
Author: Soergel, Philip M
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European  History | Christianity | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: At the close of the sixteenth century, despite Protestant attempts to discourage popular devotion to saints and shrines, the Roman Church in Bavaria initiated a propagandistic campaign through the publishing of pilgrimage books and pamphlets. Philip Soergel's cogent exploration of this little-known pilgrimage literature yields a vivid portrait of religion before, during, and after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.These "advertisements," combining testimonies of miracles with fantastic legends about shrines, fueled the conflict between Catholics and Protestants and helped shape a distinctive Catholic historical consciousness. Soergel stresses the power of the printed word as a defense of traditional authority, testing other historians' assertions about the neglect of printing and literacy in the Counter-Reformation.   [brief]
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Title: Protecting motherhood: Women and the family in the politics of postwar West Germany 
Author: Moeller, Robert G
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European  History | Women's Studies | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and "woman's place." He investigates the social, economic, and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction.The debate over "woman's place" in the fifties was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the "woman question," West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West.Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities, and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined, and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, "politics construct gender and gender construct politics."   [brief]
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Title: Russia's last capitalists: the Nepmen, 1921-1929 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European  History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1921 Lenin surprised foreign observers and many in his own Party, by calling for the legalization of private trade and manufacturing. Within a matter of months, this New Economic Policy (NEP) spawned many thousands of private entrepreneurs, dubbed Nepmen. After delineating this political background, Alan Ball turns his attention to the Nepmen themselves, examining where they came from, how they fared in competition with the socialist sector of the economy, their importance in the Soviet economy, and the consequences of their "liquidation" at the end of the 1920s. Alan Ball's history of this experiment with capitalism is strikingly relevant to current efforts toward economic reform in the USSR.   [brief]
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