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: Louis XIII, the Just
Author: Moote, A. Lloyd (Alanson Lloyd)
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Autobiographies and Biographies
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Title: The quiet revolution: Hermann Kolbe and the science of organic chemistry 
Author: Rocke, Alan J 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science | Physical Sciences | European History
Publisher's Description: Organic chemist Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884) is the subject of this vigorously contextualized biography, which combines the approaches of cognitive and social history of science. Kolbe was one of the most outstanding chemists during the remarkable period in which German science, like the wider manifestations of German industrial and political power, rose to a position of world dominance.Rocke portrays Kolbe as a leading actor in the transformation of the institutional and pedagological dimensions of the physical sciences, as well as in the rapid growth of technologically powerful pure sciences. In all these areas there was a sharp inflection point around 1860 when, as Rocke persuasively argues, the primary discipline in the drama was organic chemistry.   [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: Popular theater and society in Tsarist Russia
Author: Swift, Eugene Anthony
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Popular Culture | European Literature | European Studies
Publisher's Description: This is the most comprehensive study available of the popular theater that developed during the last decades of tsarist Russia. Swift examines the origins and significance of the new "people's theaters" that were created for the lower classes in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1861 and 1917. His extensively researched study, full of anecdotes from the theater world of the day, shows how these people's theaters became a major arena in which the cultural contests of late imperial Russia were played out and how they contributed to the emergence of an urban consumer culture during this period of rapid social and political change. Swift illuminates many aspects of the story of these popular theaters - the cultural politics and aesthetic ambitions of theater directors and actors, state censorship politics and their role in shaping the theatrical repertoire, and the theater as a vehicle for social and political reform. He looks at roots of the theaters, discusses specific theaters and performances, and explores in particular how popular audiences responded to the plays.   [brief]
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Title: The Muslims of Valencia in the age of Fernando and Isabel: between coexistence and crusade 
Author: Meyerson, Mark D
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Religion
Publisher's Description: The kingdom of Valencia was home to Christian Spain's largest Muslim population during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, Fernando and Isabel. How did Muslim-Christian coexistence in Valencia remain relatively stable in this volatile period that saw the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, the Expulsion of the Jews, the conquest of Granada, and the conversion of the Muslims of Granada and Castile? In explanation, Mark Meyerson achieves the first thorough analysis of Fernando and Isabel's policy toward both Muslims and Jews. His findings will stimulate much discussion among Hispanists, Arabists, and historians.Meyerson argues that the key to the persistence of Muslim-Christian coexistence in Valencia lies in the hitherto unexamined differences between the royal couple concerning matters of religion. More than a study of the minority policy of the Catholic Monarchs, however, The Muslims of Valencia is an exemplary analysis of the economic life of Valencia's Muslims and the complex institutional and social network that held them suspended "between coexistence and crusade."   [brief]
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Title: Shanghai on the Metro: spies, intrigue, and the French between the wars 
Author: Miller, Michael Barry 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Secret agents, gun runners, White Russians, adventurers, and con men - they all play a part in Michael Miller's strikingly original study of interwar France. Based on extensive research in security files and a mass of printed sources, this book shows how a distinctive milieu of spies and spy literature emerged between the two world wars, reflecting the atmosphere and concerns of these years.Miller argues that French fascination with intrigue between the wars reveals a far more assured and playful national mood than historians have hitherto discerned in the final decades of the Third Republic. But the larger history set in motion by World War I and the subsequent reading of French history into global history are the true subjects of this work. Reconstituting through his own narratives the histories of interwar travel and adventure and the willful turning of contemporary affairs into a source of romance, Miller recovers the ambiance and special qualities of the age that produced its intrigues and its tales of spies.   [brief]
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Title: The other Greeks: the family farm and the agrarian roots of western civilization
Author: Hanson, Victor Davis
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Classics | European History
Publisher's Description: For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the Greek city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture as the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate book leads us outside the city walls to the countryside, where the vast majority of the Greek citizenry lived, to find the true source of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson shows that the real "Greek revolution" was not merely the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm.The farmers, vinegrowers, and herdsmen of ancient Greece are "the other Greeks," who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these tough-minded, practical, and fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its distinctive emphasis on private property, constitutional government, contractual agreements, infantry warfare, and individual rights. Hanson's reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by hands-on knowledge of the subject (he is a fifth-generation California vine- and fruit-grower) is fresh, comprehensive, and absorbing. His detailed chronicle of the rise and tragic fall of the Greek city-state also helps us to grasp the implications of what may be the single most significant trend in American life today - the imminent extinction of the family farm.   [brief]
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Title: Industrialization, family life, and class relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914 
Author: Accampo, Elinor Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative study, Elinor Accampo explores the interrelationship between the structure of work and strategies of family formation in Saint Chamond, a French city that underwent intensive industrialization during the nineteenth century. Through a detailed analysis of fertility, mortality, marriages, and migration, the author analyzes the ways in which the family responded to changes in the organization of work. In the first half of the nineteenth century work was in the home, and families tended to be large in order to meet the demand for workers. But by the 1860s the mechanization of labor had begun to separate family life and work life, fundamentally transforming the relationship between work and family and making the survival of the working-class family more difficult. Accampo argues that workers began to have smaller families much earlier than has previously been suggested, and she demonstrates that fertility declined for reasons unique to working-class conditions. This decline in family size, and the context in which it took place, provides fascinating new material for understanding the working class world and the dynamics of class relations.   [brief]
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Title: A new world in a small place: church and religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188-1378 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Religion | Christianity | European History | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Distinguished historian Robert Brentano provides an entirely new perspective on the character of the church, religion, and society in the medieval Italian diocese of Rieti from 1188 to 1378. Combing through a cache of previously ignored documents stored in a tower of the cathedral, he uses wills, li . . . [more]
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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: Martyred village: commemorating the 1944 massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
Author: Farmer, Sarah Bennett
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | French Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Among German crimes of the Second World War, the Nazi massacre of 642 men, women, and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944, is one of the most notorious. On that Saturday afternoon, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, SS troops encircled the town in the rolling farm country of the Limousin. Soldiers marched the men to nearby barns, lined them up, and shot them. They then locked the women and children in the church, shot them, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Residents who had been away for the day returned to a blackened scene of horror, carnage, and devastation.In 1946 the French State expropriated and preserved the entire ruins of Oradour. The forty acres of crumbling houses, farms and shops became France's village martyr , set up as a monument to French suffering under the German occupation. Today, the village is a tourist destination, complete with maps and guidebooks.In this first full-scale study of the destruction of Oradour and its remembrance over the half century since the war, Sarah Farmer investigates the prominence of the massacre in French understanding of the national experience under German domination. Through interviews with survivors and village officials, as well as extensive archival research, she pieces together a fascinating history of both a shattering event and its memorial afterlife.Complemented by haunting photographs of the site, Farmer's eloquent dissection of France's national memory addresses the personal and private ways in which, through remembrance, people try to come to terms with enormous loss. Martyred Village will have implications for the study of the history and sociology of memory, testimonies about remembrances of war and the Holocaust, and postmodern concerns with the presentation of the past.   [brief]
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Title: Shaping history: ordinary people in European politics, 1500-1700 
Author: Te Brake, Wayne Ph
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | European Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: As long as there have been governments, ordinary people have been acting in a variety of often informal or extralegal ways to influence the rulers who claimed authority over them. Shaping History shows how ordinary people broke down the institutional and cultural barriers that separated elite from popular politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and entered fully into the historical process of European state formation. Wayne te Brake's outstanding synthesis builds on the many studies of popular political action in specific settings and conflicts, locating the interaction of rulers and subjects more generally within the multiple political spaces of composite states. In these states, says Te Brake, a broad range of political subjects, often religiously divided among themselves, necessarily aligned themselves with alternative claimants to cultural and political sovereignty in challenging the cultural and fiscal demands of some rulers. This often violent interaction between subjects and rulers had particularly potent consequences during the course of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. But, as Te Brake makes clear, it was an ongoing political process, not a series of separate cataclysmic events. Offering a compelling alternative to traditionally elite-centered accounts of territorial state formation in Europe, this book calls attention to the variety of ways ordinary people have molded and shaped their own political histories.   [brief]
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Title: Aristocratic experience and the origins of modern culture: France, 1570-1715 
Author: Dewald, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations.Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Modern French culture, Dewald argues, emerged from this conflict between tradition and the individual's inner life.   [brief]
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Title: Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world
Author: Goldstone, Jack A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | Political Theory | European History | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: What can the great crises of the past teach us about contemporary revolutions? Arguing from an exciting and original perspective, Goldstone suggests that great revolutions were the product of 'ecological crises' that occurred when inflexible political, economic, and social institutions were overwhelmed by the cumulative pressure of population growth on limited available resources. Moreover, he contends that the causes of the great revolutions of Europe - the English and French revolutions - were similar to those of the great rebellions of Asia, which shattered dynasties in Ottoman Turkey, China, and Japan.The author observes that revolutions and rebellions have more often produced a crushing state orthodoxy than liberal institutions, leading to the conclusion that perhaps it is vain to expect revolution to bring democracy and economic progress. Instead, contends Goldstone, the path to these goals must begin with respect for individual liberty rather than authoritarian movements of 'national liberation.'Arguing that the threat of revolution is still with us, Goldstone urges us to heed the lessons of the past. He sees in the United States a repetition of the behavior patterns that have led to internal decay and international decline in the past, a situation calling for new leadership and careful attention to the balance between our consumption and our resources.Meticulously researched, forcefully argued, and strikingly original, Revolutions and Rebellions in the Early Modern World is a tour de force by a brilliant young scholar. It is a book that will surely engender much discussion and debate.   [brief]
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Title: Letters from freedom: post-cold war realities and perspectives
Author: Michnik, Adam
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Social and Political Thought | European History | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: A hero to many, Polish writer Adam Michnik ranks among today's most fearless and persuasive public figures. His imprisonment by Poland's military regime in the 1980s did nothing to quench his outpouring of writings, many of which were published in English as Letters from Prison . Beginning where that volume ended, Letters from Freedom finds Michnik briefly in prison at the height of the "cold civil war" between authorities and citizens in Poland, then released. Through his continuing essays, articles, and interviews, the reader can follow all the momentous changes of the last decade in Poland and East-Central Europe. Some of the writings have appeared in English in various publications; most are translated here for the first time.Michnik is never detached. His belief that people can get what they want without hatred and violence has always translated into action, and his actions, particularly the activity of writing, have required his contemporaries to think seriously about what it is they want. His commitment to freedom is absolute, but neither wild-eyed nor humorless; with a characteristic combination of idealism and pragmatism, Michnik says, "In the end, politics is the art of foreseeing and implementing the possible."Michnik's blend of conviction and political acumen is perhaps most vividly revealed in the interviews transcribed in the book, whether he is the subject of the interview or is conducting a conversation with Czeslaw Milosz, Vacláv Havel, or Wojciech Jaruzelski. These face-to-face exchanges tell more about the forces at work in contemporary Eastern Europe than could any textbook. Sharing Michnik's intellectual journey through a tumultuous era, we touch on all the subjects important to him in this wide-ranging collection and find they have importance for everyone who values conscience and responsibility. In the words of Jonathan Schell, "Michnik is one of those who bring honor to the last two decades of the twentieth century."   [brief]
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Title: Antonia Canova and the politics of patronage in revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe
Author: Johns, Christopher M. S
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Art History | European Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: The Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) was Europe's most celebrated artist from the end of the ancien régime to the early years of the Restoration, an era when the traditional relationship between patrons and artists changed drastically. Christopher M. S. Johns's refreshingly original study explores a neglected facet of Canova's career: the effects of patrons, patronage, and politics on his choice of subjects and manner of working. While other artists produced art in the service of the state, Canova resisted the blandishments of the political powers that commissioned his works.Johns uses letters, diaries, and biographies to establish a political personality for Canova as an individual and an artist of international reputation. Though he had patrons as diverse as the pope, Napoleon, the Austrian Hapsburgs, the Prince Regent of Great Britain, and the Republic of Venice, Canova remained steadily employed and did so without controversy. A conservative and a Catholic, he devised a strategy that enabled him to work for patrons who were avowed enemies while remaining true to the cultural and artistic heritage of his Italian homeland. Using myth and funerary images and avoiding portraiture, he disguised the meanings behind his works and thus avoided their being identified with any political purpose.Johns greatly enhances our understanding of Canova's place in European art and political history, and in showing the influence of censorship, display, visual narrative, and propaganda, he highlights issues as contentious today as they were in Canova's time.   [brief]
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Title: Private lives and public affairs: the causes célèbres of prerevolutionary France
Author: Maza, Sarah C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Law | European History | European Literature | French Studies
Publisher's Description: From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.
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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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