New Books in Western European Studies

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of victory, all sides were looking for a quick exit but had few prospects of finding one. In 1917, the Germans gambled in escalating their submarine warfare, which drew the hesitant Americans into the conflict, the French faced mutinies, and the Russians plunged the throes of Revolution. The war thus raged, spreading across two oceans to four continents, finally turning toward its conclusion. In this episode of the podcast, David Stevenson discusses the causes, course, and effects of these events with us, and shares his insights about judging historical forces and human agency, evaluating counterfactuals, and drawing comparisons between 1917 and subsequent events of the last 100 years, including the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and conflicts of the twenty-first century. Professor Stevenson is Stevenson Chair of International History at the London School of Economics, and has published several important works on the World War I including With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, and 1914-1918: The History of the First World War. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Monica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and reflects upon how these interactions defined a man’s gendered and political positions within society. Focusing on training manuals, memoirs, images, satires, and other rich materials produced by some of the periods most influential equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and political life. Monica Mattfeld is an Assistant Professor of English and History at the University of Northern British Columbia and specializes in animal studies and the literature and history of eighteenth-century England. She has published on early-modern horsemanship practices, theatrical animals, the early circus, and performances of gender. In addition to authoring Becoming Centaur (2017), Monica is also the co-editor of multiple animal-studies publications. Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Lena Wetenkamp‘s Europe Narrated, Contextualized and Remembered: The Discourse of ‘Europe’ in Contemporary German Literature (Europa erzhalt, verortet, erinnert: Europa-Diskurse in der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (Koenigshausen and Neumann, 2017)) is an analysis of the idea of “Europe” in modern German literature. It not only deals with important issues such as spaces, borders, multilingualism and European identity, but also states that there is in fact something like a European poetic. Based on a division into two major parts, this study looks on the one side at essays and pamphlets and on the other side at contemporary German literature from Terezia Mora and Ilma Rakusa. In this way, the book convincingly achieves new literary perspectives on current European questions.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his most recent work, Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017), Amos Goldberg examines Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust—a subject that is familiar to many within and without the academy—from bold, new angles. Rather than using the diary as a historical source, Goldberg’s book centers on the diary as its subject. In addition to closely analyzing the more well-known diaries of Victor Klemperer and Chaim Kaplan, Goldberg incorporates a wide variety of lesser-known first-person narratives into his work, showing the widespread nature of diary writing as a cultural phenomenon during the part. Combining the methods of history, literary studies, and psychology, this impressively interdisciplinary book asks: how did the unfolding of the Holocaust changed victims inner selves? His answers to this question expose the tensions between creation and destruction, and the duality of helplessness and agency, that characterize this genre. Amos Goldberg is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Robin Buller is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his new book, Coming of Age: Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973 (Berghan Books, 2016), Martin Kalb, Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater College examines the construction of youth culture in Munich Germany. Kalb describes constructions of Munich youth in three distinct periods, beginning with the years following the conclusion of World War II, followed by the years of economic stability following the Marshal Plan, finally ending with the protest years culminating in 1968. Overall, Kalb convincing shows how authorities used the fears of adult society effectively as a method to strengthen their control over society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In her latest book, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sarah Fishman offers reader a social history of French families in the years that followed the Second World War. Fishman is focused here on illuminating the daily and practical lives of the men, women, and children who worked and often struggled to transition from wartime to peacetime. After 1945, French families had to negotiate a variety of changes that shaped, and were shaped by, shifting ideas and attitudes about gender roles and relations, love, sexuality, marriage, and parenting. To access the lives of French working and lower-middle class families, Fishman draws on a wide range of sources, including previously neglected popular press publications that reflected the politics and experiences of working people. She also uses juvenile court records from the period that detail family lives and dynamics, as well as state and societal norms and expectations. Tracing the contours of a broad transformation from a vision of family centered on (paternal) authority to an emphasis on relationships, including fatherhood, the book also considers the impact of the ideas of figures like Freud, Beauvoir, and Kinsey on the everyday beliefs and behaviors of ordinary people. Attentive to the continuities and changes that ran throughout the period from 1940 to the late 1960s, the book places the postwar in a context that remembers the war while also setting the stage for the eruption of French political, social, and cultural life in 1968. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his new book, Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Edward Ross Dickinson charts the development of modern dance in the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century. Arguing that modern dance provided the aesthetic tools to address the central features of modernity, Dickinson illustrates its impact on Euro-American cultural life, as well as on ideas about gender, nation, race, science, spirituality, and selfhood. Furthermore, he ties the development of modern dance to the emergence of mass culture and the work of marketing modernity. As becomes evident in his analysis, these ideas were fraught with contradictions as modern dance was seen to be both chaste and sexual, scientific and spiritual, universal yet grounded in racial difference. Dancing in the Blood thus provides fascinating insight into the development of modern dance, not only as an artistic genre but as part of the larger project of modernity. Edward Ross Dickinson is Professor in History at UC, Davis. He received his PhD from UC, Berkeley, and has taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and the University of Cincinnati, Ohio. His research interests include the history of social policy, especially in the German child welfare system, and welfare policy in New Zealand; the history of sexuality in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Central Europe; and debates about sexuality, sexual morality and sexual radicalism in Europe and the US. He is completing a book-length interpretive essay on the history of the world in the long twentieth century, which will appear in 2018.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The German youth movement of the late Kaiserreich and ill-fated Weimar Republic has been a subject of controversy since its inception. The longing for community that drove the movement, and a sense of shared experience that members found on long hikes to historic sites, has been linked to everything from a revolution in conservative thought to the rise of Nazism. But how did the youth movement see history? Why did hiking become a bridge between the past and the present? What possibilities did members feel in the drumbeat of German history? Find out in our discussion with Robbert-Jan Adriaansen about his new book The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933 (Berghahn Books, 2015). By examining the hiking reports of the youth movement, Robbert-Jan traces the development of historical thought among its members and how their experience of heritage became a vehicle to express hopes for the future. Robbert-Jan Adriaansen is an assistant professor of history at the Erasmus University Rotterdam where he teaches historiography and the philosophy of history. His current research on historical reenactment is part of their interdisciplinary Research Excellence Initiative Project “War! Popular Culture and European Heritage of Major Armed Conflicts.” Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title “Policing Hitler’s Critics.” He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Anthony J. La Vopa is professor emeritus of history at North Carolina State University. His book, The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), is an erudite intellectual history that explores how cultivated men and women in early modern France and Britain thought about the intellectual capacities of each sex. The manly and feminine attributes of the mind were tied to bodily and social concepts of female weakness and sentiment and male strength and reason. Beginning with the seventeenth-century salon culture of Paris, in which women were dominant and within an expanding commercial print culture, women and men conceptualized the gendered notions of what was required for polite conversation and intellectual agility. The exertion of labor was set against the desirability of the creativity and ease of play. La Vopa examines the works of multiple prominent thinkers and the positive recasting of the labor of the mind and who was qualified to engage in it. The author also shows how those engaged in debate attempted to live out their ideal for intellectual life. In course of a century and half, ideas about the nature of intellectual labor and the limits of the gendered mind formed the foundations of modernity. This episode of New Books in Intellectual History was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Sam White’s brand new book A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America (Harvard University Press, 2017) turns the tales we learned in grade school about early European colonization of North America upside-down. In the last decades of the 16th and first decades of the 17th century, three empires—Spain, France and England—each sought to establish new colonial projects on the continent of North America. They had the misfortune to embark on these projects at the most severe point of a global climatic shift called the Little Ice Age, whose harsh winters, droughts and storms seemed to plague the unready Europeans at every turn. From Florida to Maine, North Carolina to New Mexico, climate and weather-related difficulties challenged European colonists in a multitude of ways, and White explains how even the nominally successful colony projects, like Jamestown, were lucky near-misses whose success was by no means inevitable. This is a totally new look at the early history of Europeans in North America, which holds significant lessons for coping with and thinking about our modern problems of anthropogenic climate change. Sam White is associate professor of history at Ohio State University. An expert on climate and environmental history in the early modern period, he is also the author of the acclaimed book The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-founder of the Climate History Network, a resource for historians and other professionals studying climate history and climate change. Sean Munger is an author, historian, teacher and podcaster. He also has his own historical podcast, Second Decade.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies