New Books in Western European Studies

In Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Gerben Zaagsma, Senior researcher at the centre for contemporary and digital history at the University of Luxembourg, discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, focusing particularly on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade. Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the Left, and asks to what extent Jewishness and Jewish concerns mattered in the International Brigades and why the Botwin Company was actually created. To this end, the book examines representations of Jewish volunteers in the Parisian Yiddish press (both communist and non-communist). In addition, he analyses the various ways in which the memory of the experiences of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company came to be constituted and constructed after the Second World War and the Holocaust. To that end the book traces how discourses about Jewish volunteers became decisively shaped by post-Holocaust debates on Jewish responses to fascism and Nazism, analyses how, and why, volunteers of Jewish descent eventually became Jewish volunteers after the war, and discusses claims that Jewish volunteers can be seen as ‘the first Jews to resist Hitler with arms’. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In the second podcast of Arguing History, historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie address the question of whether the Protestant Reformation, an event which transformed Christianity in the Western world, was an inevitable event. This they do by considering the origins of the Reformation within the context of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, the role that personality (particularly that of Martin Luther) played in events, and the interaction between faith and politics. What they reveal is the complex matrix of factors involved in events, which included the technology of the printing press, the political makeup of the German empire, and the appeal of Luther’s evolving message all of which combined to take the Reformation in directions which the participants involved never intended. Peter Marshall is professor of history at the University of Warwick, and the author and editor of numerous works, including Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation(Yale University Press, 2017) and 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2017). Alec Ryrie is professor in the department of theology and religion at the University of Durham. Among his many works are The Age of Reformation: The Tudors and Stewart Realms, 1485-1603 (Routledge, 2009) and Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World (Viking, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The Peloponnesian War was one of the first subjects of historical inquiry, and one that has been the subject of many works ever since Thucydides wrote his famous account of the conflict. Yet these works typically focus just on the decades when Sparta’s Peloponnesian League fought against the Athenian empire. In The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jennifer T. Roberts sets the war within the broader context of inter-state hostilities in 5th and 4th century Greece. As she explains, fighting between the two sides did not begin in 431, nor did it really end in 404. Instead the Peloponnesian War was just one of a series of conflicts that stretched throughout the Hellenic era, in which victories often simply set the stage for the next round of battles. Though Sparta may have defeated Athens in 404, by continuing the story beyond then Roberts shows how the new alignments that resulted transformed the city states in ways that led to Sparta’s own defeat in 371, making her triumph in the war only a fleeting one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of his success in defeating Rome’s legions on the battlefield, Hannibal ultimately failed in his lifelong goal. In Hannibal (Simon and Schuster, 2017), Patrick N. Hunt recounts the triumphs and frustrations of the legendary commanders dramatic military career. The son of a Carthaginian leader who fought Rome in the First Punic War, Hannibal was raised to reverse Carthage’s loss in that initial conflict. This he did by taking the fight to Rome, where his outnumbered armies triumphed over the Romans in three successive battles. Yet, as Hunt explains, Rome soon learned from Hannibal’s example, and the Carthaginians’ inability to translate battlefield victories into a Roman surrender left him mired in a war of attrition he could not win. By the time he faced a Roman army at Zama in 202 BCE, the situation was now reversed, as Scipio Africanus used many of Hannibal’s own tactics against him. In this Hunt exposes the irony of Hannibal’s life, as his effort to destroy Rome’s nascent empire only made it stronger, setting the stage for the next seven centuries of its domination of the Mediterranean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press 2013) Dr. Raul Coronado provides an intellectual history of the Spanish America’s decentered from the dominant narrative of Enlightenment, revolution, and independence stemming from Protestant Europe and British America. Examining pamphlets, broadsheets, manuscripts, and newspapers, Coronado situates the emergence of Spanish American revolutionary thought at the moment of rupture, when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed King Fernando VII in 1808. It was at this moment, Coronado argues, when subjects of the Spanish Crown were thrust into the modern era with the task of envisioning and producing an alternative to the ancien regime. With an engaging and sweeping narrative that transports readers across time and space, Coronado explores the central actors and ideas that intersected in and developed out of the Spanish American borderlands to lead independence movements throughout Latin America during the first half of the 19th century. Rooted in the region that would become modern-day Texas, A World Not to Come explores the formation of community and identity, as well as the transmission of ideas, among Texas Mexicans during the eras of Mexican independence and U.S. westward expansion. In the process, Coronado provides a different history of modernity (“alternative west”) that is truly transnational in scope and content. David-James Gonzales (DJ) has a PhD in History from the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the intersection of Latina/o civic engagement and politics on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

What comes to mind when you think of Paris in the nineteenth century? For me, its revolutionary politics, the circulation of increasing numbers of people and goods, a range of spectacular cultural displays and amusements, an emergent urban modernity including a host of negotiations between social classes, public and private, men and women, citizens and the state. And if I had to name one historical figure to stand for the transformation of the nineteenth-century capital? Haussmann. Hands down. Alexia Yates‘s book, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siecle Capital (Harvard UP, 2015), opened my eyes to a whole other world of everyday urbanism and historical actors in the city during the first decades of the Third Republic. Acknowledging the undeniable impact of Haussmann and Haussmannization on the city that Paris became under and after the Second Empire, Selling Paris considers the activities, interests, and effects of a host of other figures who shaped the city’s property relations and commercial culture from the early years of the Third Republic to the First World War. In the books chapters, readers will find a social history of the business of French building during this period, from planning and production to use. Focused on the architects, private developers, municipal authorities, speculators, real estate agents, notaries, property owners, and tenants whose interactions and negotiations influenced the form, representation, and experience of Parisian real estate in purposeful ways, the book makes significant contributions to our understanding of the history of the capital and capitalism in France. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, 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 mid-March, Europeans observed the Dutch national elections with intense interest. Onlookers believed that a victory of the Party for Freedom led by Geert Wilders will influence the results of coming elections in France, the UK, and Germany. It was thought that it would impact these countries immigration policies, and shape their attitudes to their Muslim population. The media coverage stressed the racist and xenophobic rhetoric of Wilders and his supporters, and emphasized the growing tensions between the Netherland’s Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. In Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in the Netherlands (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) anthropologist and scholar of religion Pooyan Tamimi Arab uses sound to suggest a counter-narrative about the state of the Dutch nation. This exceptional monograph looks at debates over the azan, the Muslim call to pray, to reveal the civic negotiations between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. Tamimi Arab looks to local town halls meetings where community representatives work to find a compromise between the wish for public worship and demands for a discreet practice. By focusing on the sonic dimensions of public worship, Tamimi Arab can expose hidden power struggles. He finds for example, that a dual desire to belong in the nation and to keep a connection to their countries of origin motivates many of those demanding the use of loudspeakers for the azan. In his field work, Tamimi Arab observed how although conflicting needs pose challenges to religious tolerance, tensions were often mitigated on the ground. His account of the process results in a more optimist portrayal of a society in influx than the standard narrative of Europe in the twenty-first century. This makes Amplifying Islam a useful example for scholars who aspire to challenge the privileged status of the text in current scholarship. Tal Zalmanovich is a historian of modern Britain and media. She’s currently researching the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and its activists impact on domestic politics in Britain. Prior to being an academic, Tal was a journalist. Podcasting is the fruitful convergence of the two. You can contact Tal at tal.zalmanovich@mail.huji.ac.il. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins. Modernist architects believed they could build a new city that would match the modernization goals of the new communist government. In Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) , Brigitte Le Normand reveals the ideals that under girded these architects plans for Belgrade, along with the postwar realities that thwarted their attempts to foster a new society through a modernist built environment. She analyzes the political, social, and ideological implications of urban planning and the built environment, demonstrating how modernist architects were able to mold their ideal cityscape to fit Yugoslavia’s third way after the Tito-Stalin split and how market socialism created expectations that undermined their vision of social spaces. Her work demonstrates how architects and urban planners in Belgrade were part of a larger movement of modernism in postwar Europe and were affected by the movement away from modernism in the 1960s. Brigitte Le Normand is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

A revealing exploration of representative modes of medievalism, Medievalism: A Critical History (Boydell & Brewer; hardcover 2015, paperback 2017), by David Matthews, examines the people, institutions, and moments that have driven societies around the world to reimagine and revive a medieval past. Eschewing shallow comprehensiveness, David Matthews instead offers a careful and extended handling of significant moments of medieval revival. From Sir Walter Scott and Cardinal Newman embracing structures of medieval ceremony in the early nineteen century to today’s medieval reenactments and medieval markets that employ touristic capital by celebrating a medieval inheritance, Matthews explores the positive vision of the romantic middle ages. Imagined as a world of chivalry and preindustrial economy defined by courtesy and noblesse, the romantic medieval offers connection to the land, more primitive, and more peaceful, social relations, to those who long for a world before industrialism and global capitalism. Following the interlaced negative vision of the grotesque middle ages–a world of barbarity and violence, of cruelty, ignorance, superstition, and narrow parochialism–the argument examines the ways in which communities and thinkers recover both grim and grand visions of the medieval, also exploring aspects medievalism that fall outside this neat binary. Medievalism: A Critical History moves deftly from examinations of medieval recovery in statecraft, aesthetics, art, literature, architecture, and the scholarly discipline of medieval studies. Matthews shows that an investment in the medieval has often reached far beyond academic interest in historical detail or popular interest in knights and castles. He pays particular attention to what is here called civic medievalism–attempts by writers and thinkers to recover that part of the middle ages that encouraged trade, labor, and industry, an interest on the part of statesmen and business leaders who find in the middle ages a worthy model of infrastructural expansion and open commerce. Likewise, with careful eye on ways in which being “medieval” can serve as a condemnation, Matthews pays close attention to how the idea of being medieval in the present day has the power to both attract and repel those who see an unevenness of time in our present world. Discussing the ways in which various writers and communities have employed these modes of medievalism to great effect, Medievalism: A Critical History asks readers to consider why we employ the past to do work in the present, and how the pursuit of recovering the past makes that very past a malleable thing. Careful not to exaggerate the significance of medievalism in moments when it was merely one stream of many, while also directing attention to ways in which interest in the medieval world has been underrecognized, David Matthews makes a commendably searching and scholarly contribution to the study of medievalism. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation by exploring how imperial priorities shaped map-making of he dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and how these changed over the long century during which a fully independent Polish state did not exist. While focused primarily on Russian cartography is the primary focus of this work, Seegel places those developments in context with discussion of Polish nationalist map-making and a discussion of Habsburg map-making of the region as well. In so doing, he also offers intriguing portraits of the cartographers who ultimately made this research possible. It was a pleasure to interview him at last about this book and I invite you to listen to our discussion of his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies