History - Europe - General

In 1634, the Thirty Years' War had taken a spectacular turn; the great protagonists of 1630 had died: King Gustav Adolf of Sweden and Generals Tilly and Wallenstein. The Swedish army was disoriented without the presence of its charismatic king. Chancellor Oxenstierna was to...

A scholarly and imaginative reconstruction of the voyage Daniel Defoe took from the pillory to literary immortality, The Shortest Way with Defoe contends that Robinson Crusoe contains a secret satire, written against one person, that has gone undetected for 300 years. By locating Defoe's...

During a career lasting nearly half a century, Meister Frantz Schmidt (1554-1634) personally put to death 392 individuals and tortured, flogged, or disfigured hundreds more. The remarkable number of victims, as well as the officially sanctioned context in which they suffered at Schmidt's hands,...

In a time of remarkable but selective amnesia in the West reflected perhaps most dramatically in the denial of the Christian roots of Europe in the first drafts of the European constitution, Understanding Europe is as relevant today as it was on its first...

Long before we began to speak of "public intellectuals," the ideas of "the public" and "the intellectual" raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born...

There is a longstanding confusion of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's one-time business partner, with the notorious Doctor Faustus. The association is not surprising to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for from its very early days the printing press was viewed by some as black magic. For the...

Lucrative, far-reaching, and complex, the fur trade bound together Europeans and Native peoples of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rethinking the Fur Trade offers a nuanced look at the broad range of contracts that characterized the fur trade, a phenomenon that...

The Islamic revolution of 1979 transformed all areas of Iranian life. For women, the consequences were extensive and profound, as the state set out to reverse legal and social rights women had won and to dictate many aspects of women's lives, including what they...

Millions of men lived in the trenches during World War I. More than six million died there. In Eye-Deep in Hell, the author explores this unique and terrifying world--the rituals of battle, the habits of daily life, and the constant struggle of men to...

A major new history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways that life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar...

Germany's 1941 seizure of Yugoslavia led to an insurgency as bloody as any in World War II. The Wehrmacht waged a brutal counter-insurgency campaign in response, and by 1943 German troops in Yugoslavia were engaged in operations that ranked among the largest of the...

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard...

This book tells the story of the invasion of France at the twilight of Napoleon's empire. With over a million men under arms throughout central Europe, Coalition forces poured over the Rhine River to invade France between late November 1813 and early January 1814....

This book studies the connections between the political reform of the Holy Roman Empire and the German lands around 1500 and the sixteenth-century religious reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. It argues that the character of the political changes (dispersed sovereignty, local autonomy) prevented both...

This major reinterpretation of the Holocaust surveys the destruction of the European Jews within the broader context of Nazi violence against other victim groups. Christian Gerlach offers a unique social history of mass violence which reveals why particular groups were persecuted and what it...

By relating economic changes to the political backdrop, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750 describes and analyzes the economic civilisation of Europe in the last epoch before the Industrial Revolution. The author makes a special effort to apply economic reasoning...

Seventeenth-century Europe witnessed an extraordinary flowering of discoveries and innovations. This study, beginning with the Dutch-invented telescope of 1608, casts Galileo's discoveries into a global framework. Although the telescope was soon transmitted to China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire, those civilizations did not...

Robbing the Jews reveals the mechanisms by which the Nazis and their allies confiscated Jewish property, demonstrating the close relationship between robbery and the Holocaust. The spoliation evolved in intensifying steps. The Anschluss and Kristallnacht in 1938 reveal a dynamic tension between pressure from...

In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown....

In the two generations before World War I, Germany emerged as Europe's foremost industrial power. The basic facts of increasing industrial output, lengthening railroad lines, urbanization, and rising exports are well known. Behind those facts, in the historical shadows, stand millions of anonymous men...

Updated and expanded throughout with new illustrations and new material, this is the long- awaited second edition of a highly acclaimed and interdisciplinary book which quickly established itself as a seminal text in its field.Author: Mary Louise PrattISBN-10: 0415438179ISBN-13: 9780415438179Publisher: RoutledgeLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/27/2007Pages: 296Format:...

Study the Thirty Years War from the perspective of those who lived it as Experiencing the Thirty Years War as an unprecedented collection of personal accounts come together to share the experience of early modern warfare.Author: Hans Medick, Benjamin MarschkeISBN-10: 0312535058ISBN-13: 9780312535056Publisher: Bedford BooksLanguage:...

The optimistic vision of a "Europe whole and free" after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has given way to disillusionment, bitterness, and renewed hostility between Russia and the West. In No Place for Russia, William H. Hill traces the development of...

*Includes pictures *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "I have not the nerve for his operations. They are well-planned, with great cleverness and adroitness in execution - but he is in money and funds what Napoleon was in war." - Baron...

At its height, the Roman Empire was the greatest empire yet seen with borders stretching from the rain-swept highlands of Scotland in the north to the sun-scorched Nubian desert in the south. But how were the vast and varied stretches of frontier defined and...

"The Struggle for Scutari," originally published in 1914, was the fourth book of the English traveller and writer Edith Durham (1863-1944). She had already made a name for herself with "Through the Lands of the Serb" (1904), "The Burden of the Balkans" (1905) and...

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to...

Abbott's "The History of Prussia" is a comprehensive history of the kingdom that eventually became the backbone of Germany. As he put it in the preface: "Prussia is now recognized not only as one of the great powers, but as, probably, the first military...

Known as the "Land of Fire," Azerbaijan is a country located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. While it has accumulated riches from being a trading post along the Silk Road, the country has been devastated by invading hordes charging from the four...

Author: Kathe BryantISBN-10: 1410714330ISBN-13: 9781410714336Publisher: 1st Book LibraryLanguage: EnglishPublished: 04/01/2003Pages: 376Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.22lbsSize: 9.02h x 6.12w x 0.91d

Images and image cycles with genealogical content were everywhere in the high and later Middle Ages. They represent families related by blood as well as successive office holders and appear as family trees and lineages of single figures in manuscripts, on walls and in...

The practice of weather forecasting underwent a crucial transformation in the Middle Ages. Exploring how scientifically-based meteorology spread and flourished from c.700-c.1600, this study reveals the dramatic changes in forecasting and how the new science of 'astro-meteorology' developed. Both narrower and more practical in...

The triumph of Zionism has clouded recollection of competing forms of Jewish nationalism vying for power a century ago. This study explores alternative ways to construct the modern Jewish nation. Jewish nationalism emerges from this book as a Diaspora phenomenon much broader than the...

Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) is based on reading source material to recreate the lost martial arts of Europe. While reading the treatises and performing depicted techniques helps understand HEMA, there is more to it. The sources were not written and illustrated in a...

This edition faithfully reprints the full text of the classic translation by W.K. Marriott with the translator's introduction. It also includes two additional pieces by Machiavelli. The first provides a fascinating description of the methods of murder adopted by Duke Valentino, and the second...

*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." - Marie Curie The...

*Includes pictures*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading"A cowardly man thinks he will ever live, if warfare he avoids; but old age will give no peace, though spears may spare him." - old Norse proverb from the Viking AgeIn the autumn of...

*Includes pictures*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading"A cowardly man thinks he will ever live, if warfare he avoids; but old age will give no peace, though spears may spare him." - old Norse proverb from the Viking AgeIn the autumn of...

European arrowheads and crossbow bolts are relatively under-represented in the literature and are usually treated only as minor aspects. There is a lack of an overview of the various forms of European arrowhead typologies. This book intends to close this gap and give the...

Krajina ("borderland"), the Habsburg Military Frontier, was once the name of a string of territories which provided an essential link in the chain defending Europe from the Ottoman onslaught in the 16th and 17th centuries. For many generations the Serbian population of these regions...

The 18th century was a unique period of global and fundamental change. Britain conquered India and much of America, the American Revolution produced the USA, and Russia expanded vastly. In the field of ideas the Scientific Revolution was consolidated and followed by the Enlightenment....

This brand new graphic guide provides a comprehensive introduction to the schools of thought and key figures in continental philosophy. Christopher Kul-Want is the course director for the MA in Fine Art at Central St. Martins, London, and the author of the popular Graphic...

The Nazi Holocaust is one of the most momentous events in human history. Yet, it remains on many levels a baffling and unfathomable mystery. By shunning simplistic 'explanations' Ronnie Landau has set out, in a clear, thought-provoking and enlightened fashion, to mediate betweeen this...

*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading If one were to glide over the Dutch countryside via helicopter in the springtime, the beauty below them would seem almost surreal. The rolling rectangular fields are composed of immaculately...

A poignant and powerful portrait of Europe in the years between 1939 and 1941--as the Nazi menace marches toward the greatest man-made catastrophe the world has ever experienced--Under A Darkening Sky focuses on a diverse group of expatriate Americans. Told through the eyes and...

In the decade preceding the outbreak of World War II, the Vatican made a devil's bargain with fascist leaders. Anticipating that their regimes would eliminate a common enemy--namely Marxist-Leninist communism--two popes essentially collaborated with Hitler, Mussolini, and the fascist dictators in Spain (Franco) and...

Wojcik conveys the incredible true story of how he discovered and delivered information that overcame the Soviet Bloc. He learned the value of information as a student striving to survive under the communist system. Invited to the United States in 1986 by a university...

How did medieval people define themselves? And how did they balance their identities as individuals with the demands of their communities? Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages intertwines the study of identities with current scholarship to reveal their multi-layered, sometimes contradictory...

A major history of how the Enlightenment transformed people's everyday lives The Secular Enlightenment is a panoramic account of the radical ways life began to change for ordinary people in the age of Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. In this landmark book, familiar Enlightenment figures...

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dozens of alliances asserting shared sovereignty formed in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. Many accounts of state formation struggle to explain these leagues, since they characterize state formation as a process of internal bureaucratization within...