New Books in Eastern European Studies
Episodes
Waitman Beorn, “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
20 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done ...
Wojtek Sawa, “The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard” (National Center of Culture, 2016)
05 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Wojtek Sawa‘s The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard (National Center of Culture, 2016) is a bilingual Polish-English project that engages with the ...
Anika Walke, “Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia” (Oxford UP, 2015)
24 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, surv...
Erica Lehrer, “Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places” (Indiana UP, 2013)
01 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking me ...
Marie E. Berry, “War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
30 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her po...
Steven J. Zipperstein, “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History” (Liveright/Norton, 2018)
27 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a sma...
Ruth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition” (NYU Press, 2017)
02 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Profes...
Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising” (Stanford UP, 2015)
30 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford...
Anna Muller, “If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017)
22 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University P...
Erin Hochman, “Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss” (Cornell UP, 2016)
21 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016), Erin Hochman, Associa...
Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny, “Russia’s Empires” (Oxford UP, 2016)
15 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federat...
David Biale, “Hasidism: A New History” (Princeton UP, 2018)
22 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether ...
Larry Wolff, “The Singing Turk” (Stanford UP, 2016)
19 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Pr...
David Gerlach, “The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
05 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017)...
Laura Engelstein, “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921” (Oxford University Press, 2017)
31 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Lau...
Omer Bartov, “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz” (Simon and Schuster, 2018)
30 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making a...
Eddy Portnoy, “Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press” (Stanford UP, 2017)
16 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017), Eddy Portnoy, Academic Advisor and Exhibitio...
Sarah D. Phillips, “Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine” (Indiana UP, 2010)
14 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of...
Joshua Rubenstein, “The Last Days of Stalin” (Yale UP, 2016)
11 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
On March 4, 1953, Soviet citizens woke up to an unthinkable announcement: Joseph Stalin, the country’s all-powerful leader, had died of a stroke. In...
Jayne Persian, “Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017)
24 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Jayne Persian, a Lecturer in History at the U...
Michael Flier and Andrea Graziosi, eds. “The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective” (Harvard UP, 2017)
11 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awa...
Bruce R. Berglund, “Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague” (CEU Press, 2017)
09 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
As Bruce R. Berglund, points out in his terrific book Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague: Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age (CEU Press, 201...
Adi Gordon, “Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn” (Brandeis UP, 2017)
31 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Not very many intellectuals really change their minds about anything. They have a big idea, often become well known because of it. Then their big idea...
Edin Hajdarpasic, “Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840-1914” (Cornell UP, 2015)
31 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav moveme...
Pieter M. Judson, “The Habsburg Empire: A New History” (Harvard UP, 2016)
18 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Pieter Judson established himself as one of the top scholars of the East Central Europe with his first two books Exclusive Revolutionaries (University...
Alexander Prusin, “Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation” (U. Illinois Press, 2017)
11 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Alexander Prusin delineates the Nazi occupation of Yugos...
Mykola Soroka, “Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012)
07 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of...
Max Bergholz, “Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a Balkan Community” (Cornell UP, 2016)
25 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
People study atrocities and mass violence for a variety of reasons. When asked, many offer thoughtful intellectual or political explanations for their...
Scott Moranda, “The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany” (U. Michigan Press, 2014)
19 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its ci...
Bruce O’Neill, “The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order” (Duke University Press, 2017)
28 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by glob...
Adriana Helbig, “Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration” (Indiana UP, 2014)
25 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic c...
Geoffrey D. Claussen, “Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simhah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar” (SUNY Press, 2015)
13 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (SUNY Press, 2015), Geoffrey D. Claussen provides a thorough study of the life ...
Franz Nicolay, “The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar” (The New Press, 2016)
12 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What is the punk music scene like in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, or Mongolia? Who listens to punk in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans?...
Brigitte Le Normand, “Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade” (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2014)
08 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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, 7/11/1...
Steven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire” (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)
05 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 ex...
Andrew Sloin, “The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power” (Indiana UP, 2017)
19 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of Histo...
Ana Miskovska Kajevska, “Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s” (Routledge, 2017)
01 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Misko...
James Heinzen, “The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953” (Yale UP, 2016)
12 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Soviet Union under Stalin was very repressive. You could get sent to a GULAG (if not shot) for casually telling an “anti-Soviet” joke or pilfe...
William D. Prigge, “Bearslayers: The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists” (Peter Lang, 2015)
02 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their ris...
Edward Westermann, “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest” (U. Oklahoma Press, 2016)
02 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’...
Ferenc Laczo, “Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929-1948” (Brill, 2016)
15 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Ju...
Piotr Kosicki, “Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain” (Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2016)
01 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living be...
Ellie Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906” (Stanford UP, 2016)
10 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank...
Edward Cohn, “The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime” (NIU Press, 2015)
04 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The Hig...
Violeta Davoliute, “The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War” (Routledge, 2013)
04 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an ...
Regis Darques, “Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans” (Springer, 2016)
11 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Regis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region....
Jelena Batinic, “Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
01 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jelena Batinic’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the role women playe...
Michael David-Fox, “Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union” (U Pittsburgh Press, 2015)
14 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
It’s been a quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This anniversary marks a good occasion to ask a seemingly simple question: “Wh...
Mark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian History” (U. of Toronto Press, 2012)
29 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing terri...
Jessica Greenberg , “After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia” (Stanford University Press, 2014)
12 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jessica Greenberg’s After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores ...
Gregory F. Domber, “Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War” (U. of North Carolina Press, 2014)
23 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
As the most populous country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest anticommunist dissident movement, Poland is crucial in underst...
Ana Foteva, “Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe” (Peter Lang, 2014)
19 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, pla...
Per Anders Rudling, “The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931” (U of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)
23 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
I don’t often have a chance to read books that focus solely on Belarus, which is exactly why I was intrigued by The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nati...
Alan McDougall, “The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
24 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In The People’s Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom...
Joshua Zimmerman, “The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
18 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in...
Friederike Kind-Kovacs, “Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain” (Central European UP, 2014)
07 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed desc...
Timothy Snyder, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” (Tim Duggan Books, 2015)
28 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
It’s rare when an academic historian breaks through and becomes a central part of the contemporary cultural conversation. Timothy Snyder does just ...
Guntis Smidchens, “The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution” (University of Washington Press, 2014)
18 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1980s, the Baltic Soviet Social Republics seemed to explode into song as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national movements challenged So...
Glenn Dynner, “Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland” (Oxford UP, 2014)
01 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford UP, 2014), Glenn Dynner, Professor of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College...
Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, eds., “Twenty Years After Communism” (Oxford UP, 2015)
23 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
For people and governments in the west the revolutions of 1989 and 1991 were happy events, and as the twentieth anniversary of those events rolled aro...
Roland Clark, “Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania” (Cornell UP, 2015)
03 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michae...
Cecile E. Kuznitz, “YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
29 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Cecile E. Kuznitz, Associate P...
David Frick, “Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in 17th-Century Wilno” (Cornell UP, 2013)
09 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In 1636, King Wladyslaw IV’s quartermaster surveyed the houses of Wilno in advance of the king’s visit to the city. In Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Co...
Tom Junes, “Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent” (Lexington, 2015)
26 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In the conventional narratives of Communist Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, student activism tends to get short shrift. While the role of s...
Derek Sayer, “Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History” (Princeton UP 2013)
24 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Prague, according to Derek Sayer, is the place “in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled.” In this sweeping history of surrealism c...
Anton Weiss-Wendt, “The Nazi Genocide of the Roma” (Berghahn, 2015) and “Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe” (U of Nebraska Press, 2013)
06 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sen...
Magda Romanska, “The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor” (Anthem Press, 2014)
02 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Jerzy Grotowsky and Tadeusz Kantor were influential in avant-garde theater in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, receiving high critical regard despite ...
Juergen Matthaus et al., “War, Pacification and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)
18 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union. We now know much more tha...
John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic, “Bringing the Dark Past to Light” (U of Nebraska Press, 2013)
29 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and ca...
Katherine Lebow, “Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956” (Cornell UP, 2013)
15 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1940s, tens of thousands of people – mostly young male peasants – streamed to southeastern Poland to help build Nowa Huta, the largest...
Hasia Diner, “Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way” (Yale University Press, 2015).
10 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and easter...
Paulina Bren, “The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring” (Cornell UP, 2012)
20 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Major Zeman’s life is filled with action packed adventures. A young man finds his calling turning a collective farm into a shining example of agricu...
Robert J. Donia, “Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
06 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading abou...
James Mace Ward, “Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia” (Cornell UP, 2013)
25 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man...
Mary C. Neuberger, “Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria” (Cornell UP, 2012)
04 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
By the late 1960s, Bulgaria was the world’s number one exporter of tobacco, perhaps the pinnacle of the place of tobacco in the economic, social and...
Mark Corner, “The European Union: An Introduction” (I. B. Tauris, 2014)
16 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, ...
Willard Sunderland, “The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)
04 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willar...
Andrew Demshuk, “The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
23 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of ...
Edmund Levin, “A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia” (Schocken, 2014)
13 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all th...
Sener Akturk, “Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge UP, 2012)
11 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from int...
Mark Levene, “The Crisis of Genocide” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
03 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject i...
Geoffrey Wawro, “A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire” (Basic Books, 2014)
27 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
When I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attentio...
Anne Gorsuch, “All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin” (Oxford UP, 2011)
22 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter...
John Roth and Peter Hayes, “The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies” (Oxford UP, 2010)
20 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with D...
Jeremy Dauber, “The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem” (Schocken, 2013)
08 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Wor...
Robert Gellately, “Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War” (Knopf, 2013)
05 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Begi...
Dan Stone, “Histories of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2010)
03 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a f...
Luuk van Middelaar, “The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union” (Yale UP, 2013)
28 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict n...
Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp” (W. W. Norton, 2010)
18 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the fi...
Paul Mojzes, “Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)
22 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more abou...
Mary Heimann, “Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed” (Yale UP, 2009)
27 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Americans love Prague. They visit and have even moved there in considerable numbers. They like the place for a lot of reasons. One is that Prague is a...
Eric Lohr, “Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union” (Harvard UP, 2012)
05 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it’s said they don’t much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr‘s new book, Russian Citize...
R. M. Douglas, “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War” (Yale UP, 2012)
14 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
I imagine everyone who listens to this podcast knows about the Nazi effort to remake Central and Eastern Europe by expelling and murdering massive num...
William Risch, “The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv” (Harvard UP, 2011)
11 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
During the Cold War few Westerners gave much thought to Western Ukraine, and its main city, Lviv. It was what happened in Moscow and St. Petersburg...
Mary Fulbrook, “A Small Near Town Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2012)
19 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The question of how “ordinary Germans” managed to commit genocide is a classic (and troubling) one in modern historiography. It’s been well stud...
Pieter Judson, “Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria” (Harvard UP, 2006)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
What if much of what we think we know about nationalism and the spread of the national identity over the course of the nineteenth century were wrong? ...
Alexander Maxwell, “Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism” (Tauris Academic Studies, 2009)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roug...
Kimberly Zarecor, “Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960” (Pittsburgh UP, 2011)
31 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I first went to the Soviet Union (in all my ignorance), I was amazed that everyone in Moscow lived in what I called “housing projects.” The R...
Melissa Caldwell, “Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside” (University of California Press, 2010)
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Russians’ dachas are regularly mentioned in a sentence or two in newspaper articles about life in Russia, and many of who have visited the lands of ...
Francis Tapon, “The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us” (WanderLearn, 2012)
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Most of the specialists in Eastern Europe I know first got truly interested in the region after a trip, which then triggered applications to grad scho...