New Books in Western European Studies
Episodes
Guy Fraser-Sampson, “Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977” (Elliott & Thompson, 2011)
08 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appear...
Robert Bucholz and Joseph Ward, “London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550-1750” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
17 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was th...
Anne Sebba, “That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)
17 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor is more often than not presented as a great love story: she is the woman for whom the King gave up...
Paul Friedland, “Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment In France” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
16 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–p...
Richard Bessel, “Germany 1945: From War to Peace” (Harper, 2009)
02 Jul 2012
Contributed by Lukas
One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just...
Elizabeth Goldsmith, “The King’s Mistresses” (PublicAffairs, 2012)
29 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Maz...
Nancy Hargrove, “T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year” (University of Florida Press, 2010)
15 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especia...
Sally Bedell Smith, “Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch” (Random House, 2012)
01 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media att...
Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)
23 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In add...
The NBS Spring Seminar: Understanding European Football
15 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
It’s springtime in the American Midwest. The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new bas...
Philip Gounev, “Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe” (Taylor and Francis, 2012)
10 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are talking with Philip Gounev (co-edited with Vincenzo Ruggiero) about his new book Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe (Taylor and Fra...
Monica Black, “Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
27 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans ...
Randy Roberts, “A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)
13 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players. For the league’s teams, the draft is the cha...
Carolina Armenteros, “The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854” (Cornell UP, 2011)
06 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came...
Philip Oltermann, “Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters” (Faber and Faber, 2012)
02 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a Germa...
Richard Wilson, “Inside the Divide: One City, Two Teams, the Old Firm” (Canongate, 2012)
22 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Alabama-Auburn. Maple Leafs-Canadiens. Boca Juniors-River Plate. Carlton-Collingwood.Fenerbahce-Galatasaray. Great rivalries are the catalysts of na...
David Edgerton, “Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War” (Oxford UP, 2011)
22 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mech...
Jorg Muth, “Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940” (UNT Press, 2011)
12 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer E...
Carolyn Burke, “No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf” (Knopf, 2011)
01 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a v...
Robert Holland, “Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800” (Penguin, 2012)
21 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit –...
David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East” (Cambridge UP, 2009)
13 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in ...
Andy Neill, “Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After” (Omnibus, 2011)
09 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After (Omnibus 2011) Andy Neill provides a detailed account of Faces, one of the most popular an...
Andrew Ritchie, “Quest for Speed: A History of Early Bicycle Racing 1868-1903” (Cycle Publishing, 2011)
30 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, ...
Simon Winder, “Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)
24 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead ...
Gerald Steinacher, “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice” (Oxford UP, 2011)
13 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not g...
David Ciarlo, “Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany” (Harvard UP, 2011)
17 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–co...
Annette Timm, “The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin” (Cambridge UP, 2010)
15 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Many of us know that Nazi regime tried to control Germans’ fertility: some people should reproduce more, according to the National Socialists, and s...
Ronald Reng, “A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke” (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011)
11 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese. At age 32, Robert left behind a...
David Potter, “The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium” (Oxford UP, 2011)
01 Nov 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The Victor’s Crown brings to vivid life the signal role of sport in the classical world. Ranging over a dozen centuries–from Archaic Greece throug...
Timothy Nunan, “Carl Schmitt, ‘Writings on War'” (Polity Press, 2011)
25 Oct 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writin...
Edith Sheffer, “Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain” (Oxford UP, 2011)
14 Oct 2011
Contributed by Lukas
If Edith Sheffer‘s excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, it’s that divid...
Andrew Curran, “The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)
10 Oct 2011
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nel...
Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, “The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany” (University of California Press, 2010)
26 Sep 2011
Contributed by Lukas
This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign touri...
Heather Augustyn, “Ska: An Oral History” (McFarland, 2010)
05 Sep 2011
Contributed by Lukas
“Before reggae there was rock steady, and before that, ska,” writes Cedella Marley in the foreword to Heather Augustyn’s 2010 book Ska: An Oral ...
Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
02 Sep 2011
Contributed by Lukas
When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “F...
Michael Neiberg, “Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I” (Harvard University Press, 2011)
04 Aug 2011
Contributed by Lukas
As we close in on the centennial of the First World War, no doubt there will be a flood of new interpretations and “hidden histories” of the confl...
Tony Collins, “A Social History of English Rugby Union” (Routledge, 2009)
15 Jul 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Most modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin. Baseball has its Cooperstown. Golf its St. And...
Konrad H. Jarausch, “Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front” (Princeton University Press, 2011)
12 Jul 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Konrad H. Jarausch, whose varied and important works on German history have been required reading for scholars for several decades, has published Relu...
Christopher Krebs, “A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich” (Norton, 2011)
22 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Being a historian is a bit of a slog: years in graduate school, more years in dusty libraries and archives, and even more years teaching students who ...
Matthias Strohn, “The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
03 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Matthias Strohn‘s The German Army and the Defense of the Reich: Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle, 1918-1939 (Cambridge Univ...
Matthew Kelly, “Finding Poland: From Tavistock to Hruzdowa and Back Again” (Jonathan Cape, 2010)
02 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Very little illustrates history as well as the personal story. For all of the wars, deportations and suffering of the mid Twentieth Century, it’s on...
Adam Hochschild, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918” (Houghton Mifflin, 2011)
30 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, the day on which we remember those who have fought and died in the service of our country. It’s fit...
Jonathan Steinberg, “Bismarck: A Life” (Oxford UP, 2011)
24 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
What is the role of personality in shaping history? Shortly before the beginning of the First World War, the German sociologist Max Weber puzzled over...
Charles Emmerson, “The Future History of the Arctic: How Climate, Resources and Geopolitics are Reshaping the North, and Why it Matters to the World” (Vintage, 2010)
23 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
I don’t know how many young boys develop a fascination with the world from having a map of the world hung above their beds, but this certainly fits ...
Robert Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942” (UP of Kansas, 2007)
22 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Citino is one of a handful of scholars working in German military history whose books I would describe as reliably rewarding. Even when one qui...
Erik Jensen, “Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity” (Oxford UP, 2010)
01 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; ...
Hans Kundnani, “Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust” (Columbia UP, 2010)
13 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
It’s pretty common in American political discourse to call someone a “fascist.” Everyone knows, however, that this is just name-calling: suppose...
Benjamin Binstock, “Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice” (Routledge, 2009)
09 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I ha...
J. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins” (Basic, 2010)
18 Feb 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Pri...
Catherine Epstein, “Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland” (Oxford UP, 2010)
27 Jan 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The term “totalitarian” is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stali...
Joyce Salisbury, “The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages” (Routledge, 2011)
21 Jan 2011
Contributed by Lukas
I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take them to the vet, and love them. When they die, ...
Nell Irvin Painter, “The History of White People” (Norton, 2010)
14 Jan 2011
Contributed by Lukas
We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call “race.” But, as Nell Irvin Painter shows in her fascin...
Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
03 Dec 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that m...
Joe Maiolo, “Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941” (Basic Books, 2010)
12 Nov 2010
Contributed by Lukas
In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but pl...
Valerie Hebert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg” (University Press of Kansas, 2010)
27 Aug 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fo...
Jeffrey H. Jackson, “Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2010)
13 Aug 2010
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern socie...
Gary Bruce, “The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi” (Oxford UP, 2010)
29 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to ...
Ruth Harris, “Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century” (Henry Holt, 2010)
17 Jun 2010
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill...
Fearghal McGarry, “The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916” (Oxford UP, 2010)
24 May 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as ...
Jeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War” (Manchester UP, 2009)
18 May 2010
Contributed by Lukas
You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of ...
Andrew Donson, “Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918” (Harvard UP, 2010)
23 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as clos...
Hilary Earl, “The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History” (Cambridge UP, 2010)
26 Feb 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly order it and, if so, how and when? This is one of the ma...
Alan E. Steinweis, “Kristallnacht 1938” (Harvard UP, 2009)
23 Jan 2010
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most fundamental–and vexing–questions in all of modern history is whether cultures make governments or governments make cultures. Tocqu...
Toby Lester, “The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name” (Free Press, 2009)
07 Jan 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Leste...
Stephen Kotkin, “Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment” (Modern Library, 2009)
31 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given at the time was that something called “civil society,” ...
Michaela Hoenicke, “Know Your Enemy: American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945” (Cambridge UP, 2009)
29 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and o...
Padraic Kenney, “1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End” (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009)
06 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westpha...
Stevan Allen, “Roaming Ghostland: The Final Days of East Germany” (Xlibris, 2010)
30 Oct 2009
Contributed by Lukas
We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren’t. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or ...
Peter Fritzsche, “Life and Death in the Third Reich” (Harvard UP, 2008)
25 Sep 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Germans and Nazis. They were different things, right? I mean some Germans were members of the Party and believed all it said and some were not and bel...
Brett Whalen, “Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages” (Harvard UP, 2009)
18 Sep 2009
Contributed by Lukas
In the Gospels, the disciples come to Jesus and ask him about the End of Days. He’s got bad news and good. First, everything was going to go hell, s...
Alexander Watson, “Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2008)
06 Aug 2009
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death...
Giles MacDonogh, “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” (Basic Books, 2007)
20 Jun 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed wit...
Norman Stone, “World War One: A Short History” (Basic Books, 2009)
14 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
When I was in high school, I really didn’t go in for reading. Until, that is, I somehow encountered Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Wester...
Adrian Goldsworthy, “How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower” (Yale UP, 2009)
01 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the classic historical question: Why did the Roman Empire fall? There are doubtless lots of reasons. One historian has noted 210 of them. No wo...
Joel Lewis, “Youth Against Fascism: Young Communists in Britain and the United States, 1919-1939” (VDM, 2007)
16 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Most people know what “appeasement” is. You know, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi Anschluss with Austria, the Sudeten Crisis, Neville Chamberlain,...
Robert Hendershot, “Family Spats: Perception, Illusion and Sentimentality in the Anglo-American Special Relationship” (VDM, 2009)
13 Mar 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Gordon Brown, the British PM, came calling to Washington recently. He jumped the pond, of course, to have a chat with his new counterpart, President B...
Kees Boterbloem, “The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys: A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Globetrotter” (Palgrave-McMillan, 2008)
26 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
When we speak of the “Age of Discovery,” we usually mean the later fifteenth and sixteenth century. You know, Columbus, Magellan and all that. But...
Mark Mazower, “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” (Penguin, 2008)
02 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This ...
John Lukacs, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning” (Basic Books, 2008)
18 Jul 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But few understand him, at least as well as John Lukacs. That’...
Robert Gellately, “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (Knopf, 2007)
18 Apr 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Today we’re pleased to feature an interview with Robert Gellately of Florida State University. Professor Gellately is a distinguished and widely rea...