New Books in Western European Studies

Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are calling for a reengagement with the natural sciences. Taking their cues from recent breakthroughs in genetics and the neurosciences, advocates of “big history” are reassessing long-held assumptions about the very definition of history, its methods, and its evidentiary base. In Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2021), Elena Aronova maps out historians’ continuous engagement with the methods, tools, values, and scale of the natural sciences by examining several waves of their experimentation that surged highest at perceived times of trouble, from the crisis-ridden decades of the early twentieth century to the ruptures of the Cold War.The book explores the intertwined trajectories of six intellectuals and the larger programs they set in motion: Henri Berr (1863–1954), Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938), Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943), Julian Huxley (1887–1975), and John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971). Though they held different political views, spoke different languages, and pursued different goals, these thinkers are representative of a larger motley crew who joined the techniques, approaches, and values of science with the writing of history, and who created powerful institutions and networks to support their projects.In tracing these submerged stories, Aronova reveals encounters that profoundly shaped our knowledge of the past, reminding us that it is often the forgotten parts of history that are the most revealing.Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Siobhra Aiken teaches in the Department of Irish and Celtic Studies at Queens University Belfast. Her research interests include modernist Irish-language poetry; twentieth-century Irish-language literature; the Gaelic Revival in the United States, and 'trauma' and emigration during the Irish Revolution (1916–23).In this interview she discusses his new book Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War (Irish Academic Press, 2022), a study of trauma, memory and forgetting in memoirs and literature of the Irish Civil WarSpiritual Wounds challenges the widespread belief that the contentious events of the Irish Civil War (1922–23) were covered in a total blanket of silence. The book uncovers an archive of published testimonies by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, written in both English and Irish. Most of the testimonies discussed were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, and nearly all have been overlooked in historical study to date. Revolutionaries went to great lengths to testify to the ‘spiritual wounds’ of civil war: they adopted fictionalised disguises, located their writings in other places or periods of time, and found shelter behind pen names. This wealth of published testimony reveals that the silence of the Irish Civil War was not necessarily a result of revolutionaries’ inability to speak, but rather reflects the unwillingness of official memory makers to listen to the stories of civil war veterans.Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Paolo Squatriti asks: Why did weeds matter in the Carolingian empire? What was their special significance for writers in eighth- and ninth-century Europe and how was this connected with the growth of real weeds?In early medieval Europe, unwanted plants that persistently appeared among crops created extra work, reduced productivity, and challenged theologians who believed God had made all vegetation good. For the first time, in this book weeds emerge as protagonists in early medieval European history, driving human farming strategies and coloring people's imagination. Early medieval Europeans' effort to create agroecosystems that satisfied their needs and cosmologies that confirmed Christian accounts of vegetable creation both had to come to terms with unruly plants. Using diverse kinds of texts, fresh archaeobotanical data, and even mosaics, this interdisciplinary study reveals how early medieval Europeans interacted with their environments.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Beyond Exclusion: Intersections of Ethnicity, Sex, and Society Under English Law in Medieval Ireland (Brepols, 2022) offers a fresh look at the legal status of minorities in English Ireland. Through a detailed analysis of case studies gleaned from medieval court rolls, Stephen Hewer challenges the prevailing narrative of wholesale ethnic discrimination and presents a nuanced picture of intersectional identities, strategies of negotiation, and evolving tensions between legal principle and practice.The notion that all Gaelic peoples were immediately and ipso facto denied access to the English royal courts in Ireland, upon the advent of the English in 1167, has become so accepted in academic and popular histories of Ireland that it is no longer questioned. This book tackles this narrative of absolute ethnic discrimination in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English Ireland on the basis of a thorough re-examination of the Irish plea rolls. A forensic study of these records reveals a great deal of variation in how members of various ethnic groups and women who came before the royal courts in Ireland were treated. Specifically, it demonstrates the existence of a large, and hitherto scarcely noticed, population of Gaels with regular and unimpeded access to English law, identifiable as Gaelic either through explicit ethnic labelling in the records or implicitly through their naming practices.Dr. Margaret Smith is a historian of medieval Ireland and Research Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the IRIS Center at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions.Julia Walker's Berlin Contemporary: Architecture and Politics After 1990 (Bloomsbury, 2021) explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin's political and architectural “rebuilding”-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform.Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process.In Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance.Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Dr. Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Dr. Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration. Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

On this episode we have Michael Grenke (St. Johns University) who wrote the introduction to Lise Van Boxel's Warspeak: Nietzsche's Victory Over Nihilism (Political Animal Press, 2020).A comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche's thought, guided by the problem and task that Nietzsche himself identified as the heart of his own life' work: nihilism and the need to overcome it. Warspeak centers on a focused reading of Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morality, driven and ordered by the three major themes Nietzsche used to structure his attack on nihilism and to lay the foundation for his life-affirming counter-ideal: the moral-theological prejudice, the genealogical method, and utilitarianism. Van Boxel tracks the emergence of a new human type in Nietzsche's work, and explains how this represents a victory over nihilism and a more hopeful future for humanity. Provocatively, the book expresses a distinctly feminine conception of philosophy, as a necessary corrective to the excessively masculine form of earlier philosophy. Like Nietzsche's own writing, Warspeak defies traditional academic categories, dealing with poetry, literature, science, politics, and philosophy, in a style that is sometimes analytical and sometimes literary. Threaded through the book as a whole is a novel-like account of the evolution of the latest, most vital human life-form as Nietzsche understands it. Warspeak is the culmination of van Boxel's lifelong study of Nietzsche. A challenging book, by a singular thinker, that boldly confronts the central riddle of Nietzsche's thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

By the early eighteenth century, the economic primacy, cultural efflorescence, and geopolitical power of the Dutch Republic appeared to be waning. The end of this Golden Age was also an era of natural disasters. Between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch communities weathered numerous calamities, including river and coastal floods, cattle plagues, and an outbreak of strange mollusks that threatened the literal foundations of the Republic. Adam Sundberg’s new book, Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge UP, 2022), demonstrates that these disasters emerged out of longstanding changes in environment and society. They were also fundamental to the Dutch experience and understanding of eighteenth-century decline. Disasters provoked widespread suffering, but they also opened opportunities to retool management strategies, expand the scale of response, and to reconsider the ultimate meaning of catastrophe. This book reveals a dynamic and often resilient picture of a society coping with calamity at odds with historical assessments of eighteenth-century stagnation.Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The Atlantic has borne witness to major historic events that have drastically shaped humanity with each crossing of its path. In A Brief History of the Atlantic (Robinson, 2022), Jeremy Black takes the reader through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world.Black discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such as those bravest to attempt to cross the ocean before Columbus, the beginnings of slavery from 1400-1600, the struggle for control between empires in the 1600s, the way technology adapted with steamships to telegraph cables, the battle of the Falkland, and the Cold War.Black also touches on the Atlantic we know today, and the struggles it faces due to urgent global issues including climate change, pollution, and the trials of the economic rise in the Indo-Pacific world.If you have ever yearned to know more about this famed and vital ocean, this clear and concise history will be a key read as one of the first of its kind on its evolution to becoming an established world ocean.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

You think you know British Rail. But you don't know the whole story. Now, award-winning writer Christian Wolmar provides a new perspective on national loss in a time of privatisation in British Rail: A New History (Michael Joseph, 2022).From its creation after the Second World War, through its fifty-year lifetime, British Rail was an innovative powerhouse that transformed our transport system. Uniting disparate lines into a highly competent organisation - heralding 'The Age of the Train' - and, for a time, providing one of the fastest regular rail services in the world.Born into post-war austerity, traumatised, impoverished and exploited by a hostile press, the state-owned railway was dismissed as a dinosaur unable to evolve, and swept away by a government hellbent on selling it off.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies