Bücher der Reihe New Studies in European History

Using archival sources, this lively study sheds new light on the daily lives and material culture of ordinary prostitutes and their clients in Rome after the Counter-Reformation. It explores how and why women became prostitutes, the relationships between prostitutes and clients, and the wealth which potentially could be accumulated.

When East Germany collapsed in 1989-1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain.

This fascinating study examines how ordinary German subjects incorporated the material culture of monarchy into their daily lives, through the consumption of relics and royal memorabilia. Providing an insight into attitudes to sovereign power, Giloi examines how people used these objects to articulate, validate or reject the state's political myths.

Honor in nineteenth-century Germany is usually thought of as an anachronistic aristocratic tradition confined to the duelling elites. This book shows instead how it pervaded all aspects of German life and how, during rapid modernization, it was adapted and incorporated into the modern state, industrial capitalism, and mass politics.

This is a regional study of psychology during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the emergence of professional psychiatry. It explores the treatment of mental illness in society and the use of spiritual remedies to deal with physical and mental ailments from melancholy to demonic possession.

An innovative study of the politicisation of 'ordinary people' in western Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century. With chapters devoted to reading, singing, public space, carnival, violence and religion, James Brophy argues that popular culture played a critical role in linking ordinary Rhinelanders to the public sphere.

This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the German Democratic Republic and how citizens engaged with it, exposing the reasons why individuals found it hard to identify with the GDR and explaining how an apparently stable society fell apart with such ease when the revolution came.

This 2004 book is about politicisation and political choice in the aftermath of the February Revolution of 1848. The focus is on responses to the counter-revolutionary policies pursued by the imperial regime of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte following his coup d'etat and on the emergence of democracy in France.

An examination of the obsession for new technology in Britain and Germany between 1890 and 1945. It explains how Germans and Britons nurtured a fascination for aviation, glamorous passenger liners and film as they lived through profound social transformations and two wars.

James Casey offers an innovative study of prestige, power and the family in a Mediterranean city during the early modern period. He focuses on the structure and values of the ruling class of the frontier city of Granada and explores the enduring importance of ties of kinship, friendship and neighbourhood.

This is the first book in English to study the history of the Estates General of Burgundy during the classic period of absolute monarchy. It sheds light on the government of Louis XIV, the history of Burgundy and the wider political history of eighteenth-century France.

This book examines the interface between the old and the new France in the period 1760-1820. It adopts an unusual 'comparative micro-historical' approach in order to illuminate the manner in which country dwellers cut themselves loose from the congeries of local societies that made up the Ancien Regime, and attached themselves to the wider polity of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic state. The apprehensions and ambitions of six groups of villagers located in different parts of the kingdom are explored in close-up across the span of a single adult lifetime. Contrasting experiences form a large part of the analysis, but the story is ultimately one of fusion around a set of values that no individual villager could possibly have anticipated, whether in 1750 or 1789. The book is at once an institutional, a social and a political history of life in the village in an epoch of momentous change.

Pioneering history of the ordinary Russians who continued to live in a pre-modern, non-Western culture in late Imperial Russia. Leonid Heretz offers an overview of traditional Russian understandings of the world, illuminating key themes ranging from peasant monarchism to apocalyptic responses to intrusions from the modern world.

After the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917, Russia was subject to an eight month experiment in democracy. In this study, Sarah Badcock studies its failure through an exploration of the experiences and motivations of ordinary people, men and women, urban and rural, military and civilian.

Napoleon's contribution to Germany's development was immense. Under his hegemony, the millennium-old Holy Roman Empire dissolved, paving the way for a new order. Nowhere was the transformation more profound than in the Rhineland. Based upon an extensive range of German and French archival sources, this book locates the Napoleonic episode in this region within a broader chronological framework, encompassing the Old Regime and Restoration. It analyses not only politics, but also culture, identity, religion, society, institutions and economics. It reassesses in turn the legacy bequeathed by the Old Regime, the struggle between Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the 1790s, Napoleon's attempts to integrate the German-speaking Rhineland into the French Empire, the transition to Prussian rule, and the subsequent struggles that ultimately helped determine whether Germany would follow its own Sonderweg or the path of its western neighbours.

This book examines the politics of the French Revolutionary tradition in the early nineteenth century. The author argues that political struggle was not confined to the elite, and that the Restoration Liberal Opposition developed a reform tradition which was far more effective than the revolutionary tradition of conspiracy and insurrection.

Focusing on the local wine industry, Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes and demonstrates how ordinary Burgundians were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, until the absolutist policies of Louis XIII curtailed their influence on local politics.

This book brings vividly to life the courtiers and servants of the imperial court in Vienna and the royal court at Paris-Versailles. Drawing on a wealth of material, masterfully set in a comparative context, the book makes a unique contribution to the field of court studies.

This 2006 book is a controversial reappraisal of the Italian occupation of the Mediterranean during the Second World War, which Davide Rodogno examines within the framework of fascist imperial ambitions. He explores Italy's relationship with Germany, the forced 'Italianisation' of the annexed territories, collaboration, and Italian policies towards refugees and Jews.

This book gives voice, in unprecedented depth and immediacy, to ordinary villagers and landlords (Junkers) in the Prussian-German countryside, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, making a major contribution to fundamental debates in German history over the origins of modern political authoritarianism.

This book examines the overlooked topic of the influence of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Russian exiles on Nazism. White emigres contributed politically, financially, militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This work refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon: it arose primarily from the cooperation between volkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful White emigres. From 1920-1923, Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-White emigre organization, Aufbau (Reconstruction). Aufbau allied with Nazis to overthrow the German government and Bolshevik rule through terrorism and military-paramilitary schemes. This organization's warnings of the monstrous 'Jewish Bolshevik' peril helped to inspire Hitler to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union and to initiate the mass murder of European Jews. This book uses extensive archival materials from Germany and Russia, including recently declassified documents, and will prove invaluable reading for anyone interested in the international roots of National Socialism.

This is the first comprehensive analysis of public and private welfare in France available in English or French, which offers a deeply-researched explanation of how France's welfare state came to be and why the French are so attached to it.

This is a most thoroughly researched book on Napoleon III's Second Empire. It makes a vital contribution to the quarter-century of French history following the 1848 revolution, which saw major developments in the 'modernization' of the French state and in its relationships with its citizens.

A narrative of the fifty years of political struggles at the Russian court, 1671-1725. This book shows how Peter the Great was not the all-powerful tsar working alone to reform Russia, but that he colluded with powerful and contentious aristocrats in order to achieve his goals.

Fatherlands explores the nature of identity in nineteenth-century Germany, and has crucial implications for our understanding of nationalism, German unification and the German state in the modern era. It approaches these questions from a new angle, that of the non-national territorial state, exploring the state-building process in non-Prussian Germany.

This book is a study of Catholic reform, popular Catholicism and the development of confessional identity in southwest Germany. Based on extensive archival study, it argues that Catholic confessional identity developed primarily from the identification of villagers and townspeople with the practices of Baroque Catholicism - particularly pilgrimages, processions, confraternities and the Mass. Thus the book is in part a critique of the confessionalization thesis which dominates scholarship in this field. The book is not however focused narrowly on the concerns of German historians. An analysis of popular religious practice and of the relationship between parishioners and the clergy in villages and small towns allows for a broader understanding of popular Catholicism, especially in the period after 1650. Local Baroque Catholicism was ultimately a successful convergence of popular and elite, lay and clerical elements, which led to an increasingly elaborate religious style.

This 2001 book examines the surprisingly active role of royal families, notably those of Britain, Prussia-Germany and Russia, in European diplomacy before the First World War. It focuses on King Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II, but the book also contains case studies that probe the extent of royal diplomatic influence in a wider context.

Focusing on Germany's Chief of Staff 1906-1914, this book offers a fresh analysis of the origins of the First World War. It gives a fundamental re-evaluation of the circumstances leading to the outbreak of war, showing Moltke for the first time to have been a persistent advocate of war.

What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if Adolf Hitler had escaped from Nazi Germany in 1945 and gone into hiding? What if Hitler had been assassinated or had never been born? Gavriel Rosenfeld's 2005 study explores why those questions about Nazism have proliferated within Western popular culture.

A compelling account of northwest Russia under Nazi occupation, this book highlights the fragility of Soviet identity and loyalty during the 'Great Patriotic War'. Having lived through collectivization and Stalinist terror, many Soviet Russians invested hope and effort in the German promise of a better life without the Bolsheviks.