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During the period since the collapse of the USSR, a number of different history books have appeared in Russia. The book under review was published in Moscow in 2007 and appears to be the first textbook officially endorsed by the authorities. It has stirred up considerable controversy in Russia where liberals have portrayed it as an uncritical eulogy of President Putin and an attempt to gloss over Stalin's record. However, despite its sometimes polemical tone, the book is more nuanced. It is not pro-Soviet, but is decidedly anti-western; and claims to provide a new version of Cold War history and of Soviet collapse. It deserves study even by those who reject its arguments, because it throws further light on the emergence of nationalism as a political force in Russia. Adapted from the source document.

This essay presents a series of reflections on the relevance of Dutch history. Taking different angles of approach, it examines in particular the historical image and self-image of the Dutch and the nation's cultural identity; the role played by the heritage issue in the rise of the new political nationalism; the fascination of foreign historians for Dutch history and their influence on Dutch historiography itself; the role of language in history-writing and the question of whether 'relevance' is a meaningful category at all for historians. To conclude, four great themes of Dutch history are identified as of supranational relevance: water management; economy and society, in particular capitalism and colonialism; culture and intellectual life, tolerance and secularity, in particular – but not only – in the early modern era; and the national ambition to show the world an exemplary route to modernity.

"A History of Western Political Thought traces the development and consolidation of a tradition of Western political thought from ancient Greece through to the development of the modern state, the American Enlightenment, the rise of liberalism and the very different reactions it engendered. McClelland's definition of politics encompasses both power wielded from above and power threatened from below. The sustained pursuit of this theme leads him to present an original and often controversial view of the theorists of the received canon and to add some writers to that canon whom he feels have been unjustly neglected."--Publisher's website

As Nathan Huggins once stated, altering American history to account fully for the nation's black voices would change the tone and meaning--the frame and the substance--of the entire story. Rather than a sort of Pilgrim's Progress tale of bold ascent and triumph, American history with the black parts told in full would be transmuted into an existential tragedy, closer, Huggins said, to Sartre's No Exit than to the vision of life in Bunyan. The relation between memory and history has received increasing attention both from historians and from literary critics. In this volume, a group of leading

Introduction : the surprising shared history of Chinese and Americans -- Anson Burlingame : China's first messenger to the world -- The Chinese education mission : 120 Chinese boys in nineteenth-century America -- Ge Kunhua : America's first Chinese language teacher -- Frank Goodnow : an American adviser in China -- John Dewey : a Yankee Confucius and cultural ambassador -- Shared diplomatic journey through sports

1. From pre-history to the Crusades -- 2. From the Crusades to the Renaissance -- 3. The Protestant work ethic and the rise of capitalism as Gods work -- 4. The Enlightenment: From Leonardo to Galileo -- 5. The rise of the East India Trading Companies -- 6. The "glorious revolution" and the BoE -- 7. Laissez-Faire and John Law's premature invention of "futures" -- 8. Classical economics as moral philosophy -- 9. Bentham and utilitarianism -- 10. The rise of physics: from Newton to Einstein -- 11. Energetics -- 12. Evolutionary theory and genetics -- 13. Entropy, exergy, information and complexity -- 14. The "marginal revolution" in Economics -- 15. Socialism and the Welfare State -- 16. Keynes v. Hayek and the monetarists -- 17. The future of economics and the economics of the future.

Verlagsinfo: Wie überlebt man das Überleben? Zeitzeugeninterviews des Holocaust in ihrem historischen, institutionellen und medialen Kontext. Mehr als 70 Jahre nach Kriegsende wird eindringlicher denn je das Ende der Zeitzeugenschaft beschworen. Die Erinnerung an Krieg und Holocaust, so die Sorge, werde ohne die direkten Augenzeugen verblassen, sich in den endlosen Lauf der "kalten Geschichte" einreihen. Jan Taubitz zeigt, wie bereits vor mehr als 35 Jahren etliche Oral History Archive dieser Entwicklung mit der systematischen Aufnahme, Konservierung und Verbreitung zehntausender audio-visueller Interviews mit Überlebenden des Holocaust entgegentraten. Die Initiative ging von US-amerikanischen Museen, Archiven, Bibliotheken, Stiftungen und Graswurzelbewegungen aus. Somit drängen sich folgende Fragen auf: In welchem Verhältnis stehen die Zeugnisse zur amerikanischen Kultur sowie zu der von ihr hervorgebrachten Oral History? Wer waren die Hauptakteure? Welche Beziehungen lassen sich zu anderen, vor allem populären Darstellungen des Holocaust nachweisen? Wie wirkt sich der digitale Wandel auf die Zeugnisse aus? Und schliesslich: Können die Holocaust Oral Histories das Ende der Zeitzeugenschaft tatsächlich überwinden?

It is graceless, perhaps, to begin by quarrelling with the program committee in my initial remarks, but I must plead that the assignment itself—to propose an agenda for early modern economic history—provides a mandate for such seemingly uncouth behavior. The controversial issue, of course, is the periodization of economic history into the traditional Middle Ages (pre-1500) and the Early Modern Period (post-1500). The division has never been sharp in political or intellectual history, but it is even less meaningful in economic history—there is no single, dramatic, economic event, no ninety-five theses, to establish a break—and the intellectual consequences of the division at 1500 have often been pernicious. When specialists of the early modern period assert nascent capitalism, medievalists point to thirteenth century Italy. When early modernists lay their claims to discovery and colonization, medievalists point first to the early eastern Mediterranean colonies of the Italian city-states and then to the Atlantic explorations of Spain and Portugal, begun in the fourteenth century. If rapid early modern economic growth is the issue, the medievalist will again cry foul and recall that growth was, at least in part, merely the inevitable recovery from the economic collapse of the later middle ages.

Virtually every account of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire identifies 'Europe' with Christian civilisation, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the universalist claims of the Byzantine emperors, the popes and the western Roman emperors. Yet it is also the case that Islam possessed a European presence from the eighth century onwards, first of all in Spain and the Mediterranean islands, and later, from the mid-fourteenth century, in the Balkans, where the Turks were able rapidly to establish an empire which directly threatened Hungary and Austria. The lands ruled by Islam on the European land mass have tended to be treated by historians as European only in geographical identity, but in human terms part of a victorious and alien 'oriental' civilisation, of which they were provincial dependencies, and from which medieval Spanish Christians or modern Greeks and Slavs had to liberate themselves. Yet this view is fallacious for several reasons. In the first place, there is a valid question about our use of the term 'civilisation', which Fred Halliday has expressed as follows:'Civilisations' are like nations, traditions, communities – terms that claim a reality and authority which is itself open to question, and appeal to a tradition that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a contemporary creation.