Suchergebnisse

"In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century." --

During the Second World War, all contact between German soldiers and Polish women - considered an 'inferior race' - was officially banned. Sexual encounters frequently took place, however. Some were consensual, while others were characterised by brutal violence, and women often sold their bodies as a means of survival. The army and SS constructed purpose-built brothels for their soldiers, but also banned and frequently punished loving relationships.0In Wartime Relations, Historian Maren Roeger gives a powerful account of these encounters and describes the actions of the army and the SS in regulating relations between soldiers and civilian women. Roeger provides new and important insights into everyday life during the occupation, Nazi racial policy, and the fates of the women involved

"Discussions about the morality of slavery are a central part of the history of early modern philosophy. This book explores the philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that occur in eighteenth-century debates about slavery, with a particular focus on the role that race plays in these debates. This exploration reveals how closely Blackness and slavery had come to be associated and how common it was to believe that Black people are natural slaves, or naturally destined for slavery. The book examines not just well-known authors like David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also less widely studied philosophers like Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Lemuel Haynes, and Olympe de Gouges. By presenting philosophically important aspects of debates about slavery in eighteenth-century North America and Europe, the book aims to be a valuable resource for scholars, instructors, and students who are curious about a topic that historians of philosophy have so far neglected"--

Being Single in Georgian England explores what eighteenth-century family life looked like, and how it was experienced, when viewed from the perspective of unmarried and childless family members, explored through the lens of three generations of the famous musical and abolitionist Sharp family.

At age thirty in 1919, Adolf Hitler had no accomplishments. He was a rootless loner, a corporal in a shattered army, without money or prospects. A little more than twenty years later, in autumn 1941, he directed his dynamic forces against the Soviet Union, and in December, the Germans were at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. At that moment, Hitler appeared - however briefly - to be the most powerful ruler on the planet. Given this dramatic turn of events, it is little wonder that since 1945 generations of historians keep trying to explain how it all happened. This richly illustrated history provides a readable and fresh approach to the complex history of the Third Reich, from the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933 to the final collapse in 1945. Using photographs, paintings, propaganda images, and a host of other such materials from a wide range of sources, including official documents, cinema, and the photography of contemporary amateurs, foreigners, and the Allied armies, it distills our ideas about the period and provides a balanced and accessible account of the whole era

Does nationalism lead to interstate war? This book challenges the existing presumption that nationalism causes war and systematically investigates how popular nationalism affects a country's decision to launch military aggression. In doing so, the book makes a provocative and novel claim that popular nationalism has both a conflict-inducing and a restraining effect and identifies the conditions under which popular nationalism triggers interstate violence. Specifically, the book asserts that popular nationalism leads to war only when leaders who confront popular nationalism are very confident about their chance of achieving complete victory in conflict or they are politically vulnerable. In the absence of these two conditions, popular nationalism has a restraining effect, pushing leaders toward seeking the status quo and avoiding the use of force. The book first demonstrates the restraining effect of popular nationalism through a survey experiment conducted in China and an in-depth case study on the territorial dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea. It then offers a comprehensive historical and contemporary analysis of when popular nationalism's restraining effect turns into a conflict-inducing one through case studies on the War of 1812 and the Falklands War. The book provides important insights into whether popular nationalism could put great powers like the United States and China on a collision course, as well as broad policy implications for preventing war driven by popular nationalism.

"Empires were never the agents of progress as their apologists claimed. Yet during the Progressive Era, various people across the Pacific turned to empires as a source of empowerment. While the United States and Japan strove to emerge as the world's great powers, numerous Asians and African Americans embraced Japan to challenge the long-standing human inequality based on the color line. Japan's allure, however, was hardly limited to nonwhite peoples. American policymakers perceived Japan as a "progressive" empire akin to their own, and the two powers cultivated an amicable relationship across the color line, even as they competed for influence in Asia and conflicted over Japanese immigration to the American West. The Allure Empire traces how American ideas about Asians were made and remade on the imperial stage, and how these ideas shaped US foreign and immigration policies. Based on research conducted in South Korea and the United States, it uncovers how Americans justified Japan's colonial rule in Korea by comparing it to the US rule in Cuba and the Philippines. It reveals that the United States refused to exclude Japanese immigrants the same way as it had excluded Chinese and Indian immigrants until American perceptions of Japan took a negative turn, in light of Japan's violent treatment of Koreans and the Chinese. But even after Japanese exclusion in 1924, the mutual respect for "progressive" empires sustained the inter-imperial relationship until World War II, when both sides erased the history of their collaborations to cast each other as incompatible enemies"--

This volume presents two closely related essays by Thomas Nagel: "Gut Feelings and Moral Knowledge," discusses the value of intuitions in understanding human rights and argues against subjectivist and reductionist accounts of morality of the kind offered by evolutionary psychology or based on brain scans. The second essay, "Moral Reality and Moral Progress," proposes an account of the historical development of moral truth, according to which it does not share the timelessness of scientific truth. This is because moral truth must be based on reasons that are accessible to the individuals to whom they apply, and such accessibility depends on historical developments. The result is that only some advances in moral knowledge are discoveries of what has been true all along.

Getting to grips with the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s. The 21st century has brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks. Their fallout has led central banks to create over USD25 trillion of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilised the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault lines in the United States. Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories - one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies - and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why as the green transition takes place the long-standing predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place.

Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating towards cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity-endeavors considered to be more 'real' and 'genuine.' Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities during the Cold War, Culture from the Slums details how punk became the site of historical change during this era: in the West, concerning national identity, commercialism, and politicization; while in the East, over repression, resistance, and collaboration. But on either side of the Iron Curtain, punks' struggles for individuality and independence forced their societies to come to terms with their political, social, and aesthetic challenges, confrontations which pluralized both states, a surprising similarity connecting democratic, capitalist West Germany with socialist, authoritarian East Germany. In this manner, Culture from the Slums suggests that the ideas, practices, and communities which youths called into being transformed both German societies along more diverse and ultimately democratic lines. Using a wealth of previously untapped archival documentation, this study reorients German and European history during this period by integrating alternative culture and music subculture into broader narratives of postwar inquiry and explains how punk rock shaped divided Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.