Berfrois

Turmoil in 19th Century Spain

Turmoil in 19th Century Spain

The analysis begins judiciously with the war of 1793-95 and its aftermath...

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Genia Blum: Slaves of Dance

Genia Blum: Slaves of Dance

After the war, Babusia Genia fled Ukraine with her daughters...

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The Truth of the Future

The Truth of the Future

Since Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was first published, posthumously, in 1980, it has earned praise as one of the most significant books of our time. Leon Aron called it “the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.”

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Colonial Responses to the Nazi Regime

Colonial Responses to the Nazi Regime

it was an often deplored “fact” among German enthusiasts of colonialism that too few of their compatriots were thoroughly interested in the colonies.

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Karla Huebner: Prague, Crossroads of Europe

Karla Huebner: Prague, Crossroads of Europe

As this book is a travel guide, we may reasonably ask whether it is useful beyond that specific purpose. What does it offer scholars of urban history, or for that matter scholars in general who may or may not be planning trips to Prague?

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The Myth of Blubber Town, an Arctic Metropolis

The Myth of Blubber Town, an Arctic Metropolis

Perched on a desolate island in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — 1,500 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle — sits the settlement of Smeerenburg.

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Ernesto Bassi on the Occupation of Havana

Ernesto Bassi on the Occupation of Havana

The Siege of Havana, 1762, Dominic Serres the Elder, 1767 by Ernesto Bassi The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, by Elena Andrea Schneider,  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 360 pp. On a Sunday morning in early June 1762, Cuba’s captain general,...

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Abu Bakr II’s 200 Ships

Abu Bakr II’s 200 Ships

Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms

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Modernity as a Heuristic to Study the Great Divergence

Modernity as a Heuristic to Study the Great Divergence

Kaveh Yazdani, in India, Modernity and the Great Divergence, provides the readers with a case study of Mysore and Gujarat to explain why precolonial India could not experience an economic take-off similar to the one that happened in western Europe.

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How Jung’s collective unconscious inspired Alcoholics Anonymous

How Jung’s collective unconscious inspired Alcoholics Anonymous

According to correspondence between Rowland Hazard and his cousin, he had daily sessions with Jung in Zürich over several months, and stopped drinking...

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Marjorie Harrington on Medieval Soul-Health

Marjorie Harrington on Medieval Soul-Health

The idea of Christus medicus, Christ the Physician, is a commonplace in late medieval religious texts. In Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England, Daniel McCann...

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Chairman of the Board

Chairman of the Board

Ten thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes...

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Chrissy Lau: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental”

Chrissy Lau: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental”

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, San Francisco had the popular reputation as a sexually liberal wonderland and an international city. At the same time, during the era of increasing nativism and immigration exclusion...

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Why didn’t they see Hitler?

Why didn’t they see Hitler?

A few weeks ago, a six-thousand-word article in Esquire on the unexceptional life of a white teen-ager in peri-urban Wisconsin generated a furious online backlash.

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How translation obscured the music and wordplay of the Bible

How translation obscured the music and wordplay of the Bible

An essential fact about the Hebrew Bible is that most of its narrative prose as well as its poetry manifests a high order of sophisticated literary fashioning.

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The Lost History of Prosecuting War Crimes by Amy Carney

The Lost History of Prosecuting War Crimes by Amy Carney

Human Rights after Hitler describes the rise and fall of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC). But author Dan Plesch did not write this book...

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Julian of Norwich and the Process of Transformation

Julian of Norwich and the Process of Transformation

Julian of Norwich was born in 1342. No stranger to violence and suffering, she grew up in a world ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and torn apart...

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Liberalism and Slavery

Liberalism and Slavery

Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves is a teaser, an invitation to think through the historiography on Atlantic slavery as a liberal metanarrative...

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