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In 1875, the Liebig Extract of Meat Company began to distribute a series of pictures printed on small (11 x 7 cm), colorful, collectible cardboard cards along with its main product, Fleischextrakt. While not the first to adopt this advertising technique, Liebig quickly became the best-known purveyor of Sammelbilder. ...
The focus of this work, the debate about a body of law dealing with aristocratic issues, is not easy to summarize. This problem stems in part from a topic that historians who do not work on law might be forgiven for considering nonexistent; in part, it has to do with the indirect way in which Dorothee Gottwald engages with current trends in the historiography of nineteenth-century Germany. ...
Since the turn of the millennium, historical research has become increasingly interested in knowledge-based societies and their cultures, not least medieval ones. Whereas legal historical medieval studies have joined the interdisciplinary discussion about the notion of order as well as that of law, the notion of knowledge, and especially that of legal knowledge, has not been in the focus of interest. This observation serves as the starting point for Stephan Dusil’s habilitation thesis, which he submitted in 2016 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich and which is now available as a monograph. ...
Many historians of Britain (and indeed, many Britons) celebrate that nation's "splendid isolation" from what they often deem "the continent," a.k.a. Europe. Scholars ranging from J. D. B. Clark to Linda Colley frame the formation of the United Kingdom as a "modern" state and a "modern" nation over the course of the eighteenth century as a process either unique to the British Isles or one that occurred as a (more often than not, positive) reaction to political and religious developments occurring across the English Channel. Few of these historians acknowledge that from 1715 until 1837, the British monarch also was the elector (after 1806, king) of Hanover, and that for most of this period the interests of that electorate/kingdom played a significant role in British politics and foreign policy, just as Ireland and Scotland had while they were in personal union with England. Those who note this union refer to these rulers as "The Hanoverians" (as a bevy of titles of works on eighteenth-century Britain attest to), but by and large, they minimize any influence that the actual or ancestral homeland of these rulers had in Great Britain besides the bequeathing of their dynastic name or, more negatively, the involvement of a reluctant "Blue Water" power in "European" wars of little significance to her. ...
Mike Rapport is one of the few scholars who write European history not as the history of a few select countries, but of the entire continent. Rapport is at home in the history of the Balkans as well as France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia, and well versed in the historiography published in English, French, and Italian. Rapport's well-rounded viewpoint is one excellent argument for anyone suffering from "1848 fatigue" after the sesquicentennial celebrations and their aftermath in conference volumes and historiographical reviews to put aside any skepticism regarding the possibility of anyone presenting a novel perspective; the book itself is another. In it, Rapport offers a narrative history of the events of 1848 in those European countries and regions affected directly by the revolution--France, Italy, the German states, Denmark, and Rumania--with some remarks on areas where the impact was more indirect (Britain, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Scandinavia). This book is less obviously an academic textbook than Jonathan Sperber's excellent survey of the revolutions of 1848, and less encyclopedic than the survey of national events and overarching themes edited by Dieter Dowe and others for the 1998 anniversary. ...
It is a rare and wonderful thing when a book of 383 pages leaves a reader wanting to read more, much more in fact. That is certainly the case with this intriguing collection of thirteen assorted essays on the Rhine economy from 1815 to the present, organized in six broad topical sections: origins, enterprises, sectors and clusters, infrastructures, transport, and environment. ...
The volume under review is the result of a conference on historical graffiti held at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in 2017. The aim of this book is to analyse — for the first time — graffiti from the ancient, medieval and modern periods in their historical and geographical contexts from an interdisciplinary point of view. Following this comparative approach the authors show the tremendous potential of this nascent area of research by investigating epigraphic material that has been neglected and underestimated by scholars for a long time. ...
In the last thirty years, the study of the Late Roman period has intensified and has spawned a whole new branch of study commonly known now as Late Antiquity. Within this field there are now research journals dedicated exclusively to the theme, regular congresses now convene on the same and scholarly articles and books are produced at a rate annually that makes it a herculean task to keep up with it all. Within such a historiographical framework is the Germanic invasion and settlement in Western Europe by a wide variety of tribes. Discussions on the nature and impact continue without abatement, as an example the recent works by Heather, Ward-Perkins, Goffart and others demonstrate that considerable divergence of interpretation still abound and will so for a long time. ...
In a year of many anniversaries – the death of Charlemagne 814, Council of Constance 1414, Congress of Vienna 1814, the outbreak of World War 1914 – it was appropriate to remember Bouvines 1214 for, as Pierre Monnet and Claudia Zey note in their Introduction (p. 9–15), it marked an important event in Franco-German relations with which all these events are in one way or another bound up. These two authors attach much importance to Georges Duby and his study of the battle, making it clear that the book is not about a single event, but concerned to contextualize and set it in the longue durée, hence the timespan of the title. ...
In Johannes Fried’s The Middle Ages, the author makes his case for an alternative interpretation of the medieval period as much more sophisticated than commonly thought, writes Ignas Kalpokas. The book intricately traces how ideas and systems of thought that we now consider quintessentially modern European ways of life, thinking and culture stemmed from this time period.
Over the last few years the boom in Rathenau-studies has continued. The latest addition to the list is Lothar Gall’s biography, which was published last year. Reading Gall’s biography makes it understandable why Rathenau’s life has remained such a popular subject. As a multi-facetted polyglot and business man, as an active and critical commentator of political events and contemporary trends and as an early victim of violent anti-Semitism, he remains a focus for study and research. ...
Published in good time for the 2014 "Karlsjahr", marking 1200 years since the emperor’s death, Johannes Fried’s latest book is intended to make specialist scholarship on Charlemagne accessible to a broad audience. Judging by the impressive sales figures, it has admirably fulfilled that purpose. That is not however to say that it is an anodyne synthesis of current research. The picture of the Frankish ruler it provides is very much the author’s own, as he himself emphasises, so there is little danger that it might be lost to sight amongst the many other biographies currently available. ...
Johannes Fried saves the programmatic aim of his book for the last chapter, but I’ll begin with it: unlike their counterparts in China or India or really any other center of historical civilizations, Europe has a particular disdain neither for its oldest period nor for the most recent but for the middle age (507). Some, and Fried chooses his countryman Immanuel Kant as their chief, regard the middle ages as an age lacking in the beauty of the ancient world and without the dedication to reason that his modern counterparts share. He holds Gothic architecture in particular contempt (506). Just as bad, Fried notes, are those who would romanticize the middle ages, ignoring the truly radical thought of characters like Meister Eckhart and William of Ockham, whose philosophical explorations set the stage for the most radical thought of what Kant would regard as his own era’s Enlightenment (508). In his masterful book titled simply The Middle Ages, Fried begins with Boethius and wends his way to Machiavelli in a campaign against such dismissals and such flattening accounts, telling a tale of political thought and philosophical exploration and most importantly of complexity at every step, a journey through Western Europe’s middle millennium that encourages the reader to think of the period as a truly fruitful period of intellectual, political, and social transformation. ...
In Charlemagne, Johannes Fried offers a new account of the life of the Frankish king and emperor, one of the most influential figures in European history. Although the limited surviving resources from the period make the book more of an in-depth account of the socio-political context of Charlemagne’s reign rather than a strict biography, Sara Perley welcomes this as a well-researched and engaging read that will foster curiosity about both Charlemagne and this lesser known period of history.
Wilhelmine Germany enjoyed something of an economic miracle that enabled men from modest backgrounds to become wealthy and influential. Among these was Carl Duisberg, who rose as the son of a modest ribbon weaver in Barmen to head the Bayer chemical works and later the massive German chemical trust I. G. Farben. Like others of his generation, Duisberg was the beneficiary of an excellent scientific education and the opportunities opened up by a rapidly expanding economy. In this massive and definitive biography of the man, Werner Plumpe explores Duisberg’s life as an industrial entrepreneur to uncover the role of the individual manager in the creative-destructive dynamics of capitalism, drawing on his own extensive knowledge of German entrepreneurship and industrial relations in the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras. ...
As Bernhard Jussen correctly stresses in his introduction to this essay collection, we do not need to rediscover kingship. Kings and queens have always been favorite subjects for historians--at least, one might add, as far as medieval and early modern history are concerned. But even for the premodern period, kingship has rarely been studied in long-term perspective. This lacuna is all the more striking as kingship, existent in one form or another since ancient times, seems ideally suited to such a study. A history of kingship--prescinding from specific rulers--would bring to light the very characteristics of this form of rule. Moreover, as kingship was a highly visible and politically relevant phenomenon, and thus comparatively well represented in the sources, such an approach would also allow insights into general social, political, and cultural developments. Jussen's essay collection, in filling the gap, strives for both goals. It does so in a form that, at least in the German context, is innovative. The book combines the characteristics of a single-author volume and essay collection in the sense that each chapter follows clear rules and--with some exceptions--the same structure, though written by different authors. In addition, the strict chronological order, with each of the twenty-six chapters focusing on one particular date and source, and the respective headlines in the form of general questions (for example, "How to Depose a King"), point beyond the scope of the chapter and at the same time make the process of historical analysis visible to the reader. ...
Andreas Fahrmeir’s history of the first half of the "long nineteenth century" begins with a disdainful Arthur Young travelling through France at the beginning of 1790 and ends with London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. The contrasting fortunes of France and Great Britain exemplify the contrasting concepts of the title. While the former experienced at least eleven contested regime changes – 1789, 1792, 1793, 1794, 1799, 1814, 1815 (twice), 1830, 1848 and 1850 – the British political system endured, albeit modified by reforms. Moreover, revolutionary-Napoleonic France was responsible for numerous revolutions from above elsewhere, uprooting old regimes and creating satellite states right across the continent, from the Batavian Republic to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Old Europe was not restored in 1815. With the Holy Roman Empire gone for good, the Low Countries combined in a single kingdom, Poland expunged from the map once again and the Habsburg Empire much more of an Italian and Balkan power than in the past, quite a new order had emerged. The shallow roots of the new creations ensured their future fragility. ...
The 900th anniversary of the death of Emperor Henry IV (7 August 2006) occasioned several special colloquia (in Cologne, Speyer, Goslar) and publications in celebration of the so-called "Year of the Salians" . While several scholarly publications and exhibits also appeared with specific focus on Henry IV himself, the present volume contains the papers given at a colloquium held at the University of Cologne (26–30 September 2006), which accordingly focused on the Salian dynasty’s history in the lower Rhine region. Prof. Dr. Tilman Struve (emeritus professor at the University of Cologne), who has spent much of his career studying the Salian house during the Investiture Struggle, lends his considerable expertise to framing this collection of disparate essays. ...
This study explores the development of the concept of administratio between the early Merovingian period and the late ninth century. The author’s thesis is that administration lost its original connotation of authority delegated by and exercised on behalf of the state, and that this signals the loss of an abstract awareness of the commonwealth in the early medieval period. In the fifth century the idea of administratio as public powers derived from a higher authority was still in place, but soon thereafter this conception vanished (p. 2–3). Yet when in 814 Louis the Pious became emperor, the original meaning of administratio seemed to get a revival – or, should one say, a new lease of life? Hardly, for only in Italy and Aquitaine was there any awareness left of public service as an abstract concept (p. 7–37). North of the Alps, those in charge did not understand such abstract concepts referring to "Staatlichkeit", as is shown by the fact that the authority of the Carolingian mayors of the palace was never called administratio, even though, in the original meaning of the word, the mayoral office was a clear case of delegated power (p. 16–18). ...
What happened to Jews in areas annexed to Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1941? In what ways was their persecution similar or different from that of Jews in the old Reich? What do we learn about the Nazi regime more generally by examining anti-Jewish policies in the annexed areas? This elegant volume explains how the unique demographic, economic, and social situation in each area annexed to the Third Reich played out in antisemitic policies. For some areas, such as Memel, Eupen-Malmedy, and Alsace, it offers the first overview of the persecution of Jews in a particular area. In other locations, such as Austria and East Upper Silesia, the volume presents a stellar overview of areas of the Final Solution that scholars have already well documented. But as the editors' introduction underscores, the real strength of the volume is that it examines the cases together. This, in turn, reinforces insights into some of the fundamental dynamics of the Final Solution, including the role of local initiative and the transfer of Nazi persecution practices from one area to another.