Books

Between three and four thousand civilians, primarily Serbian and Jewish, were murdered in the Novi Sad massacre of 1942. Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes carried out the crime in the city and surrounding areas, in territory Hungary occupied after the German attack on Yugoslavia. The perpetrators believed their acts to be a ...

Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society. As the capital of the newly ...

From Citizens to Subjects challenges the common assertion in historiography that Enlightenment-era centralization and rationalization brought progress and prosperity to all European states, arguing instead that centralization failed to improve the socioeconomic position of urban residents in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth over a hundred-year period. Murphy examines the government of ...

No End in Sight offers a critical analysis of Polish cinema and literature during the transformative late Socialist period of the 1970s and 1980s. Anna Krakus details how conceptions of time, permanence, and endings shaped major Polish artistic works. She further demonstrates how film and literature played a major role ...

Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, ...

Since the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, Russia’s support to the European far right—and to a variety of populist leaders more globally—has become a cornerstone of the West’s perception of Moscow as a “spoiler” on the international scene. The fact that Russia’s most fervent supporters are now ...

Despite Russia’s religiously diverse population and the strong connection between the Russian state and the Orthodox Chuch, the problem of religious freedom has been a driving force in the country’s history. This volume gathers leading scholars to provide an extensive exploration of the evolution, experience, and contested meanings ...

Grace Kennan Warnecke’s memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found ...

Unintended Affinities examines the ways in which German and Polish historians of the nineteenth-century regarded the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The book parallels how historians approached the old Reich and the Commonwealth within the framework of their national history. Kożuchowski analyzes how German and Polish nationalistic ...

In Nature and the Iron Curtain, the authors contrast communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War. Its chapters draw from archives across Europe and the U.S. to present new perspectives on the origins and evolution of modern environmentalism on ...

Ivan the Terrible is infamous as a sadistic despot responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, particularly during the years of the oprichnina, his state-within-a-state. Ivan was the first ruler in Russian history to use mass terror as a political instrument. However, Ivan’s actions cannot be dismissed ...

Rising Subjects explores the change of the public sphere in Russian Poland during the 1905 Revolution. The 1905 Revolution was one of the few bottom-up political transformations and general democratizations in Polish history. It was a popular rebellion fostering political participation of the working class. The infringement of previously carefully guarded limits ...

Translated by John Markoff, Malgorzata Markoff The official end of World War II did not mean the end of the torments inflicted on civilians. This book brings us vivid personal accounts of ordinary people in Poland—Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and others—caught up in the most violent war in ...

John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope in over 500 years, and the first Slavic pontiff in history. Shortly after his election to the papacy in 1978, he launched a series of visits to his native Poland, then in the midst of dramatic social changes that heralded the end of Communism. ...

Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902–80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in ...