February 9, 2022
|9780822985341|The Illusion of Strength|With the development of a strong parliamentary system, Orlow shows how close Prussia came to realizing its goal of lasting democracy for the entire Reich, and how far it fell when the Nazis took power.| Dietrich Orlow|| History / Europe / General History / General
February 7, 2022
|9780822959885|Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America| Throughout history, rivers have run a wide course through human temporal and spiritual experience. They have demarcated mythological worlds, framed the cradle of Western civilization, and served as physical and psychological boundaries among nations. Rivers have become a crux of transportation, industry, and commerce. They have been loved as nurturing providers, nationalist symbols, and the source of romantic lore but also loathed as sites of conflict and natural disaster. Rivers in History presents one of the first comparative histories of rivers on the continents of Europe and North America in the modern…
February 7, 2022
|9780822960812|The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900| Translated by Jeremy Moyle When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. Originally formulated by the eminent natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and expanded by the Prussian encyclopedist Cornelius de Pauw, this provocative thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and is far from extinct today. Translated in 1973, The Dispute of…
February 6, 2022
|9780822960805|From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo| Translated by Jeremy Moyle In Nature in the New World (translated 1985), Antonello Gerbi examines the fascinating reports of the first Europeans to see the Americas. These accounts provided the basis for the images of strange and new flora, fauna, and human creatures that filled European imaginations. Initial chapters are devoted to the writings of Columbus, Vespucci, Cortés, Verrazzano, and others. The second portion of the book concerns the Historia general y natural de las Indias of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, a work commissioned by Charles V of Spain in 1532 but…
February 6, 2022
|9780822961857|Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America| Urban Rivers examines urban interventions on rivers through politics, economics, sanitation systems, technology, and societies; how rivers affected urbanization spatially, in infrastructure, territorial disputes, and in floodplains, and via their changing ecologies. Providing case studies from Vienna to Manitoba, the chapters assemble geographers and historians in a comparative survey of how cities and rivers interacted from the seventeenth century to the present. Rising cities and industries were great agents of social and ecological changes, particularly during the nineteenth century, when mass populations and their effluents were introduced to river environments….