European Modern History

It is a cliché that tsarist Russia had two rival capitals: St Petersburg, Russia’s ”window to Europe” and Moscow, the tradition-bound metropolis of the Orthodox heartland. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by examining the tsarist regime’s efforts to turn Moscow into a European city. In the eighteenth century, Europeans scorned Moscow as an ”Asiatic” city, and the tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their political security and their effort to Westernize their country and gain respect for Russia abroad. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to remake Moscow on the model of St Petersburg by reconstructing its buildings and institutions, fostering a Westernized ”middling sort,” and constructing a new image of Moscow as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the city’s urban environment—buildings, institutions, streets, smells—transformed in the nine decades from Catherine’s accession to the death of Nicholas I? How did these changes affect the everyday lives of the inhabitants, and did a ”middling sort” in fact come into being? Did Moscow’s urban modernization resemble that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon in 1812? Lastly, how was Moscow’s modernization interpreted by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

This book is a discussion of how modern Poland was created by the application and manipulation of myths about its past, and the symbols that represented them. Its focus is on the era 1914–2008, and the central actor is the charismatic Józef Piłsudski. Piłsudski came to represent a disposition regarding the meaning of Polish history which eventually penetrated virtually the whole of modern Polish society. The work is constructed by the analysis of memoirs, documents, coins, stamps, films, maps, monuments, and many other features, making it a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional volume It is written with verve and passion; its chapters explain the meaning of Polish history from a new perspective.

The Third Reich met its end in the spring of 1945 in an unparalleled wave of suicides. Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler and later Göring all killed themselves. These deaths represent only the tip of an iceberg of a massive wave of suicides that also touched upon ordinary lives. As this suicide epidemic has no historical precedent or parallel, it can tell us much about the Third Reich's peculiar self-destructiveness and the depths of Nazi fanaticism. The book looks at the suicides of both Nazis and ordinary people in Germany between 1918 and 1945, from the end of World War I until the end of World War II, including the mass suicides of German Jews during the Holocaust. It shows how suicides among different population groups, including supporters, opponents, and victims of the regime, responded to the social, cultural, economic and, political context of the time. The book also analyses changes and continuities in individual and societal responses to suicide over time, especially with regard to the Weimar Republic and the post-1945 era.

During the momentous events that shook Italy in 1860 as the nation was unified, there was a murderous riot in the Sicilian town of Bronte, on the slopes of Mount Etna. Thereafter, Bronte became a symbol—of the limits of the liberal Risorgimento and of the persistence of foreign domination: descendants of Admiral Horatio Nelson had the largest landholding in the town and the British were said to have put pressure on Garibaldi to crush the uprising, which his lieutenant did with brutality. Lucy Riall has used the discovery of a new archive to transform brilliantly a local history into an ambitious exploration of much larger themes. Relaying an often brutal tale of poverty, injustice, and mismanagement, her powerful and engaging narrative also opens windows onto the true meaning of the British presence. Bronte’s story becomes one that is also about Britain’s policy towards Italy and Europe in the nineteenth century, and about colonial rule overseas in the age of Empire. It shows what happened when these two different aspects of British power bumped into each other in one Sicilian town.