Author Archives: stuartelden

Brandon Bloch, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy – Harvard University Press, May 2025 A revealing account of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after WWII, while firmly and consequentially refusing to account for … Continue reading →

Sander Verhaegh (ed.), American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration: Pragmatism, Logical Empiricism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory – De Gruyter, 2025 (open access) How did immigrant scholars such as Rudolf Carnap, Max Horkheimer, and Alfred Schütz influence the development of American philosophy? … Continue reading →

Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature – Princeton University Press, August 2025 Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, … Continue reading →

Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, Childhood, Pain and Emotion: A Modern British Medical History – Cambridge University Press, April 2025  Situated between the history of pain, history of childhood and history of emotions, this innovative work explores cultural understandings of children’s pain, from … Continue reading →

Ned Richardson-Little, The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State – Bloomsbury, August 2025 This book is a succinct yet comprehensive history of East Germany which provides a differentiated picture of the communist state. It … Continue reading →

James Q. Whitman, From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World – Cambridge University Press, November 2024 Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, … Continue reading →

Derek Sayer, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History – Princeton University Press, January 2025 Postcards from Absurdistan is a cultural history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal democracy, to 1989, when the … Continue reading →

Krista A. Milne, The Destruction of Medieval Manuscripts in England – Oxford University Press, April 2025 The Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-40) is widely held as the single most significant event in England’s history of the destruction and loss of … Continue reading →