Category Archives: Uncategorized

Border Temporalities in and Beyond Europe – special issue of Borders in Globalization Review (open access)

Border Temporalities in and Beyond Europe – special issue of Borders in Globalization Review (open access) Guest editors Johanna Jaschik, Machteld Venken, and Birte Wassenberg bring time into border studies with this new collection, Border Temporalities in and Beyond Europe, featuring 12 research … Continue reading

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Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague

There are some good histories of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, which met in the years before the Second World War, and which included Russian scholars as well as ones from Czechoslovakia. Jindřich Toman’s The Magic of a Common Language is a particularly … Continue reading

Posted in Antoine Meillet, Emile Benveniste, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Roman Jakobson, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Ned Richardson-Little, The German Democratic Republic: The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State – Bloomsbury, August 2025

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

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James Q. Whitman, From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World – Cambridge University Press, November 2024

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

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Derek Sayer, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History – Princeton University Press, January 2025

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

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Krista A. Milne, The Destruction of Medieval Manuscripts in England – Oxford University Press, April 2025 (print and open access)

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

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Shane Bobrycki, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages – Princeton University Press, November 2024

Shane Bobrycki, The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages – Princeton University Press, November 2024 By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And … Continue reading

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Daniela R. P. Weiner, Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys – Cornell University Press, July 2024

Daniela R. P. Weiner, Teaching a Dark Chapter: History Books and the Holocaust in Italy and the Germanys – Cornell University Press, July 2024 Teaching a Dark Chapter explores how textbook narratives about the Fascist/Nazi past in Italy, East Germany, and … Continue reading

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Aaron Aquilina, The Ontology of Death: The Philosophy of the Death Penalty in Literature – Bloomsbury, November 2024

Aaron Aquilina, The Ontology of Death: The Philosophy of the Death Penalty in Literature – Bloomsbury, November 2024 Through examination of the death penalty in literature, Aaron Aquilina contests Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-towards-death’ and proposes a new understanding of the … Continue reading

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Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians – John Hunt/Zer0 – reissue, September 2022

Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians – John Hunt/Zer0 – reissue, September 2022 I shared news of this reissue before. There is now a New Books network discussion with Morteza Hajizadeh. Thanks to dmf for this link.

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