Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order. The Making of Dissidents demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding.

Iconoclasm, the destruction of images, is part of our history – from the destroying of religious images in early Christianity to today’s toppling of statues of Confederate generals and slave traders. Images, buildings and objects that violate religious or ideological beliefs must be wrecked. Those who perform such purges – iconoclasts – are convinced they are carrying out an act of purification. The past has been turned upside down in a desire to start over from the very beginning.The different contributions in the anthology Iconoclasm: Rejecting the Past make the consequences crystal-clear. Not just invaluable cultural treasures but also human lives are lost when fanaticism has free rein. We saw this when the Islamic State destroyed museum artefacts that were thousands of years old, when Mao’s Red Guards burned books and persecuted people who did not share their beliefs during China’s Cultural Revolution, or when the Russian Bolsheviks dynamited churches and desecrated icons.There are countless examples of the damage these destructive forces have wrought over the centuries. The battle cry of iconoclasm, which is so strong today, demonstrates its continued appeal. Iconoclasm: Rejecting the Past is a warning bell, an alarm, alerting readers to the threat against the tolerance and openness of democratic society.

At the heart of the present work is the matter of the date and path which lead to the ultimate decision to destroy European Jews (to paraphrase the title of the masterpiece written by Raul Hilberg, the first great historian on the Shoah). The author intends to introduce the topic in the clearest possible way with regards to language and arguments and to deal with the topic from the perspective of an intellectual historian, not that of a contemporary historian (which he is not). He presents it as an exemplary case for the comparison of ideas on contemporary history, society, and politics. Starting with an examination into the Nazi as an individual, he continues with an analysis and various portraits of intellectuals turned exterminators. A key item is the year 1941 as the turning point toward the Shoah. The final chapter is dedicated to the comparison between Intention and Function in the history of the Shoah.

In no country were contests over racism in sport more bitterly fought, more protracted or important than in Australia. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in 1960, sport became a fault-line in international campaigns against racism. Struggles over racism penetrated every aspect of sporting interaction between Australia and South Africa. Playing With Apartheid explores the role of Australian sport in the long campaign to end white minority rule in South Africa. International controversy over apartheid-sport also exposed racism in the very fabric of sport in Australia.

In the late eighteenth century, enlightened politicians and upper-class women in Spain debated the right of women to join one of the country’s most prominent scientific institutions: the Madrid Economic Society of Friends of the Country. Societies such as these, as Elena Serrano describes in her book, were founded on the idea that laypeople could contribute to the advancement of their country by providing “useful knowledge,” and their fellows often referred to themselves as improvers, or friends of the country. After intense debates, the duchess of Benavente, along with nine distinguished ladies, claimed, won, and exercised the right of women to participate in shaping the future of their nation by inaugurating the Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito, or the Committee of Ladies of Honor and Merit. Ten years later, the Junta established a network of over sixty correspondents extending from Tenerife to Asturias and Austria to Cuba.With this book, Serrano tells the unknown story of how the duchess and her peers - who succeeded in creating the only known female branch among some five hundred patriotic societies in the eighteenth century - shaped Spanish scientific culture. Her study reveals how the Junta, by stressing the value of their feminine nature in their efforts to reform education, rural economy, and the poor, produced and circulated useful knowledge and ultimately crystallized the European improvement movement in Spain within an otherwise all-male context.

In 1950, at the age of twenty-seven, Henry Kissinger wrote The Meaning of History as his senior thesis at Harvard university. Now, more than 70 years later, it’s published for the first time. The thesis explores the ideas of three important thinkers in Western philosophical and historical thought, in a way that also reflects Kissinger’s own transition from the Continental world to the Atlantic: Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), a German historian and philosopher; Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), a British historian and philosopher and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a Prussian of the European Enlightenment era and one of the most important philosophers of this time. The study wrestles with some of the first-order dilemmas of Western political, philosophical, and moral thought. Its scope ranges from the Enlightenment through to the midpoint of the twentieth century – an era scourged by two world wars and the advent of the nuclear age. It also provides great insight into the conceptual perspective of its author, who was to become the most influential American statesman of the post-war period.

It has been claimed that around 14,500 wars have been fought since 3,500 BC. Humanity has only experienced 300 years of peace on Earth. During the twentieth century more people in total, were killed in wars, than during any previous century. Relatively, though we kill each other less often now. Are we gradually becoming more peaceful? Regardless of the number of people killed, and the technology used to do it, we can rest assured that wars will be continued to be fought. Can the causes of war be found in society or in biology, in a competition for economic or sexual resources, in historical circumstances – or in a universal violent instinct? The essays in this anthology originate from the internationally renowned Engelsberg Seminar of 2015, and are written by international historians, journalists, thinkers, researchers, and authors. From the conflicts of antiquity to the dynamics of modern terrorism, this book is about war as a creator and destroyer of states and civilizations.

How many lives can one man save? Never enough, Horton realized. As his ship backed away from Smyrna’s wharf, he could better see the helpless, teeming crowd on the waterfront trapped between the sea and a raging inferno. He was not consoled by rescuing his shipload of refugees, nor by the many other Christian, Jewish, and Muslim lives he had saved during his service as American consul. His focus was on the people before him threatened with fire, rape, and massacre. Their persecution, he later said, made him ashamed he “belonged to the human race.” Helping them would not be easy, however. His superiors were blocking humanitarian aid and covering up atrocities with fake news and disinformation to win Turkish approval for American access to oil. When Horton decried their duplicity and hard-heartedness, they conspired to destroy his reputation. Undaunted, Horton pursued his cause until it went to the President and then Congress for decisions that would set the course for America’s emergence as a world power. At stake was the outcome of WWI, the stability and liberality of the Middle East, and the likelihood of more genocide.

Cultural differences are often the trigger for conflict – whether politically motivated or arising from dissonant understandings of national culture. But what we regard as distinctive today in our cultural heritage or day-to-day cultural experience is deeply rooted in the rich diversity of the national currents of the nineteenth century. Culture and Conflict: Nation-Building in Denmark and Scandinavia, 1800–1930 explores the many strands of Danish and Scandinavian culture that helped to shape these cultural identities. The sixteen contributions in this volume analyse how competing national agendas influenced the development of political life as well as literature, the visual arts, and music. A central theme is the cultural conflicts that formed an essential part of nineteenth-century nation-building. Culturally as well as politically, boundaries were drawn up, ideologies were formulated and discussed, and determined attempts were made to suppress divergent cultural voices in the drive to forge strong national or Scandinavian narratives. The results of these conflicts were the enduring cultural struggles that form the subject of this volume. The contributions at hand, by scholars from Denmark, Britain, Norway, the United States, and Germany, bring a broad and interdisciplinary perspective to bear on these distinctively Nordic themes. Aimed both at students and at established scholars, the chapters discuss the many facets of nationalism, its cultures, and its countercultures, as well as revisiting the historiography of the 1800–1930 period with a more pluralistic approach.

In 1493, King Hans of Denmark and Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow concluded one of the earliest treaties of alliance between a Catholic European and an Orthodox Muscovite ruler. The alliance proved viable enough to generate two further treaties and an astounding fifty-plus diplomatic missions between Copenhagen and Moscow over the next thirty years. Yet little of scholarly value has been written about this unique late-medieval relationship across a divisive religious border. The book is intended to provide a solid foundation for a comprehensive study of the alliance. The author first goes over the peculiar customs and diplomatics of treating with medieval Russia, then proceeds to detail the diplomatic processes leading to each of the three Danish-Muscovite treaties. Further the surviving Danish and Muscovite treaty texts are published in a new critical edition with commentary and translations into English. And finally, the author reconstructs the missing originals of the treaties for a complete assembly of texts underlying the alliance.

This in-depth study offers a new examination of a region that is often overlooked in political histories of the Bluegrass State. George G. Humphreys traces the arc of politics in western Kentucky from avid support of the Democratic Party to its present-day Republican identity. He demonstrates that, despite its relative geographic isolation, the counties west of the eastern boundary of Breckinridge County down to the Tennessee state line played significant roles in state and national politics during the New Deal and postwar eras.Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Humphreys explores the area's political transformation from a solid Democratic voting block to a conservative stronghold by examining how developments such as advances in agriculture, the diversification of the economy, and the Civil Rights Movement affected the region. Addressing notable deficiencies in the existing literature, this impressively researched study will leave readers with a deeper understanding of post-1945 Kentucky politics.

Unanimously banned and condemned, torture has been used in many countries throughout the 20th century. Ruxandra Cesereanu’s essay aims to deepen this subject, showing the unimaginable dimensions that human cruelty can sometimes reach. The Armenian Genocide, the Nazi camps, the Gulag, the Military Juntas in Latin America, the totalitarian regimes in Africa and those in Islamic states are just a few examples of the tortures that man can inflict on his fellow men. From the description of the techniques, the motivations and the moments in which acts of savage violence take place to portraits of torturers and the victim, Ruxandra Cesereanu’s book gives us an overview of the phenomenon of torture, to refresh our collective memory.

With the end of the Cold War and the triumph of globalisation, many believed that nationalism now was a thing of the past: instead, the opposite is true. Today, we can see nationalism spreading across the world, as populistic and antidemocratic movements grow stronger. Belonging somewhere seems to become even more important in a time of economic and social uncertainty. In a globalised world, identity, citizenship and belonging are consequently connected to birthplace and an established residence.In these essays the writers consider how different kinds of identity are tied to different kinds of communities. How does a nation emerge? How is unity achieved in an empire with a diverse population?Contributors: Philip Bobbitt, Gillian Clark, Christopher Coker, Carlos Escudé, Richard J Evans, Jonathan Fenby, Robin Lane Fox, Jessica Frazier,David Goodhart, Freddy Gray, Steven Grosby, Tom Holland, Lawrence James, Jeremy Jennings, Josef Joffe, Rob Johnson, Charles S Maier, Tim Marshall, Iain Martin, Janne Haaland Matláry, Simon Mayall, Lucy Riall, Larry Siedentop, Lars Trägårdh, Maurizio Viroli, Harvey Whitehouse, Peter H Wilson, Martina Winkelhofer

Alan Ward combines constitutional history and political science to compare all nine of Australia’s political systems: federal, state and territory. Guided by a model of parliamentary government drawn from comparative politics, he considers the selection of the government; the prime minister and cabinet; government control of the lower house; the primacy of the lower house in bicameral systems; the head of state, and the influence of Australian federalism on parliamentary government. He also considers the growth of executive democracy in Australia, with its dominant executive.

Michel Foucault claimed that the term biopolitics can be fully understood only within the context of modern forms of governing society. From this perspective, the development of modern medical knowledge, the re-organization of the hospital as a health institution, the growing attention to issues related to birth and population, and the rise of biological racism can be attributed to the influence of economic rationality on the most influential political strategies. In this book, Marzocca further explores the crucial role that the family structure has played throughout the history of biopolitics, explaining how family is firstly a place of government of life as well as a means to extend various forms of biopower to the whole society. By analysing the works of key figures in the debate on biopolitics – such as Agamben, Negri, Esposito, Rose, Cooper, Lemke, among others – this volume offers a systematic examination of this notion also in relation to the current ecological crisis, addressing fundamental problems of modern and contemporary political thought.

Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin from August 1991 to January 1996. During the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, he was present when tanks moved in to seize the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin famously stood on a tank to address the crowd assembled. He then departed to Paris to muster international support and, if needed, to form a Russian government-in-exile. He participated in the negotiations at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in Belazheva, Belarus where the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to secede from the Soviet Union and form a Commonwealth of Independent States. Kozyrev’s pro-Western orientation made him an increasingly unpopular figure in Russia as Russia’s spiraling economy and the emergence of ultra-wealthy oligarchs soured ordinary Russians on Western ideas of democracy and market capitalism.