bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Euromissiles
Authors: Colbourn Susan
Published: May 2023

This book tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles—intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war—highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their time. At the center of the story is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The book highlights the weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War turned. The book is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, the author takes a long view of the strategic crisis—from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination.
It Takes Two
Authors: Colbourn Susan
Published: May 2023

This chapter reviews the year 1979 to show how the Western allies translated broad ideas into the final Dual-Track Decision. The decision that the Western allies adopted in December 1979 endorsed the very essence of Helmut Schmidt's strategy of balance. The chapter narrates NATO's deployment of a new generation of theater nuclear forces to Western Europe and extension of an arms control offer to reduce systems, such as the Soviet Union's SS-20 Sabers. It stresses how security could be reached through defense modernization or arms control but the balance is still needed to be maintained. The chapter discusses the success of the Dual-Track Decision, the two-part policy that became known as a “manhood test.”
First Principles
Authors: Colbourn Susan
Published: May 2023

This chapter shows how the Euromissiles triggered a series of debates about foundational elements in NATO's strategy, from the logic of nuclear deterrence and the wisdom of flexible response to the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union. It points out the success of NATO's policies that had always relied on the approval of leaders and bureaucracies and on the broader backing of the various member's publics and parliaments. It also describes allied leaders that had lived through bouts of anti-NATO sentiment, including ones punctuated by large public demonstrations against nuclear weapons. The chapter analyzes debates in the early 1980s that fixated on NATO's Dual-Track Decision and its paired program of deployments and negotiations. It mentions NATO's core principles including the wisdom of relying on the United States for protection, the severity of the Soviet threat, and the logic and morality of nuclear deterrence.
The End of Victory
Authors: Kaplan Edward
Published: May 2023

This book recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war—how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy—a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. This book details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The book reveals how all policy decisions run risks—and ones involving military force run grave ones—though they can rarely be known with precision.
Victory
Authors: Kaplan Edward
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the first two years of the Special Evaluation Subcommittee's (SESC) work in 1953 and 1954, when “victory” seemed possible. The SESC published its inaugural report in May of 1953, only four months after the NSC 140 directive creating it, and after Dwight Eisenhower's inauguration. This timing put the subcommittee's conclusions into Eisenhower's hands as he made key decisions about Cold War strategy during Project Solarium. Named for the White House room where the president received the project's reports, Solarium examined alternative approaches to the Cold War. The SESC's success in creating a report that was serious, sober, and comprehensible led to its perpetuation. The result was NSC 5423, creating a new “Net Capabilities Evaluation Subcommittee” for a trial period, with the inherent promise of becoming permanent. Taken together with intelligence estimates of the probability of an attack, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee's (NESC) work helped a new president estimate the risk that the United States was running: casualties on the scale suffered by the USSR in the Second World War.
Recording Russia
Authors: Safran Gabriella
Published: May 2023

This book examines scenes of listening to “the people” across a variety of texts by Russian writers and European travelers to Russia. The book challenges readings of these works that essentialize Russia as a singular place where communication between the classes is consistently fraught, arguing instead that, as in the West, the sense of separation or connection between intellectuals and those they interviewed or observed is as much about technology and performance as politics and emotions. Nineteenth-century writers belonged to a distinctive media generation using new communication technologies—not bells, but mechanically produced paper, cataloguing systems, telegraphy, and stenography. Russian writers and European observers of Russia in this era described themselves and their characters as trying hard to listen to and record the laboring and emerging middle classes. They depicted scenes of listening as contests where one listener bests another; at times the contest is between two sides of the same person. They sometimes described Russia as an ideal testing ground for listening because of its extreme cold and silence. As the mid-century generation witnessed the social changes of the 1860s and 1870s, their listening scenes revealed increasing skepticism about the idea that anyone could accurately identify or record the unadulterated “voice of the people.” The book looks at how writers, folklorists, and linguists such as Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Dahl, as well as foreign visitors, thought about the possibilities and meanings of listening to and repeating other people's words.
Ringing
Authors: Safran Gabriella
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the listening contest between two aspects of a foreign traveler, Astolphe-Louis-Léonor, the Marquis de Custine: the empathetic self that he sees as truly French and Catholic, and the heartless one that he identifies with Russia. Inspired by folklore and by the ideal of Christian unity, Custine and his Russian acquaintances tell tales of Russia as a frigid testing ground for people to demonstrate that they can hear against the odds. Their stories allow one to situate stereotypes about Russian silence in the global media environment of the midcentury, when new cultural tectonic patterns meant that around the world metallic instruments were falling out of use for urban communication. The chapter begins by looking at Custine's depiction of himself as responding to the Russian soundscape with prophetic listening, meaning that he hears a divine voice that others do not. It then studies tales of Northern silence—where frozen words wait to thaw and be heard—that figure in European imaginings of Russia. Finally, the chapter considers texts where the metallic ringing sounds of bells or cannons, in the percussive mode, compel people to think about death and their own guilt.
Insulting
Authors: Safran Gabriella
Published: May 2023

This chapter argues that the performative mode of the ritual insult exchange structures Fedor Dostoevsky's writing about how intellectuals listen to and record other people's words. It begins by addressing the playful, competitive recording of lower-class language in Dostoevsky's pre-katorga years and its extension in his descriptions of the prison. The chapter reflects on how Dostoevsky and the other prisoners “enregistered” the speech patterns of specific groups, creating and circulating verbal stereotypes through their mocking listening. The stenographic systems that courts and newspaper reporters would employ from the 1860s onward were part of the expansion of the use of the literary language to more readers as well as of the growing sensitivity of language users to the standard and the available antistandards. The chapter considers the writer's fantasies about stenography as a disembodied, technologically marvelous form of mediation. Finally, it analyzes a ritual insult contest of a sort that Dostoevsky engaged in in print with another writer, Nikolai Leskov, inspired by the question of which of them might be a better stenographer of the speech of priests.
Don't Count Me Out
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This book chronicles the life of Bruce White from the beginning of his drug use in elementary school through criminal acts fueled by his need for drugs, to his miraculous recovery three decades later and involvement in the treatment of addicts, where he is now a leader in the rehabilitation field. The book's recounting of White's journey should inspire those dealing with the fallout of addiction. The book allows the reader to get inside the head of an addict who was stealing alcohol from his parents at the age of nine, selling drugs and tripping on LSD and PCP by the time he hit seventh grade, and hooked on morphine before he turned fifteen. “Bruce White? I thought he was dead?” is a response encountered in many of the interviews conducted. The book shines a spotlight on an improbable and stunning miracle. Though this is just one person's story, the contributing factors of early sexual assault, the role of permissive preoccupied parents, and the need for peer approval, among others, will resonate with many as the opioid crisis continues to haunt us.
Skipping Stones / Getting Stoned
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter tackles the start of Bruce White's addiction in grade school. Bruce attended Hampton Elementary School and his teachers believed he needed more guidance concerning direction, development and discipline. In the fifth grade, the White family took their son to see a psychiatrist at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Baltimore's premier mental health facility. Despite the prescription of Ritalin, Bruce did not like the medicine and gave it to his friend Greg Swafford Burke, who was a transfer student. The chapter also highlights the friendship between boys was close due to their lust for drugs and shared recklessness.
Ninth Grade in the Psych Ward
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the time Bruce White spent in Sheppard Pratt, a mental hospital. White felt betrayed when he realized his family was going to leave him, but quickly got accustomed to his life within the ward. During Christmas of 1975, White was only granted 12 hours outside the hospital after his attempted stint to escape. However, he got into a car accident and received surgery at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center. The chapter explains how White liked the morphine he received during surgery. When June arrived and Bruce spent more time in rehabilitation and braces, Sheppard Pratt deemed him untreatable and let him leave.
Shootout on Ready
Authors: Alvarez Rafael
Published: May 2023

This chapter recalls Bruce White's involvement with a shootout. It states how White met up with his childhood friend, Greg Burke, to trade a TV to an open-air drug market. The duo got into a scuffle where White shot through a dealer's jaw and the dealer's posse ambushed Burke's house in retaliation. White's Thunderbird is not exactly properly licensed for a Ford car, with a Mercedes license. However, he was still arrested after he was found to be in possession of a shotgun. The chapter explains the duration of White's stay in Baltimore County Detention Center filled with withdrawal symptoms before he was bailed out by his father.
Introduction
Authors: Scott Blake C.
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the development of tourism in the Caribbean, which followed a pattern, from conquest to playground, from Florida to Cuba all the way to Panama. It begins by defining tourism as specialized “travel in pursuit of pleasure and an escape from everyday realities.” Tourism in the circum-Caribbean began as a maritime route dependent on imperial and commercial expansion emanating from the United States, calling on various ports of call. Although the contemporary tourism industry evokes romantic visions of the Caribbean's past, industry boosters and consumers are seemingly unaware of the long arc of power, violence, and social and environmental transformation that made the industry possible. The chapter introduces how the book examines the multifaceted ways that imperialism and visions of the frontier, capitalism, science and technology, environmental change, literary imaginations, and political power struggles converged to remake the Caribbean into a modern vacation.
Conclusion
Authors: Scott Blake C.
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter highlights the exacerbation of mobile inequalities in the postcolonial and neoliberal era, looking at the tourist–service dynamic. The meaning behind a professional smile, when contextualized by history and contemporary political-economic relations, is clear: the service smile is a survival tool in the face of centuries of historic inequalities. Whether on a cruise ship or at port in the Caribbean, whether smiling or not, service workers are reminded of their place. The chapter then considers how the Caribbean's history of tourism, born from colonialism, has been repackaged as a template for regional and perhaps global development. To study tourism's history, therefore, is to commit to more conscious travel. Indeed, the Caribbean's history of tourism, with all its historic problems and challenges, offers clues for reimagining the present and future of international travel.
The View from the Boat
Authors: Carruthers William
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the correlation between the construction of dams and the undertaking of archaeological work in Nubia. Regulating the Nile equates to the regulation of Nubia's remains, which is a process that shaped the Nubian past constituted by UNESCO's campaign. Additionally, intervention in Nubia's remains required governmental interest, so the ability to decide which remains were of value and which were not was firmly in the hands of ministerial officials. The chapter notes the lack of concern exhibited at Philae was coupled with the actions of the burgeoning Egyptian tourist industry. It discusses the execution of the first and second Archaeological Survey of Nubia before the Aswan High Dam's initial heightening.
Valuing Egyptian Nubia
Authors: Carruthers William
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the constitution of Egyptian Nubian pasts through fieldwork that generated links between documentation and instruments. Tensions surrounding knowledge created during the Nubian campaign were occasionally bureaucratized into irrelevance. The chapter details the Chicago House Method enforced by UNESCO, which involves photography and line drawing. Despite CEDAE's best efforts, precision recording of Nubian remains continued to be adjudicated by reference to the cast of people involved at particular sites rather than with respect to any standardized system. The chapter mentions how the assumption of values lies in the Egyptian government itself. It cites the development of infrastructure for national and international tourists who might be exposed to riverside pleasures anew.
Peopling Nubia
Authors: Carruthers William
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks into the Nubian campaign becoming symbolic of the global mobility and cosmopolitan representation of people. It cites the paperwork resonances connecting Nubian migration and the Nubian campaign. Through the promotion of universalism during the Nubian campaign, UNESCO attempted to make cosmopolitan, internationalist values rhetorically central to the organization's foundation. Moreover, the opening of the Suez Canal became a symbol of increasingly rapid mobility that drove processes of globalization. In Nubia, mobility became a marker of how technological innovation could be used to promote both local modernization initiatives and UNESCO-backed cosmopolitanism. The chapter notes the High Dam construction accelerated the formation of a collective identity for the different groups comprising the Nubian population.
Introduction
Authors: Hessinger Rodney
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the emergence of religious competition in the midst of the Second Great Awakening. In the early nineteenth century, religious innovation flourished in America. As new sects emerged, religious competition escalated. As some churches radically reimagined relations between men and women, opponents accused them of violating the acceptable boundaries of religious liberty. No matter how they are classified, there is one thing adherents to these faith groups shared in common in this era: a style of religious engagement referred to as religious enthusiasm. Religious enthusiasm is ultimately more about commitment and comportment than any particular theology or ecclesiastical form. The chapter explains that the book uncovers how sex and gender were at the center of debates over religion in the early republic.
Conclusion
Authors: Hessinger Rodney
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter assesses how, as the Second Great Awakening drew to a close, with Methodists and other mainline denominations encouraging more modesty in women, the religious outliers who had more radically broken sex and gender conventions were marginalized to contain their threat. Whether externally imposed or internally erected, Mormons, Shakers, Catholics, and the Oneida Community all had religious boundaries built between them and wider American society. By mid-century even enthusiastic religion itself (branded as fanaticism) had been sequestered from the evangelical mainstream. The radical reordering of sex and gender relations proposed by some enthusiastic groups was only kept alive by protecting them within isolated religious communities. Ultimately, the act of religious containment not only staved off sex and gender disruption; it also served to shape the values of middle-class northern Americans.
Introduction
Authors: Parker Luke
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how Vladimir Nabokov's Russian fiction flourished in tandem with the twentieth century's signature cultural formation, the cinema. By the 1920s, when Nabokov, now living in exile in Berlin, was trying to make his mark as a writer, the cinema was also coming out of adolescence. Russian exile was indeed the “Europe Picture Palace,” the space of cinema itself. This included the technology and art of film, the habitus and experience of moviegoing, the entertainment and promotion complex of production companies' “grand design,” and, paramount for the literary context, the discourse of film theory and cinema debates. Nabokov's response to the intellectual and artistic challenge of silent and early sound cinema took the form of a sustained engagement that has never been studied in its historical context. The chapter then considers Nabokov as a Russian émigré writer. Ultimately, Nabokov's continuation in the United States of his European literary work within cinematic culture parallels that of Austro-German Weimar filmmakers, whose wartime noir films display a transnationalism as much about markets and economics as about politics.
A Cinematic Genius
Authors: Parker Luke
Published: May 2023

This chapter offers a reading of Camera Obscura (1932–1933) that dramatizes its status as a work that both recapitulates the 1920s and transitions to the new, “born translated” cinema praxis of the 1930s. Set mainly in 1928, the high point of Vladimir Nabokov's engagement with and appreciation by German culture, Camera Obscura represents a reworking of his earlier “German” novel King, Queen, Knave from the far side of Weimar Berlin's economic collapse. The chapter argues that the novel includes a precise topography of Berlin cinematic culture, centered on a pastiche of the Weimar street film, a genre focused on the infiltration of cinematic culture into urban life. Through archival correspondence, it tells the story of the translation of the Russian novel Kamera obskura into French as Chambre obscure (1934) and English as Camera Obscura (1936), which reveals a Nabokov geared to assuring the promotion and dissemination of this novel through translation and screen adaptation. Finally, the purchase of the option on screen rights to the novel by the German émigré-owned company Capitol Film Productions shows the continual role that Weimar culture played even after the publishing market in Berlin had closed to Nabokov.
America Obscura
Authors: Parker Luke
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses Vladimir Nabokov's attempts to secure an American outlet for his fiction throughout the 1930s, culminating in his contract with Bobbs-Merrill to rewrite Camera Obscura as Laughter in the Dark (1938). By examining his correspondence with the American agent Altagracia de Jannelli and reviews of his work in the American press by bilingual and assimilated Russian émigrés, it shows how the figure of Nabokov as a cosmopolitan European was used to promote him to a new American audience. In writing Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov responded directly to these reviews, as well as to newly discovered reader reports from the Bobbs-Merrill archives. The Bobbs-Merrill correspondence confirms the interconnectedness of middlebrow American publishing and Hollywood, as his first American publisher sought from the start to market the novel as a movie. Ultimately, it was unsuccessful due to the stipulations of the Production Code Administration. However, the chapter shows that the publisher's support was instrumental in obtaining for Nabokov the visa that allowed him to escape France with his wife and son on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Cinema is thus seen in exile to have eminently practical consequences.
Negotiation and Resistance
Authors: Bouchard Constance Brittain
Published: May 2023

This book challenges familiar depictions of the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of impoverished and powerless workers. Peasants in eleventh- and twelfth-century France had far more scope for action, self-determination, and resistance to oppressive treatment—that is, for agency—than they are usually credited with having. Through innovative readings of documents collected in medieval cartularies, the book finds that while peasants lived hard, impoverished lives, they were able to negotiate, individually or collectively, to better their position, present cases in court, and make their own decisions about such fundamental issues as inheritance or choice of marriage partner. The book upends the received view of this period in French history as one in which lords dealt harshly and without opposition toward subservient peasants, offering numerous examples of peasants standing up for themselves.
The Readability of the World
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This book represents the author's first extended demonstration of the metaphorological method he pioneered in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. For the author, metaphors are symptomatic of patterns of thought and feeling that escape conceptual formulation but are nonetheless indispensable, because they allow humans to orient themselves in an otherwise overwhelming world. The book applies this method to the idea that the world presents itself as a book. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality, and the author traces the evolution of this metaphor from ancient Greek cosmology to the model of the genetic code to access the different expectations of reality that it articulates, reflects, and projects. Writing with equal authority on literature and science, theology and philosophy, ancient metaphysics and twentieth-century biochemistry, the author advances rich and original interpretations of the thinking of a range of canonical figures, including Berkeley, Vico, Goethe, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bacon, Flaubert, and Freud. The author uncovers a wealth of new insights into the continuities and discontinuities across human history of the longing to contain all of nature, history, and reality in a book, from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur'an to Diderot's Encyclopedia and Humboldt's Cosmos to the ACGT of the DNA code.
God’s Books Agree with Each Other
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter cites the emerging science of the modern age, which draws chiefly on two aspects: the reliability of its ever-expanding horizon of objects and its relationship to the past of human knowledge. It reveals that the predicament of finding one's way in a reality almost entirely lacked standardized measures for gauging its dimensions and taking one's bearings. The book metaphor serves to draw a line in time between epochs and divide areas of responsibility between the world and the next. The chapter analyzes the connection between the old metaphors of light and enlightenment. It describes the book metaphor that claims for the secular object that have the same preconditions that had previously been reserved for the sacred one.
A Robinsonian World against the Newtonian World
Authors: Blumenberg Hans
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the old need to “save the phenomena” that equates to salvaging visibility in the principle of omni-visibility, even if touch retains its primacy for disclosing spatiality as the form of order projected onto sight. It demonstrates how creating a system out of perceptions and then reading into that system a message about humankind and its place in the cosmos is the root of all confusion in ideas about the world. It also talks about the unerring certainty with which language asserts itself in the face of theoretical transformations. The chapter explains how everyday speech may not enjoy privileged access to truth, but it stubbornly resists being influenced by systemic changes. It considers space as the most stubborn rival of immediacy ever since Isaac Newton had made it the sensorium of God.
Political Intimacy
Authors: Klumbyte Neringa
Published: May 2023

This chapter expounds on the concept of political intimacy to define relations of trust and coexistence among those who have different positions within a power hierarchy. While the banality of power explains the political participation of editors in an authoritarian regime, political intimacy primarily focuses on relational interdependence, coexistence, and trust within the regime. The chapter explains how political intimacy mediated insecurities within the authoritarian milieu as a tool of Soviet governance. It also elaborates on the hierarchies of political intimacy by referencing the experiences within Broom. Political intimacy was constituted and reaffirmed in particular forms of sociality, including hunting sprees and rituals of drinking.
Can—or Should—There Be a Political Science of the Holocaust?
Authors: King Charles
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the idea that the Holocaust is best seen by social scientists as a series of events, shaped in large part by local actors attuned to their own circumstances and institutions alongside the state strategies of the occupying power. Drawing on emerging trends within history writing and historically informed social science, it begins by surveying contemporary changes in scholarly agendas and approaches to the Holocaust. The chapter then identifies some of the major questions in the field and sketches a research program for political science centered on the interaction of state power, local communities, and violent mobilization in five areas: military occupation, repertoires of violence, alliance politics, genocidal policymaking, and resistance. It offers five specific preliminary findings that challenge and recast some of what we believe about mass killing, from the role of states as makers of genocide to the determinants of resistance. The chapter also addresses issues of comparison, morality, and memory—especially the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the ethical imperative to acknowledge human suffering.
Historical Legacies and Jewish Survival Strategies during the Holocaust
Authors: Finkel Eugene
Published: May 2023

This chapter analyzes Jewish behavior during the Holocaust at the individual and community levels. More specifically, it compares the large, important, yet understudied Jewish communities of Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok. These case studies were chosen because of their similarities in a number of important features. The three cities are comparable in the size of their prewar Jewish communities and their percentages of Jews. During the Nazi occupation, they had ghettos enclosed by a physical barrier and were located in the “zone of extermination”—no Jews were supposed to be spared in each locale. They were also important Nazi administrative and government centers. Yet despite these similarities, in Białystok almost no one escaped the ghetto, whereas in Minsk thousands fled. The Jewish underground attacked Germans outside the ghetto in Kraków but staged a rebellion within the ghetto walls in Białystok. In Minsk the internal organization of the ghetto was chaotic and its leadership corrupt, while the Białystok ghetto was known for its order and efficiency. Ultimately, the strategies that the Jews could and did engage in during the Holocaust can be divided into four categories: (1) cooperation and collaboration, (2) coping, (3) evasion, and (4) resistance.
Normalizing Violence
Authors: Luft Aliza
Published: May 2023

This chapter addresses why French bishops supported the Vichy regime's persecution of Jews in 1940 but two years later mobilized on behalf of Jews. Drawing on Bourdieusian theories of legitimacy and political and symbolic capital, it identifies four mechanisms: public endorsements, cooperation, the expression of shared values, and the use of common rhetoric. These mechanisms led to a “synchronization” of religious and political fields in France and a concomitant decline in the Catholic leadership's alignment with the rabbinate, particularly when compared with the support the former provided to the latter from 1933 to 1940. The chapter argues that French Catholic bishops' alliance with Prime Minister Phillipe Pétain and the Vichy government played a central role in the government's attempts to legitimize its National Revolution philosophy. This included an effort to redefine who belonged to the nation and who did not, targeting, first and foremost, Jews.
Using the Yad Vashem Transport Database to Examine Gender and Selection during the Holocaust
Authors: Welch Susan
Published: May 2023

This chapter begins by describing the role of transports in the Holocaust. Transporting Jews to the East, where they would be murdered en masse out of the sight of westerners, was a key part of the Holocaust. Transports were not only an effective way to move people to the camps and killing sites, where they would be murdered immediately or through the brutality of the camp conditions, but an efficient way to continue the process of dehumanization and destruction that began with public policies to strip Jews of their livelihood and freedoms and ended in their deaths. The chapter then looks at the Yad Vashem “Transports to Extinction” database, where, for the first time, information is being assembled on all known transports. Using this database, it compares findings on the gender composition of transports and the survival rates of those transported with the individual-level survival rates of Italian Jews who were deported.
The International Relations of Holocaust Memory
Authors: Subotić Jelena
Published: May 2023

This chapter illustrates how Holocaust remembrance practices serve various state international reputational needs, drawing on, among other ideas, the concepts of “collective psychology,” “ontological security,” and other elements from psychoanalysis. It brings international relations (IR) back into dialogue with other social scientific approaches to the Holocaust. Indeed, the chapter demonstrates how a focus on states' international relations—their relations with other states and actors in the international system—can help illuminate some of the puzzling features of contemporary Holocaust remembrance. Specifically, the chapter discusses the international politics of Holocaust memory in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The chapter elucidates ways in which an IR perspective on state memory, identity, international status, and reputation seeking can explain why the Holocaust remains ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated in much of the region that was the central location of the genocide.
Conclusion
Authors: Ziblatt Daniel
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter, while appreciating the disaggregating approach and emphasis on the local in many of the contributions to this volume, shifts the attention back to the broader national and especially international forces that determined the course of the Holocaust. Exclusive focus on the local and comparative microhistories, or even the internal features of a country or society, misses out on the important external factors that determined the causes and impact of the destruction of European Jewry. When democracy died in a regional hegemonic power, such as Germany in the 1930s, this paved the way for the horrors to follow well beyond its borders through force and emulation. Were democracy to die in a global hegemon such as the United States—an ominous possibility after 2016—“the reverberations would be massive.” Ultimately, the Holocaust offers an important warning: the local process of political violence and dehumanization highlighted in this book occurred when democracy died in a powerful nation.
Introduction
Authors: Kaiser Claire P.
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the Mtatsminda Pantheon and how it came to encapsulate modern Georgian national history: its origins, transformation, additions, erasures—and omissions. The chapter highlights that the Mtatsminda Pantheon was a rare initiative in the Soviet Union, and its location presented opportunities in the Stalin era to remake the pantheon and its broader neighborhood in Stalin's image, at the height of the construction of the Stalin cult in Georgia under the guidance of Georgian first secretary Lavrenti Beria. The Mtatsminda Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures, as it is now known, is a snapshot of the modern Georgian nation-building project, even if the site was created and largely populated in the Soviet era. The chapter shows how the example of the Mtatsminda Pantheon revealed a longer-term, evolving conversation about “dead body politics” in Georgia that closely paralleled projects of nation-building throughout the Soviet century and beyond. The chapter demonstrates the deep integration of Soviet-style national development in a broader trajectory of modern Georgian nationhood.
Entitled Foreign Policy and Its Limits
Authors: Kaiser Claire P.
Published: May 2023

This chapter investigates how newly endowed Soviet institutions of nation-building gave form to nationalizing aspirations of local- and republic-level actors in Georgia, from party cadres to academics. The chapter particularly looks at the three parallel attempts by Soviet Georgian officials, scholars, and activists to claim territories and populations in Turkey and Azerbaijan and to “repatriate” co-ethnics from the Fereydan region of Iran at the dawn of the Cold War. Focusing on the prominent roles of the historians Nikoloz Berdzenishvili and Simon Janashia, First Secretary Kandid Charkviani, and Georgian people's commissar of foreign affairs Giorgi Kiknadze, the chapter shows how these (ultimately unsuccessful) schemes were not simply a Moscow-managed, geopolitical gambit but also advanced local interests among a new generation of Georgian nation-builders. This does not downplay Jospeh Stalin's role in these endeavors; rather, Stalinist patronage and the entitled position of Georgians in Stalin's Soviet Union emboldened local leaders in Georgia. The chapter emphasizes how these efforts tested the bounds of republic-level agency vis-à-vis neighboring republics. It then reviews the legal fictions of Soviet federalism and the extent of national autonomy.
A Georgian Tbilisi
Authors: Kaiser Claire P.
Published: May 2023

This chapter underlines the new national–social contract that emerged in Georgia and facilitated the hegemony of the entitled Georgian nationality by the late 1970s. From the nationalization of the republic's capital to negotiation of “traditional” cultural practices, citizens in Georgia (and not only Georgians) increasingly claimed national rights as they understood them through—rather than in spite of—Soviet institutions and collectives. The chapter also emphasizes how Tbilisi's ancient roots, the nationalization of the city—from population demographics to built environment to lived experience—was achieved through Soviet institutions, and postwar ones at that. The postwar development of new neighborhoods in Tbilisi demonstrates the process of urban nationalization on a larger and longer-term scale. The chapter then focuses on Saburtalo, a neighborhood that developed primarily via Khrushchev's residential building boom. It evaluates how Saburtalo shifted the residential center of Tbilisi as Georgians from elsewhere in the republic migrated to the capital. It also studies the neighborhood as a site that was central to the development of a Soviet Georgian Tbilisi. Yet like the contrasts in “Tbiliso,” the Soviet Georgian modernity of Tbilisi developed alongside a delicate balance of eradicating, constructing, and compromising with a spectrum of lingering “traditions” among Georgia's populace.
Entangled Nationalisms
Authors: Kaiser Claire P.
Published: May 2023

This chapter reveals the political implications of negotiations over what it meant to be Soviet and Georgian in the Communist Party of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in the last decade of the Soviet experiment. It first surveys the public reaction to a perceived policy change in the Brezhnev constitution regarding the status of Georgian as the republic's official language in early 1978. The chapter then explores a concurrent movement among Abkhaz intellectuals and activists that expressed a plethora of grievances regarding entitled nationality rights in the Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic that continued through the 1980s—and inspired Georgian responses that would prove decisive for Georgia's fate in the Soviet empire. The chapter stresses that the cases examined here challenge the assumptions that national expressions and interests necessarily implied resistance to Soviet structures. It also highlights how Georgian political mobilization and the republic leadership's management of the situation revealed the extent to which the space of discourse and practice of the Soviet among Georgians had enlarged by the late 1970s, as well as the singular role of First Secretary Eduard Shevardnadze in navigating the tension between Tbilisi, Moscow, and Sukhumi during his tenure.
Epilogue
Authors: Kaiser Claire P.
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks at how Georgia grappled with the legacies of its peculiar Soviet experiment: strained relations with Russia and war and occupation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, on the one hand, and an enduring sense of national identity, history, and canon if not conceived by, then nurtured and raised by, Soviet institutions of nation-building, on the other hand. The chapter evaluates how the Soviet institutionalization of nationality equipped national republics and their entitled citizenries with the tools of nationalizing states through the mechanisms of empire. These tools included special rights and privileges for members of the entitled nationality; a clearly defined ethnoterritorial unit; and state-endowed institutions to promote the language, culture, and history of the entitled nationality. The chapter highlights that these projects and practices facilitated ethnoterritorial consolidation and recast imperial centers and peripheries, such that Tbilisi emerged as an imperial center in its own right, from the vantage points of autonomous regions within Georgia, the Georgian diaspora, and even (for a time) the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The chapter underlines that entitled Georgians had to undertake a considerable amount of nationalizing work to actually make the polity they were given by the Soviet project sufficiently Georgian.
Colonizing the Home with Bamboo, Tiles, and Timber
Authors: Meerwijk Maurits Bastiaan
Published: May 2023

This chapter traces the early development of what would become the signature response to plague in Java: home improvement. The chapter digs into the evolution of home improvement over the first decade of plague in Java. The use of bamboo in home construction—Java's principal building material—was at first regulated, then banned, before being partially recuperated. The chapter argues that this scheme effectively “colonized the home” by regulating, restricting, and partially recuperating the use of traditional Javanese building materials and architectural forms. In the process, local populations came more clearly into the purview of the colonial state, while home improvement entailed a dramatic expansion of Dutch influence over the Javanese landscape. The chapter concludes by emphasizing that it was an intervention that was rivaled only by the vast plantations established here and elsewhere in the Indies. Home improvement placed increasing pressure on the growth and availability of natural resources—and indeed upon the Javanese ability to pay.
Kin-Slaying and Oath-Breaking
Authors: Neidorf Leonard
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers how kin-slaying and oath-breaking shaped the composition of Beowulf. Since legends form around the moment in which a protagonist is compelled to kill a kinsman or break an oath, Beowulf is considered to be an unusual poem for not climaxing in such a scene. Moreover, Beowulf showcases a kind of moral absolutism that is absent from the other witnesses to migration-period legend, where circumstances justify and arguably exonerate a hero driven to commit one moral transgression to avoid committing another. The chapter looks into the contrast between the death songs performed by Beowulf and Hildebrand, a traditional hero of migration-period legend. It notes the Beowulf poet's refusal to valorize the kin-slaying and oath-breaking heroes of the tradition, citing the amorality that was incompatible with Christian teachings.
Monotheism and Monstrosity
Authors: Neidorf Leonard
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses that the Beowulf poet used monstrosity to bring greater moral clarity to the narrative. It notes the arguments regarding how the poet attempted to morally renovate the amoral tradition of heroic-legendary poetry that he inherited. Unlike the moral ambiguity in most migration-period legends, the monotheism of Beowulf's foregrounded characters is similarly fundamental since it forms a coherent and consistent feature of the poem that contributes to the moral renovation of an amoral heroic tradition. Moreover, the epic poem showcased a tension between Christianity and paganism. The chapter also explores how the notions of monotheism and the conception of monstrosity worked in tandem in an effort to maintain a firm moral framework.
One China, Many Taiwans
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This book shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China (PRC) pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. The book's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new lens for social scientists and area specialists to examine the impacts of Chinese tourism, which is increasing in importance not only in the region but worldwide.
How Taiwan Became an Exceptional Territory
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This chapter provides a historical account of Taiwan's changing political geography. It describes that Taiwan's contemporary condition was administered domestically and represented internationally by the Republic of China (ROC), claimed and threatened by the People's Republic of China (PRC), and imagined and lived as a free and democratic Taiwan. It also presents contemporary Taiwan's territoriality as emerging from and forming against clashing colonial and national projects within Taiwan. The chapter looks at Taiwan's ways of staging territory that are subject to changing relations with political entities and representative bodies beyond it. It draws from several histories, such as Evan N. Dawley's study of ethnogenesis in the port town of Keelung, which argues that Taiwanese forged their ethnic consciousness in contradistinction to Japanese and Chinese.
The Rise of Cross-Strait Travel and Tourism
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers mobility within and between Taiwan and China, as well as the baroque institutional arrangements and exotic rhetorical formulations that regulated it. It reviews the history of quasi-official agencies, political party negotiations, and state and business networks that has traced the complex institutional and interpersonal relationships that facilitated and were themselves transformed by tourist flows. It also considers tourism as the rationale for the establishment of the first cross-strait quasi-state reciprocal offices. The chapter looks at the interplay between and relative importance of the political and the economic, which is a long-standing concern of cross-strait researchers. It talks about how skepticism was warranted about arguments that economic integration initiatives and tourism development would necessarily precipitate peaceful relations.