Download or read book Eastern Europe written by Sabrina P. Ramet and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastern Europe addresses the emergence of uncertain pluralism in the region following the disintegration of the communist regimes in 1989. Taking a broad historical approach, the volume considers issues and challenges that have marked Eastern Europe from 1939 through World War II and the era of socialism, up to the present. Eight comprehensive country studies are augmented by detailed assessments of economic developments, security issues, religious currents, cultural policies, and gender relations in the region.

Download or read book Stalin and the Cold War in Europe written by Gerhard Wettig and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War was a unique international conflict partly because Josef Stalin sought socialist transformation of other countries rather than simply the traditional objectives. This intriguing book, based on recently accessible Soviet primary sources, is the first to explain the emergence of the Cold War and its development in Stalin's lifetime from the perspective of Soviet policy-making. The book pays particular attention to the often-neglected "societal" dimension of Soviet foreign policy as a crucial element of the genesis and development of the Cold War. It is also the first to put German postwar development into the context of Soviet Cold War policy. Stalin vainly tried to mobilize the Germans with slogans of national unity and then to discredit the West among the Germans by forcing the surrender of Berlin. Further attempts to prevail deadlocked him into a confrontation with the newly united Western powers. Comparing Stalin's internal statements with Soviet actions, Gerhard Wettig draws original conclusions about Stalin's meta-plans for the regions of Germany and Eastern Europe. This fascinating look at Soviet politics during the Cold War provides readers with new insights into Stalin's willingness to initiate crisis with the West while still avoiding military conflict.

Download or read book Eastern Europe written by Tomek E. Jankowski and published by New Europe Books. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastern Europe! is a brief and concise (but informative) introduction to Eastern Europe and its myriad customs and history. When the legendary Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome in 753 BCE, Plovdiv -- today the second-largest city in Bulgaria -- was already thousands of years old. Indeed, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam are all are mere infants compared to Plovdiv. This is just one of the paradoxes that haunts and defines the New Europe, that part of Europe that was freed from Soviet bondage in 1989 which is at once both much older than the modern Atlantic-facing power centers of Western Europe while also being in some ways much younger than them. Even those knowledgeable about Western Europe often see Eastern Europe as terra incognita, with a sign on the border declaring "Here be monsters." This book is a gateway to understanding both what unites and separates Eastern Europeans from their Western brethren, and how this vital region has been shaped by, but has also left its mark on, Western Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Ideal for students, businesspeople, and those who simply want to know more about where Grandma or Grandpa came from, Eastern Europe! is a user-friendly guide to a region that is all too often mischaracterized as remote, insular, and superstitious. Illustrations throughout include: 40 photos, 40 maps and 40 figures (tables, charts, etc.) From the Trade Paperback edition.

Download or read book Staged Otherness written by Dagnosław Demski and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people in front of the European audiences in the 19th and 20th century was concentrated in the metropolises in the western part of the continent. Nevertheless, traveling ethnic troupes and temporary exhibitions of non-European humans took place also in territories located to the east of the Oder river and Austria. The contributors to this edited volume present practices of ethnographic shows in Russia, Poland, Czechia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Romania, and Austria and discuss the reactions of local audiences. The essays offer critical arguments to rethink narratives of cultural encounters in the context of ethnic shows. By demonstrating the many ways in which the western models and customs were reshaped, developed, and contested in Central and Eastern European contexts, the authors argue that the dominant way of characterizing these performances as “human zoos” is too narrow. The contributors had to tackle the difficult task of finding traces other than faint copies of official press releases by the tour organizers. The original source material was drawn from local archives, museums, and newspapers of the discussed period. A unique feature of the volume is the rich amount of images that complement every single case study of ethnic shows.

Download or read book Germans to Poles written by Hugo Service and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to 'cleanse' these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as 'native Poles' and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.

Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Download or read book Occupation in the East written by Stephan Lehnstaedt and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following their occupation by the Third Reich, Warsaw and Minsk became home to tens of thousands of Germans. In this exhaustive study, Stephan Lehnstaedt provides a nuanced, eye-opening portrait of the lives of these men and women, who constituted a surprisingly diverse population—including everyone from SS officers to civil servants, as well as ethnically German city residents—united in its self-conception as a “master race.” Even as they acclimated to the daily routines and tedium of life in the East, many Germans engaged in acts of shocking brutality against Poles, Belarusians, and Jews, while social conditions became increasingly conducive to systematic mass murder.

Download or read book Postwar written by Tony Judt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-05 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Download or read book British Policy in South East Europe in the Second World War written by Elisabeth Barker and published by Springer. This book was released on 1976-06-18 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Decades of Crisis written by Ivan T. Berend and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-03-02 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume leads the reader through the maze of social, cultural, economic and political changes in 12 Central and Eastern European countries, showing how every path ended in dictatorship and despotism by the start of World War II.

Download or read book A History of Eastern Europe written by Robert Bideleux and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-10 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change is a wide-ranging single volume history of the "lands between", the lands which have lain between Germany, Italy, and the Tsarist and Soviet empires. Bideleux and Jeffries examine the problems that have bedevilled this troubled region during its imperial past, the interwar period, under fascism, under communism, and since 1989. While mainly focusing on the modern era and on the effects of ethnic nationalism, fascism and communism, the book also offers original, striking and revisionist coverage of: * ancient and medieval times * the Hussite Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation * the legacies of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Hapsburg Empire * the rise and decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth * the impact of the region's powerful Russian and Germanic neighbours * rival concepts of "Central" and "Eastern" Europe * the 1920s land reforms and the 1930s Depression. Providing a thematic historical survey and analysis of the formative processes of change which have played the paramount roles in shaping the development of the region, A History of Eastern Europe itself will play a paramount role in the studies of European historians.

Download or read book Europe at War 1939 1945 written by Norman Davies and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conventional narrative of the Second World War is well known: after six years of brutal fighting on land, sea and in the air, the Allied Powers prevailed and the Nazi regime was defeated. But as in so many things, the truth is somewhat different. Bringing a fresh eye to bear on a story we think we know, Norman Davies.Davies forces us to look again at those six years and to discard the usual narrative of Allied good versus Nazi evil, reminding us that the war in Europe was dominated by two evil monsters - Hitler and Stalin - whose fight for supremacy consumed the best people in Germany and in the USSR . The outcome of the war was at best ambiguous, the victory of the West was only partial, its moral reputation severely tarnished and, for the greater part of the continent of Europe, ‘liberation’ was only the beginning of more than fifty years of totalitarian oppression. ‘Davies writes with real knowledge and passion.’ Michael Burleigh, Evening Standard ‘Punchy and compelling' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

Download or read book No Simple Victory written by Norman Davies and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's leading historians re-examines World War II and its outcome A clear-eyed reappraisal of World War II that offers new insight by reevaluating well-established facts and pointing out lesser-known ones, No Simple Victory asks readers to reconsider what they know about the war, and how that knowledge might be biased or incorrect. Norman Davies poses simple questions that have unexpected answers: Can you name the five biggest battles of the war? What were the main political ideologies that were contending for supremacy? The answers to these questions will surprise even those who feel that they are experts on the subject. Davies has established himself as a preeminent scholar of World War II. No Simple Victory is an invaluable contribution to twentieth-century history and an illuminating portrait of a conflict that continues to provoke debate.

Download or read book A Low Dishonest Decade written by Paul N. Hehn and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-09-26 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the rivalries among the Great Powers in the search for markets during the world depression of the 1930s, the author surveys the five Major Powers and all the Eastern European countries from the Baltic to Turkey. But he primarily canvases the economic situations in locations like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

Download or read book Occupied Economies written by Hein A.M. Klemann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the consequences of the German occupation for the economy of occupied Europe? After Germany conquered major parts of the European continent, it was faced with a choice between plundering the suppressed countries and using their economies to supply its needs. The choices made not only differed from country to country, but also changed over the course of the war. Individual leaders; the economic needs of the Reich; the military situation; struggles between governors of occupied countries and Berlin officials; and finally racism, all had an impact on the outcome. In some countries the emphasis was placed on production for German warfare, which kept these economies functioning. New research, presented for the first time in this book, shows that as a consequence the economic setback in these areas was limited, and therefore post-war recovery was relatively easy. However, in other countries, plundering was more characteristic, resulting in partisan activity, a collapse of normal society and a dramatic destruction not only of the economy but in some countries of a substantial proportion of the labour force. In these countries, post-war recovery was almost impossible.

Download or read book Modern Art in Eastern Europe written by S. A. Mansbach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-05 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering and award-winning study provides the world with the first coherent narrative of Eastern European contributions to the modern art movement. Analyzing an enormous range of works, from art centers such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, (many published here for the first time), S.A. Mansbach shows that any understanding of Modernism is essentially incomplete without the full consideration of vital Eastern European creative output. He argues that Cubism, Expressionism and Constructivism, along with other great modernist styles, were merged with deeply rooted, Eastern European visual traditions. The art that emerged was vital modernist art that expressed the most pressing concerns of the day, political as well as aesthetic. Mansbach examines the critical reaction of the contemporary artistic culture and political state. A major groundbreaking interpretation of Modernism, Modern Art in Eastern Europe completes any full assessment of twentieth-century art, as well as its history. Modern Art in Eastern Europe is the recipient of the 1997 C.I.N.O.A. Prize, awarded by La Confédération Internationale de Négociants en Oeuvres d'Art. The prize is awarded to defray the costs of publication in order to encourage publishers to produce maunscripts of particular merit and the works of younger art historians.

Download or read book Famine in European History written by Guido Alfani and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic study of famine in all parts of Europe from the Middle Ages to present. It compares the characteristics, consequences and causes of famine in regional case studies by leading experts to form a comprehensive picture of when and why food security across the continent became a critical issue.