European History Commons^™

Objects Of Atrocity: Material Culture And The Challenges Of Difficult Histories, Robert M. Ehrenreich, Jane E. Klinger, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, Caroline Sturdy Colls

Purdue University Press Books

The vast majority of people throughout history have left few written traces. That is especially the case for those who were brutally forced from their homes, stripped of their possessions, and swiftly imprisoned, enslaved, or murdered. Objects of Atrocity: Material Culture and the Challenges of Difficult Histories addresses how we return humanity to these people in order to avoid their erasure from history. Academics and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and cross-disciplinary approaches grapple with the challenges and possibilities relating to the collection, conservation, storage, and display of objects in the aftermath of mass atrocities. This collection confronts a …

Working At The Margins In Interwar Yugoslavia, Stefano Petrungaro

Central European Studies

Prostitutes, beggars, folk healers, peddlers, wandering artists, and bear-leaders: Working at the Margins in Interwar Yugoslavia shows how work shaped their relations with the state and the rest of their world. The protagonists of the book’s story lived on the fringes of society and engaged in activities that were only partially recognized, from a legal and social point of view, as proper jobs, while some of them had no job at all. This book looks at Yugoslavia’s disciplining and social engineering practices through the lens of socially marginal workers. The analysis shows that in this period the South Slav regions …

Trauma Beyond Time: Temporal Constructs In Holocaust Testimonies, Sarah Seiselmyer-Snyder

Purdue University Press Books

Trauma Beyond Time: Temporal Constructs in Holocaust Testimonies challenges our understanding of what it means to be a Holocaust survivor, arguing that the term “post-Holocaust” fundamentally misrepresents survivors’ experiences. Through careful analysis of Holocaust literature and testimony, this book reveals how trauma persists across generations, defying conventional historical timelines. For those who perished, there can be no “after” to the Holocaust—their stories were violently ended. Yet for survivors, the Holocaust didn’t simply conclude in 1945. Their experiences demonstrate how trauma continues to shape lives decades later, making “post-Holocaust” a misleading concept that fails to capture their ongoing reality. Using the …

Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946, Nina Paulovicova, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Joanna Beata Michlic

Purdue University Press Books

Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946 challenges the notion of joyous liberation of Holocaust survivors by the Red Army, which is often embedded in popular imagination and collective memory. This is one of the first volumes to shine light on the sexualized violence that some Holocaust survivors endured in the hands of the Soviet Army, partisans, rescuers, and army personnel in filtration camps during the liberation process. By focusing on testimonies and memoirs, this book discusses in detail a wide range of interactions, including sexual violence, rape, forced cohabitation, sex barter, aid, and romance. The book addresses methodological …

Flowing Progress: Transforming The Danube Through Infrastructure, Stefan Dorondel, Luminita Gatejel

Central European Studies

Flowing Progress: Transforming the Danube Through Infrastructure focuses on how different political regimes and forms of governance have imagined and technologically transformed the most international river in the world. Multidisciplinary and drawing on methodologies of history, anthropology of infrastructure, and science, technology, and society, this collection explores the tensions between the river and its natural pulses, the humans that populate its floodplains, state agencies, and infrastructure. The book engages the concept of disturbance to point out the circular and spiraling dynamics between hydrological processes and technopolitical and economic practices. Disturbance denotes a specific type of long-term dynamic between human attempts …

Ethnicizing Europe: Hate And Violence After Versailles, Éva Kovács, Raul Cârstocea, Gábor Egry

Central European Studies

Ethnicizing Europe focuses on the dynamics of interethnic violence in Europe between the two world wars. The new international system that was enshrined by the Versailles peace treaties after World War I did not bring stability to East-Central Europe. Rather, it resulted in a host of conditions like self-determination, international oversight, revolutionary political ideas, and democratic processes, which eventually gave new meaning to already established conflicts, as well as igniting new conflicts in the region. This book opens with a discussion of the theoretical scholarship on ethnicity before proceeding to specific case studies investigating the different ways in which ethnicity …

The Devil’S In The Details: Opposition To Demonology In Early Modern Europe, Abigail Pickard

The Purdue Historian

Common assumptions that believers of witchcraft in the early modern period were uneducated fanatics overgeneralize the complex interplay of early modern science and theology. The study of demons, known as demonology, was considered a science. It was a respected field that was studied and debated. Theologians scrutinized, defended, and revised demonological theories. Thinkers turned over foundational concepts and split hairs over the fine details of theology. Since educated scholars were considered authorities on demonology, they repeatedly wrote, talked, and theorized about the topic in a similar fashion to other ideologies of the early modern era. Due to this, authors of …

Origins Of Art: Demystifying The Scheuring Icon Collection, Mikayla Klemp

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Everyday Postsocialism In Eastern Europe: History Doesn't Travel In One Direction, Jill Massino, Markus Wien

Central European Studies

The collapse of state socialism ushered in dramatic political and economic change, producing new freedoms and opportunities, but also new challenges and disappointments. Focusing on laborers, professionals, youth, women, sexual minorities, foreign students, and emigrants, Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe explores these multifaceted changes and people’s varied experiences of them. The featured narratives complicate hegemonic representations of transformation, revealing ruptures and continuities, progress and reversals. Highlighting the multi-directionality of change over the last thirty years, the book reappraises 1989 as an epochal event for all.

From Schmelt Camp To “Little Auschwitz”: Blechhammer’S Role In The Holocaust, Susanne Barth

Purdue University Press Books

From Schmelt Camp to “Little Auschwitz”: Blechhammer’s Role in the Holocaust is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer’s role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived.

Established in the spring of 1942 …

A Sense Of Loss: The Effect Of Prisoner Camp Conditions On German Pows’ Masculinity During The First World War, Analucia Lugo

The Purdue Historian

During the First World War, almost a million German soldiers became prisoners of war (POW) and held captive in enemy camps. The moment of capture and arrest caused these men to experience debilitating emotions, including guilt and fear. Varied conditions at POW camps bolstered these responses and often determined prisoner health and morale throughout the war. This article examines how camps in Britain, France, and Russia treated German POWs, and how German nationalism affected these soldiers' senses of masculinity and patriotism during and after the war.

The Death Of Glasnost And Perestroika, Matthew B. Zechiel

The Purdue Historian

This paper covers the rise, fall, and ultimate destruction of the twin policies of Glasnost and Perestroika in Russia as they existed under the regimes of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. After ascending to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to liberalize the USSR through his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika. While these policies were not always followed under Gorbachev, it is clear that they were relatively successful at creating a freer society and state. However, these policies began to whither under Yeltsin, as the state, particularly the office of President, …

Jews And Urban Life, Leonard J. Greenspoon

Studies in Jewish Civilization

Jews and Urban Life recognizes that throughout their long history, Jews have often inhabited cities. The reality of this urban experience ranged from ghetto restrictions to robust participation in a range of civic and social activities. Essays in this collection present relevant examples from within the Jewish community itself, moving historically from the biblical period to the modern-day State of Israel. Taking a comparative approach while recognizing the particulars of individual instances, authors examine these phenomena from a wide variety of approaches, genres, and media. Interdisciplinary and accessibly written, the articles display a multitude of instances throughout history showing the …

Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education In Socialist Poland, Agata Zysiak

Central European Studies

State socialism tried to industrialize, urbanize, encourage the more frequent washing of hands, urge people to leave the church, emancipate women, and electrify cities—all within a single lifetime. Central to these initiatives was extending educational opportunities to the working class and creating a vision of an egalitarian socialist university that offered advancement for all. Limiting Privilege: Upward Mobility Within Higher Education in Socialist Poland traces the possibilities and limits of this goal by looking at a model socialist university established in 1945 in the working-class city of Łódź, Poland. Initially a flagship project of socialist modernization, the university tried to …

Women, Nationalism, And Social Networks In The Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918, Marta Verginella

Central European Studies

Women, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918 focuses on the lives of women in Southeastern Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the intersection of gender and nationalism. By looking at a wide range of sources and employing rich historiography, this collection investigates the currents of women’s emancipatory efforts in a climate of conflicting assumptions relating to nationhood and nationalization. This book sheds light on a time when both women and nations were working to assert themselves, and how women promoted the national cause in an attempt to assume stronger roles in the public sphere. The …

Les Expositions Turnus, Une Page D’Histoire Transnationale Des Beaux-Arts En Suisse À La Fin Du Xixe Siècle. Et Comment Découvrir Les Humanités Numériques, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

Cet article présente le travail de la classe d’introduction aux humanités numériques de l’Université de Genève sur les expositions Turnus en Suisse à partir des années 1840. Près de 50 catalogues ont été retranscrits, décrits et structurés à l’aide de scripts Python, puis géolocalisés. Les données ont été ajoutées à BasArt, le répertoire mondial de catalogues d’expositions d’Artl@s (https://artlas.huma-num.fr/map). Elles permettent de mieux comprendre les premières années de ces expositions et leurs dynamiques locales, fédérales et internationales. Le Turnus fut une plaque tournante pour les artistes suisses, voire un tremplin vers le marché européen de l’art.

War And Peace. The Film Iconeme Of The Urban Square As Image Of Europe In Transition (1944-1948), Paolo Villa

Artl@s Bulletin

A central feature of European urban landscapes, the square represents the public space par excellence. At the end of WW2 and in the immediate postwar time, the role of cinema in representing and reimagining urban squares was crucial. Through film images, they became the stage and the mirror of a Europe in transition. This contribution, examining Italian, French, German, and Czechoslovak cases, posits the square as an essential iconeme in postwar nonfiction cinema and visual culture, acting as a fil rouge to visually retrace the path of Europe from war to peace, and into new forms of political tension.

Perspectives On Changing Cultural Spaces In 19th Century Europe, Christophe Charle

Artl@s Bulletin

To define the limits of European cultural spaces requires a pragmatic and empirical approach, founded on a comparative overview of the circulations of symbolic goods, of the agents involved in the processes of diffusion and mediatization of these goods, and of their modes of transmission or valorization. In this essay, I illustrate the effects of changing conditions on the specific field of 19th-century opera, one of the first international forms of cultural practice in Europe. I then consider the origins and causes of unequal cultural circulations in other fields, notably the presence or absence of mediators in these processes of …

Geopolitics In Recent U.S. Professional Military Reading Lists, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Professional military reading lists have existed for a long time in the U.S. military and in other national militaries. They are frequently updated and intended to enhance the professional knowledge of military professionals in areas ranging from cultural awareness, ethics, leadership, international relations, military history and military operations, and areas of expertise considered essential to successfully executing the operations of their military service branch. These lists are prepared by the leadership organizations of these armed services such as the Air Force Chief of Staff, U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations, and Marine Corps Commandant. Such readings are …

U.S. Government Information Resources For Accountability On U.S. Assistance To Ukraine, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides detailed coverage of U.S. Government information resources documenting accountability for U.S. civilian and military assistance to Ukraine. Includes U.S. laws, agencies involved in U.S. arms export policy, Defense Department resources and data, Defense Dept. Inspector General reports, Government Accountability Office reports, congressional committee hearings, a letter from a congressional committee to the Secretaries of Defense and State and U.S. Agency for International Development administrator, congressional debate, and congressional recorded votes.

The Nazis, The Vatican, And The Jews Of Rome, Patrick J. Gallo

Purdue University Press Books

On October 16, 1943, the Jews of Rome were targeted for arrest and deportation. The Nazis, the Vatican, and the Jews of Rome examines why—and more importantly how—it could have been avoided, featuring new evidence and insight into the Vatican’s involvement. At the time, Rome was within reach of the Allies, but the overwhelming force of the Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and SS in Rome precluded direct confrontation. Moral condemnations would not have worked, nor would direct confrontation by the Italians, Jewish leadership, or even the Vatican.

Gallo underscores the necessity of determining what courses of actions most likely would have spared …

Combating The Hydra: Violence And Resistance In The Habsburg Empire, 1500–1900, Stephan Steiner

Central European Studies

Combating the Hydra explores structural as well as occasion-specific state violence committed by the early modern Habsburg Empire. The book depicts and analyzes attacks on marginalized people “maladjusted” of all sorts, women “of ill repute,” “heretic” Protestants, and “Gypsies.” Previously uncharted archival records reveal the use of arbitrary imprisonment, coerced labor, and deportation. The case studies presented provide insights into the origins of modern state power from varied techniques of population control, but are also an investigation of resistance against oppression, persecution, and life-threatening assaults. The spectrum of fights against debasement is a touching attestation of the humanity of the …

A Summer Of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal For The Hungarian Holocaust, George Eisen

Purdue University Press Books

Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets.

The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In exploring the fate …

Applying The Byronic Model To The International Volunteers Of The Spanish Nationalists (1936–1939), Nathan Au

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities Of Space, Time, And Memory In Twentieth-Century War And Genocide, Volker Benkert, Michael Mayer

Purdue University Press Books

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide investigates interconnections between space and violence throughout the twentieth century, and how such connections informed collective memory. The interdisciplinary volume shows how entangled notions of time and space amplified by memory narratives led to continuities of violence across different conflicts creating “terrortimes” and “terrorscapes” in their wake. The volume examines such continuities of violence with the help of an analytical framework built around different themes. Its first part, spatial and temporal continuities of violence, looks at contested spaces and ideas of national, ethnic, or religious homogeneity that …

The Marriage Between Art And Politics: Propaganda, Rebecca J. Counen

The Purdue Historian

During the first half of the twentieth century Europe, Asia, and the United States faced many political/social changes and challenges amid both ideological wars and revolutions. This research paper works to analyze films from this era in order to convey the somewhat unorthodox, yet nonetheless influential and compelling, relationship between the arts and politics and how creativity is oftentimes manipulated for power and influence.

From The Stars To The Headlines: The Propaganda Of Yuri Gagarin, Peyton Edelbrock

The Purdue Historian

There were no haphazard decisions made by the Soviet Union when it came to choosing the first man to be sent to space. Months of training, careful planning, and well-hidden secrets eventually led to the decision of Yuri Gagarin. This led to the mass production of propaganda to spread, from Yuri Gagarin touring around the world to music being written about him, all centered around his trip to space and Soviet excellency. This propaganda still stands today in Russia, and its God-like idolization of cosmonauts is forever present.

Organized Savagery: Legitimization Of British Occupation In The Post-Ottoman State, Jamie M. Emerson

The Purdue Historian

The Great War of 1914-1918 saw the internment of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, captured and maintained by the hand of their enemy. Allegations and accounts of ill-treatment under the enemy’s care abounded during and after the war. Leading up to the Peace Conference of 1919, negotiators chose to account for the suffering of these prisoners in their demands for indemnities and reparations. This paper assesses how the British Parliament and press used stories about the suffering of British and Indian prisoners of war in Ottoman internment camps as a means to delegitimize Ottoman rule and legitimize British …

Opposing Strands: The Mediterranean As Site Of Cultural Conflict Around 1900, Neil F. Mcwilliam

Artl@s Bulletin

From antiquity to the Third Republic, this article follows visual and literary representations that measured space, time and ideological oppositions that spawned an image of the Mediterranean as an area of transmission and cultural tension. It focuses on three theorists: the head of Action Française, Charles Maurras; the novelist Louis Bertrand; and critic and cultural impresario Joachim Gasquet. Each contributed to the formation of an image of the Mediterranean basin as the birthplace of European heritage and a battlefield in a struggle against the forces of democracy and cultural hybridization.

Provincializing New York: In And Out Of The Geopolitics Of Art After 1945, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

In this article, I argue that the putative global centrality of New York in art after 1945 is a construct, as it is for Paris prior to 1945. Monographs and national approaches are unsuccessful in challenging such powerful myths as these. A global, transnational and comparative approach demonstrates that the struggle for centrality was a global phenomenon after 1945, a battle that New York does not win (depending on one’s point of view) until after 1964. Rather than considering centres and peripheries as a fixed category, I propose to consider them as a strategic notion which artists and their promoters …