Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 238 pp., $28.99 (pb), ISBN 978-0-52169-143-7.
Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 239 pp., $29.99 (pb), ISBN 978-0-2172-761-7.
The call to attend to a history of affect is hardly a new one in the profession: in 1941, in a classic essay entitled “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer le vie affective d’autrefois?,” Lucien Febvre laid out an agenda for just such a historiographical turn. His reasoning, however, had less to do with the need for a history of affect per se than with the belief that the history of ideas or of institutions, both of them mainstays of traditional historiography, “are subjects that the historian can neither understand nor make understood without this primordial interest that I call the psychological.” In a perceptive review essay of the historiography of emotions that marked the beginning of the current affective turn in historical inquiry, Barbara Rosenwein argued that Febvre’s turn toward such a history was less a repudiation of the political focus of history than a belief born from observing the rise of Nazism: “politics itself is not rational, not unemotional.” As Rosenwein notes, Febvre answered the skeptics in his own essay: “The history of hate, the history of fear, the history of cruelty, the history of love; stop bothering us with this idle chatter. But that idle chatter … will tomorrow have turned the universe into a fetid pile of corpses.”
Today most cities emphasize the construction of separate bicycle lanes as a sure path toward sustainable urban mobility. Historical evidence shows a singular focus on building bicycle lanes without embedding them into a broader bicycle culture and politics is far too narrow. Bicycle lanes were never neutral, but contested from the start. Based on comparative research of cycling history covering nine European cities in four countries, the article shows the crucial role representations of bicycles play in policymakers' and experts' planning for the future. In debating the regulation of urban traffic flows, urban-planning professionals projected separate lanes to control rather than to facilitate working- class, mass-scale bicycling. Significantly, cycling organizations opposed the lanes, while experts like traffic engineers and urban planners framed automobility as the inevitable modern future. Only by the 1970s did bicycle lanes enter the debate as safe and sustainable solutions when grass-roots cyclists' activists campaigned for them. The up and downs of bicycle lanes show the importance of encouraging everyday utility cycling by involving diverse social groups.
: Bloomsbury, 2013). Pasi Ihalainen and Antero Holmila, eds., Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2022), 364 pp. In 1780, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham thought about a
sensibility in dealing with these kinds of historical sources. Moreover, colonialism is usually discussed as if it was most of all a phenomenon undertaken by and having effects on European nation-states. Understandably, the curriculum focuses on European
Against the background of a new interest in empires past and present and an inflation of the concept in modern political language and beyond, the article first looks at the use of the concept as an analytical marker in historical and current interpretations of empires. With a focus on Western European cases, the concrete semantics of empire as a key concept in modern European history is analyzed, combining a reconstruction of some diachronic trends with synchronic differentiations.
This essay provides an introduction to the articles by Laird Boswell, Stéphane Gerson, and Gilles Pécout in this forum, which is based on a one-day conference held at UCLA in December 2006, several months before the death of Eugen Weber. It gives a brief biographical sketch of Weber's life, the central themes of his scholarly work, and assesses his contribution as an historian to the field of French and modern European history.
After a complex integration process which has taken more than half a century, most Europeans—and non-Europeans—no longer identify Europe with simply an economic common market; yet the final political status of the European Union is still an open question. In general, Europe is usually regarded as the birthplace of a set of values claiming universal validity and serving as the basic political reference for citizens and institutions throughout the world. The emergence and spread of such significant concepts as civilization, democracy, liberalism, parliamentarism, (human) rights, or tolerance, for example, are generally associated with modern European history.
This article discusses the relationship between Europe and ancient Greece as narrated (or ignored) in a range of European history textbooks. It unravels the threads the narrative has followed since the eighteenth century, investigating the choices made in construing the narrative taught today. Which meanings were inherent in the terms “east” and “west” before they acquired the ideological coloring associating “east” with “barbarians” and “west” with the civilized world and “Europe”? The article opens up a new perspective on a complex past that was lost from view when perceptions of the ancient Greeks as guarantors of European values became entwined with the invention of the nation state.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873), one-time President of the Second French Republic (1848-1852) and Emperor of the French (as Napoleon III, 1852-1870) exercised a profound effect on European cartoonists and the comic art they produced during his lifetime. As a real historical personality, Louis Napoleon feared the power of the cartoon to make him appear ridiculous and instituted one of the most effective and heavy-handed regimes of censorship of comic art in all European history. Beyond the boundaries of the French Empire, he pressured neighbouring states to protect his image in similar fashion, but in Britain and Germany and beyond, the cartoon Napoleon III became not only ubiquitous in the satirical press, but also served as a powerful touchstone for emerging national identities. The real Louis Napoleon's political and military influence was felt throughout Europe for over two decades, but his cartoon self was even more of a European phenomenon. Usually studied within national contexts, the 'Cartoon Emperor' needs to be studied transnationally in order fully to grasp his importance for developments in European history, as in European comic art.
