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Channel: European History - Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press
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Genre and Periodization in the History of European Political Thought

Popular histories of political thought often seem to hop from the Greeks to the Renaissance, perhaps with an excursus to Aquinas. When I set out to write The First French Reformation: Church Reform and...

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War Short of War

In the history of the cold war Italy is not often seen as a crucial locale of the conflict.  Why was it so important for the United States and what were the stakes? Italy was the frontline of the...

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Into the Intro: Behind the Front

Prologue The shelling of the Belgian village of Dickebusch in April 1916 was hardly unexpected. Well within range of German guns when the mobile operations of summer and fall 1914 had given way to the...

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The Race Laws After 75 Years

Historians tend, for good reason, to be skeptical about practical applications of their work. When I suggest applications of this type, my editors say I am being “ahistorical,” which seems to be the...

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Preserving World War I in Words

Nine sheets of paper preserve a life. I often think, finding fragments in the Press Archive, how precarious is the line between preservation and destruction. Survival depends on so many chances and...

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Europe, 1914: A Puzzle

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America the Unready

Defense budgets and military preparedness have frequently been a contentious issue in the United States.  Today the defense budget of the United States equals in dollars the combined defense budgets of...

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Famous Faces of World War I

For more details about World War I, visit www.cambridge.org/firstworldwar or cambridgewwi.tumblr.com.

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Dark Humor in the Dark Ages

Fourteen hundred years ago a monk named Fraimer was plowing a field about a mile away from his monastery and broke the plow on a rock-hard clod of dirt. Then he accidentally cut off his thumb while he...

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Things That Go Bump in the Night

In December 2013, I tried to persuade you, in a piece on Christmas books, that Dickens and Prince Albert between them did not invent the ‘traditional’ Christmas. I now embark on a much more difficult...

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Why to Read Twentieth Century Spain: A History?

Many works on twentieth-century Spain have been published in the last decade, some of them extremely good. But a non-specialist reader, a university student or a foreigner interested in learning about...

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How I Became a Neo-Francoist Revisionist Historian Without Realising

In January 2012, the Spanish version of my Cambridge University Press monograph on Republican terror in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War was published. Having worked on this project for a decade, I...

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Beyond the Dinner Table

What do wine and sugar have in common? At first glance not much. Indeed, besides menu planning that combined wine and dessert, I thought little about connections between these two common foodstuffs, at...

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The Genesis of a Book

The relationship between religion and politics, and especially the influence of religion on political decisions, stirred my interest first as an undergraduate. When as a young Jesuit I departed for...

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A Crisis Is Just What France Needed – Or Is It?

The French like nothing more than to be in crisis. More than almost any other nation, the French enthusiastically declare themselves – and their country – to be in crisis. According to a whole raft of...

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Normalizing the Nazis

The Nazi era stands as an exceptionally horrific period of global history. But in recent years the perception of Hitler and the Third Reich has changed. In Internet culture, where irony rules supreme,...

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Images and the Images of Dreams in the Early Middle Ages

In Francia, probably in the late 780’s, a monk called John had a troubling vision about the death of Christianity. Charlemagne, king of the Franks (768–814), concerned with reforms of the church and of...

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Excavating in Hitler’s Path

Introduction The battle of Moscow involved 2.5 million men on both sides of the eastern front, making it one of the largest and, without question, one of the most important battles of the Second World...

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Inside the German-Soviet War

Introduction I. The infantry’s war “This campaign is the infantryman’s war. He wins and holds territory. He combs through the forests, he secures the supply lines, he wins the war.” So wrote Lt....

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WWII in the Mediterranean

Introduction For midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, the social highlight of their second year is the Ring Dance. It is an event replete with tradition and symbolism during...

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