Provides a history of contemporary Europe, covering thirty-four countries over a span of sixty years, and includes discussion of the region's economic development, culture, and politics.

This is the untold story of how some of Germany's top aristocrats contributed to Hitler's secret diplomacy during the Third Reich, providing a direct line to their influential contacts and relations across Europe, especially in Britain, where their contacts included the press baron and Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere and the future King Edward VIII. Using previously unexplored sources from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and the USA, this book unravels the story of top-level go-betweens such as the Duke of Coburg, grandson of Queen Victoria, and the seductive Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who rose from a life of poverty in Vienna to become a princess and an intimate of Adolf Hitler. As Urbach shows, Coburg and other senior aristocrats were tasked with some of Germany's most secret foreign policy missions from the First World War onwards, culminating in their role as Hitler's trusted go-betweens, as he readied Germany for conflict during the 1930s and later, in the Second World War. Tracing what became of these high-level go-betweens in the years after the Nazi collapse in 1945, from prominent media careers to sunny retirements in Marbella, the book concludes with an assessment of their overall significance in the foreign policy of the Third Reich.

"An encyclopedic amount of information is analyzed with considerable wisdom and a felicitous style."--Simon Serfaty, Johns Hopkins Univ. Laqueur presents a fascinating overview of post-war Europe, providing detailed analyses that cover every major political development, economic and social trends, and cultural movements since 1945. "An excellent work destined to become a standard text for the 90s."-- Library Journal .

Common wisdom has long held that the ascent of the modern nation coincided with the flowering of Enlightenment democracy and the decline of religion, ringing in an age of tolerant, inclusive, liberal states. Not so, demonstrates Anthony W. Marx in this landmark work of revisionist political history and analysis. In a startling departure from a historical consensus that has dominated views of nationalism for the past quarter century, Marx argues that European nationalism emerged two centuries earlier, in the early modern era, as a form of mass political engagement based on religious conflict, intolerance, and exclusion. Challenging the self-congratulatory geneaology of civic Western nationalism, Marx shows how state-builders attempted to create a sense of national solidarity to support their burgeoning authority. Key to this process was the transfer of power from local to central rulers; the most suitable vehicle for effecting this transfer was religion and fanatical passions. Religious intolerance--specifically the exclusion of religious minorities from the nascent state--provided the glue that bonded the remaining populations together. Out of this often violent religious intolerance grew popular nationalist sentiment. Only after a core and exclusive nationality was formed in England and France, and less successfully in Spain, did these countries move into the "enlightened" 19th century, all the while continuing to export intolerance and exclusion to overseas colonies. Providing an explicitly political theory of early nation-building, rather than an account emphasizing economic imperatives or literary imaginings, Marx reveals that liberal, secular Western political traditions were founded on the basis of illiberal, intolerant origins. His provocative account also suggests that present-day exclusive and violent nation-building, or efforts to form solidarity through cultural or religious antagonisms, are not fundamentally different from the West's own earlier experiences.

The transformation of mathematics from its ancient Greek practice to its development in the medieval Arab-speaking world is approached by focusing on a single problem proposed by Archimedes and the many solutions offered. From a practice of mathematics based on the localized solution (originating in the polemical practices of early Greek science), we see a transition to a practice of mathematics based on the systematic approach (grounded in the deuteronomic practices of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages). A radically new interpretation is accordingly offered of the historical trajectory of pre-modern mathematics.

Continuing with the theme of his work Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts , Murray Roston applies to a later period the same critical principle: that for each generation there exists a central complex of inherited ideas and urgent contemporary concerns to which each creative artist and writer responds in his or her own way. Roston demonstrates that what emerges is not a fixed or monolithic pattern for each generation but a dynamic series of responses to shared challenges. The book relates leading English writers and literary modes to contemporary developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture. "A sumptuous book. . . . Clearly and gracefully written and cogently argued, Roston's admirable achievement is of paramount significance to literary studies, to cultural and art history, and to aesthetics. . . . Outstanding."--Choice Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The period from November, 1989 to November, 1990 can be compared with such decisive dates in twentieth-century European history as 1918 and 1945. Germany and Europe have entered a crucial period of transition altering the European security landscape considerably. The documents published in this volume--many of them for the first time--provide an important record of this historic period. Key papers by some of the leading German politicians of this period, delivered at Potsdam in February, 1990, are presented, along with a sober assessment of the role which the united Germany can play in the newly emerging structure of European security.