You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
The Rhine River is Europe’s most important commercial waterway, channeling the flow of trade among Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. In this innovative study, Mark Cioc focuses on the river from the moment when the Congress of Vienna established a multinational commission charged with making the river more efficient for purposes of trade and commerce in 1815. He examines the engineering and administrative decisions of the next century and a half that resulted in rapid industrial growth as well as profound environmental degradation, and highlights the partially successful restoration efforts undertaken from the 1970s to the present. The Rhine is a classic example of a “mu...
Throughout the world more policy making and the politics that shape it take place in the urban regions where most people live. This book draws on eleven case studies of similar but disparate urban regions in France, Germany and the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. It documents the growth of this urban governance and develops a pioneering analysis of its causes and consequences. It traces the origins to the expansion and devolution of policy making, to local business mobilization and institutional interests in high-tech and service activities, and the incorporation of local social movements. Nation-states shape the possibilities for this urban governance, but operate increasingly as infrastructures for local initiatives. Where urban governance has succeeded in combining environmental quality and social inclusion with local prosperity, local officials have built on supportive infrastructures from higher levels, the local economy, civil society, and favourable positions in the global economy.
This volume looks at how religious identity and symbolic ethnicity influence migration. Religion – Christianity – was an important factor in European transatlantic migrations; religion – Islam – is a major issue in the immigration debate in “post-secular” Germany (and Europe) today. Essays focus on German missionaries and their efforts in the eighteenth century to establish new communal forms of living with Native Americans as religious encounters. In a comparative fashion, Islamic transnational migration into Germany in the twenty-first century is explored in a second group of essays that look at Muslim populations in Germany. They provide an insight into the ongoing discussions in Germany about modern migration and the role of religion. This volume is of interest to all who are engaged in issues of historical and contemporary migration, in Cultural and German Studies.
Tobias Krüger explores the discovery of the Ice Ages, how the idea was received, and what further research it stimulated. The approach used in Discovering the Ice Ages is uniquely sweeping. The contemporary debates on the subject are compared from an international perspective. Krüger retraces the arguments advanced from the middle of the 18th century to the threshold of the 20th century. The positions held by defenders of the glacial theory as well as those by its most important opponents are set within the context of the then current understanding of geology. In an interdisciplinary overview Krüger then focuses on the impetus gained from early ice-age research. The most prominent examples worth mentioning are the discovery of trace gases and the greenhouse effect.
This book is a comprehensive treatment of the professionalization and institutionalization of the academic discipline of geography in Europe and North America, with emphasis on the 20th century and the last quarter of the 19th. No other book has ever attempted coverage of this sort. It is relevant to geographers, practitioners of the social and earth sciences, and historians of science and education.
The Battle of Itter Castle was undoubtedly one of the strangest events of the Second World War, being one of only two occasions during the war in which Americans and Germans fought side by side. The castle was seized by the Nazis on 7 February 1943, on the direct orders of Heinrich Himmler, and in just ten weeks was changed into a five-star prison for a number of high-ranking French dignitaries, both civilian and military. In the final days of the war, in May 1945, with the castle's German guards having deserted their posts and an attack by SS units imminent, those inside the castle realised they needed help. Having sent out two men to try to make contact with American forces, it was then a ...
One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity. In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland's scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeles...