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A century-long struggle to make a borderland population into loyal Germans or Poles drove nationalist activists to radical measures.
Biographies of a Reformation. Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, c. 1520-1635 introduces the region of Upper Lusatia, where Lutherans, Catholics and a range of other groups coexisted in a largely peaceful manner.
Civil War in Central Europe argues that Polish independence after the First World War was forged in the fires of the post-war conflicts which should be collectively referred to as the Central European Civil War (1918-1921). The ensuing violence forced those living in European border regions to decide on their national identity - German or Polish.
Plebiscites, or referendums, are epitomes of direct democracy and the right of self-determination. While direct democracy has always been a key subject in the theory and practice of western liberal democracies, the issue of self-determination has been propelled to the fore by the hegemonistic moves of Russia. By providing a historical analysis of the post-World War One plebiscites, this book deals with enduring, painfully contemporary, and in in any case fundamental, concepts. The contributors to this edited volume approach the referendums comparatively. After grounding the analysis theoretically, the authors look at detailed aspects of individual cases, with the two plebiscites held in the ...
Ten essays analyzing the history and effects of the Paris Peace Conference following World War I. The settlement of Versailles was more than a failed peace. What was debated at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 hugely influenced how nations and empires, sovereignty, and the international order were understood after the Great War?and into the present. Beyond Versailles argues thatthis transformation of ideas was not the work of the treaty makers alone, but emerged in interaction with nationalist groups, anti-colonial movements, and regional elites who took up the rhetoric of Paris and made it their own. In shifting the spotlight from the palace of Versailles to the peripheries of Euro...
In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Upper Silesia was the site of the largest formal exercise in self-determination in European history, the 1921 Plebiscite. This asked the inhabitants of Europe’s second largest industrial region the deceptively straightforward question of whether they preferred to be Germans or Poles, but spectacularly failed to clarify their national identity, demonstrating instead the strength of transnational, regionalist and sub-national allegiances, and of allegiances other than nationality, such as religion. As such Upper Silesia, which was partitioned and re-partitioned between 1922 and 1945, and subjected to Czechization, Germanization, Polonization...
Winner of the Jefferson Davis Award Winner of the Johns Family Book Award Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award “A work of deep intellectual seriousness, sweeping and yet also delicately measured, this book promises to resolve longstanding debates about the nature of the Civil War.” —Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg—tens of thousands of soldiers died on these iconic Civil War battlefields, and throughout the South civilians suffered terrible cruelty. At least three-quarters of a million lives were lost during the American Civil War. Given its seemingly indiscriminate mass destruction, this conflict is oft...
A long environmental history of the Aral Sea region, focusing on colonization and development in Russian and Soviet Central Asia.
Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.
This book examines the ways Poland dealt with the territories and peoples it gained from Germany after the Second World War.