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German Scholars in Exiledeals with intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany and found refuge in either the United States or in American Services in Great Britain and post-WWII Germany. The volume focuses on scholars who were outside the commonly known Max Horkheimer-Hannah Arendt circles, who are less well-known but not less important. Their experiences ranged from an outstanding career at an Ivy-League university to a return to the German Democratic Republic and a position as an economic advisor to East Berlin's party leadership. None had actual political power, but many asserted some degree of influence. Their intellecutal legacies can still be seen in today's political culture.
Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400-1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE is a completely updated version of John Ward’s much-used doctoral thesis of 1972, and is the definitive treatment of this fundamental aspect of medieval and rhetorical culture. It is commonly believed that medieval writers were interested only in Christian truth, not in Graeco-Roman methods of ‘persuasion’ to whatever viewpoint the speaker / writer wanted. Dr Ward, however, investigates the content of well over one thousand medieval manuscripts and shows that medieval writers were fully conscious of and much dependent upon Graeco-Roman rhetorical methods of persuasion. The volume then demonstrates why and to what purpose this use of classical rhetoric took place.
"A harrowing account of the profoundly consequential decisions American universities made about refugee scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe. The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving" and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era."--Provided by publisher.
The essays in An Interrupted Past describe the fate of those German-speaking historians who fled from Nazi Europe to the United States. Their story is set into several contexts: the traditional relationship between German and American historiography, the evolution of the German historical profession in the twentieth century, the onset of Nazi persecution after 1933, the special situation in Austria, and the difficulty of settling the refugees in their new homeland. In addition to articles on prominent scholars, there are accounts of the group as a whole, including information on more than ninety individuals, and of their family lives. An Interrupted Past is set in one of the darkest periods in human history, a time of political catastrophe and personal suffering. Yet the lives recorded here also illustrate people's capacity to survive, adjust, and create under difficult circumstances.
The book deals with the relationship between Friedrich Meinecke, who is often considered to be the leading German historian of the first half of the twentieth century, and several of his students who, after the Nazi seizure of power, were forced to emigrate because of their Jewish descent or their political views. The letters published here to Meinecke from Hans Rothfels, Dietrich Gerhard, Hajo Holborn, Felix Gilbert, Hans Rosenberg, and others show these scholars' deep respect for their old teacher, but also their growing distance from his historical interests and methods. In a period of struggle between democracy and Nazi dictatorship, the letters address the problems of emigration and remigration, German-Jewish and German-American identity, and historiography in both Germany and the United States.
The gradual secularization of European society and culture is often said to characterize the development of the modern world, and the early Italian humanists played a pioneering role in this process. Here Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles, have edited and translated seven primary texts that shed important light on the subject of "civic humanism" in the Renaissance.Included is a treatise of Francesco Petrarca on government, two representative letters from Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni's panegyric to Florence, Francesco Barbaro's letter on "wifely" duty, Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue on avarice, and Angelo Poliziano's vivid history of the Pazzi conspiracy. Each translation is prefaced by an essay on the author and a short bibliography. The substantial introductory essay offers a concise, balanced summary of the historiographcal issues connected with the period.
The impact of the Norman conquest of Sicily and Southern Italy in the 11th-12th centuries upon the society of that region forms the central theme of this volume. Norman relations with the Byzantine world are also an important topic. Several studies directly examine questions of continuity and change, both with regard to lay society and in a section devoted to the Church; others approach the subject more obliquely, through the analysis of contemporary historical writing, the documents and diplomatic of the Princes of Capua, and religious patronage. Throughout, they attempt to locate the conquerors within the context of the society they invaded, and within which they were only a minority.
Twice-Told Tales presents the life and writings of Dante Alighieri's maestro, the Florentine notary and diplomat, Brunetto Latino. The book first discusses archival documents found in Florence, the Vatican Secret Archives, Genoa, England and elsewhere, which were written by or which name Brunetto Latino. The documents concern, among other topics, the Vallombrosan Abbot Tesauro, the Sicilian Vespers' plotting, and the death by starvation of Ugolino. The book then discusses Brunetto's translations of Aristotle's Ethics and Cicero's De inventione, as texts presented to Charles of Anjou and others, as well as the influence of these texts on Dante. Appendices present the archival documents discussed in the book and list manuscripts containing Latino's writings.