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This book argues that despite the tensions existing in all societies between religious faith and legal order, they inevitably interact. In the course of his discussion Berman traces the history of Western law, exposes the fallacies of law theories that fail to take religion into account, examines key theological, prophetic, and educational themes, and looks at the role of religion in the Soviet and post-Soviet state.
In The Baron in the Grand Canyon, Steven Rowan presents the first comprehensive look at the life of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Egloffstein, mapmaker, artist, explorer, and inventor. Utilizing new German and American sources, Rowan clarifies many mysteries about the life of this major artist and cartographer of the American West. This revealing account concentrates on Egloffstein’s activity in the American mountain West from 1853 to 1858. The early chapters cover his roots as a member of an imperial baronial family in Franconia, his service in the Prussian army, his arrival in the United States in 1846, and his links to his scandalous gothic-novelist cousin, Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein. E...
Friedrich Hecker (1811-1881) lived the first half of his life in the Grand Duchy of Baden, a small state in southern Germany. He was a major leader of a rebellion on behalf of the German republican movement in 1848, but his defeat forced him into exile in America. There he spent the second half of his life as a farmer in southern Illinois, helping to found the Republican Party and campaigning among his countrymen in local and national elections. During the Civil War he served bravely, fighting in some of the most important battles. Although much better known in Germany than in America, he founded a remarkable family in the Midwest that is still flourishing and is a major example of the melding of the European and American traditions of liberty. The work draws heavily from original sources, including letters and diaries at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection, the Missouri Historical Society, and the St. Louis Mercantile Library.
This is a uniquely authoritative study of German history between the mid-eighteenth century and the formation of the Bismarckian Reich. This is an extensive account of social and cultural, as well as political developments and shows that the creation of a Prussian-led nation-state should not be seen as 'natural' or inevitable.
The concept of customary international law, although differently formulated, is already present in early modern European debates on natural law and the law of nations. However, no scholarly monograph has, until now, addressed the relationship between custom and the European natural law and ius gentium tradition. This book tells that neglected story, and offers a solid conceptual framework to contextualize and understand the 'problematic of custom', namely how to identify its normative content. Natural law doctrines, and the different ways in which they help construct human reason, provided custom with such normative content. This normative content consists of a set of fundamental moral value...
An exploration of the interaction between art and politics in early modern Germany, this work focuses on art, political in content, produced by the Augsburg artist Jörg Breu the Elder during the second and third decodes of the sixteenth century. The book argues for the function of the art as fashioning political identities. The artist Jörg Breu is first introduced. His work for the city of Augsburg and for Habsburg and Wittelsbach rulers are examined. These works are placed within their historical context and analyzed according to how they articulate themes of warfare, ceremony, and history in order to construct political identity. The analysis of Breu's city chronicle and of the response of his art to political contest is particularly useful for historians of art and of politics.
Thirteen leading scholars offer a fresh look at four key topics in medieval Jewish studies: the history of Jewish communities in Western Christendom, Jewish-Christian interactions in medieval Europe, medieval Jewish Biblical exegesis and religious literature, and historical representations of medieval Jewry.
A comparative study of the power and limits of bureaucracy in historical empires from ancient Rome to the twentieth century.
To examine the long-run origins of democracy and dictatorship, Brian Downing focuses on the importance of medieval political configurations and of military modernization in the early modern period. He maintains that in late medieval times an array of constitutional arrangements distinguished Western Europe from other parts of the world and predisposed it toward liberal democracy. He then looks at how medieval constitutionalism was affected by the "military revolution" of the early modern era--the shift from small, decentralized feudal levies to large standing armies. Downing won the American Political Science Association's Gabriel Almond Award for the dissertation on which this book was based.
"His labors were often fruitless. His own master, Wilhelm I, and the Prussian bureaucrats, diplomats, and courtiers with direct access to this first of Bismarck's Wilhelmian nemeses could be at least as obstructionist in Berlin as Franz Joseph and his minions in Vienna. In fact, all too often Bismarck's lack of control over the Prussian elites was in part responsible for the resistance of the Habsburg ruling circle.".