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See you at AHA!

Dear Colleague,

We are delighted to inform you that we will be attending the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in New York, NY, on January 3rd–6th, 2020. Please stop by Booth #1007 to browse our latest selection of books at discounted prices and pick up free journal samples. Scroll down for a preview of the new releases on display.

If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. Receive a 25% discount on all History titles found on our website until 2/6/2020. At checkout, simply enter the discount code AHA20. Browse our newly published 2020 History catalog here.

Berghahn Journals is delighted to offer free access to core History journals (see details below) until January 10, 2020! To access, use promo code AHA20. View redemption instructions.

We hope to see you in New York!

With best wishes,

Berghahn Books


A new interrogation of Steven Pinker’s argument on human violence

ON VIOLENCE IN HISTORY
Edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Stephen Micale

Is global violence on the decline? Steven Pinker’s highly-publicized argument that human violence across the world has been dramatically abating continues to influence discourse among academics and the general public alike. In this provocative volume, a cast of eminent historians interrogate Pinker’s thesis by exposing the realities of violence throughout human history. In doing so, they reveal the history of human violence to be richer, more thought-provoking, and considerably more complicated than Pinker claims.

The extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the Caribbean

NEARLY THE NEW WORLD
The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945
Joanna Newman

In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of Hitler’s Europe. Nearly the New World tells the extraordinary story of Jewish refugees who overcame persecution and sought safety in the West Indies from the 1930s through the end of the war. At the same time, it gives an unsparing account of the xenophobia and bureaucratic infighting that nearly prevented their rescue—and that helped to seal the fate of countless other European Jews for whom escape was never an option. See Harriet Sherwood’s review, “Revealed: how the Caribbean became a haven for Jews fleeing Nazi tyranny,” in The Guardian.

Read Introduction.

Celebrating the life and scholarship of Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews

THE ANATOMY OF THE HOLOCAUST
Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship
Raul Hilberg
Edited by Walter H. Pehle and René Schlott

“[Hilberg was] undoubtedly the most important pioneer in the field of perpetrator research, all of whose topics and controversies he anticipated in their essence.” • H-Soz-Kult

Though best known as the author of the landmark 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews, the historian Raul Hilberg produced a variety of archival research, personal essays, and other works over a career that spanned half a century. The Anatomy of the Holocaust collects some of Hilberg’s most essential and groundbreaking writings—many of them published in obscure journals or otherwise inaccessible to nonspecialists—in a single volume. Supplemented with commentary and notes from Hilberg’s longtime German editor and his biographer, it not only offers a multifaceted look at the man and the scholar, but also traces the evolution of Holocaust research from a marginal subdiscipline into a diverse and vital intellectual project.

Read Introduction.

GERMAN RAILROADS, JEWISH SOULS
The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution
Christopher R. Browning, Peter Hayes and Raul Hilberg
Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

“This important book unites three prominent scholars tackling crucial questions about German railways and the Holocaust. Two essays from the late, renowned Raul Hilberg investigate their overlooked role in the extermination of the European Jews. They provide groundbreaking investigations into the German railway as the prototype of a bureaucracy and challenge its supposed banality. While Christopher Browning eloquently situates Hilberg’s essays within the historical literature, Peter Hayes makes a detailed critique of the common but false belief that the deportation and annihilation of the Jews were more of a priority for the Nazis than the war effort. This question, arising from Hilberg’s essays, demonstrates the continued significance of his work today.” • Wolf Gruner, author, The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses

Renowned Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg considered the German railway system that delivered European Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe to be not only an essential component of the “machinery of destruction” but also emblematic of the amoral bureaucracy that helped to implement the Jewish genocide. German Railroads, Jewish Souls centers around Hilberg’s seminal essay of the same name, a landmark study of German railways in the Nazi era long unavailable in English. Supplemented with additional writings from Hilberg, primary source materials, and historical commentary from leading scholars Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes, this is a rich and accessible introduction to a topic in Holocaust history that remains understudied even today.

Read Preface.


Worlds of Memory Series

Vol. 2
VELVET RETRO
Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture
Veronika Pehe

Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.


Studies in Latin American and Spanish History Series

Vol. 6
TEACHING MODERNIZATION
Spanish and Latin American Educational Reform in the Cold War
Edited by Óscar J. Martín García and Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla

In the 1960s and 1970s, the educational systems in Spain and Latin America underwent comprehensive and ambitious reforms that took place amid a “revolution of expectations” arising from decolonization, global student protests, and the antagonism between capitalist and communist models of development. Deploying new archival research and innovative perspectives, the contributions to this volume examine the influence of transnational forces during the cultural Cold War. They shed new light on the roles played by the United States, non-state actors, international organizations and theories of modernization and human capital in educational reform efforts in the developing Hispanic world.

Read Chapter 1.


Environment in History: International Perspectives Series

Vol. 17
HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS
Agents of Risk and Change, 1800-2000
Edited by Ernst Homburg and Elisabeth Vaupel

Although poisonous substances have been a hazard for the whole of human history, it is only with the development and large-scale production of new chemical substances over the last two centuries that toxic, manmade pollutants have become such a varied and widespread danger. Covering a host of both notorious and little-known chemicals, the chapters in this collection investigate the emergence of specific toxic, pathogenic, carcinogenic, and ecologically harmful chemicals as well as the scientific, cultural and legislative responses they have prompted. Each study situates chemical hazards in a long-term and transnational framework and demonstrates the importance of considering both the natural and the social contexts in which their histories have unfolded.

Read Introduction.


New and featured titles

THE HOLOCAUST IN BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA
Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses
Wolf Gruner
Translated from the German by Alex Skinner
Vol. 28, War and Genocide

WINNER OF THE 2017 SYBIL HALPERN MILTON MEMORIAL BOOK PRIZE FROM THE GERMAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
2017 YAD VASHEM INTERNATIONAL BOOK PRIZE FOR HOLOCAUST RESEARCH – FINALIST

“Whoever is working on the National Socialist persecution of the Jews won’t be able to ignore Wolf Gruner’s work.” • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Prior to Hitler’s occupation, nearly 120,000 Jews inhabited the areas that would become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; by 1945, all but a handful had either escaped or been deported and murdered by the Nazis. This pioneering study gives a definitive account of the Holocaust as it was carried out in the region, detailing the German and Czech policies, including previously overlooked measures such as small-town ghettoization and forced labor, that shaped Jewish life. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Wolf Gruner demonstrates how the persecution of the Jews as well as their reactions and resistance efforts were the result of complex actions by German authorities in Prague and Berlin as well as the Czech government and local authorities.

Read Introduction.

NEW IN PAPERBACK!
THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
Impacts and Outcomes
Edited by Kristina Schulz
Vol. 22, Protest, Culture & Society

For over half a century, the countless organizations and initiatives that comprise the Women’s Liberation movement have helped to reshape many aspects of Western societies, from public institutions and cultural production to body politics and subsequent activist movements. This collection represents the first systematic investigation of WLM’s cumulative impacts and achievements within the West. Here, specialists on movements in Europe systematically investigate outcomes in different countries in the light of a reflective social movement theory, comparing them both implicitly and explicitly to developments in other parts of the world.

Read Introduction.

NEW IN PAPERBACK!
THE NUCLEAR CRISIS
The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s
Edited by Christoph Becker-Schaum, Philipp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, Martin Klimke, and Marianne Zepp
Vol. 19, Protest, Culture & Society

“This is an important volume on a key phase of the Cold War, one that will be of interest to scholars, but can also be assigned to undergraduate and graduate students. The various chapters build on each other beautifully, forming a coherent whole. Aside from a couple of rough spots, they are beautifully written, though they originally appeared in German. A list of abbreviations and annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter make this volume highly reader-friendly.” • German History

In 1983, more than one million Germans joined together to protest NATO’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe. International media overflowed with images of marches, rallies, and human chains as protesters blockaded depots and agitated for disarmament. Though they failed to halt the deployment, the episode was a decisive one for German society, revealing deep divisions in the nation’s political culture while continuing to mobilize activists. This volume provides a comprehensive reference work on the “Euromissiles” crisis as experienced by its various protagonists, analyzing NATO’s diplomatic and military maneuvering and tracing the political, cultural, and moral discourses that surrounded the missiles’ deployment in East and West Germany.

Read Introduction.

CONSTRUCTING INDUSTRIAL PASTS
Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation
Edited by Stefan Berger
Vol. 38, Making Sense of History

Since the 1960s, nations across the “developed world” have been profoundly shaped by deindustrialization. In regions in which previously dominant industries faced crises or have disappeared altogether, industrial heritage offers a fascinating window into the phenomenon’s cultural dimensions. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches and straightforward apologias for a past that was often full of pain, exploitation and struggle.

Read Introduction.

A HUMAN GARDEN
French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation
Paul-André Rosental
Translated from the French by Carolyn Avery
Foreword by Theodore M. Porter

Vol. 16, Berghahn Monographs in French Studies

“Paul-André Rosental has recovered each of the threads that led to this remarkable experiment … we discover piece by piece, within the history of Ungemach Gardens, the scientific and moral wellsprings of eugenics.” • Le Monde

Well into the 1980s, Strasbourg, France, was the site of a curious and little-noted experiment: Ungemach, a garden city dating back to the high days of eugenic experimentation that offered luxury living to couples who were deemed biologically fit and committed to contractual childbearing targets. Supported by public authorities, Ungemach aimed to accelerate human evolution by increasing procreation among eugenically selected parents. In this fascinating history, Paul-André Rosental gives an account of Ungemach’s origins and its perplexing longevity. He casts a troubling light on the influence that eugenics continues to exert—even decades after being discredited as a pseudoscience—in realms as diverse as developmental psychology, postwar policymaking, and liberal-democratic ideals of personal fulfillment.

Read Introduction.


Berghahn Journals

Berghahn Journals is delighted to offer free access to their core History journals until January 10, 2020! To access, use promo code AHA20. View redemption instructions.

Now Open Access!
ASPASIA
The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History
Senior Editor: Sharon Kowalsky; Editor & Book Review Editor: Krassimira Daskalova

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF CONCEPTS
Editors: Jani Marjanen, Jan Ifversen, and Margrit Pernau
Published on behalf of the History of Concepts Group.

HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/RÉFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES
Editor: Elizabeth C. Macknight; Co-Editor: W. Brian Newsome

JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL MEDIA, MEMORY & SOCIETY
Editor: Eckhardt Fuchs
Published on behalf of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research