At the heart of the present work is the matter of the date and path which lead to the ultimate decision to destroy European Jews (to paraphrase the title of the masterpiece written by Raul Hilberg, the first great historian on the Shoah). The author intends to introduce the topic in the clearest possible way with regards to language and arguments and to deal with the topic from the perspective of an intellectual historian, not that of a contemporary historian (which he is not). He presents it as an exemplary case for the comparison of ideas on contemporary history, society, and politics. Starting with an examination into the Nazi as an individual, he continues with an analysis and various portraits of intellectuals turned exterminators. A key item is the year 1941 as the turning point toward the Shoah. The final chapter is dedicated to the comparison between Intention and Function in the history of the Shoah.

In no country were contests over racism in sport more bitterly fought, more protracted or important than in Australia. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in 1960, sport became a fault-line in international campaigns against racism. Struggles over racism penetrated every aspect of sporting interaction between Australia and South Africa.   Playing With Apartheid explores the role of Australian sport in the long campaign to end white minority rule in South Africa. International controversy over apartheid-sport also exposed racism in the very fabric of sport in Australia.

In the late eighteenth century, enlightened politicians and upper-class women in Spain debated the right of women to join one of the country’s most prominent scientific institutions: the Madrid Economic Society of Friends of the Country. Societies such as these, as Elena Serrano describes in her book, were founded on the idea that laypeople could contribute to the advancement of their country by providing “useful knowledge,” and their fellows often referred to themselves as improvers, or friends of the country. After intense debates, the duchess of Benavente, along with nine distinguished ladies, claimed, won, and exercised the right of women to participate in shaping the future of their nation by inaugurating the Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito, or the Committee of Ladies of Honor and Merit. Ten years later, the Junta established a network of over sixty correspondents extending from Tenerife to Asturias and Austria to Cuba.   With this book, Serrano tells the unknown story of how the duchess and her peers - who succeeded in creating the only known female branch among some five hundred patriotic societies in the eighteenth century - shaped Spanish scientific culture. Her study reveals how the Junta, by stressing the value of their feminine nature in their efforts to reform education, rural economy, and the poor, produced and circulated useful knowledge and ultimately crystallized the European improvement movement in Spain within an otherwise all-male context.

How many lives can one man save? Never enough, Horton realized. As his ship backed away from Smyrna’s wharf, he could better see the helpless, teeming crowd on the waterfront trapped between the sea and a raging inferno. He was not consoled by rescuing his shipload of refugees, nor by the many other Christian, Jewish, and Muslim lives he had saved during his service as American consul. His focus was on the people before him threatened with fire, rape, and massacre. Their persecution, he later said, made him ashamed he “belonged to the human race.” Helping them would not be easy, however. His superiors were blocking humanitarian aid and covering up atrocities with fake news and disinformation to win Turkish approval for American access to oil. When Horton decried their duplicity and hard-heartedness, they conspired to destroy his reputation. Undaunted, Horton pursued his cause until it went to the President and then Congress for decisions that would set the course for America’s emergence as a world power. At stake was the outcome of WWI, the stability and liberality of the Middle East, and the likelihood of more genocide.

Cultural differences are often the trigger for conflict – whether politically motivated or arising from dissonant understandings of national culture. But what we regard as distinctive today in our cultural heritage or day-to-day cultural experience is deeply rooted in the rich diversity of the national currents of the nineteenth century. Culture and Conflict: Nation-Building in Denmark and Scandinavia, 1800–1930 explores the many strands of Danish and Scandinavian culture that helped to shape these cultural identities.   The sixteen contributions in this volume analyse how competing national agendas influenced the development of political life as well as literature, the visual arts, and music. A central theme is the cultural conflicts that formed an essential part of nineteenth-century nation-building. Culturally as well as politically, boundaries were drawn up, ideologies were formulated and discussed, and determined attempts were made to suppress divergent cultural voices in the drive to forge strong national or Scandinavian narratives. The results of these conflicts were the enduring cultural struggles that form the subject of this volume.   The contributions at hand, by scholars from Denmark, Britain, Norway, the United States, and Germany, bring a broad and interdisciplinary perspective to bear on these distinctively Nordic themes. Aimed both at students and at established scholars, the chapters discuss the many facets of nationalism, its cultures, and its countercultures, as well as revisiting the historiography of the 1800–1930 period with a more pluralistic approach.

In 1493, King Hans of Denmark and Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow concluded one of the earliest treaties of alliance between a Catholic European and an Orthodox Muscovite ruler. The alliance proved viable enough to generate two further treaties and an astounding fifty-plus diplomatic missions between Copenhagen and Moscow over the next thirty years. Yet little of scholarly value has been written about this unique late-medieval relationship across a divisive religious border.   The book is intended to provide a solid foundation for a comprehensive study of the alliance. The author first goes over the peculiar customs and diplomatics of treating with medieval Russia, then proceeds to detail the diplomatic processes leading to each of the three Danish-Muscovite treaties. Further the surviving Danish and Muscovite treaty texts are published in a new critical edition with commentary and translations into English. And finally, the author reconstructs the missing originals of the treaties for a complete assembly of texts underlying the alliance.

This in-depth study offers a new examination of a region that is often overlooked in political histories of the Bluegrass State. George G. Humphreys traces the arc of politics in western Kentucky from avid support of the Democratic Party to its present-day Republican identity. He demonstrates that, despite its relative geographic isolation, the counties west of the eastern boundary of Breckinridge County down to the Tennessee state line played significant roles in state and national politics during the New Deal and postwar eras.Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Humphreys explores the area's political transformation from a solid Democratic voting block to a conservative stronghold by examining how developments such as advances in agriculture, the diversification of the economy, and the Civil Rights Movement affected the region. Addressing notable deficiencies in the existing literature, this impressively researched study will leave readers with a deeper understanding of post-1945 Kentucky politics.

Unanimously banned and condemned, torture has been used in many countries throughout the 20th century. Ruxandra Cesereanu’s essay aims to deepen this subject, showing the unimaginable dimensions that human cruelty can sometimes reach. The Armenian Genocide, the Nazi camps, the Gulag, the Military Juntas in Latin America, the totalitarian regimes in Africa and those in Islamic states are just a few examples of the tortures that man can inflict on his fellow men. From the description of the techniques, the motivations and the moments in which acts of savage violence take place to portraits of torturers and the victim, Ruxandra Cesereanu’s book gives us an overview of the phenomenon of torture, to refresh our collective memory.

Alan Ward combines constitutional history and political science to compare all nine of Australia’s political systems: federal, state and territory. Guided by a model of parliamentary government drawn from comparative politics, he considers the selection of the government; the prime minister and cabinet; government control of the lower house; the primacy of the lower house in bicameral systems; the head of state, and the influence of Australian federalism on parliamentary government. He also considers the growth of executive democracy in Australia, with its dominant executive.

This is a book on the rise and fall of diasporic communities in Early Modern urban centers in Denmark and Sweden. It contains 17 chapters written by archaeologists, historians and scientists, ranging from in-depth studies of artefacts, biofacts and archaeological features to large-scale analyses of community formation among natives and migrants of multiple origins. The plethora of sources and approaches afforded by the numerous disciplines involved enables a significant new insight into the creation and recreation of migrant communities in these Early Modern towns.

Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin from August 1991 to January 1996. During the August 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, he was present when tanks moved in to seize the Russian White House, where Boris Yeltsin famously stood on a tank to address the crowd assembled. He then departed to Paris to muster international support and, if needed, to form a Russian government-in-exile. He participated in the negotiations at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in Belazheva, Belarus where the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus agreed to secede from the Soviet Union and form a Commonwealth of Independent States. Kozyrev’s pro-Western orientation made him an increasingly unpopular figure in Russia as Russia’s spiraling economy and the emergence of ultra-wealthy oligarchs soured ordinary Russians on Western ideas of democracy and market capitalism.

In 1952 an Australian journalist cabled from Johannesburg: ‘Apartheid is the trigger that has fired racial explosions in South Africa and sent echoes rumbling around the world’. In the outposts of Europe’s unstable empires, entrenched racism came under unprecedented assault. ’White Australia’, in particular, was challenged as opposition to racial oppression under a white minority regime in South Africa hardened. In both countries the politics of anti-racism were unleashed, in different ways and with very different consequences. In South Africa entrenched systems of white supremacy were brutally enforced under apartheid. In Australia, ideologies of race and white privilege were disrupted and, slowly, walls of discrimination cracked. Race politics in post-war Australia was deeply affected by the fractious international struggle over apartheid.   The movement against apartheid obliged white Australia to grapple with moral and political issues embedded in its own racialised history and sense of nationhood. Contests provoked by apartheid were played out on the world stage and, as Indigenous activists emphasised, in Australia’s own backyard.   This pioneering book explores these struggles as white Australia negotiated its place in a post-colonial world.

Vladimir Fedorovich Dzhunkovsky was a witness to Russia’s unfolding tragedy - from Tsar Alexander II’s Great Reforms, through world war, revolution, the rise of a new regime, and finally, his country’s descent into terror under Stalin. But Dzhunkovsky was not just a passive observer - he was an active participant in his troubled and turbulent times, often struggling against the tide. In the centennial of the Russian revolution, his story takes on special significance.

David Hume was not only a lover of political speculation, who dealt with politics in his most important works, but also an expert in military strategies and techniques; a friend and confidant of generals, ministers, parliamentarians, local administrators, dukes, and barons. He was also a talented diplomat, a moderate member of the British government, and an original interpreter of international affairs and war, which he experienced first-hand on the battlefield. Nevertheless, until today, Hume’s practical experience as statesman has not been adequately considered.   In this book, the first complete edition, the five writings concerning Hume’s involvement in the practice of policy are collected: A True Account of the Behaviour and Conduct of Archibald Stewart, late Lord Provost of Edinburgh (1748); Account of the Descent on the Coast of Brittany and the Causes of its Failure (1746); Journal of the British Embassy to the Courts of Vienna and Turin  (1748); Dispatches of a British Diplomat at Paris (1764-65); and Correspondence of an Under-Secretary of State (1767-68).

What are the limits of tolerance in constitutional or liberal democracies today? This is a crucial question, for if there were no limits to tolerance, it would ultimately destroy itself by accepting the intolerable. The concept of tolerance has to be assessed from a political point of view, thus questioning to what extent its potential achievement does not suppose any moral mutation in humanity. For instance, if people were all already ‘virtuous’ according to a commonly held moral framework, there would be simply no need to speak of tolerance. Conversely, if it were the case that people could be made ‘virtuous’, then tolerance would be the matter of an improbable utopia. Ultimately, we need to consider how tolerance can be conceptualised in a way that is relevant to people and their societies as they actually are. In a time when a growing amount of political demands touches on themes of cultural identity and rights, and while we witness a mounting wave of religious fundamentalism, what should democracies accept and what should they refuse?

What can Montesquieu still teach us today? Montesquieu was the first political writer who formulated the principles of separation of powers and the independence of justice. He was the first to scientifically study human institutions, both ancient and modern, Asiatic and European, African and American. Again, he was the first thinker to theorize Federal Democracy, systematically tracking down the root causes of human events in its environmental, cultural, historical, and geographical aspects. Analysing several aspects of Montesquieu’s philosophical and political thought, this volume highlights his stoicism, realism, anti-despotism as well as his staunch defence of human dignity.   Introducing one of the sharpest thinkers of modernity, this book offers fundamental tools to understand the very ground of our contemporary times.