William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most prominent and productive authors of the twentieth century-and his works have been among the most cinematically transformed in history. For more than five decades, adaptations of his plays, stories, and novels dominated movie theaters and, later, television screens. More than ninety ......
Transnational solidarity movements often play an important role in reshaping structures of global power. However, there remains a significant gap in the historical literature on collaboration between parties located in the Global South. Facing increasing repression, the Latin American left in the 1960s and 1970s found connection in transnational ......
RenEe Poznanski's magisterial history of the French Resistance during World War II offers a comprehensive exploration of the most significant issue in that period's social imaginary: the "Jewish question." With extraordinary nuance, she analyzes the discourse around Jews and Judaism that pervaded the Resistance's propaganda and debates, while ......
Imperial Rome privileged the elite male citizen as one of sound mind and body, superior in all ways to women, noncitizens, and nonhumans. One of the markers of his superiority was the power of his voice, both literal (in terms of oratory and the legal capacity to represent himself and others) and metaphoric, as in the political power of having a ......
Nietzsche, Culture, and the Scandinavian Welfare Society
In 1889, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published "Aristocratic Radicalism: An Essay on Friedrich Nietzsche," which transformed the as-yet-unknown German-Swiss philosopher into a European, and ultimately global, phenomenon. The article sparked a furious public debate between Brandes and a fellow Dane, philosopher Harald HOffding, who swiftly ......
During World War II, some two million Jewish refugees relocated from the western regions of the USSR to the Soviet interior. Citizens in the Central Asian territories were at best indifferent-and at worst openly hostile-toward these migrants. Unpopular policies dictated that residents house refugees and share their limited food and essentials with ......
43 BCE, the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar. While the Roman republic had seen many conflicts, it was this civil war, headed by the vengeful triumvirate of Mark Anthony, Marcus Lepidus, and Octavian, that irrevocably transformed Rome with its upheaval. What followed was years of fighting and the eventual ascendancy of Octavian, who ......
Iurii Trifonov and the Material World of Soviet Culture
Although understudied in the West, Iurii Trifonov was a canonical Soviet author whose lifetime spanned nearly the whole of the USSR's history and who embodied many of its contradictions. The son of a Bolshevik murdered on Stalin's orders, he wrote his first novel in praise of the dictator's policies. A lifelong Muscovite, he often set his prose in ......
History, Heritage, and the Construction of Swedish American Identity
Spanning more than 100 years of Swedish American local history in the Midwest and the West, Jennifer Eastman Attebery's thorough examination of nearly 300 historical legends explores how Swedish Americans employ these narratives in creating, debating, and maintaining group identity. She demonstrates that historical legends can help us better ......
