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This book is a fascinating collection of chapters which partly analyse and partly evoke different periods, spaces and above all images of Milan since the 1950s. It does not fit into a neat academic category or discipline, beyond its being loosely a historical overview of the city. History, in this case, is neither social nor economic or political - nor is it a combinations of these.
One of the most difficult, and under-rated, jobs undertaken by the historian is that of the synthesis. Text books covering long periods of historical time demand the exclusion of vast quantities of material.
The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 / Terry Martin
Weighing in at over five hundred pages, this formidable work of scholarship investigates the fifteen-year evolution of the Soviet Union's strategy towards its multi-ethnic jurisdiction from the 'Lenin Constitution' of 1923 through to the consolidation of the 'Stalin Constitution' of 1936.
In The Fall of the GDR, David Childs discusses the collapse of the GDR up to unification. He begins by discussing the leadership structure of the GDR, and notes in particular the relative longevity and the geriatric age structure of the Politbureau in the 1980s.
In spring 2004, Chris Ward argued in Rethinking History that writing on late Stalinism ‘focuses almost exclusively on “high politics”’.(1) Despite the publication of a handful of works that explore the social and cultural history of post-war era – in particular monographs by Amir Weiner, Donald Filtzer and Elena Zubkova – this has remained
John Hiden’s book on Paul Schiemann, the Baltic German ‘defender of minorities’, is a highly welcome contribution not only to the history of Baltic Germans or the Baltic States, but also to European twentieth-century history as a whole.
During the last 25 years, academic writing on film and the cinema has been dominated by two analytical systems.
Both these books have their origins in excellent PhD research theses, which have then been adapted into book form. Both books are highly original, well-written and well-organised.
This book can be viewed in several ways. Each of its ten chapters by a different author deals with a discrete topic (women, gender, public opinion, photography and food supply) without any pretence of thematic unity.
In August 1985 the French weekly L'Evénement du jeudi published a dossier of articles by professional historians titled 'Pétain, héros ou traître?' to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Marshal's trial for high treason as Vichy head of state.