Studies in Early Modern and Contemporary European History – serie

This volume explores the challenges and possibilities of research into the European dimensions of popular print culture.Popular print culture has traditionally been studied with a national focus. Recent research has revealed, however, that popular print culture has many European dimensions and shared features. A group of specialists in the field has started to explore the possibilities and challenges of research on a wide, European scale. This volume contains the first overview and analysis of the different approaches, methodologies and sources that will stimulate and facilitate future comparative research.This volume first addresses the benefits of a media-driven approach, focussing on processes of content recycling, interactions between text and image, processes of production and consumption. A second perspective illuminates the distribution and markets for popular print, discussing audiences, prices and collections. A third dimension refers to the transnational dimensions of genres, stories, and narratives. A last perspective unravels the communicative strategies and dynamics behind European bestsellers.This book is a source of inspiration for everyone who is interested in research into transnational cultural exchange and in the fascinating history of popular print culture in Europe.

The volume explores the relationship between religion and violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early modern period, involving European and Japanese scholars. It investigates the ideological foundations of the relationship between violence and religion and their development in a varied corpus of sources (political and theological treatises, correspondence of missionaries, pamphlets, and images).

This book takes up the stimuli of new international historiography, albeit focusing mainly on the two regimes that undoubtedly provided the model for Fascist movements in Europe, namely the Italian and the German. Starting with a historiographical assessment of the international situation, vis-à-vis studies on Fascism and National Socialism, and then concentrate on certain aspects that are essential to any study of the two dictatorships, namely the complex relationships with their respective societies, the figures of the two dictators and the role of violence. This volume reaches beyond the time-frame encompassing Fascism and National Socialism experiences, directing the attention also toward the period subsequent to their demise. This is done in two ways. On the one hand, examining the uncomfortable architectural legacy left by dictatorships to the democratic societies that came after the war. On the other hand, the book addresses an issue that is very much alive both in the strictly historiographical and political science debate, that is to say, to what extent can the label of Fascism be used to identify political phenomena of these current times, such as movements and parties of the so-called populist and souverainist right.

Looking back over the centuries, migration has always formed an important part of human existence. Spatial mobility emerges as a key driver of urban evolution, characterized by situation-specific combinations of opportunities, restrictions, and fears. This collection of essays investigates interactions between European cities and migration between the early modern period and the present. Building on conceptual approaches from history, sociology, and cultural studies, twelve contributions　focus on policies, representations, and the impact on local communities more generally. Combining case-studies and theoretical reflections, the volume’s contributions engage with a variety of topics and disciplinary perspectives yet also with several common themes. One revolves around problems of definition, both in terms of demarcating cities from their surroundings and of distinguishing migration in a narrower sense from other forms of short- and long-distance mobility. Further shared concerns include the integration of multiple analytical scales, contextual factors, and diachronic variables (such as urbanization, industrialization, and the digital revolution).

The material and energy flows that characterized the metabolism of preindustrial and industrial societies were organized through complex infrastructures based on interwoven social and natural elements. Analyzing infrastructures from many methodological and thematic perspectives, the present volume adopts an extensive periodization to identify the undeniable changes caused by industrialization and the persistence of pre-existing features and dynamics. The contributions range from the late Middle Ages to the 1990s and deepen historical characteristics of urban metabolism, the study of energy systems and their transitions, and the management and control of water resources. These reveal the strategies societies and states adopted to transform and adapt their surrounding environment in a constant and challenging equilibrium of diverse interests, whose impact over time has had environmental consequences on a global scale.

For decades historians argued for the downfall of communication, when early modern societies were hit by a natural disaster. After all, earthquakes caused the destruction of infrastructure, which hindered the spread of news. Instead, the last investigations opened a new point of view about the political communication: every crisis was a catalyst for news. The book widens this reading through a comparative analysis of several earthquakes in the Hispanic Monarchy territories, from Asia to America. However, the examination of communications provided in this volume is not an end in itself but is offered as a basis for reflection and to propose the notion that earthquakes trigger change in social and political dynamics. Earthquake-related crises exposed the underlying contradictions that the court of Madrid needed to address in the most effective way, and, if possible, swiftly. Earthquakes not only destroyed buildings and infrastructure but also social norms. Urgency reduced the distance between interlocutors, to some extent blurring the boundaries of self-censorship. Tremors therefore offer a rare opportunity to observe the political and military crises faced by the Hispanic Monarchy, the global empire of the time.

In the decades around 1900, there was a real boom in the establishment of nongovernmental international organizations in Europe. Their congresses debated a wide range of scientific, political, and social problems that had arisen with the industrial development and the dynamics of internationalization since the 1880s. The elites that were engaged in the meetings of international organizations, reacted to sociopolitical or economic change and developed new concepts for societal reform. The nation remained central to the world views of these elites and to the professional or political careers of their members. Internationalism and nationalism were closely linked in the decades before World War I. This shaped also their relations with national governments, the concrete forms of internal cooperation of international associations, and even the specific sociability of the transnational meetings of the elites. The contributions in this volume deal with the elites and encounters of various types of international organizations.

Selling goods, services, and experiences on the streets or roads has been a common activity in many parts of the world throughout history, as it still is today. The mobility and social marginality of many itinerant and street traders, however, has often caused them to be neglected by historians, when in fact they should be considered as central to the economic, social and cultural history of many cities and regions. Mobile Lives investigates the nexus between peddling, street trading and a series of interconnected issues (migration, the uses of urban space, the informal economy, cross-cultural encounters, street entertainment) across the longue durée and from an interdisciplinary perspective.The chapters present case studies spanning from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries and consider questions including the connections between street/mobile trades and migration across the centuries and in different regions; how this largely informal economy interacted with the licit economy; what kinds of spaces mobile traders have occupied in and between cities; how they have been regulated by local or national authorities; and how we can study them in the past given the limits of documentary and visual sources.