"Eley brilliantly probes transformations in the historians' craft over the past four decades. I found A Crooked Line engrossing, insightful, and inspiring."--Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic"A Crooked Line brilliantly captures the most significant shifts in the landscape of historical scholarship that have occurred in the last four decades. Part personal history, part insightful analysis of key methodological and theoretical historio...

As the 20th century recedes, how should its history be written? The 1920s and 1930s were a time of paradox, of great conflict and contradiction. If those years were the crucible of a new metropolitan modernity and its possibilities, what were the forward-moving forces and ideas? What were their effects and where did they lead? The Modernist Wish provides a comprehensive, non-hierarchical and integrated history of Europe's early 20th century across the whole of the continent. Uniting social...

Stepping back from the immediate controversy surrounding the merits and shortcomings of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, this edited volume intervenes in the continuing discussion by exploring aspects of the public's reception to Goldhagen's book--what the authors call the "Goldhagen Effect." The first essay, by Omer Bartov, examines the extent to which the book's reception in the United States, Germany, France, and Israel reflected differing attitudes toward the Hol...

Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930 draws together important new work on the Kaiserreich--the period between Bismarck's unification of Germany and the First World War. Work on the Kaiserreich built up impressive momentum during the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of inspiring but divisive controversies called into question the ways in which German historical development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mainly understood. These discussions focused on issues of ...

Visualizing Fascism argues that fascism was not merely a domestic menace in a few European nations, but arose as a genuinely global phenomenon in the early twentieth century. Contributors use visual materials to explore fascism's populist appeal in settings around the world, including China, Japan, South Africa, Slovakia, and Spain. This visual strategy allows readers to see the transnational rise of the right as it fed off the agitated energies of modernity and mobilized shared p...

Offering a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the key issues at the heart of the study of German Fascism, Nazism as Fascism brings together a selection of Geoff Eley’s most important writings on Nazism and the Third Reich.Featuring a wealth of revised, updated and new material, Nazism as Fascism analyses the historiography of the Third Reich and its main interpretive approaches. Themes include:Detailed reflection on the tenets and character of Nazi ideology an...

Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve orgainically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that or...

What was German modernity? What did the years between 1880 and 1930 mean for Germany's navigation through a period of global capitalism, imperial expansion, and technological transformation?German Modernities From Wilhelm to Weimar brings together leading historians of the Imperial and Weimar periods from across North America to readdress the question of German modernities. Acutely attentive to Germany's eventual turn towards National Socialism and the related historiograp...

How History has changed in the half-century since the 1960sDuring the last fifty years, the writing of history underwent two massive transformations. First, powered by Marxism and other materialist sociologies, the great social history wave instated the value of social explanation.Then, responding to new theoretical debates, the cultural turn upset many of those freshly earned certainties. Each challenge was profoundly informed by politics, from issues of c...

Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve orgainically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that or...

This book is one of the first to use citizenship as a lens through which to understand German history in the twentieth century. By considering how Germans defined themselves and others, the book explores how nationality and citizenship rights were constructed, and how Germans defined—and contested—their national community over the century. The volume presents new research informed by cultural, political, legal, and institutional history to obtain a fresh understanding of German history in ...

What was distinctive—and distinctively "modern"—about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently "bourgeois" formation in German public culture, the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a mo...