After World War II, some 12 million Germans, 3 million Poles and Ukrainians, and tens of thousands of Hungarians were expelled from their homes and forced to migrate to their supposed countries of origin. Using freshly available materials from Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czechoslovak, German, British, and American archives, the contributors to this book provide a sweeping, detailed account of the turmoil caused by the huge wave of forced migration during the nascent Cold War. The book also...

A thrilling piece of undiscovered history, this is the true account of a young Jewish woman who survived World War II in Berlin."The most extraordinary memoir of World War II I've ever encountered." — Washinton PostIn 1942, Marie Jalowicz, a twenty-year-old Jewish Berliner, made the extraordinary decision to do everything in her power to avoid the concentration camps. She removed her yellow star, took on an assumed...

Western Balkans, and specifically Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, are lagging significantly on the path to EU integration. Even twenty years after the conflict, these countries are burdened by ethnic and post conflict issues which hinder their progress on the path to EU integration.There is no alternative to this path, and it is one of the primary generators of reforms in the region.The most important parts of the reform which must be implemented are the fight agai...

Nearly twenty years after it ceased to exist as a multinational federation, Yugoslavia still has the power to provoke controversy and debate. Bringing together contributions from twelve of the leading scholars of modern and contemporary South East Europe, this volume explores the history of Yugoslavia from creation to dissolution.Drawing on the very latest historical research, this book explains how the country came about, how it evolved and why, eventually, it failed. From the sta...

According to Wikipedia: "John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) is best known for his work as an art critic, stage writer, and social critic, but is remembered as an author, poet and artist as well. Ruskin's essays on art and architecture were extremely influential in the Victorian and Edwardian eras."

When seeking the origins of World War I, the chain of events in the late nineteenth century that led to the breakdown of relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and facilitated the rise of an aggressive Serbian nationalism needs to be understood. This book focuses on the hitherto unexplored Hungarian influence on the Habsburg Monarchy's policy toward Serbia after the 1867 Ausgleich, and it argues that this early period was critical in shaping policy after 1871, down to the imposition ...

From Communists to Foreign Capitalists explores the intersections of two momentous changes in the late twentieth century: the fall of Communism and the rise of globalization. Delving into the economic change that accompanied these shifts in central and Eastern Europe, Nina Bandelj presents a pioneering sociological treatment of the process of foreign direct investment (FDI). She demonstrates how both investors and hosts rely on social networks, institutions, politics, and cultural...

Even before it collapsed into civil war, ethnic cleansing, and dissolution, Yugoslavia was an archetypical example of a troubled multinational mosaic, a state without a single national base or even a majority. Its stability and very existence were challenged repeatedly by the tension between the pressures for overarching political cohesion and the defense of separate national identities and aspirations. In a brilliant analysis of this complex and sensitive national question, Ivo Ban...

In 1949 construction of the planned town of Nowa Huta began on the outskirts of Krakow, Poland. Its centerpiece, the Lenin Steelworks, promised a secure future for workers and their families. By the 1980s, however, the rise of the Solidarity movement and the ensuing shock therapy program of the early 1990s rapidly transitioned the country from socialism to a market-based economy, and like many industrial cities around the world Nowa Huta fell on hard times.Kinga Pozniak shows how t...

This is a chronicle of one of the many ethnic groups in Canada, a group of about 80,000 people of Czech and Slovak origin who now live in this country. In the authors' own words, "the book is addressed both to Canadian-Canadians and to Czech-and-Slovak Canadians (if there is such a distinction)." The latter will learn from it who their fellow citizens of similar origin are, where they came from, what they brought to this country, and how they succeeded here. The book provides the "Canadian...

Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use “soft power” in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. Populated with compelling characters ranging from artists, writers, journalists, and scientists to party and government functio...

From the Soviet perspective, Eastern Europe was the near abroad – more accessible than the capitalist West, yet also unambiguously foreign. Observing their western neighbours, citizens of the USSR developed new ideas about the role of states, borders, and national identities in the Soviet empire.In The Near Abroad, Zbigniew Wojnowski traces how Soviet Ukrainian identities developed in dialogue and confrontation with the USSR’s neighbours in Eastern Europe. The author aptly...