This article examines the history of ancestral tourism and its development as a form of cultural diplomacy between 1945 and 1966. The phenomenon often referred to as ‘roots tourism’ has during the last decades increased in popularity, especially in Old World countries that historically have sent large numbers of people to North America. While previous scholarship has focused on its existential dimensions

Raul Hilberg’s landmark study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, was published in 1961. This article tells the story of the early response to Hilberg’s book. For the first time, journalists, scholars, intellectuals and representatives of Jewish communities engaged in a debate about the history and political significance of the Holocaust. This debate preceded the controversy surrounding

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual

This article investigates the contribution of the Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi to the anti-nuclear peace movement at national and international level. Amaldi (1908–89) was one of the leading nuclear physicists of the twentieth century. He grew up in the extraordinary environment of the ‘Via Panisperna Boys’, a group of young physicists active in Rome during the late 1920s and 1930s, under Enrico

The July 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey caught the Greek Colonels (1967–74) off guard, as they proved entirely incapable of responding to the casus belli, partly provoked by their own actions. Greece remained technically in the state of military mobilisation for about four months and with the democratic transition well underway. This article catalogues the ways in which this conflict mobilised Greek

The effects of the Great Depression on the important cocoa plantation sector of the archipelago of São Tomé e Príncipe – a Portuguese colonial laboratory for social change in plantation agriculture shifting between coercive practices and attempts at accommodation – were drastic: initially backed by a right-wing authoritarian government, plantation managements lowered workers’ wages and made already

This article examines The Gambia’s campaign from 1977-83 for a new international mechanism to protect human rights in the Commonwealth of Nations. President Dawda Jawara’s crusade for a Commonwealth Human Rights Commission complicates the dominant scholarly interpretation of human rights history, which tends to dismiss or overlook African participation in the international human rights movement. The

In the aftermath of civil war, Spain witnessed a period known as the ‘Years of Hunger’, which would extend throughout the postwar years (1939–52). The dictatorship would lay the blame on external factors, although the causes for the collapse of living conditions and food supply over that time lay in its autarkic policies. This article attempts to show that Spain was victim of a famine as a consequence

This article addresses the protest culture of the Spanish anti-NATO movement during the first half of the 1980s. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it focuses on the collective practice of painting murals and graffiti (pintadas) on walls in the outskirts of Spanish cities. This was done by neighbourhood associations, together with local artists, in order to display and disseminate the widespread

Why did the French government delay its endorsement of the Hoover Moratorium in the summer of 1931? Key policymakers were fully aware that their stance would exacerbate the German financial crisis, which ultimately dragged the European economy into the abyss. Most historical accounts identify the plan for an Austro-German customs union, which became known publicly in March 1931, as a major cause for

This article explores the twin phenomena of anti-fascism and transnational war volunteering through a case study of the International Group of the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War. This anarchist-led unit comprised approximately 368 volunteers with a variety of political views from at least 25 different countries. The article examines the relationship between these foreign volunteers and their

After white landowners evicted black sharecroppers in late 1960 for registering to vote, activists in Fayette and Haywood Counties organized ‘Tent Cities' in a bid to focus national media attention on their plight. Over the decade, it developed into a wide-reaching campaign for desegregation in public accommodations and education, welfare reform, voting rights, and sustained community improvement measures

This article unravels the complexities revealed in the act of traveling to and photographing Fascist Italy in order to consider the intricacies of a particularly German-Jewish engagement with contested and highly politicized spaces and scenes. It examines four specific images in the album: namely, one photo from South Tyrol/Alto Adige along with the three images from a Fascist night-time rally in Venice

Strange and unhealthy visions of the past gained popular currency during Britain’s 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union and were elaborated upon by commentators in its acrimonious aftermath. These stories were infused with nostalgia – particularly for the Second World War – and proclaimed the specialness of the British state and its people and their supposed indefatigability in the face

There has been an explosion of academic interest in humanitarianism in recent years. Salvatici’s monograph adds to this dynamic field of research that has lately seen the proliferation of detailed thematic and case-study analyses of individual organisations, aspects of the humanitarian endeavour and humanitarian crises. The variety of these contributions have gradually begun to fill in the gaps in

The rise of the ‘shock city’ in Britain and America in the mid-nineteenth century catapulted the state of the urban environment into the public eye. The emergence of shock cities – ‘new industrial and mercantile giants’ (p. 2) – heralded the emergence of a new economic, social, and political age, but also shaped a discourse that framed urban centres as places of filth, deprivation, and vice. Manchester

Jimmy Reid is a totemic figure of twentieth century labour history. His political life is of interest to scholars of Scottish labour history and beyond, perhaps most obviously through his leadership of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ (UCS) successful 1971 work-in. Knox and McKinlay’s new biography provides a valuable resource for revisiting the life of a celebrated, charismatic and sometimes controversial

What makes a monument? How did the practice of monument preservation intersect with global political changes during the twentieth century? These questions sit at the heart of this book, which convincingly and elegantly traces the rise of monument preservation as inextricable from the oftentimes-destructive global political convulsions of the twentieth century. Emphasizing how destruction in fact wrought

This book will be indispensable for researchers of the British Mandate in Palestine. For starters, the amount of research put into this volume is truly outstanding. While most official sources have long been in the hands of historians, Hughes makes extensive use of previously untapped British regimental archives and the private correspondence and oral testimonies of rank and file officials, policemen

While in the last few decades the historiography of the Haitian Revolution has thrived, becoming increasingly central to the histories of the Atlantic World, Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938 with a second edition published in 1963, remains the classic exploration of the Haitian Revolution. The book’s narrative sweep, elegant prose, and revolutionary

Based on Raul Hilberg’s work, Holocaust research traditionally divides the members of societies affected by the genocide into three categories: victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, the last of which was the least studied until the ‘bystander boom’ at the turn of the millennium. The present volume of 16 ground-breaking studies published in 2019 by editors Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs is a contribution

Jack Omer-Jackaman’s analysis of Anglo-Jewish identity between 1948 and 1982 constitutes a worthy addition to a literature the contours of which have been shaped by figures such as Geoffrey Alderman, W.D. Rubinstein and V.D. Lipman. In its specific concerns about the role played by Israel and Zionism in defining that identity, it builds upon the scholarship of Stephan Wendehorst, Natan Aridan, Rory

Energy resources have always been a fundamental actor in human development, and have had an important influence on our technologies, cultures and societies. However, it is only with industrialization and the rise of fossil fuel consumption that energy systems have come to the fore of world governance. Without playing a ‘chicken or egg’ game of causation, Burning Up moves from the necessary question

Natasha Goldman's book offers an engaging account into early and lesser researched memorials dedicated to the Holocaust in pre-and post-unification Germany and in the United States. The focus is on the 1960s to mid-2000s, a period which Goldman argues witnessed the coming of age of the Holocaust Memorial, both as an aesthetic genre, and as a central marker of a developing culture of Holocaust remembrance

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite set out to understand how political change impacted ideas about class. She wound up explaining how changing ideas about class facilitated political change. That subtle evolution followed from two attributes of this impressive book: a formidable source base, including the revisiting of social surveys undertaken between 1968 and 2000; and an attentiveness to findings that

The visit of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the ‘New Town’ of Milton Keynes in September 1979 offers the starting point of Guy Ortolano’s new book about changing views of how to build a city, from the social democratic perspective of postwar Britain to the market liberal approach of Thatcherism and New Labour.

Jack Saunders’ study of car workers digs beneath simple explanations for the industrial militancy found in the sector in the 1960s and 1970s to show how car workers created and sustained a culture that – for a time – enabled them to leverage industrial power in their interests. The growing industrial militancy of the period from the 1950s to the early 1980s is often depicted as the result of the strong

In the wake of the ‘Windrush scandal’ it is vital that the complicated relationship between Britain and the Caribbean is better understood. Romain’s book offers a window into the ties of identity and history which bind Britain and Jamaica. Using the lens of an individual queer black man – Patrick Nelson – Romain interweaves local, national and imperial narratives. Working across a range of cultural

On 20 September 2019, hundreds of thousands of school children walked out of their classrooms to protest government inaction on the climate crisis. Led by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the global climate strike provoked a range of responses from adults, many of whom took to popular and social media to voice their opinion on the next generation. The strike emphasized, too, the

In this book, Dan Healey explores the prehistory of 2013, Russia’s ‘year of political homophobia’ (p. 1), when the so-called gay propaganda law provoked a national conversation about Russia’s LGBT citizens, and a rash of hate crimes and other acts of discrimination prompted Western countries to threaten to boycott the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Written for ‘the general reader who is puzzled by the current

The relative failure of political extremism in interwar Britain has long fascinated historians. Bernhard Dietz, in this deeply researched book (excellently translated by Ian Copestake), suggests that scholars’ focus on the activities of fascism has blinded us to the threat to interwar political stability from Conservative ‘Neo-Tories’. This was a group of elite, highly educated men who had been profoundly

In the past decade, British Black Power (BBP), which began in the late 1960s and reached its apex in the early 1970s, has gone from obscurity to having a TV mini-series complete with Idris Elba as its star. The re-emergence of BBP has been accompanied by a range of historical work on BBP groups, such as the Black Panther Movement and the Black Liberation Front, and individuals such as Olive Morris

This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) in the Netherlands during the Marshall Plan era. It shows that the impact of the ECA’s public diplomacy w...

This article explores how the Mexican state gathered, archived and destroyed information. It focuses on the US–Mexico campaign against foot-and-mouth disease between 1947 and 1952, whose paper archive Mexican officials burned near the successful conclusion of the campaign. This article argues that several factors shaped the context for this documentary bonfire and made the 1940s a key point of inflection

William W. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018; 542 pp.; US$34.99; ISBN 9781139025737

emerges here and there, the book is basically an institutional history of governmental energy policies (most primary sources stem from Government or Parliament). Intellectual debates are relegated mostly to the background. There are exceptions to this rule, such as the intriguing description of the ‘Akins vs. Adelman controversy’ about how to deal with price increases (pp. 139–44), or references to

esting comparative. However, such suggestions do not detract from what is already a unique and impressively constructed study. The contemporary migrant crisis has seen Britain, once again, pursued as site for sanctuary. Restrictive immigration measures and anti-migrant rhetoric has largely dictated policy, with detention centres most often the destination for those seeking asylum. Bailkin’s important

and highlights differences between differing imperial approaches and those of the indigenous populations, allowing for an incredibly nuanced presentation of shared ideas and practices applied to commodities across empires, concluding with their legacies. Environmental historians too will find much of interest in Ross’s approach to explaining how the latter stages of empire helped influence future environmental

This is an important contribution to the history of science, of NATO and of international scientific cooperation. Simone Turchetti has engaged in extensive, multi-archival research in several countries, in state as well as private archives. He has discussed a broad chronological period, from the early 1950s until today; and aptly points to NATO’s ‘green’ (as opposed to the ‘khaki’) dimensions. Science

However, despite its newness and its extreme artifice, the town has come to be seen as the home of a normative British everyman and woman, a place whose preferences and prejudices are the raw material of British politics and should be courted by anyone who seeks power. The most important lesson from Milton Keynes in British Culture is about the unexpected ways that certain landscapes become imbued

suffer from this difficulty, the importance of interconnection outlined in the introduction does rather draw the reader’s attention to the lack of connection between chapters. As far as the genre can take us, however, the introduction does a good job of setting out the more cohesive historiographical agenda. Overall, this volume is a welcome and thoughtful contribution to the field. Individual chapters

This article provides the first in-depth historical case study of Honda’s assembly plant in Lincoln, Alabama. Established in 1999, the plant became one of the biggest auto factories in the US, empl...

While the suffering of Allied prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma railway during the Second World War is well documented, much less is known about the Asian labourers employed on the project. Focusi...

The peace mobilisation against the Euromissiles in the early 1980s constituted one of the biggest mass movements in contemporary European history. The article aims to examine the completely neglect...

While most victims of sexual offences perpetrated by US servicemen during the Second World War were women and girls, rape and sexual assault of men and boys were not uncommon. 75 such cases are exa...

Politicians across parties repeatedly agreed that their visions of social improvement rested as much on the promotion of character virtues as on the efficacy of economic systems. Character posed re...

This article explores four aspects of George L. Mosse’s legacy in the field of nationalism. First, it examines his wrestling with the normative complexities of nationalism, reflected in his horror ...

In the wake of the Second World War, cultural officers from the western Allied powers recovered several million objects plundered by the Nazis – works of art, Judaica, fine furniture, collectible books and archive collections. Recent books and films have popularized the history of the heroic art recovery effort, but less well-known is the story of what happened to objects that were never returned to

The fact that the Geneva Convention of 1929 placed prisoners of war (POWs) under the laws in effect in the army of the detaining state meant that western POWs in Nazi Germany were exposed to the ex...

Despite its impact on the breakdown of public order and on the rise of armed violence, the role of civilian disarmament in post-Second World War transitions is yet to be properly investigated. This...

This article explores transnational connections between anti-imperialist groups in West Germany and Japan through an examination of the protest around the Japanese Emperor’s state visit to Bonn in 1971. Although anti-imperialist movements in Japan and West Germany had many similarities and moments of contact, there are few treatments of these groups in transnational perspective. The event offers a

From 1941 to 1945 thousands of British and American sailors came to the northern Soviet ports of Arkhangel’sk and Molotovsk with Lend-Lease convoys. On the shore they made many casual contacts with local residents, in particular with Soviet women. These contacts came under close scrutiny of the Soviet authorities who tried to limit the alleged subversive influence of foreign nationals on Soviet citizens

During the Second World War, the US Army was faced with the problem of turning average civilians into soldiers capable of destroying the German army. To ease their adjustment to their new duties an...

The objective of this article is to compare the concept of brutalization, analyzed by George Mosse, with the civilizing process, described by Norbert Elias. The intellectual life of these German-Je...

AbstractIn May and June 1943, a photographer with the American Office of War Information (OWI) photographed West African men who he identified as ‘witch doctors’ engaging in masquerade dances dedic...

In August 1935, British authorities tipped off Ankara about a team of assassins who were allegedly headed for Turkey to assassinate its president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Within a month, the Turkish ...

This article explores George Mosse's complex attitude to both nationalism in general and particularly to Zionism and Israel. It examines how Mosse was explicitly caught between a critical analysis ...

The French-Congolese Senator, Jane Vialle, was appointed as a French delegate to the United Nations in 1949. During her term she served on the Ad-Hoc Anti-Slavery committee as an expert on African colonial conditions and the status of African Women. Vialle's work on the international stage was an extension of her efforts towards reforming the political, social and economic rights of women at national

The Second World War became the backdrop of Japanese espionage activities in Latin America that helped to delay the total expulsion of Japanese officers and businesses from the Americas and confine...

Laurent Warlouzet, Governing Europe in a Globalizing World : Neoliberalism and its Alternatives following the 1973 Oil Crisis, Abingdon, Routledge, 2018; 288 pp.; £105.00 hbk; ISBN 9781138729421.