Really enjoyed sitting down with Dr. Miranda Melcher from the New Books Network podcast to discuss my book From Occupation to Integration: Recivilizing the French Zone of Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1955 (LSU Press, 2026).
@newbooksnetwork.bsky.social #skystorians
open.spotify.com/episode/2K5Y...
I appreciate that, thank you! And I know it can be a big ask, so no obligation.
Thank you!
Thank you! I see you're just up the road from me in Rochester - I'd love to drop by RIT and talk about the book if there's interest!
UPDATE: It's officially published as of today! If you're interested, I'm happy to answer questions and to speak to undergraduate and graduate courses as desired.
lsupress.org/978080718678...
#skystorians
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATHER
thank you so much!
At the same time, civilizational identities, as social constructions, are also negotiated and renegotiated. Consider Israel, a country that has made bids to be seen as part of "the West" despite its location in the Levant, the "near East" by British imperial reckoning.
Of course power has to do with who gets to be considered both "civilized" in terms of levels of civilization and "one of us/them" in terms of civilizational belonging. States claim centrality to a civilization and draw lines around their civilization based on their own interests.
West Germany's "recivilizing" was not as brutal as "civilizing" processes undergone by Europe's overseas colonies, but it was structurally similar. The German population was ethnologically dissected, its collective psychology and loyalties analyzed according to a mix of scholarship and stereotypes.
At the same time, even West Germany, a clearly European power the history of which was intertwined with that of France and other western European powers, was understood as having pass through a set of trials to rejoin a supposedly higher civilization.
Like all social constructions, we could hand wave it as basically "made up" - a pretext for "harder," surer forms of power to do what they wanted to anyway. But civilizational ideas really shaped both French practices in their Zone of Occupation and German responses to them. The ideology functioned.
The Cold War and decolonization were backdrops for West Germany's admittance into Western institutions - NATO, the EEC, etc. That's the institutional West. But it was paired with an imaginative process of integrating West Germany back into historical/cultural/religious solidarity with its neighbors.
My book From Occupation to Integration (out tomorrow!) is about the readmission of southwestern Germany to the Occident - the Roman-Germanic west. I think it contains general lessons regarding civilizing processes and inclusion/exclusion, though. lsupress.org/978080718678...
These two parts don't always fit cleanly together. A place an be conceived of as spatially/historically "part" of a civilization but also at a different LEVEL of civilization than the rest. Then there's the process of admission to a civilizational category, which is often provisional and revocable
These are crucial questions. I see civilizational thinking as instrumental, a flexible ethnocultural and political discourse. It has, as far as I can see, two main axes: 1) the idea of the world being made up of discrete civilizations and 2) ideas about the process by which peoples become civilized
(i do not know what it is about [the Strait of Hormuz] that closes and opens;only something in me understands
the [price] of your [oil] is [higher] than all roses)
nobody,not even the [president],has such small hands
e.e. cummings said it best:
your slightest look easily will unclose [the strait of Hormuz]
though i have closed [it] as fingers,
you open always petal by petal [the strait] as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
"the colleges that dominate the headlines are not the colleges that most Americans attend
their core mission: to serve students from all backgrounds, at a price families can actually afford, prepare graduates for real careers and meaningful lives."
www.geneseo.edu/enrollment-m...
Many faculty at places like Yale, especially ones who like to pontificate about the state of higher ed, have never stepped foot on a non-fancy small liberal arts campus, a state school, or a community college. Which is the majority of higher ed.
Authoritarianism 101. I am so happy to participate of this key educational initiative by the American Historical Association
@historians.org !
www.historians.org/news-publica...
#YomHaShoah Among 1,3 million people deported to the German Nazi camp #Auschwitz, 1,1 million were Jews (1 million of them were murdered). See their countries of origin.
Learn more about Jewish prisoners & victims of Auschwitz: http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/29_zydzi_en
Peter Schöttler - Marc Bloch, une biographie intellectuelle
À paraître en mai chez Gallimard
Congratulations to the new PM of Hungary, Péter Magyar - truly the Pierre (Mendès)-France of his country.
With 60% of the vote in, the Hungarian opposition is projected to win 135 seats in parliament--which would give it a supermajority to overturn Orban's changes to the constitution.
Incredible result for the Hungarian people.
from the potlatch gift giving rituals of the pre-contact Pacific Northwest to "buy nothing" and contemporary gift economies
In Senegal, Lamine Gueye is affiliated with this law.
If you can't make one of my upcoming in-person book launches (and even if you can!) join me on May 7 at 3-4pm EST for a virtual book launch event through LSU Press. More info at the link below:
www.facebook.com/share/1RwKRQ...
By normal standards most academic work gets overlooked, but my least-read piece seems to be this book chapter from 2019... it's in German, a book chapter, and on a characteristically niche subject, but I enjoyed the theory side of it a lot and maybe you will too!
www.academia.edu/42332023/Tu_...