Orals Bibliography

Here’s the bibliography I have to draw from for the oral exam. My final preparation task is to make sure I know something about each book, it’s importance (historigraphically, methodologically and historically) and thesis. No biggie, right?

  1. William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, Rev. ed. (New York: F. Watts, 1984).
  2. Götz Aly, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
  3. Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006).
  4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
  5. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  6. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, Studies on the history of society and culture 42 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
  7. Volker Rolf Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, 2nd ed. (New York, N.Y: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
  8. Lenard R Berlanstein, ed., The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, [England]: Routledge, 1992).
  9. Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
  10. David Blackbourn, Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Wurttemberg Before 1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
  11. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1984).
  12. Rita S Botwinick, A History of the Holocaust: From Ideology to Annihilation, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson Education, 2004).
  13. Christopher R Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 1st ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).
  14. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918, 2nd ed., New approaches to European history (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
  15. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
  16. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
  17. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, Studies on the history of society and culture 28 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
  18. Caroline C Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993).
  19. Christopher E Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, The Johns Hopkins University studies in historical and political science 121st ser., 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
  20. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
  21. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1st ed. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1998).
  22. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998).
  23. Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
  24. Mary Fulbrook, Twentieth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture and Society 1918-1990 (London: Arnold, 2001).
  25. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
  26. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
  27. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
  28. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1990).
  29. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
  30. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1996).
  31. Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998).
  32. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity After World War II, Inside technology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998).
  33. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
  34. E. J Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution [Europe] 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962).
  35. E. J Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).
  36. E. J Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
  37. Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
  38. Lynn Avery Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
  39. Konrad Hugo Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
  40. Konrad Hugo Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2003).
  41. Eric Thomas Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2001).
  42. Marion A Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Studies in Jewish history (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
  43. Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
  44. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution–Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002).
  45. George O Kent, Bismarck and His Times (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
  46. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
  47. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family , and Nazi Politics, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
  48. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003).
  49. Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
  50. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
  51. Maurice Larkin, France Since the Popular Front: Government and People, 1936- 1986 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
  52. Kristie Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
  53. Kristie Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  54. Peter Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
  55. A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
  56. John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
  57. Jan-Werner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
  58. Philip G Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
  59. Robert A Nye, Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France: The Medical concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1984).
  60. Robert O Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, Columbia University Press Morningside ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
  61. Pamela M Pilbeam, The Constitutional Monarchy in France, 1814-48, Seminar studies in history (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000).
  62. Koppel Shub Pinson, Modern Germany; Its History and Civilization, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
  63. Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-2004, 4th ed. (Harlow, Essex, England: Pearson/Longman, 2004).
  64. David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
  65. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).
  66. Jean H Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1979).
  67. Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker, Science, Technology, and National Socialism (New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  68. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1998).
  69. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991).
  70. Edward W Said, Orientalism, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
  71. Carl E Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
  72. Robert R Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans?: The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
  73. James J Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866, Oxford history of modern Europe (Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press, 1989).
  74. Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  75. Rebecca L Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000).
  76. Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1984).
  77. Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848-1849 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1991).
  78. W. B Stephens, Education in Britain, 1750-1914, Social history in perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
  79. Matthew Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich (London: Arnold, 2003).
  80. Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
  81. Raymond G Stokes, Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany 1945-1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
  82. E. P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964).
  83. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
  84. F. M. L Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).
  85. Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Women in culture and society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
  86. R. K Webb, Modern England; from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968).
  87. Eugen Joseph Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977).
  88. Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1994).
  89. Hans Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1993).
  90. Eric D Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2007).
  91. Martin J Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, 1st ed. (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
  92. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979). 

[image from flickr Commons]

Prep for Orals – Teaching Plans

I will invariably get a few questions about how I would teach modern European history as a professor. To prepare for these types of questions I wrote down (actually, I typed them all in, no pencil or paper used 🙂 ) the three nations I’m looking at and some themes, events, and books I would like to use in a course. I struggled with which people, if any to focus on.

A theoretical question I could be asked is: Say you have to teach a course on (Modern England, Modern France, Modern Germany, Modern Europe, World Wars in Europe, etc). What themes, events, people would you focus on and what books would you include? What would be the layout of the course?

I focus on individual countries below, and for a general European course, I would just draw from each of the countries. The books I pull from are only the ones on my Orals reading list. I would most likely supplement with other books after doing some research if I were really teaching a course.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that I probably would never just go chronologically through a time period to hit big events and “important” people. History is very subjective. We look back on events and information with a certain set of “filters” on. For example we view Germany with political filters, focusing on governments and politicians. Or we may focus on France with cultural filters, looking at food, society, entertainment and arts. It’s impossible to get a full picture or sense of the past. Just as it’s impossible to gain a full sense of the present. There’s just too many people, too many viewpoints, too many sides to the same story, and too many filters to encompass everything. What’s the point, then? The point is to do what we can. Find what interests you and study the past through that filter. There’s nothing wrong with learning about one slice of the pie, as long as we don’t think our slice represents the whole thing. With that said, then, I would probably pick a few themes and have the books, discussions and (unless totally unavoidable) lectures focus on those themes. See the very bottom of this post for a couple of teaching ideas.

Trafalgar Square, London, England. 1915

England

Themes:

Industrial Revolution (political and economic changes), gender issues, education and society (state vs individual), nationalism, modernization, imperialism

Events:

Industrial Revolution

Chartists

Imperialism (changes)

Boer Wars

WWI – inter war – WWII

post-WWII

People:

Books:

Thompson, E. P.: Read sections to show the idea that class was created through Industrialization. Shows argument about quality versus quantity, and averages dilute the results.

Berlanstein: shows importance of Industrial Revolution and the different ways historians view the past based on present circumstances. Shows how historical works are influenced by current situations.

Thompson, Dorothy: Shows the beginnings of political uprisings supported by the common people.

Davidoff & Hall: Shows the beginning of the Victorian ideals, the separation of men and women spheres, and the “traditional” gender roles. Gender and economy seen to influence each other (gender roles determined by occupation, work and public sphere influence gender roles).

Porter: A good look at imperialism/British colonialism, the change from economical to ideological. Shows colonialism as a European power struggle. Addresses the masculinity of imperialism and fears in rise in feminism (Boer Wars)

Mandler: Brings up issue of state control versus individual liberty and accountability.

Eiffel Tower, Paris, France. 1900

France

Themes:

Political revolutions, class changes, colonialism, gender, religion, memory, nationalism, antisemitism

Events:

French Revolution

Political changes through 1870 (republics, monarchies, and empires)

Third Republic

Colonialism

Dreyfus Affair

WWI – interwar – WWII

Fourth Republic

Algeria

Fifth Republic

People:

Napoleon, Dreyfus, de Gaulle, Petain,

Books:

Ford and Weber: compare different ways of looking at nationalism in France. Bottom-up and Top-down show many ways and nationalism was sculptured.

Hazareesingh: Argues that concepts of citizenship and a weaker state government were first established during Second Empire, rather than in Third Republic. Sources based on elite writings, so it shows what they wanted, not necessarily what happened, since there was much restriction of local governments and individual rights.

Nord: Unique way of looking at how Third Republic lasted so long, not how it could end in Vichy. Shows how Third Republic implemented political ideas that Hazareesingh shows the Second Empire wanted to use (decentralized govt., create sense of citizenship, etc). Shows building of “traditional” Victorian ideals about gender, public/private spheres, middle-class bourgeois life shaped by and influenced politics in France.

McManners: to show the decline in religion, the issues of church and state (infalibility of pope)

Forth (or other book on Dreyfus Affair): Discuss why Dreyfus Affair was so influential in France and elsewhere. The issues of antisemitism in places other than Germany, and the masculinity complex in France and Europe.

Prochaska: To show importance of colonies, especially Algeria, to France. Stresses that Algeria was France, so issues there were similar to issues in France. Perhaps also read with Horne about the Algerian wars and end of France occupation to show the story from occupied and occupiers.

Weber: Show the interwar years as decisive in France allowing Nazis so much influence in France.

Paxton and Rousso: Show the involvement of Vichy with Nazis, and the national conundrum that places on French narrative.

Hecht: To address the issue of France dealing with their national image and turning to technology and technocrats as the source of narrative building.

Marktplatz in old town Goslar Germany. 1882

Germany

Themes:

nationalism, colonialism, fascism, religion, memory, antisemitism,

Events:

Napoleon’s unification of Germany

1848 Revolutions

Unification

Imperial Germany

Wilhelmina Germany

WWI – interwar (Weimar, Nazi) – WWII

post-war (Ground zero)

East and West Germany

re-Unification

People:

Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Hitler,

Books:

Kent: Show the unification of Germany and the role Bismarck played in shaping German politics and culture in nineteenth century.

Chickering: Discuss the reasons for WWI and Germany.

Bessel and Gay: Bessel for a traditional account of Weimar, Gay for a look at the social impact.

Allen: Look at the rise of Nazis.

Kershaw: Look at the mythos and sensationalism surrounding Hitler

Koonz: Look at women and their roles in Nazi Germany.

Kaplan: Look at the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Unique look from the bottom up, from the woman and mother’s viewpoint.

Fullbrook: formation and existence of East Germany.

Jarausch & Geyer: How to deal with Germany’s past, and how best to interpret and write history. Also a good book to address methodology, how should historians write, there are too many ways to explain and recount history than just political. OR Koshar for the same reasons, but he focuses on buildings as monuments which provides a tangible reference to the discussion rather than the theoretical discussion by Jarausch & Geyer.

Europe

Themes and events to focus on for European history:

Nationalism is the biggest one. Look at political change, republics, democracies, socialism, and communism.

Decline in religion and the increased reliance in science. Modernization.

Economies of scale. Global markets and capitalism vs socialism vs communism. Role of Industrial Revolution and colonialism, class and gender.

Colonialism/imperialism as economic, political and cultural motivators.

Gender issues. Defining gender in Victorian period, creation of “traditional roles”, affect of industrial revolution and capitalism on changing role of occupations. Changes in legal rights for women and men.

Rise in class consciousness, workers unions, political movements. Failure or success of communist ideals.

Teaching in a classroom.

Teaching Ideas

History Filters

Study of history is always dependent upon the “filter” through which you want to look at it. It would be fun to divide the class into sections, and each group take a specific “filter” (gender, culture, politics, economy, class, race, etc). Each group either gets their own reading list or they have to pull the specific themes from a general list. Then each class period, each group takes a turn discussing history viewed through their filter. Have the other groups not presenting write one question before class and one question after for the presenting group to answer about their “filter.” (Questions could be done on a blog.)

Timelines

Have students make a timeline of the time period the class will be studying. Then in the first lecture share what my points are and argue them. Have the students keep their timeline throughout the semester. They will argue their points, especially if they change them, taking ideas from the texts. Final paper is a well argued timeline.

(PS. All images are from Flickr Commons.)