Napoleon's contribution to Germany's development was immense. Under his hegemony, the millennium-old Holy Roman Empire dissolved, paving the way for a new order. Nowhere was the transformation more profound than in the Rhineland. Based upon an extensive range of German and French archival sources, this book locates the Napoleonic episode in this region within a broader chronological framework, encompassing the Old Regime and Restoration. It analyses not only politics, but also culture, identity, religion, society, institutions and economics. It reassesses in turn the legacy bequeathed by the Old Regime, the struggle between Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the 1790s, Napoleon's attempts to integrate the German-speaking Rhineland into the French Empire, the transition to Prussian rule, and the subsequent struggles that ultimately helped determine whether Germany would follow its own Sonderweg or the path of its western neighbours.

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed. But first we need to weigh the moral obligations of citizenship and carefully consider how we relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, and the meaning of leadership. Powerful, urgent, and utterly vital, this is a heartfelt missive from one of our foremost political thinkers.

In its determination to take absolute control, the Third Reich focused on the nation's youth, reserving for the schools the vital task of refashioning the German psyche. This book examines these propaganda efforts—one of the most radical and far-reaching experiments in educational history. The book focuses on the manipulation of the German past, one of the primary means of state intervention to ensure the triumph of the racial idea in history. It shows how textbooks written by National Socialists equalled or exceeded the most imaginative fiction, with an itinerary that extended from Valhalla and the Germania of Tacitus to the Prussia of Frederick the Great, before mounting to the pinnacle represented by the Third Reich. The primary source materials for this study consist of a broad, representative collection of history textbooks, primers, and books of readings containing historical instruction.

A fundamental reassessment of the ways that racial policy worked and was understood under the Third Reich. Leading scholars explore race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

This is an authoritative history of the twelve years of the Third Reich from its political takeover of January 30, 1939 to the German capitulation in May 1945.