Sie zeigt, wie die russische Gesellschaft zu dem wurde, was sie heute ist: eine ihrer Meinungsfreiheit beraubte Nation, über deren Wirtschaftskraft die Führungsclique nach Belieben verfügt. Diese hat ein System errichtet, in dem politische, militärische und wirtschaftliche Eliten untrennbar verzahnt sind und dadurch uneingeschränkte Macht auf das Leben der Menschen ausüben. Mit Putin an der Spitze, der bald länger herrscht als Stalin. Wohin führt Putins Kurs das Land - und uns? Nach ihrem Bestseller »Die Ukraine und wir« steht auch in diesem Buch der Osteuropa-Expertin des Deutschlandfunks eines im Zentrum: Aufklärung.

This much-awarded work by one of Italy’s most esteemed historians of fascism, Mauro Canali, is now available in English translation. Based on a wealth of previously unavailable judicial and archival material, it sheds light on how fascism exercised power through violence and corruption from the very beginning. The book reveals the motives that led Mussolini to order the kidnapping and murder of Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, a turning point in Mussolini’s grasp of total power in Italy. Canali further explores the corrupt dealings between the Mussolini family and the American Sinclair Oil Company that Matteotti had intended to denounce in the Italian parliament the day after his death.

This book examines the efforts of the government in Scotland to manage the increase of migrants travelling to Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Focussing on the period between 1885 and 1914, the book explores how the Scottish machinery of government handled the administration of ‘foreigners.’ The author uses a comparative, thematic approach to analyse migrant experiences, identities, and relationships with state institutions. Drawing from state records held by the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, the book argues that Scottish officials in semi-autonomous boards began to recognise, describe and enumerate the presence of the ‘foreigner’ in the early twentieth century, framing their handling of foreignness in accordance with the Aliens Act of 1905. The author goes on to explain that institutions operating in Scotland developed a distinctly Scottish approach to alien matters, which continued up until the Second Word War.

This book argues for an approach based on values when trying to make sense of shifts and changes that occurred in French politics during the last four decades. Values play a pivotal role in structuring political views and policy preferences. They influence citizens’ attitudes and behaviours as well as reflect long-lasting political cultures and cleavages. After presenting the data collected within the European values studies, on which the six contributions included in this book build, we explain how these contributions highlight some major French political dynamics by scrutinizing key driving forces such as the individualization process, generational replacement or ideological consistency in economic and cultural beliefs, and by re-assessing how attitudes toward democracy, religiosity and nationalism shape political attitudes. Challenging dominant narratives of value crisis, this book sets up an agenda for future research on French politics through the lens of value change.

This book explores knowledge practices by five women from different European contexts. Contributors document, analyze, and discuss how women employed practices of privacy to pursue knowledge that did not necessarily conform with the curriculum prescribed for them. The practices of Jane Lumley in England, Camila Herculiana in Padua, Victorine de Chastenay in Paris, as well as Elisabeth Sophie Marie and Philippine Charlotte in Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, will help us to exemplify the delicate balance between audacity and obedience that women had to employ to be able to explore science, literature, philosophy, theology, and other types of learned activities. Cases range from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, presenting continuities and discontinuities across temporal and geographical lines of the strategies that women used to protect their knowledge production and retain intact their reputations as good Christian daughters, wives, and mothers. Taken together, the essays show how having access to privacy—the ability to regulate access to themselves while studying and learning—was a crucial condition for the success of the knowledge activities these women pursued.

This book examines the efforts of the French-speaking minority in Flanders, Belgium, to maintain a legal and social presence of the French language in Flemish public life. Chronologically, the study is bookended by two developments, almost exactly a century apart. In 1873, the first laws were passed which required the use of Dutch in some aspects of public administration in Flanders, challenging the de facto use of French among the Flemish ruling class. One hundred and one years later, the last French daily newspaper in Flanders collapsed, marking the end of a once-vibrant French-language public sphere in Flanders. The author contends that the methods and arguments by which French speakers defended the role of French in Flemish public life changed along with the social and political situation of this minority. As the Flemish movement grew over the course of the twentieth century, French speakers’ appeals to the “free choice” of language lost traction, and they put forward claims that they represented an ethnolinguistic minority who deserved protection for their mother tongue. Providing new insights for scholars of European history, and in conversation with the literature on liberalism, national identity, and Francophonie, this book demonstrates how the debate over the role of French in Flanders was at the center of Belgium’s ethnolinguistic conflict – the repercussions of which continue to be felt to this day.

This book focuses on institutions that were produced and formed by the emerging welfare state. How were institutions experienced by the people who interacted with them? How did institutions as sites of experience shape and structure people’s everyday lives? Histories of institutions have mainly focused on the structures and power relations produced by institutional settings. Likewise, despite an extensive historiography of the welfare state, reflections on individuals’ experiences of welfare are few. By using ‘lived institutions’ as its conceptual frame, this edited collection merges the fields of institutional studies, the history of the welfare state – and the novel and vibrant field of the history of experience.

This book examines how migration and mobility were controlled, supported, and restricted in early modern Europe and European colonies. The aim of the book is to investigate how different actors, such as rulers, regional lords, local authorities, and corporations tried to regulate different forms of mobility and how those on the move reacted to these attempts. The book examines the agency of both the authorities and the migrants, shifting focus between the macro and the micro level. The chapters will also illuminate the ways gender, religion, language, ethnicity, occupation, and socioeconomic status were entangled in the regulations concerning mobility. Control of migration is inextricably linked with power relations. In this book, mobility is seen as a wide social process, which covers daily or seasonal movement as well as less or more stable migration.

This book provides a historical and socio-legal investigation into the prevalence of litigation arising from cursing and interpersonal hostility in the under-explored region of Northwest England during a period of acute socio-economic crisis in the seventeenth century. Contributing to the scholarship of magic and witchcraft, it shows the complex circumstances of the world of healing and harming using customary knowledge such as magic and folk medicine as it is variously presented in the documents of the legal system. While primary sources such as pamphlets have usefully informed numerous witchcraft studies, this book establishes popular belief derived from the depositions, interrogatories and various other manuscripts of the manorial, ecclesiastical and secular courts positioned within a micro historical early modern context.

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