By Sabine Hake (NHC Fellow, 2010–11) From the late 1930s to the early twenty-first century, European and American filmmakers have displayed an enduring fascination with Nazi leaders, rituals, and symbols, making scores of films from Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Watch on the Rhine (1943) through Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, 1955) and Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), up to Der … Continued
By Christopher Grasso (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and … Continued
Edited by David Warren Sabean (NHC Fellow, 2008–09) and Malina Stefanovska The notion of ‘selfhood’ conjures up images of self-sufficiency, integrity, introspectiveness, and autonomy – characteristics typically associated with ‘modernity.’ The seventeenth century marks the crucial transition to a new form of ‘bourgeois’ selfhood, although the concept goes back to the pre-modern and early modern … Continued
By Sumathi Ramaswamy (NHC Fellow, 2013–14) Why and how do debates about the form and disposition of our Earth shape enlightened subjectivity and secular worldliness in colonial modernity? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores this question for British India with the aid of the terrestrial globe, which since the sixteenth century has circulated as a worldly symbol, a … Continued
By Jaroslav Folda (NHC Fellow, 1988–89; 1998–99; 2006–07) The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098-1187 examines the art and architecture produced for the invading Crusaders in Syria-Palestine during the first century of their quest to recapture and control the holy sites of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. Commissioned by kings and queens, patriarchs, … Continued
By Franklin W. Knight (NHC Fellow, 1986–87) Offering a rare pan-Caribbean perspective on a region that has moved from the very center of the western world to its periphery, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism journeys through five centuries of economic and social development, emphasizing such topics as the slave-run plantation economy, the changes in … Continued
By Michael J. White (NHC Fellow, 1988–89) This book presents a detailed analysis of three ancient models of spatial magnitude, time, and local motion. The Aristotelian model is presented as an application of the ancient, geometrically orthodox conception of extension to the physical world. The other two models, which represent departures from mathematical orthodoxy, are … Continued
By Ashraf H. A. Rushdy (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) The End of American Lynching questions how we think about the dynamics of lynching, what lynchings mean to the society in which they occur, how lynching is defined, and the circumstances that lead to lynching. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy looks at three lynchings over the course of the … Continued
By Merrill D. Peterson (NHC Fellow, 1980–81) Enormously powerful, intensely ambitious, the very personifications of their respective regions–Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun represented the foremost statemen of their age. In the decades preceding the Civil War, they dominated American congressional politics as no other figures have. Now Merrill D. Peterson, one of … Continued
By Thomas Richards (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) Nineteenth-century Britain could be seen as the first information society in history—for the simple reason that it accumulated knowledge from the far-flung corners of its empire faster than it could easily digest it. The British Empire presented a vast administrative challenge; by meeting that challenge through maps and surveys, … Continued