Series: Harvard Historical Studies

A revealing account of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after WWII, while firmly and consequentially refusing to account for their earlier complicity with Nazism. Germany's Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in 1933. For many Protestant leaders, pastors, and activists, national and religious revival were one and the...

A new history of globalization and empire at the crossroads of the Pacific. Located halfway between Hawai'i and Australia, the islands of Samoa have long been a centre of Oceanian cultural and economic exchange. Accustomed to exercising agency in trade and diplomacy, Samoans found themselves enmeshed in a new form of globalization after missionaries and traders arrived in the middle...

The surprising story of the sixteenth-century Lutheran scholar who became Europe's foremost authority on Ottoman Greece, shedding new light on the place of Greek culture and religion in the Western imagination. In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home...

A bold account of property reform during the French Revolution, arguing that the lofty democratic ideals enshrined by revolutionary leaders were rarely secured in practice—with lasting consequences. Property reform was at the heart of the French Revolution. As lawmakers proclaimed at the time, and as historians have long echoed, the revolution created modern property rights. Under the new regime, property...

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk PrizeWinner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize "Witty and full of fascinating details." -Los Angeles Times Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century,...

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson's image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread throughout Italy, filling an ideological void after the rout of Caporetto and diverting attention from a hapless ruling class. Wilson's popularity depended not only on the modernity of his democratic message, but also on a massive propaganda campaign he...

In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Jonathan Reed Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. At the outbreak of war in 1914, British control of the cable network affected the Americans' ability to communicate internationally, and the development of radio worried the Navy about hemispheric...

At the height of its power around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world's trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers at home and abroad. Yet the story of the Company's beginnings in the early seventeenth century has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra's account of the East India Company's formative years sheds new light...

In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime. This occurred, not at the moment of settlement or federation, but in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when notions of statehood, sovereignty, empire, and civilisation were in...

No political parties of present-day Germany are separated by a wider gulf than the two parties of labour, one democratic and reformist, the other totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary. Social Democrats and Communists today face each other as bitter political enemies across the front lines of the Cold War; yet they share a common origin in the Social Democratic Party of Imperial...