Although the 1956 Hungarian uprising failed to liberate the country from Soviet domination, it became a symbol of freedom for people throughout Eastern Europe and beyond. Labeling the events a counterrevolution, communist authorities exacted revenge in two years of terror and intimidation. Then, for the next thirty years, they pursued a policy of forced forgetting, attempting to obliterate public memory of the events. As communism unraveled in the...

Searching for the remnants of his family, Leonard Kniffel left Chicago in 2000 to live in Poland. A Polish Son in the Motherland is the story of a search for roots and for the reasons why one family’s ties were severed more than fifty years ago. Along the way, we see what half a century of communism did to Poland and how the residue of World War II lingers. The author’s search begins inauspiciously, but he soon meets a local wine merchant and...

In Keeping the Faith, Jennifer Jean Wynot presents a clear and concise history of the trials and evolution of Russian Orthodox monasteries and convents and the important roles they have played in Russian culture, in both in the spiritual and political realms, from the abortive reforms of 1905 to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. She shows how, throughout the Soviet period, Orthodox monks and nuns continued to provide spiritual strength to the people,...

In The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia, 1992–1994 Charles R. Shrader offers the first full-scale military history of a crucial conflict in Bosnia between two former allies. When the Bosnian Serbs and their Serbian allies attacked Bosnia-Herzegovina in March, 1992, the Bosnian Croats and Muslims collaborated to defend themselves. As Serbian pressure increased and it became clear that the West would not intervene, the two allies began to...

In his introduction, Alexander Obolonsky notes that Russian history and life are full of paradoxes, most of them rather sad. Why, he asks, have the Russians, who have not only been endowed by nature with enormous natural, human, and intellectual resources, but who have also developed a great literary and scientific heritage and made significant contributions to world civilization, proved unable to arrange the conditions of their own existence to realize...

What does a religious community do when confronted by a political regime determined to eliminate religion? Under communism, Hungary’s persecuted Lutheran Church tried desperately to find a strategy for survival while remaining faithful to its Christian beliefs. Appealing to the Lutheran Confessions, many argued that the church can do whatever is necessary to survive provided it does not compromise on its essential ministry, while others, appealing...

Students of democratic theory have watched the dramatic transformation of Eastern Europe from communism to various forms of democracy in the last two decades. With her unique blend of theory and empirical analysis, veteran observer Sabrina P. Ramet offers clear insight into the processes, challenges, and accomplishments of this area. Drawing on a classical understanding of “liberalism” based on a philosophy of Natural Law, she probes the issues...

How is it that the small continent of Europe, with its rich multiplicity of cultures and traditions, has managed to exert so profound an influence on the rest of the world? Roberts’ sweeping and entertaining history notes the paradoxical effect, for good and ill, on everything touched by those Western values that originated in Europe. Beginning with its Paleolithic origins and the early civilizations of the Aegean, Roberts traces the development...

In 1671, Dutch diplomat and scientist Nicolaes Witsen published a book that served, among other things, as an encyclopedia for the “shell-first” method of ship construction. In the centuries since, Witsen’s rather convoluted text has also become a valuable source for insights into historical shipbuilding methods and philosophies during the “Golden Age” of Dutch maritime trade. However, as André Wegener Sleeswyk’s foreword notes, Witsen’s...

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an EndingThe Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Epoque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.