'Nationalism from the Left' analyses the case of the BCP as a Marxist institution which increasingly adopted and adapted nationalism; it contributes to the examination of the relatively underresearched field of communist national propaganda, as only in the last decade, have researchers become interested in this topic. It explains the reasons for this and provides evidence of the Party's nationalism across a number of spheres of political life: domestic and foreign policy, school text books, historiography, festivities and symbols. Thus, the Marxist nationalist discourse of the BCP was...

Pavlina Bobič examines the Catholic Church's interpretation of the nature of the First World War, which furnished the great European conflagration with a moral dimension and bestowed upon it ideological legitimation. This volume scrutinizes contexts in which religious concepts were employed by the Slovenian clergy to advance the Habsburg dynastic authority as well as to deepen the patriotic sense of Slovenians. It shows the interaction of experiences at the front and at home, and explains the crucial reasons for the Church's political (re)orientation during the war. Drawing extensively...

The essays in this collection disclose cultural and political dynamics as they occurred before and in the wake of Yugoslavia's dissolution (1991-92) by analyzing visual data such as film, art, graffiti, street-art, public advertisement, memorials, and monuments. Within the vast field of Balkan Studies such visual materials have rarely been taken for important empirical evidence. Against the still widely held presumption that the cultural production of allegedly "totalitarian" states such as Yugoslavia can be neglected as they were penetrated by state ideology, the contributions offer a...

In contrast to research on elites or "history from below," this study offers an approach that can be called "mesohistory" - a collective social biography of the Balkan merchants. In foregrounding the voices of traders, this study sheds fresh light on multiethnic networks of social actors navigating multiple social, political, and economic systems - supporting and opposing various aspects of nationalist ideologies. Personal accounts humanize features of these "faceless" socially mediating groups. Merchants' generation-specific perspectives on the economy, society, and state, both in times of...

Literary and cultural images, once considered marginal to the main currents of political and institutional development in southeastern Europe, have been accorded much greater importance by scholars in recent years. In this volume Alex Drace-Francis brings together over fifteen years of work on the topic of representations of Romania and Romanians. Crossing the East-West divide, the book studies both external images of the country and people, and domestically-generated representations of Europe and 'the West'. It draws on material in a wide range of languages and offers a long-term view,...

Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They all seek to treat the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions....

This book asks how a study of many different musics in South East Europe can help us understand the construction of cultural traditions, East and West. It crosses boundaries of many kinds, political, cultural, repertorial and disciplinary. Above all, it seeks to elucidate the relationship between politics and musical practice in a region whose art music has been all but written out of the European story and whose traditional music has been subject to appropriation by one ideology after another. South East Europe, with its mix of ethnicities and religions, presents an exceptionally rich field...

Angela Jianu explores the lives and activities of a group of Romanian revolutionaries exiled in Paris, London and the Middle East in the aftermath of the insurrections of 1848. Drawing largely on diaries, memoirs and private correspondence, A Circle of Friends is a social history of political exile, presenting the personal life dramas of the protagonists within the wider context of the European post-revolutionary turmoil of the 1850s. Exile and political repression allied this group not only to their Hungarian and Polish peers, but also to French republicans, English radicals and...

Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They all seek to treat the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions,...

Before it became established as an academic discipline, physical anthropology emerged as a contested notion of reference to the cosmological views associated with the Darwinian theory of evolution and its implementation by the natural sciences. However, its subsequent development points to a science which made holistic claims regarding its ability to explore humankind in its entirety and to influence society, with its involvement in politics, as well as racial and eugenic concepts serving as the vehicle for doing so. This book explores the emergence of physical anthropology in the modern...