Twice in the decade before the Thirty Years' War the Julich-Kleve succession placed Europe on the verge of war. Located along the Rhine River on the borders of the divided Netherlands, the Julich-Kleve duchies possessed great political, economic, and religious importance which attracted the interest of all the major European powers of the day. Yet despite the strategic location of the duchies and the international involvement in the succession disputes, diplomacy triumphed, and war was averted. This book examines the Julich-Kleve succession crises from a wide, international perspective in...

The book traces the precocious diffusion of family limitation in Grafenhausen bei Lahr, Kappel am Rhein, and Rust, using thousands of reconstituted family histories in local genealogies (Ortssippenbucher), as well as economic and political data from municipal and provincial archives. Graphs, tables, and maps document the fertility transition on the densely populated Rhine plain. A new measure of the percentage of couples practising family limitation is applied. The account highlights the roles of women as landholders under traditional partible inheritance and as workers in the cigar...

Priest and Parish in Vienna, 1780 to 1880 is a bold, new social and cultural history of religion in modern Europe. By establishing some of the most important parameter of religious life, such as parish demographics, the economics of parish life, the social and national background of priests, and the world of Catholic sacrament and feastdays, this book contextualizes for the first time the contentious social and cultural relationship between religion and society in nineteenth-century Vienna. In the nineteenth century, parish priests confronted tumultuous social changes such as...

The Cross and the Ballot describes the origins, development and present status of Catholic political parties in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and The Netherlands. Its comparative perspective contributes significantly to the current debate over Germany's Sonderweg, that is, whether or not German history has taken a "special path," or unique direction from others. The emergence of a separate political representation for German Catholics was not a deviation from the usual European spectrum but on the contrary was strikingly similar to events in the other four countries....

The following study exacmines the social, cultural and political history of Catholic workers in the city of Cologne and its environs from 1885 to 1912. Specifically, it treats the methods employed by the Catholic Church to isolate its working class members from Marxist Social Democracy by enclosing them within a clerically constructed and controlled social-cultural miliue, explores the beliefs and behaviors inculcated in this confessional envrironment, and explains the causes of the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) conquest of Cologne in the 1912 Reichstag election.

Did you ever wonder how and why Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf (1852-1925) earned his reputation for brilliance, while failing so miserably during the First World War? In examining Conrad's life and career, including his years as a military writer, teacher of tactics, and a peacetime troop commander before 1906, this first modern biography offers a fascinating and impressive explanation of his thoughts and actions. Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf (1852-1925) served as Austro-Hungarian chief of the general staff between 1906 and 1917, and was a leading figure in the origins and conduct of the First...

Emil J. Gumbel (1891-1966) began his career simply as a professor of mathematical statistics in Heidelberg, but he is most remembered as a political activist militantly advocating for pacifism during the complicated and volatile times of the Weimar Republic in Germany. As a Jew with left-wing socialist and democratic sensibilities, he was exiled to France and later America. Ironically, the same writings on political terror and politicized justice in Nazi Germany that caused his ostracization saved his life. A courageous man, Gumbel spoke out passionately against the Nazis and came to...

After World War II Germans not only had to rebuild, they had to redefine their national political identity as well. This book traces how state symbols such as national colors, anthems, holidays, capital cities, and postage stamps were used to legitimize the two Germanies from 1949 to 1959. Although the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) developed distinct post-war identities, the one cannot be understood apart from the other, for they were in direct competition to define the same state symbols. The study of symbols offers valuable insights into the realms of...

The frontier of the Early Modern Burgundies? In this book, Edwards applies in reverse the American frontier concept in order to understand the local changes in family and community in a Burgundy torn in two after the death of Charles the Bold in 1477. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, residents of the eastern duchy and the western county of Burgundy were in a place and time of transition and transformation, a veritable frontier. While France and the Holy Roman Empire vied for political control of the region, residents struggled to define their social, cultural,...

Shortly after the Augsburg peace settlement of 1555, from 1563 to 1576, the Holy Roman Empire was threatened by the rivalry between Denmark and Sweden. This book examines the empire's reaction to a foreign crisis, the Seven Years' War of the North, and the connections between foreign policy and internal imperial politics. As this study will show, and contrary to most assumptions, the empire, through its confederal structure, was able to provide effective means for defending the domestic order against external dangers. Further, the empire could conduct a common foreign policy to protect common...