Kategoria BISAC: History >> Eastern Europe - General

In writings about travel, the Balkans appear most often as a place travelled to. Western accounts of the Balkans revel in the different and the exotic, the violent and the primitive - traits that serve (according to many commentators) as a foil to self-congratulatory definitions of the West as modern, progressive and rational. However, the Balkans have also long been travelled from. The region's writers have given accounts of their travels in the West and elsewhere, saying something in the process about themselves and their place in the world. The analyses presented here, ranging from...

For more than fifty years prior to the Second World War, Budapest was one of the outstanding cultural capitals of Central Europe, on a par with, and in some ways ahead of, Vienna and...

Following the brutal wars which raged in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina was awkwardly partitioned into two governing entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. But there was one part of the country which could not be fitted into either category: the Breko District, a strategically critical land-bridge between the two parts of the Bosnian Serb territory. This region was the subject of a highly unusual experiment: placed under a regime of internationally supervised government, Breko became a ""free city,"" evoking the memory of...

Drawing on hundreds of newly available, top-secret KGB and party Central Committee documents, historian Matthew E. Lenoe reexamines the 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. Joseph Stalin used the killing as the pretext to unleash the Great Terror that decimated the Communist elite in 1937-1938; these previously unavailable documents raise new questions about whether Stalin himself ordered the murder, a subject of speculation since 1938.

The book includes translations of 125 documents from the various investigations of the Kirov murder, allowing readers to...

Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian born in 1746, was one of the most important figures of the modern world. Fleeing his homeland after a death sentence was placed on his head (when he dared court a woman above his station), he came to America one month after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, literally showing up on Benjamin Franklin's doorstep in Philadelphia with little more than a revolutionary spirit and a genius for engineering. Entering the fray as a volunteer in the war effort, he quickly proved his capabilities and became the most talented engineer of the...

Seit 2004 gehort Slowenien der Europaischen Union an. Uber 1000 Jahre war das kleine Land mit seinen nicht mehr als zwei Millionen Einwohnern von fremden Machten abhangig. Dennoch haben die vielfaltigen Einflusse Sprache und Eigenart der slowenischen Bevolkerung nicht ausloschen konnen. Die Beitrage beschaftigen sich u.a. mit der Widerstandskraft der Slowenen, dem Nationaldichter France Pre eren, der Entfaltung von Verwaltungsstrukturen in der jugoslawischen Zeit sowie mit der Kunst und Kultur der Slowenen.