Program Mission
The Mosse Program supports and sustains an international scholarly community informed by multiple perspectives and cultural traditions exemplified by George L. Mosse. » Learn More
Program Announcements:
New Mosse Series book out now!
In 1933, George L. Mosse fled Berlin and settled in the United States, where he went on to become a renowned historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Through rigorous and innovative scholarship, Mosse uncovered the forces that spurred antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and populism. His transformative work was propelled by a desire to know his own persecutors and has been vital to generations of scholars seeking to understand the cultural and intellectual origins and mechanisms of Nazism. This translation makes Emilio Gentile’s groundbreaking work, Fascination with the Persecutor: George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man available to English language readers.
New Mosse Series book out now!
Leading up to World War II, two Polish men witnessed the targeted extermination of Jews under Adolf Hitler and the German Reich before the reality of the Holocaust was widely known. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” and Jan Karski, a Catholic member of the Polish resistance, independently shared this knowledge with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Having heard false rumors of wartime atrocities before, the leaders met the messengers with disbelief and inaction, leading to the eventual murder of more than six million people. Messengers of Disaster draws upon little-known texts from an array of archives, including the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen.
New Mosse Series book out now!
Alessandra Tarquini’s A History of Italian Fascist Culture, 1922–1943 is widely recognized as an authoritative synthesis of the field. The book was published to much critical acclaim in 2011 and revised and expanded five years later. This long-awaited translation presents Tarquini’s compact, clear prose to readers previously unable to read it in the original Italian. Tarquini sketches the universe of Italian Fascism in three broad directions: the regime’s cultural policies, the condition of various art forms and scholarly disciplines, and the ideology underpinning the totalitarian state. She details the choices the ruling class made between 1922 and 1943, revealing how cultural policies shaped the country and how intellectuals and artists contributed to those decisions.
The fourth volume in the Collected Works of George L. Mosse is now available for purchase: The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism. Pick up a copy today!
The Fascist Revolution is the culmination of George L. Mosse’s groundbreaking work on fascism. Originally published posthumously in 1999, the volume covers a broad spectrum of topics related to cultural interpretations of fascism from its origins through the twentieth century. In a series of magisterial turns, Mosse examines fascism’s role in the French Revolution, its relationship with nationalism and racism, its use by intellectuals to foment insurrection, and more as a means to define and understand it as a popular phenomenon on its own terms. This new edition features a critical introduction by Roger Griffin, professor emeritus of modern history at Oxford Brookes University, contextualizing Mosse’s research as fascism makes a global resurgence.
Latest on the Mosse Blog:
- Read Krzysztof Borowski, review of Kathryn Ciancia’s “On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World”
- Read Robert Corban, review of Lorenzo Benadusi’s “Respectability and Violence: Military Values, Masculine Honor, and Italy’s Road to Mass Death”
- Jack Styler, “My Year with the UW-Madison Oral History Program“
- Matthew Greene, Mosseaner Presentations at the Spring 2022 History Department Board of Visitors Meetings
- X-Post: Jack Styler, “Those ‘Confrontational Days’: Remembering Madison’s LBGTQ+ Early Activists through Oral Histories.”
- Read Lawrence L. Langer’s review of Anna Hájkovás The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt.
- Read Alex Scheepens’s review of David Sorkin’s Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries.
- Read Itamar Ben Ami’s review of Adi Armon’s Leo Strauss between Weimar and America.
- Read Piotr Puchalski’s review of Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe.
- Read David Harrisville’s review of Moritz Föllmer’s Culture in the Third Reich.
- Read Athan Biss’s review of Francine Hirsch’s Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II.
- Read Conrad Allen’s review of Mary Louise Roberts’s Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII.
New from the Mosseaner:
Read Arie Dubnov’s essay, “A Sentimental Stroll Down Ramban Straße” in the Tel Aviv Review of Books.
Watch Ethan Katz on PBS NewsHour segment “What Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust remarks can teach us about antisemitism.”
Listen to former Mosse Fellows Dan Hummel and David Harrisville discuss The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front 1941-1944 on the UpWords Podcast.
Congratulations to Magda Teter for winning the 2021 American Historical Association George L. Mosse Prize for her book Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020).
Read Alin Constantin’s “Nazi Culture Revisited” on Anson Rabinbach’s Staging the Third Reich on the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (5 May 2021).
Read Chad Gibbs’s Newsweek article “Advice About the End of the Pandemic, From a Combat Veteran” (16 February 2021).
Read Chad Gibbs’s Fortunoff Video Archive post, “What they Tell: Treblinka Survivor and Witness Voices in the Fortunoff Archive.”
Read Omri Shafer-Raviv’s The Forum for Regional Thinking article “המלחמה הדמוגרפית של ישראל בעזה” (16 February 2021).
Read the H-Diplo roundtable on Till van Rahden’s Demokratie: eine gefährdete Lebensform (New York: Campus, 2019)
Read Cindy Schweich Handler’s “We can hope history won’t repeat itself — but Fritz Oppenheimer’s experience is a warning,” in NorthJersey.
Read Torsten Fluh’s “Von der Fiktionalität der Epidemie” on Night Out@Berlin.
Congratulations Tamar Herzig on winning the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize for the history of the Jewish diaspora for her new book A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard, 2019).
Congratulations David Warren Sabean for receiving the AHA Award for Scholarly Distinction.
Read Sara Brinegar’s Holocaust Forced Labor teaching resource at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Read Abigail Lewis’s H-Diplo review of Lara R. Curtis, Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender (17 September 2020).
Read Chad Gibbs’s opinion piece “China is Perpetuating Genocide: We’ve Seen This Before,” in Forward (22 July 2020).
Read Ethan Katz’s and Deborah Lipstadt’s opinion piece “Far more unites Black and Jewish Americans than divides them,” on CNN (18 July 2020).
Read John D. Wilsey’s Christianity Today review of Daniel G. Hummel’s book Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Read Walker Robins’s H-Net review of Daniel G. Hummel’s book Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Read Steven Aschheim’s review of David G. Marwell’s Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death (W.W. Norton, 2020).
Read Arie Dubnov’s Ha’aretz article about the life of George Steiner: “What if Mossad Agents Had Caught Hitler in the Amazon Rain Forest?”
Read Mosse Exchange Fellow Abby Lewis’ review of Sara Blair’s new book How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images (Princeton University Press, 2018).
Listen to Professor David Sorkin discuss his new book, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Medaon put out an article by Dieter Langewiesche, “Bildungsliberalismus und deutsches Judentum. Historische Reflexionen auf den Spuren von George L. Mosse.”
Smithsonian Magazine published a long article on the Mosse Art Restitution project, “The Lost Maidens of Berlin.”
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