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:
The fifth volume in the Collected Works of George L. Mosse is now available for preorder:
The Culture of Western Europe:
The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Order a copy today!
The Culture of Western Europe, George L. Mosse’s sweeping cultural history, was originally published in 1961 and revised and expanded in 1974 and 1988. Originating from the lectures at the University of Wisconsin—Madison for which Mosse would become famous, the book addresses, in crisp and accessible language, the key issues he saw as animating the movement of culture in Europe. This new edition restores the original 1961 illustrations and features a critical introduction by Anthony J. Steinhoff, professor in the department of history at the Université du Québec à Montréal, contextualizing Mosse’s project and arguing for its continued relevance today.
The sixth volume in the Collected Works of George L. Mosse is now available for preorder: The Nationalization of the Masses:
Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich. Preorder a copy today!
The Nationalization of the Masses is George L. Mosse’s major statement about political symbols and the means of their diffusion. Focusing on Germany and, to a lesser degree, France and Italy, Mosse analyzes the role of symbols in fueling mass politics, mass movements, and nationalism in a way that is broadly applicable and as relevant today as it was almost fifty years ago. This new edition contains a critical introduction by Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University, contextualizing Mosse’s research and exploring its powerful influence on subsequent generations of historians.
Latest Mosse Series titles:
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.
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.
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.
Newest on the Mosse Blog:
- Read Rebecca Carter-Chand, review of Monique Scheer’s Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany
- Read Donatello Aramini’s lecture “Nationalists and Fascists in Interwar Italy: A Study on Right-Wing Radicalism and the Processes of Hybridization and Fascistization”
- Read Tom Eshed, review of Jeffrey Herf’s Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949
- Read Braden Russell, review of Javier Samper Vendrell’s The Seduction of Youth
- Read Stefania Ragaù’s lecture “Nationalist Humanism, ‘Nationalhumanismus,’ after George L. Mosse
- Read Austin Clements, review of Emilio Gentile’s Fascination with the Persecutor
- Read Dagmar Herzog, review of Queer Jewish Lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine
- Read Stefania Ragaù, review of La contemporaneità del passato. Studi in onore di Renato Moro
- 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
- 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.
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 S.A. Gibbs’s Newsweek article “Advice About the End of the Pandemic, From a Combat Veteran” (16 February 2021).
Read Chad S.A. 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 S.A. 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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