George L. Mosse Program in History

New Collected Works titles:

The eleventh volume in the Collected Works of George L. Mosse is now available for preorder!

Order a copy today!

The revised and updated edition of a seminal text, Europe in the Sixteenth Century weaves the distinct histories of various European states into a vivid and complex tapestry. Focusing on similarities of experience across borders, including the centralization of town life and development of market economics, the authors reexamine familiar subjects of the era—from religious upheaval to imperial conflict to artistic revolutions—creating a dynamic, unified narrative of change. This third edition features a new introduction by Magda Teter, tracing the influence of H. G. Koenigsberger, George L. Mosse, and G. Q. Bowler’s work on the historiography of Europe well into the twenty-first century.

The tenth volume in the Collected Works of George L. Mosse is now available!

Order a copy today!

First published in 1985, German Jews Beyond Judaism is George L. Mosse’s sweeping exploration of German Jewish secular identity across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Germany, Jews were emancipated at a time when cultural education was becoming an integral part of German society. They felt a powerful urge to find their Jewish substance within German culture and thus craft an identity as both Germans and Jews. Mosse argues that they did so by adopting the concept of Bildung―the idea of intellectual and moral self-cultivation―combined with key Enlightenment ideals of human potential, individualism, and the connection between knowledge and morality through aesthetics.

The ninth volume in the Collected Works of George L. Mosse is now available for purchase! Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality

Order a copy today!

Masses and Man comprises three parts. The first lays out a cultural history of nationalism, essentially the first of its kind, emphasizing the importance of sacred expressions like myths, symbols, and rituals as appropriated in a political context. The second zeroes in on fascism’s most dramatic irruptions in European history in the rise of Italian Fascism and the Nazi Party in Germany, elucidating these as not just political movements but also cultural and even aesthetic ones. The third part considers nationalism and fascism from the particular standpoint of German Jews.

The eighth volume in the Collected Works of George L. Mosse is now available for purchase! Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism

Order a copy today!

Confronting the Nation brings together twelve of celebrated historian George L. Mosse’s most important essays to explore competing forms of European nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mosse coins the term “civic religion” to describe how nationalism, especially in Germany and France, simultaneously inspired and disciplined the populace through the use of rituals and symbols. The definition of citizenship shaped by this nationalism, however, frequently excluded Jews, who were stereotyped as outsiders who sought to undermine the national community. With keen attention to liberal forms of nationalism, Mosse examines the clash of aspirational visions of an inclusive nation against cultural registers of nativist political ideologies.

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.

Order 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.

New Mosse Series titles:

Forthcoming March 2026:
On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland, launched an uprising against their captors, during which hundreds successfully escaped while guards killed as many in the process. In this groundbreaking work, Chad S.A. Gibbs draws upon recently discovered sources and novel research methods to fundamentally reassess Jewish resistance at Treblinka—both before and during the revolt.

Using the testimonies of revolt survivors, prior escapees, those who passed through the camp, and a handful of bystander witnesses and former SS guards, Gibbs sheds new light on the events of August 2 as well as many prior acts of resistance.

Ever since the Salvation Army, a British Protestant social welfare organization, arrived in Germany in 1886, it has navigated overlapping national and international identities. After existing on the margins of the German religious landscape while solidifying its role as a social service provider, the Salvation Army proactively shaped its public profile during the Nazi rise to power. Accepted into the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (ethnonational community) and made an auxiliary member of the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV), the organization continued limited operations throughout the Nazi period before returning to its international affiliations in the immediate postwar period, thereby bypassing denazification and rehabilitating its reputation.

Rebecca Carter-Chand argues that the Salvation Army was able to emphasize different aspects of its identity to bolster and repair its reputation as needed in varied political contexts, highlighting the variability of Nazi practices of inclusion and exclusion.

Founded in 1932, Thunder Cross (Pērkonkrusts) was the largest and most prominent right-wing political party in Latvia in the early twentieth century. Its motto—“Latvia for Latvians!”—echoed the ultranationalist rhetoric of similar movements throughout Europe at the time. Unlike the Nazis in Germany or the Fascists in Italy, however, Thunder Cross never succeeded in seizing power. Nevertheless, Holocaust historian Paula A. Oppermann argues, its movement left an indelible mark on the country. The antisemitism at the core of Thunder Cross’s ideology remained a driving force for Latvian fascists throughout the twentieth century, persisting despite shifting historical and political contexts.

Thunder Cross is the most comprehensive study of Latvia’s fascist movement in English to date, and the only work that investigates the often neglected continuities of fascist antisemitism after World War II.

In The Work of Music, Celia Applegate examines the cultural history of Austro-German music through the lens of labor from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to the Third Reich. She explores the working world of music and musicians, the various jobs they performed, the work music did in society, the observations and commentaries of contemporaries on the shape and function of musical life, and the work of organizing music making, both amateur and professional.

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through the documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation familiar to scholars but also through a surreal mode of meaning making. From an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the spare, intimate spaces of documentary interviews, Brackney shows that the humanity of victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence.

George L. Mosse (1918–99) was one of the most influential cultural and intellectual historians of modern Europe. In Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination, an international assembly of leading scholars explore Mosse’s enduring methodologies in German studies and modern European cultural history. Considering Mosse’s life and work historically and critically, the book begins with his intellectual biography and goes on to reread his writings in light of historical developments since his death, and to use, extend, and contend with Mosse’s legacy in new contexts he may not have addressed or even foreseen.