Tamar Herzig. A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 400 pp. ISBN 9780674237537. In a story told with all the elegance of Renaissance goldsmithery, the single …
Blog
Eric Kurlander review of Anson Rabinbach’s “Staging the Third Reich”
Anson Rabinbach. Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History. Edited by Stefanos Geroulanos, Dagmar Herzog. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. 494 pp. ISBN 9780367818975. Anson Rabinbach has spent the …
Matthew Unangst review of Marie Muschalek’s “Violence as Usual”
Marie Muschalek, Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). 270 PP. $49.95. ISBN: 978-1501742859. Marie Muschalek’s Violence as Usual takes as its subject the Landespolizei, …
Sunny Yudkoff: “Mosse, Literature, and the Wisconsin Workshop”
Scholars enter the world of George L. Mosse scholarship through different avenues. Years ago, as a graduate student studying modern Jewish literature, I first encountered Mosse’s work through The Image of Man (1996). At the …
Mosse Comic: “Ideas can be Weapons”
Nick Thorkelson, Dave Wagner, and Paul Buhle have illustrated and written a new comic based on Mosse’s scholarship: “Ideas can be Weapons.” Below we have asked all three to answer a few questions about this …
Maria Mitchell review of Giuliana Chamedes’s “A Twentieth-Century Crusade”
Giuliana Chamedes. A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 432 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN 978-0674983427. Giuliana Chamedes’ masterfully conceived and richly documented study of Vatican policy …
Grace Allen, Exploring the Power and Limits of Victim-Witness Testimony in Emma Kuby’s “Political Survivors”
Emma Kuby’s Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 tells the institutional history of the International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime (CICRC), a short-lived organization assembled …
Jennifer Gramer, The Art of Collaboration- “Hitler’s Art Dealer”
In September of 2010, German authorities at the Swiss border stopped an aged man on his way back into Germany. The man, nearly 80 years old and bent with age, would have seemed harmless had …
Kayci Olson Harris, Teaching the Cold War during COVID-19
Since my early days as a history graduate student at UW-Madison, I hoped that one day I would enjoy the opportunity of teaching my very own course. Thanks to the George L. Mosse Program in …
Chad S.A. Gibbs, On the Shoulders of Yitzhak Arad: A Review of The Operation Reinhard Death Camps
On the Shoulders of Yitzhak Arad: A Review of The Operation Reinhard Death Camps and Paths for Future Research on Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka The three extermination camps of Aktion Reinhard, or Operation Reinhard, sit …
Scott Spector, The Novel Corona Virus Crisis as Pedagogical Opportunity: History of the Present
As the COVID-19 crisis hit the United States and our students were sent home to complete the semester remotely, my colleague and I were teaching an introductory lecture course called “History of the Present.” The …
Abigail Lewis, George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellow, 2019-2020
From October 2019 to March 2020 I had the opportunity to study and live in Jerusalem as a George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (HUJI). At HUJI, I …
Chad S.A. Gibbs: George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellow, 2019-2020
A Holocaust memoir in the form of a musical. A living witness. Historical connections to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. And hundreds of previously unknown primary sources left behind by survivors of Treblinka. These are …
Till van Rahden, Democracy: A Fragile Way of Life
1) What Mood Are We In? Over the past fifteen years, we have moved from complacency and hubris to panic and despair. After the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy was taken for granted. …
Digitizing 1914: Then Came Armageddon
In 2014 the George L. Mosse Program in History and UW-Madison’s Special Collections created an exhibition—1914: Then Came Armageddon—to commemorate the hundred year anniversary since the outbreak of World War I. Guest exhibit co-curators Skye …
Tom McLeish on James Ungureanu’s “Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition”
Review of: James C. Ungureanu Science, Religion and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2019). Book Abstract: The story of the “conflict thesis” between science and religion—the notion of …
Teresa Bergen: Lecture- What I’ve Learned from 20 Years of Listening to Interviews
Troy Reeves: Hello? Yes, I’m guessing you can hear me. Because I can hear myself well. Thank you. So, we’re going to start right at noon. But please feel free to get up, get snacks. …
Teresa Bergen: A Breakfast Talk- “For the Oral History Curious”
Skye Doney: Teresa Bergen joins us today from Portland. And she has just published a book. Can I— Bergen: Oh, yeah. Doney: Do you mind if we send this around? Bergen: No, go ahead. Doney: …
Meike Hoffmann: Lecture- The Mosse Art Research Initiative
The Mosse Art Research Initiative (MARI): A Beacon of International Provenance Research Thank you all for being here. And thank you especially to the Center for German and European Studies for making this talk possible. …
Amos Bitzan: COVID-19 in Jerusalem, March 18, 2020
I hope that in future posts I will be able to document many of my wonderful experiences in Jerusalem and at the Hebrew University this academic year. This first post, however, will focus on less …
Sarah Qidwai, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Familiar Figure in an Unfamiliar Historical Setting
As a historical figure, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) is frequently characterized as a leader of Muslim nationalism in India and a reformer of both Islam and education.[1] Throughout his life he established several educational …
David Milne: Lecture- Sigrid Schultz: Investigative Reporter who Predicted World War II
N.B. Please do not quote without the author’s permission. This is the transcript of a delivered lecture, not a finished paper or journal article. Skye Doney: I want to thank you all for coming …
Mendel Kranz on Gordon’s “Toward Nationalism’s End”
Adi Gordon, Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017). It is surely no easy feat to write the intellectual biography of someone whose work traversed as many …
Claire Hitter: Memories of Memorial Union- The Preservation of Campus History at University Archives
This past spring and summer, my internship with the George L. Mosse Program in History took me to UW Madison’s very own University Archives housed at Steenbock Library. During my time in the warm and …
Nick O’Connell: The Fry Collection- Life in Early Twentieth-Century Italy
William F. “Jack” Fry was a University of Wisconsin–Madison physics professor from 1952 to 1998. He also had an incredible passion for Italian history. Fry collected thousands of Italian manuscripts over the years and donated …