Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Social & Behavioral Sciences — History, Geography & Area Studies — Middle East & North Africa

In her first book, Lauer (Oregon State Univ.) investigates the relationship between the Jewish minority on Crete and the Venetian legal system in the 14th and 15th centuries. She mines Venetian court records and Jewish communal ordinances to challenge the stereotype of the walled-off, isolated, and autonomous medieval Jewish community. Lauer shows that Jews on Crete routinely engaged with the Venetian legal system, even in cases against other Jews, to pursue personal interests, shame opponents, and express individual agency. The six brisk and clearly written chapters cover the development of the Jewish quarter, relations between Jews and their Christian neighbors, a description of the Venetian legal system and what it offered to Jewish professionals and litigants, and a closer analysis of two types of cases: those involving marriage or legal separation and those in which the Venetian courts were asked to intervene in disputes regarding Jewish customs and the internal workings of the Jewish community. This is an important contribution to the history of Jewish-Christian relations and Mediterranean legal culture.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this compelling new study of Hitler's military leadership, Fritz (East Tennessee State Univ.) presents the German leader as a man well-versed in German history, who regularly acted in ways wholly consistent with his ideological aims. While Hitler has been routinely described as irrational and incompetent, Fritz demonstrates the coherency and internal logic of his strategic and operational decisions as they related to his goals of gaining living space (Lebensraum) and transforming Germany into a hegemonic world power. Described by Fritz as a loyal adherent of the theorist Carl von Clausewitz, Hitler believed strongly that military strategy should be subordinated to political objectives. This conviction indeed defined Hitler's worldview, yet it also complicated his relationships with his generals. Despite these tensions, the book illustrates the broad support of Germany's military leaders for Hitler's political aims. Although his generals may have resented taking orders from a former corporal, Fritz persuasively shows that military elites not only facilitated but largely endorsed the total war that Hitler unleashed on Europe. These conclusions further undermine long-standing portrayals of a German army compelled to wage a war of extermination against its will.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Every so often a history book comes along that tells a riveting story--"reads like a novel" is the customary praise--significantly expands knowledge of the past, and compels one to rethink the historiography of its narrative. Such a triumph is Olson's Madame Fourcade's Secret War, an account of France's largest espionage network during the Occupation and the elegant, beautiful, 31-year-old Marie-Madeleine Fourcade (1909-89) who led it. In the face of the Nazis' suffocating surveillance and savage reprisals--some 450 members of the Resistance network Fourcade led were executed--Fourcade's agents garnered intelligence that helped win the U-boat war, assisted in planning the D-Day invasion, and provided information on the German ballistic missile program that allowed the Allies to forestall its development until the second front was secure. Fourcade's work has been too long ignored: her story fell victim to competition over control of the historical narrative about the Resistance on the parts of the communists, de Gaulle's Free French, and the Maquisards. In addition, Fourcade's background, her practical feminism, and her alignment with British intelligence ensured her story was downplayed after the war; her memoir, L'Arche de Noe (1968; Eng. tr., Noah's Ark, CH, May'74), was for the most part ignored. Bottom line: Olson's book is important as well as captivating.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Amid religious controversies and wars, Michel de Montaigne advised in Essays (1580): "totally submit to the authority of our ecclesiastical polity or totally release.... It is not for us to decide what degree of obedience we owe it." Jacob (UCLA) presents the Enlightenment as a time when people decided the measure of obedience owed authorities. Jacob argues that during the Enlightenment a secular shift occurred in an era of unprecedented expansion of spacial knowledge and time management. Jacob's archival research impresses. Her presentation is chronological: 1500-1800 overview; time and space ideas; secularity concept; analyses of enlightened individuals in Paris and five continental cities; and 1790s critique. Jacob scrutinizes diarists, travelers, freemasons, almanacs, police reports, familiar philosophes, presses, and obscure individuals. She privileges Spinoza, Hobbes, and Locke. Jacob declares that a comprehensive Enlightenment achievement was the formation of secular, critically curious innovators committed to liberating political reform. Other legacies: secularized history, empirically based disciplines, and Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. Montaigne judged rational hubris madness; Voltaire applauded philosophes as lovers of truth (Dictionaire philosophique). Choose. A superb contribution to Enlightenment studies and intellectual history.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

First published in French in 2013 and here abridged and updated in English, this volume examines the reasons for the high survival rate of French Jewry during the Holocaust. Using a rich archival base of official documents, diaries, memoirs, oral testimonies, and personal interviews with survivors, Semelin paints a nuanced portrait of practices such as hiding, using fake documents, crossing the border from the occupied zone into Vichy France, dispersal in rural areas, placing Jewish children in Catholic boarding schools and in foster care, and receiving help from non-Jews--which, taken together enabled 90 percent of France's Jewish population and 60 percent the Jewish exiles living in France to escape deportation at the hands of German and Vichy authorities. The author engages a wide range of secondary literature, including Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton's classic Vichy France and the Jews (Eng. tr., CH, Apr'82; 2nd ed., 2019), and provides numerous illuminating comparisons between the specifics of the rescue efforts in France and those of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland. Engagingly written, combining psychological perspectives with first-rate historical research, and brimming with original insights, this is masterful scholarship.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Jones (Queen Mary Univ. of London, UK) has written a pioneering, masterful study of Versailles. Though many historians and literary scholars concentrate on the development of Paris, Versailles is usually mentioned as a sidebar of sorts. Jones takes the opposite approach. He notes that starting with the Bourbon Louis XIII in the 1630s, Versailles was used as a hunting ground. When smallpox broke out in Paris, he transferred his wife and three-year-old son, the future Louis XIV (the "Sun King"), there. When Louis XIV took over in 1661, he built up Versailles through the 1670s and 1680s to look much as it does today. He for the first time made it clear that he and the court would live there year-round. He rarely returned to Paris other than for ceremonial functions. On his death in 1715, Louis XV tried to accentuate Versailles, much as his father had, as did Louis XVI, until the Revolution of 1789. After the beginning of the Third Republic, Versailles became a monument of French culture and continues so to this day. Jones is to be commended for the detail and precision of this study, unique and worthy in the history of French scholarship.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.