Understanding Eastern Europe
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| Author | : Tomek E. Jankowski |
| Publisher | : New Europe Books |
| Total Pages | : 600 |
| Release | : 2014-05-20 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0985062339 |
Eastern Europe! is a brief and concise (but informative) introduction to Eastern Europe and its myriad customs and history. When the legendary Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome in 753 BCE, Plovdiv -- today the second-largest city in Bulgaria -- was already thousands of years old. Indeed, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam are all are mere infants compared to Plovdiv. This is just one of the paradoxes that haunts and defines the New Europe, that part of Europe that was freed from Soviet bondage in 1989 which is at once both much older than the modern Atlantic-facing power centers of Western Europe while also being in some ways much younger than them. Even those knowledgeable about Western Europe often see Eastern Europe as terra incognita, with a sign on the border declaring "Here be monsters." This book is a gateway to understanding both what unites and separates Eastern Europeans from their Western brethren, and how this vital region has been shaped by, but has also left its mark on, Western Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Ideal for students, businesspeople, and those who simply want to know more about where Grandma or Grandpa came from, Eastern Europe! is a user-friendly guide to a region that is all too often mischaracterized as remote, insular, and superstitious. Illustrations throughout include: 40 photos, 40 maps and 40 figures (tables, charts, etc.) From the Trade Paperback edition.
| Author | : Bruce R. Berglund |
| Publisher | : Central European University Press |
| Total Pages | : 404 |
| Release | : 2010-01-01 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 9639776653 |
Disgraceful collusion. Heroic resistance. Suppression of faith. Perseverance of convictions. The story of Christianity in twentieth-century Eastern Europe is often told in stark scenes of tragedy and triumph. Overlooked in the retelling of these dramas is how the region's clergy and lay believers lived their faith, acted within religious and political institutions, and adapted their traditions---while struggling to make sense of a changing world. The contributors to this volume, coming from the U.S. and Western and Eastern Europe, look beyond the narratives of resistance and collaboration. They offer surprising new evidence from archives and oral history interviews, and they provide fresh interpretations of Christianity as it was lived and expressed in modern Europe: from religiosity in the industrial cities of the late nineteenth century to current debates over immigration and European identity; from theological debates in East Germany to folk healing in post-socialist Bulgaria; and, counter-intuitively, from religious fervor among the Czechs to indifference among the Poles. Addressing Christianity in diverse forms---Orthodox, Protestant, Roman and Greek Catholic---as an integral part of the region's politics, society, and culture, this collection is a major addition to studies of both Eastern Europe and religion in the twentieth century. "A volume that specialists in the history of Christianity in other regions of the world will read with great interest, and a degree of envy. As an historian of religion in Western Europe, I can say that although there is a vast literature on the religious history of the nineteenth century and a growing literature on the twentieth century, there is nothing quite like this." From the Foreword by Hugh McLeod, author of The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. "This is a path-breaking book in two different ways. It contributes to the re-evaluation of the nature of modern European religion generally, and to the nature of religion in the modern world." Jeffrey Cox, University of Iowa, author of Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India.
| Author | : Tomek Jankowski |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : 744 |
| Release | : 2022-03 |
| Genre | : |
| ISBN | : 9781644697603 |
The long-awaited new edition of the acclaimed, first-ever comprehensive, informative, and entertaining history of Eastern Europe in English―thoroughly updated, with a major new section on the postcommunist era and a foreword by BBC Central Europe Correspondent Nick Thorpe. When the legendary Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city of Rome in 753 BCE, Plovdiv--today the second-largest city in Bulgaria--was thousands of years old. Indeed, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, Brussels, Amsterdam are all are mere infants compared to Plovdiv. This is just one of the paradoxes that haunts and defines the New Europe, that part of Europe that was freed from Soviet bondage in 1989, and which is at once both much older than the modern Atlantic-facing power centers of Western Europe while also being much younger than them. Eastern Europe! is a brief and concise (but informative) introduction to Eastern Europe and its myriad customs and history. Even those knowledgeable about Western Europe often see Eastern Europe as terra incognito, with a sign on the border declaring "Here be monsters." Tomek Jankowski's book is a gateway to understanding both what unites and separates Eastern Europeans from their Western brethren, and how this vital region has been shaped by but has also left its mark on Western Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. It is a reader-friendly guide to a region that is all too often mischaracterized as remote, insular, and superstitious. The book comprises three parts, The first sums up modern linguistic, geographic, and religious contours of Eastern Europe, while the second, main part delves into the region's history, from the earliest origins of Europe up to the end of the Cold War, as well as--new to the 2nd edition--a section on the post-Cold War period. Closing the book is a section that makes sense of geographical name references -- many cities, rivers, or regions have different names -- and also includes an Eastern Europe by Numbers feature that provides charts describing the populations, politics, and economies of the region today. Throughout are boxed-off anecdotes (Useless Trivia) describing fascinating aspects of Eastern European history or culture.
| Author | : Larry Wolff |
| Publisher | : Stanford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 444 |
| Release | : 1994 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780804727020 |
Wolff explores how Western thinkers contributed to defining and characterizing Eastern Europe as half-civilized and barbaric.
| Author | : Anna Sosnowska |
| Publisher | : Central European University Press |
| Total Pages | : 372 |
| Release | : 2019-06-12 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9637326316 |
This monograph is about an exciting episode in the intellectual history of Europe: the vigorous debate among leading Polish historians on the sources of the economic development and non-development, including the origins of economic divisions within Europe. The work covers nearly fifty years of this debate between the publication of two pivotal works in 1947 and 1994. Anna Sosnowska provides an insightful interpretation of how local and generational experience shaped the notions of post-1945 Polish historians about Eastern European backwardness, and how their debate influenced Western historical sociology, social theories of development and dependency in peripheral areas, and the image of Eastern Europe in Western, Marxist-inspired social science. Although created under the adverse conditions of state socialism and censorship, this body of scholarship had an important repercussion in international social science of the post-war period, contributing an emphasis on international comparisons, as well as a stress on social theory and explanations. Sosnowska's analysis also helps to understand current differences that lead to conflicts between Europe’s richest and economically most developed core and its southern and eastern peripheries. The historians she studies also investigated analogies between paths in Eastern Europe and regions of West Africa, Latin America and East Asia.
| Author | : Philip Longworth |
| Publisher | : Springer |
| Total Pages | : 332 |
| Release | : 1992-08-18 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 134922202X |
Why has the collapse of Communism resulted in so much disappointment for the hopeful millions of Eastern Europe? In this original and provocative book Philip Longworth argues that their predicament is only partly due to the imposition of the Soviet system but rather they are the heirs of misfortune which dates back centuries. In exploring the origins of current problems, this sweeping history ranges from the present day to the time of Constantine the Great, from the Urals to the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and emphasises culture and society, as well as politics and economics. The resulting analysis provides the crucial, and until now much-needed, long-term background to the difficulties now facing Eastern Europe. This new perspective and the insight it brings will improve our understanding of this complex region and be of immense value to all who want to understand Eastern Europe's past and present.
| Author | : Daniel Chirot |
| Publisher | : Univ of California Press |
| Total Pages | : 276 |
| Release | : 1989 |
| Genre | : Business & Economics |
| ISBN | : 9780520076402 |
Reaching back centuries, this study makes a convincing case for very deep roots of current Eastern European backwardness. Its conclusions are suggestive for comparativists studying other parts of the world, and useful to those who want to understand contemporary Eastern Europe's past. Like the rest of the world except for that unique part of the West which has given us a false model of what was "normal," Eastern Europe developed slowly. The weight of established class relations, geography, lack of technological innovation, and wars kept the area from growing richer. In the nineteenth century the West exerted a powerful influence, but it was political more than economic. Nationalism and the creation of newly independent aspiring nation-states then began to shape national economies, often in unfavorable ways. One of this book's most important lessons is that while economics may limit the freedom of action of political players, it does not determine political outcomes. The authors offer no simple explanations but rather a theoretically complex synthesis that demonstrates the interaction of politics and economics.
| Author | : John Connelly |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 966 |
| Release | : 2020-01-21 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0691167125 |
Peoples of Eastern Europe -- Ethnicity on the edge of extinction -- Linguistic nationalism -- Nationality struggles : from idea to movement -- Insurgent nationalism : Serbia and Poland -- Cursed are the peacemakers : 1848 in East Central Europe -- The reform that made the monarchy unreformable : the 1867 compromise -- 1878 Berlin Congress : Europe's new ethno-nation states -- The origins of National Socialism : fin de siecle Hungary and Bohemia -- Liberalism's heirs and enemies : socialism vs. nationalism -- Peasant utopias : villages of yesterday and societies of tomorrow -- 1919 : a new Europe and its old problems -- The failure of national self-determination -- Fascism takes root : Iron Guard and Arrow Cross -- East Europe's anti-fascism -- Hitler's war and its East European enemies -- What Dante did not see : the Holocaust in Eastern Europe -- People's democracy : early postwar Eastern Europe -- Cold War and Stalinism -- Destalinization : Hungary's revolution -- National paths to communism : the 1960s -- 1968 and the Soviet bloc : reform communism -- Real existing socialism : life in the Soviet bloc -- The unraveling of communism -- 1989 -- East Europe explodes : the wars of Yugoslav succession -- East Europe joins Europe.
| Author | : Fred L. Casmir |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 380 |
| Release | : 2012-12-06 |
| Genre | : Language Arts & Disciplines |
| ISBN | : 1136484701 |
This volume represents a clear attempt to learn something from the events in Eastern European countries. It does not start with simplistic or old assumptions based on convenient Western communication models, but instead takes a new approach. If chaos theory could fundamentally change how physicists looked at order in the universe, then it may be of value for communication scholars to attempt to understand the diversity of chaos or order in the human universe, rather than attempt to force existing models on it for their own explanatory purposes. This book is not merely based on the study of select groups of university students or on laboratory settings created in the minds of social scientists. It seeks to understand some of the "real world," including the historical backgrounds and the theoretical assumptions brought to studies of intercultural conflicts. Using personal and professional insights developed during firsthand contacts with existing situations, chapter authors illustrate some of the realities by using the complexity of changes in Eastern European states during the final decade of the 20th century. From education to business, from the role of women to the role of mass media, from the impact of political systems to the impact of history, communication between those who are culturally diverse, though they may have been arbitrarily forced to live under the same "political roof," is the theme of these scholarly studies. The editor's reason for developing this volume of original essays is his belief that diversity rather than assumed similarity or even sameness -- based on the use of inadequate terminology -- is necessary for learning from contemporary human experiences. He further believes that diversity and the significant roles of cultural values as well as of history need to become key concepts in the model with which to begin when it comes to the study of various aspects of intercultural communication. It is therefore vital that scholars who represent various points of view and backgrounds contribute to that process. After all, understanding what is happening in the world is centrally anchored in or related to effective and successful "intercultural" communication between scholars who have different academic and personal backgrounds.
| Author | : Marcin Moskalewicz |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 571 |
| Release | : 2017-11-20 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1351654519 |
“Central Europe” is a vague and ambiguous term, more to do with outlook and a state of mind than with a firmly defined geographical region. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Central Europeans considered themselves to be culturally part of the West, which had been politically handicapped by the Eastern Soviet bloc. More recently, and with European Union membership, Central Europeans are increasingly thinking of themselves as politically part of the West, but culturally part of the East. This book, with contributions from a large number of scholars from the region, explores the concept of “Central Europe” and a number of other political concepts from an openly Central European perspective. It considers a wide range of issues including politics, nationalism, democracy, and the impact of culture, art and history. Overall, the book casts a great deal of light on the complex nature of “Central Europe”.
