University of Wisconsin Press

The first book-length study of YorÙbÁ therapeutics, encompassing thousands of remedies for more than 160 different ailments, ÌwÉ ÌwÒsÀn (Book of Healing) was originally published in 1910 by Ìjẹ̀bÚ healer, politician, and public intellectual Joseph OdÙmÓsÙ. Much of the scholarship on African healing cultures has been reconstructed from oral sources and texts produced by missionaries, colonial officials, and anthropologists. Of the handful of firsthand accounts from across all of sub-Saharan Africa that have survived in written form, OdÙmÓsÙ’s is one of the most extensive and encyclopedic. While the existence of OdÙmÓsÙ’s massive work is well-known in southwestern Nigeria, it has not previously been available in English. Michael ỌlÁdẹ̀jọ AfọlÁyan and Helen Tilley have translated the volume in its entirety, and here use it as an entrÉe into greater understandings of YorÙbÁ medicine, spirituality, and print culture during a time of rapid change under British colonialism and the spread of Christianity.

In 1963, nearly two decades after the end of the most destructive war in human history, George L. Mosse assembled a group of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds to answer a seemingly simple question: What is fascism? The landmark seminar that followed, held at Stanford University, came to define the intellectual conversation about European fascism throughout the postwar era. Mosse strove to better understand the legacy of fascism by debating its origins—often contentiously—with the sharpest minds of his generation. In this volume, which collects Mosse’s lectures as well as his peers’ responses, Mosse and his colleagues wrestle with fascism’s origins and impact. The straightforward question that launched the seminar quickly expands to deeper debates. What are the intellectual foundations of right-wing populist political movements? How had this particular movement risen to power so quickly and then left so much devastation in its wake? Were charismatic leaders like Hitler and Mussolini the driving forces, or did the various incarnations of fascism throughout Europe and beyond constitute a broader revolution? What was the relationship of religious and cultural institutions to fascism’s rise and cataclysmic fall? As the word “fascism” takes on new meaning in the twenty-first century, it is more urgent than ever to revisit the work of scholars who witnessed its birth—and its defeat. In the foreword, Stanley G. Payne situates the lively debate in its historical context, and in the critical introduction, James J. Sheehan shares his own memories of the seminar and reflects on how the experience drove Mosse’s later work.

Walace Weiss, a famous fantasy novelist struggling with drug addiction, sets himself on a twofold quest: to finish his first book in more than a decade and, like the immortal elves of his stories, to try to remember what, in his long life, he should not have forgotten. While many have come to view Walace as a bad influence on children, literature, and himself, his impact sweeps across worlds both fantastic and real, leading to his establishing a new kingdom in his neglected McMansion, Summerheim. The result is a mock-epic in rehabilitation, starring such friends and enemies as Cal, Walace’s dealer and private jester; Dragon, a porn star turned guidance counselor; Epiphany, a lunch lady and stripper in recovery; her son, Tuffy, planning everyone’s funerals at age nine; Jackal, newly sober and in touch with his emotions for the first time; and Wolf, Walace’s socially withdrawn twin brother and reluctant doppelgÄnger. Brian Bouldrey piles on the laughs and absurdity alongside dollops of humanity. With brilliant recklessness, he praises and pokes fun at genres, conventions, fandoms, and critics, offering a Deadpool-like exploration of an upside-down world filled with epic quests, epic mistakes, and epic characters.

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. Critical to these new interpretations of the revolt are the actions of women prisoners, who here assume a central place in this story for the first time.

Alessandra Tarquini, an expert in Italian Fascism, untangles the complicated relationship between the Italian Left and Jews since the late nineteenth century. Due largely to indifference, and sometimes to antisemitism, Italian leftists consistently overlooked Jews in their visions for a collectivist future. Yet, from the birth of the Socialist Party in 1892 until 1992, when the heirs of the Marxist tradition dispersed or set out on a new path, questions continually arose in revolutionary efforts to remake the Italian state: Should Jews be seen as oppressed, and therefore welcome to participate in the struggle that would lead to the advent of a new civilization? Or might they hinder the realization of socialism because of their attachment to a religious identity? Tarquini’s research fills an important lacuna by analyzing the antisemitism of twentieth-century socialist movements. Crucially, however, Tarquini makes important distinctions between antisemitism on the Italian Left and Right, and identifies the relationship between leftism and antisemitism as a distinct formation.

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.

American Fantastic challenges readers to recognize an organizing myth in America’s perception of its imperialist past, “the myth of redemptive violence.” Derek J. Thiess persuasively argues that this myth serves to obscure the deep thread of Christian supremacy that underwrites America’s colonial and imperial impulses, from the early colonial period to westward expansion to the contemporary global order. This American imaginary, which enmeshes religion with violence, is constructed in multiple contentious and productive contact zones: between genres, between cultures, and between past and present. Thiess’s interdisciplinary study examines America’s past and present imperial projects, from the Hawaiian Islands to the Eastern Seaboard, as they proliferate in popular story forms. By interrogating American myths, legends, and fantastic narratives across an impressive array of genres, including folk narratives, science fiction, movies, and more, Thiess exposes how the “myth of redemptive violence” manifests in contemporary constructions of America’s fantastic imaginaries.

In 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany agreed to a nonaggression treaty named for its signatories, foreign ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Kept hidden from the public was an addendum to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a “secret protocol” whose existence was denied by the Soviet Union until 1992. It defined new borders for German and Soviet spheres of influence, effectively preparing for the partition of Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. Shortly after signing on August 23, 1939, both the USSR and Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In this volume, Antonella Salomoni scrutinizes this consequential document and its afterlives, focusing predominantly on the discourse that surrounded it. From the moment of the secret protocol’s inception—and the near-instantaneous rumors of its existence—it generated friction and competing narratives. The document became public during the Nuremberg trials, but the USSR declared it a fabrication evidencing the West’s willingness to falsify history. It continues to be relevant to the reconfiguration of history currently advanced by Vladimir Putin. By centering the rumors, accusations, and propaganda the pact precipitated, Salomoni illuminates how political actors can use and abuse history, how they create and disseminate truths and falsehoods, and how they can blur the boundary between facts and fictions even in the glaring face of black-and-white documentation.

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. At a time when ideas of absolute music and music-as-leisure were both on the rise, writing about music tended to obscure these practical matters. Here, Applegate reflects on how an intensely musical society organized and understood the ubiquitous activity that underpinned it.