New Books in History

There’s a quip that goes “Christianity is probably a great religion. Someone should really try it.” The implication, of course, is that most people who call themselves Christians aren't very Christian at all. And, in truth, it's hard to be a good Christian, what with all that loving your enemi...

I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to the West (which they did), so they naturally told the Stasi"the East German secret service"to watch them (which they did). After the fall of the Wall,...

You’ve probably heard of hipsters. Heck, you may even be a hipster. If you don’t know what a hipster is, you might spend some time on this sometimes entertaining website. Where do hipsters come from? Lets work backwards. Before hipsters (1990s), there were slackers (1980s): middle-class, college...

I've got a name for you: Robert Zimmerman (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham). You've heard of him. He was a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota. But he didn't (as the stereotype would suggest) become a doctor, lawyer, professor or businessman. Nope, the professions were not for him. He loved the Americ...

I met George Kennan twice, once in 1982 and again in about 1998. On both occasions, I found him tough to read. He was a very dignified man--I want to write "correct"--but also quite distant, even cerebral. Now that I've read Nicholas Thompson's very writerly and engaging The Hawk and the Dove: Paul...

For us, every "nation" has and has always had a "culture," meaning a defining set of folkways, customs, and styles that is different from every other. But like the modern understanding of the word "nation," this idea of "culture" or "a culture" is not very old. According to the OED, the modern meani...

Why did communism collapse so rapidly in Eastern Europe in 1989? The answer commonly given at the time was that something called "civil society," having grown mighty in the 1980s, overthrew it. I've always been more than a little uncomfortable with both the idea of "civil society" and this explanati...

By the time the Nazi's invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of building socialism. Certain "elements" needed to be se...

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they--both North and South--understand the war?...

We like to think of countries as permanent fixtures. They aren't. They come and go. In 1989, a place called the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or East Germany, was going.nbsp; It was never really an "ordinary" place. In the West but also the East; sovereign but not sovereign; German but not German...