Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

Scholarship on informal empire in the 19th century often centers on British influence around the globe. However, A Velvet Empire forcefully contends that, similar to Britain, France also pursued international aspirations through "soft power" from 1815 to the 1870s. Todd (King's College London, UK) effectively harnesses an array of case studies to show how French investors, politicians, and intellectuals saw opportunity in furthering French economic interests in Haiti, Mexico, and the Middle East and North Africa. More provocatively, he argues that even the French occupation of Algeria emerged only after efforts to establish less-formal ties with indigenous leaders failed. Todd suggests that the failures of informal empire combined with the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 and subsequent setbacks to generate support in France for expanding colonial rule. Ultimately, Todd convincingly overturns traditional assumptions in French and colonial scholarship that perceive this period of French history as one in which imperialism had relatively little influence on politics. Skillfully organized and enjoyable to read, A Velvet Empire is a must read for historians of modern France and 19th-century colonialism.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Gaborik (Univ. of Calabria, Italy) portrays Benito Mussolini as the prime mover and ultimate arbiter of dramatic taste and support under Italian Fascism. Unable to forge a national Fascist theater, Mussolini used theater to educate Italians about their grand traditions and new modernities as a form of "strategic aestheticism" in his effort to craft the new Fascist man. Covering Mussolini's roles as theater critic, impresario, dramatist, and censor, the book also analyzes key dramatic figures who influenced Mussolini, including playwrights Gabriele D'Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, George Bernard Shaw, Giovacchino Forzano; the dedicated censor Leopoldo Zurlo; and the multitalented trio Massimo Bontempelli, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and Silvio D'Amico. These Italians developed the early and late art theater, the Experimental Theater, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the ingenious thespian truck shows that took drama and opera to the masses. The book covers primarily the first two-thirds of Mussolini's dictatorship. The deterioration of Italian life after 1936, covered briefly in the epilogue, may have told a different tale of theater amid Mussolini's failed colonial expansions and destructive Nazi war alliance. Engagingly written and based on a deep reading of primary sources and the relevant Italian and English scholarship, this incomparably learned monograph is critical for Italian Fascist, modern Italian, and theater studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

In this fascinating, engaging study, Renaud (Yale Univ.) reveals the steady transformation of leftism in Europe, from radical Marxism, which stressed economics, to an ideology that focused on youth, education, and quality of life. Heavily influenced by thinkers such as Georg Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse, leftist ideology (chastened by the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and horrified by Fascism in Western Europe) changed dramatically with the founding of the neoleftist group New Beginning, which grew out of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD). After the SPD was outlawed in 1933, its members began rethinking leftism. Given the schism between the Communists and Socialists in Germany, many distrusted the Soviet Union. After 1945, with the Communists' attempts to increase power, particularly in Eastern Germany, unity socialism fell flat. By 1958, with the country divided, the Socialists in Germany abandoned Marxism as a goal, reducing its base to trade unionists and, as Renaud shows, alienating students who valued quality of life and distrusted authority. From Rudi Dutschke in Western Germany to Daniel Cohn-Bendit in France, a student-based left rooted in non-conformity arose. It did not hold, however, losing labor and alienating the bourgeoisie. An outstanding work.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

The term Belle Epoque was not used, in any uniform sense, by those who lived in France in the years before the rupture of WW I. Rather, the term was invented later. In this outstanding volume, the late Kalifa (formerly, Univ. of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, France) demonstrates that it was not until the Nazi occupation during WW II that a definitive connotation for and wide usage of the term Belle Epoque fully emerged in the French cultural imagination. Kalifa traces that invention, along with the continuing evolution thereafter of the chrononym Belle Epoque. Exploring why a persistent impetus to recall and be nostalgic about this era has remained, as Kalifa notes, the Belle Epoque "truly exists only because we have needed it to" (p. 184)--the author examines successive redefinitions of the Belle Epoque in the decades since 1945 to illuminate lessons about those subsequent eras themselves, as the understanding of the phrase has repeatedly shifted with changing times. Ultimately, Kalifa considers what the example of the Belle Epoque conveys about the past's relationship with the present and the fundamental essence of what history is. A genuinely thought-provoking study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

This book is not about Louis XIV nor even about one man's unquenchable thirst for power centuries ago. It is, rather, an analysis of a dream culture driven by its own logic and frighteningly relevant today. Building on seminal works on absolutism, including Orest Ranum's Artisans of Glory (1980) and Peter Burke's The Fabrication of Louis XIV (CH, Jan'93, 30-2830), Bjornstad (French, Indiana Univ., Bloomington) encourages readers to reject what he considers a historically incorrect, reductive view of propaganda as top-down and manipulative. He argues that the mobilization of the arts to celebrate the Sun King was in fact a joint enterprise, a dream the monarch, his image-makers, the court, and parts of the entire country shared. Through careful and convincing analysis of Charles Le Brun's paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles; the king's Memoires; and two short, extravagant apologies of the king by Claude-Charles Guyonnet de Vertron and Jean de Prechac, Bjornstad shows how absolutist culture became a national fantasy. At the heart of unfettered power lies a web of myths and outrageous exaggerations, a mutually beneficial labyrinth of deceit and self-delusion. Beautifully illustrated with seven color plates and 14 halftones, this is a remarkable study of an important subject.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.

Today, as a result of the internet age, everyone is blessed, or cursed (depending on one's perspective), with a tremendous amount of information at one's fingertips. This "revolution" regarding information, however, truly began back in the early modern period of Western history. In this meticulously researched book, Dover (Kennesaw State Univ.) describes in detail the evolution of this information phenomenon. The book centers on the fact that early modern Europeans, as the author writes, "put paper inscribed with text at the center of their lives." It is also interesting to note that much like today's informational explosion, simply the attainment of information was key. "Information might not be knowledge nor is it wisdom, yet its acquisition and preservation are essential because it might yield some knowledge and perhaps some wisdom." Dover's coverage shows that virtually all areas of European culture were affected, from science, commerce, and politics to all areas of educational development. With this book, Dover unveils a very important aspect of early modern history, making it invaluable to all major libraries.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

This is a superb text for teaching. Shopkow (Indiana Univ., Bloomington) presents a "worked example" of how a historian comes to understand the ways a text--in this case, Stephen de Fougere's 12th-century biography of St. Vitalis of Savigny (included in full translation along with the author's biography of St. Firmat)--was embedded in and responded to its literary and social contexts. She unfolds for students how the story of St. Vitalis's life reflected its author's background and milieu, the purposes such a text would have served, and the expectations of its medieval audience. Shopkow keeps her student readers in mind both when explaining and demonstrating such sophisticated analytical concepts as "positionality" and "emotional regime" and when answering basic questions, such as, What is a formulary? Her relaxed and personal tone moves lightly over some very complex matters, which might tempt less-careful undergraduate readers to miss that her matter-of-factness rests on a deep level of historical and historiographical understanding. This is an invaluable text and tool not only for the medieval studies survey but also for a general history methods course; this reviewer adopted it for his own survey before finishing the third chapter.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates and faculty.