From The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 1-2 (reviewed here, here, and here):
During the Scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, European powers staked claims to virtually the entire continent. At meetings in Berlin, Paris, London and other capitals, European statesmen [...]
From: Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 114-115:
Martyrs were an essential element of all three totalitarian political religions. Düsseldorf tried to get in on the act by creating a cult of relics connected with Albert Leo Schlageter, who [...]
From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 440-442:
Little wonder that the war appeared to many as a sort of spiritual purification, a violent purging of the ‘inhuman power of the lie’ that had stifled all political discussion in the years before. ‘The war forced us to rethink our [...]
From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 234-236:
Extraordinary even by the standards of the Stalinist regime, the Great Terror was not a routine wave of mass arrests, such as those that swept across the country throughout Stalin’s reign, but a calculated policy of mass murder. No longer satisfied [...]
In Drexel University’s online publication, The Smart Set, Graeme Wood portrays Joseph Mengele’s Germany in exile in Paraguay. Here’s a taste of it.
Eugene, a Belgian computer programmer, has retired to a cottage in southern Paraguay, and the pride of his golden years is his view. From his stone patio, he sees forested hills, the [...]
From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 364-365:
Between the arrival of American troops in North Africa in November 1942 and the return of the last French prisoners and deportees from Germany via the Soviet Union (in 1946 or later), French people experienced many different kinds of [...]
From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 277-279:
What does [Service du Travail Obligatoire (the wartime labor draft)] tell us about the broader nature of the Vichy regime? Most obviously, it shows how resistance, collaboration, passivity and Pétainism always overlapped. Not everyone who evaded STO, or who [...]
From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 206-207:
It is now commonplace to observe that Poland has become a “normal country.” But what does this mean? Certainly, to arrive in Warsaw these days is more like arriving in Lisbon or Naples than [...]
My first introduction to Elsässisch (Alsatian German) came in the form of bilingual street signs in Strasbourg, where the main street through Grand Île in the heart of the old city is named both Grand’Rue and Lang Stross. (A street of the same name in Pfalzgrafenweiler on the German side of the border was labeled [...]
From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 224-225:
The black market epitomized everything that Vichy disapproved of. It went with selfishness, materialism and indifference to the authority of the state. Denunciations under Vichy often concerned black-market matters, and were couched in interesting terms. Someone describing himself as [...]
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