UVM History Department Blog

Today (Friday, January 29) the history department will celebrate the many books recently published by members of our department, and their authors.  Members of the UVM community and the general public are cordially invited to join us at 4 PM at Billings Library Apse for free food and brief remarks by several of the authors.

As part of our celebration, this week on our blog we are featuring short commentaries by the authors on their books, and the research and writing that went into producing them.

In this fifth and final installment, we hear from Professors Denise Youngblood and Frank Zelko.

Professor Youngblood joined the UVM History Department in 1988. She teaches Russian and East European history; her research focuses on the cultural politics of Russian and Soviet cinema and the Soviet historical film.

She has recently published a new book, and a book she co-wrote in 2010 has been reissued in paperback.

Youngblood, Denise, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace:  Literary Classic to Soviet Cinematic Epic  (University Press of Kansas, 2014).

Youngblood, Denise, and Tony Shaw, Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds (University Press of Kansas, 2014) (paperback edition, first published 2010).

From Professor Youngblood:

“For the last nine years, my scholarship on Soviet cinema has focused on the Cold War, which I never would have predicted when I started at UVM. My work at that time was firmly rooted in the early years of Soviet power and the Soviet silent film industry. I wrote two books on that subject (Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era and Movies for the Masses) before turning to an even earlier period, late imperial Russian cinema (The Magic Mirror). I eventually ventured into the world of sound cinema, with a genre study that covered nearly a century of Russian films (Russian War Films). After that project finished, I was frankly at a loss as to what to write about next. Fate intervened, in the form of an invitation from Tony Shaw, Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, to co-write a comparative study of American and Soviet Cold War films. I thought, why not? I’ll learn something new.

Our book Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, first published by the University Press of Kansas (which specializes in Cold War studies) in 2010, was reissued in paperback in 2014. This book is the first comparative survey of cinema’s vital role in disseminating Cold War ideologies. It has been praised as “an insightful and novel introduction to the visual culture of the Cold War” (Slavic and East European Journal), “a stimulating and richly informative work” (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema), and “an important contribution to our understanding of Cold War culture” (Journal of American History).

Over the course of this research I became fascinated with a Cold War film that we did not cover in Cinematic Cold War: the eight hour Soviet adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This film, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, was commissioned by the state as a direct response to King Vidor’s 1956 American version of the novel, which was screened in the USSR and became very popular with Soviet audiences, who fell in love with Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova. Vidor’s film was seen as an affront to Russian national pride, so Bondarchuk’s film had to be bigger and better in every way. It was, taking six years to make (1961-67), at a cost of $700 million in today’s dollars. It is still the most expensive film ever made and became the first Soviet film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. This is the subject of my 2014 book Bondarchuk’s War and Peace: Literary Classic to Soviet Cinematic Epic (University Press of Kansas), which analyses the movie as a Cold War epic, a literary adaptation, a historical film, and more.

For my most recent project, I returned to a collaboration with Tony Shaw. We were asked to present the keynote address at an international Cold War Sports conference held in Moscow last spring on the topic of American and Soviet Cold War sports cinema. When the invitation was issued in fall 2014, I had never seen a Soviet sports film, in more than 40 years spent watching hundreds of Soviet movies. So this research became another part of my education…it was fun! Our paper became an article that will appear in a forthcoming issue of Journal of Cold War Studies.”

Professor Zelko specializes in environmental history.

He has recently published a new, German-language edition of his history of Greenpeace, Make it a Green Peace (first published 2013) with additional material and extra chapter on Germany.

Zelko, Frank, Greenpeace: Von der Hippiebewegung zum Ökokonzern (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

From Professor Zelko:

“In 2013, Oxford University Press published my book on the history of Greenpeace. Shortly after it appeared, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, a German publisher based in Göttingen, expressed interest in publishing a German edition. I was very happy for them to do so, and set about editing the manuscript and writing a new chapter on Greenpeace Germany. Within a few months they had translated the text, and the book appeared in early 2014. Greenpeace is the most prominent environmental organization in Germany, so the book received quite a bit of attention in the media—more so than it did in the English-speaking world. The highlight was a panel devoted to the book at the Göttingen literature festival, which included Germany’s former environmental minister, Jürgen Trittin, among the discussants. I’m not sure that he read the book particularly carefully, but I nonetheless appreciated the extra publicity!”

On Friday of this week, the history department will celebrate the many books recently published by members of our department, and their authors.  Members of the UVM community and the general public are cordially invited to join us at 4 PM on January 29 at Billings Library Apse for free food and brief remarks by several of the authors.

As part of our celebration, this week on our blog we will be featuring short commentaries by the authors on their books, and the research and writing that went into producing them.

In this fourth installment, we hear from Professors Robert McCullough and Francis Nicosia.

Professor McCullough specializes in historic preservation, architectural history and historic preservation law.

McCullough, Robert, Old Wheelways: Traces of Bicycle History on the Land (MIT Press, Oct. 2015).

From Professor McCullough:

“This book presents two largely unstudied and closely related topics concerning the legacies of nineteenth-century American wheelmen and wheelwomen.  The first introduces bicyclists as explorers of America’s built and cultural environments, travelers who amassed a substantial but today largely underutilized body of geographical literature, travel journalism, illustration, photography, road books, maps, and descriptions of American places.  In the process, these cyclists became some of the country’s keenest observers of suburban and rural landscapes at an important moment in history when urban, suburban and rural environments are in the midst of tenuous adjustment, but soon will be altered forever by the automobile.  As part of that exploration, too, these cyclists engaged in heritage tourism half-a-century before that practice became an economic justification for preserving America’s cultural heritage.

The second explores the building of nineteenth century bicycle paths and establishes three principal contexts for the origins of those paths: club or wheelway-league sponsored projects; park or parkway paths authorized and maintained by municipal or metropolitan park boards; and legislatively sanctioned sidepath campaigns overseen by sidepath commissions with governmental authority.  The building of bicycle paths begins in the mid-1880s during cycling’s high-wheel era and rapidly gains momentum as safety-bicycles become popular during the 1890s. In particular, cyclists in New York State financed, constructed, and maintained an extraordinarily far-reaching network of sidepaths, by conservative estimates more than two-thousand miles, in pursuit of their quest to experience America’s open countryside, or as a way to ride to and from work.  Moreover, New York’s cyclists accomplished that feat in little more than five or six years, a remarkably short time when one considers today’s projects that can consume a decade of planning and cost astounding sums.  Regrettably, probably fewer than a dozen of the country’s nineteenth-century bicycle paths survive.

A third underlying theme, also new, emphasizes the lack of recognition given to the historic buildings, structures, sites, and corridors such as bicycle paths that recall the important contributions of nineteenth-century cyclists to American culture – the vanishing factories, workers housing, club houses, shops, racing tracks, overland race routes, and other landmarks.  In truth, this project began as an effort to document the surviving traces of that heritage, and continues in that same direction.  However, the history of bicycle paths became too broad to be presented as part of that larger work.  In addition, the topic of bicycle paths is an especially timely one, relevant to current debates about alternative means of transportation and about the place for bicycles on public roads.  Thus the story of cycling’s industrial architecture, planned neighborhoods, fashionable clubhouses, and other landmarks will be introduced in a second volume.

All three themes support an argument that the disciplines engaged in conserving America’s important built and cultural environments – historic preservation, environmental history, cultural and historical geography, landscape studies, urban planning, and travel and tourism – should make much better use of cycling’s heritage, and should accord greater recognition to the scant surviving traces of that heritage.  Unfortunately, the omissions can be glaring.”

More of the beautiful images featured in Professor McCullough’s book can be viewed in a Slate review of the book.

Professor Nicosia is a professor of history and the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies.  He specializes in the history of modern Germany, the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

He has recently published a monograph, as well as a new edition of an edited volume.

Nicosia, Francis R., Nazi Germany and the Arab World (Cambridge University Press, January 2015).

From Professor Nicosia:

“In this book, published by Cambridge University Press in early 2015, I consider the evolving strategic interests and foreign policy intent of the Third Reich toward the Arabic-speaking world, from Hitler’s assumption of power in January 1933 to 1944, a year following the final Axis defeat in and expulsion from North Africa in May 1943. I do so within the context of two central, interconnected issues in the larger history of National Socialism and the Third Reich, namely Nazi geopolitical interests and ambitions and the regime’s racial ideology and policy. This book defines the relatively limited geopolitical interests of Nazi Germany in the Middle East and North Africa within the context of its relationships with the other European great powers, and its policies with regard to the Arabs and Jews who lived in those areas.”

Nicosia, Francis R., and Lawrence Stokes, eds., Germans Against Nazism: Non-Conformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich (Berghahn Books, 2015) (paperback edition, first published 1990).

From Professor Nicosia:

“This is a new and revised paperback edition of a collection of twenty scholarly essays that I co-edited and published with Berg Publishers in London in 1990. Rather than being accepted by all of German society, the Nazi regime was also resisted in both passive and active forms by some. This new edition examines opposition and resistance in its broadest sense to National Socialism among Germans during the Third Reich. It considers individual and organized nonconformity, opposition, and resistance, ranging from symbolic acts of disobedience to a few organized assassination attempts. It looks at how within disparate groups such as the Jewish community, the Christian churches, conservatives, communists, socialists, and the military there existed elements that at times defied the regime, each in its own way.”

On Friday of this week, the history department will celebrate the many books recently published by members of our department, and their authors.  Members of the UVM community and the general public are cordially invited to join us at 4 PM on January 29 at Billings Library Apse for free food and brief remarks by several of the authors.

As part of our celebration, this week on our blog we will be featuring short commentaries by the authors on their books, and the research and writing that went into producing them.

In this third installment, we hear from Professors Alfred Andrea and James Overfield.

Professor Andrea specializes in medieval Europe and global history.

Professor Overfield specializes in Global, Renaissance and Reformation and European intellectual history.

Together, they have written a book that was recently published in a new edition:

Andrea, Alfred J., and James H. Overfield, The Human Record: Sources of Global History, 2 vols, 8th ed. (Boston: Cengage, 2014).

From the Professors Andrea and Overfield:

“This is a two-volume collection of primary source documents and artifacts relating to the span of world history from ca. 4000 BC to today arranged thematically and chronologically. First appearing in 1989, The Human Record was one of the first textbooks from a major publisher in what was then the newly emerging field of world history. Now in its eighth edition, it remains the leading primary source reader for the introductory World History course.”

Professor Andrea has also recently published a book he co-edited with Andrew Holt:

Andrea, Alfred, and Andrew Holt, eds., Seven Myths of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2015)

One reviewer wrote:

“Seven Myths of the Crusades‘ rebuttal of the persistent and multifarious misconceptions associated with topics including the First Crusade, anti-Judaism and the Crusades, the crusader states, the Children’s Crusade, the Templars and past and present Islamic-Christian relations proves, once and for all, that real history is far more fascinating than conspiracy theories, pseudo-history and myth-mongering. This book is a powerful witness to the dangers of the misappropriation and misinterpretation of the past and the false parallels so often drawn between the crusades and later historical events ranging from nineteenth-century colonialism to the protest movements of the 1960s to the events of 9/11. This volume’s authors have venerable track records in teaching and researching the crusading movement, and anyone curious about the crusades would do well to start here.” –Jessalynn Bird, Dominican University, co-Editor of Crusade and Christendom.