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A succession of tragic events extending from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the bloodletting on the killing fields of World War 1 through the fall of the Berlin [...]

In what follows I build on to previous writing relating to the nature of religion (including religious belief) in modern Europe and the factors that must be taken into account if this is to be properly understood (Davie 1994, 2000, 2002, 2006). These factors are: •the cultural heritage of Europe; •the ‘old’ model of a moderately dominant state church which operates like a public utility; •a ‘newer’ model which takes the form of a growing market in religion; •the arrival into Europe of new groups of people both Christian and other; •an increasingly articulate secular lobby. The first point to grasp is that all five exist alongside each other and that they push and pull in different directions. The second point provides the focus for this article: namely that exactly the same factors that account for the nature of religious belief in European society are equally present in unbelief. I will take each of them in turn in order to illustrate this point.

The experiences of France, Germany and Italy in dealing with urban terrorists who wanted to overthrow parliamentary democracy through violent means are presented. The conciliatory and coercive efforts made by them to deter the urban terrorists are examined.

The western production of lead-glazed pottery began in Asia Minor during the first century B.C.E. Examining this topic offers insights into invention and innovation in a period frequently dismissed as technologically stagnant and invites questions about why lead-glazed pottery did not come into general use in Europe until the Medieval period. The identification of this pottery with the rhosica vasa mentioned by Cicero and Athenaeus highlights difficulties in reconciling documentary sources with material culture. Lead-glazed pottery is discussed in terms of chronology, function, and production technology. Contemporaneous developments in glass and metalwork suggest cognitive synchronization among workers in different materials. The trajectory of invention, innovation, and diffusion of lead-glazed pottery is compared with that of other Greek and Roman technologies.

The political, economic and nationalistic causes that fuelled the European revolutions of 1848 and 1989 as well as their effects are analyzed.

The impact of evolutionary thought is fundamental to the archaeological perception that the third millennium BC in Europe is a period of highly developed social hierarchy. Following a critique of previous uses of the evolutionary frame of reference to model understandings of the material culture for this period, I suggest an alternative reading on the basis of a polythetic analysis of several categories of data (funerary practices, ceramics, settlement pattern). The two major archaeological complexes involved are characterized by the widespread diffusion of categories of artefacts and associated ideas. The networks therefore established are paralleled by a series of other interaction processes indicated by regionally homogeneous patterns in material culture. In sum, this entire system functions because it draws on a relationship of equality between the involved partners, individuals or communities, rather than social hierarchy. Keywords Social equality; Corded Ware complex; Bell Beaker phenomenon; Late Neolithic; Europe; polythetic analysis.

The article unfolds the coloniality of knowledge from its historical foundation in the sixteenth century to its continued implementation in the twenty-first century.

The various levels of memory politics in Europe are identified and illustrated through an examination of the events surrounding the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II on 9 May 2005. The reactions of the leaders of the Baltic States who were invited to the ceremony by Russia's President Vladimir Putin are analyzed in this connection.

There were, broadly speaking, two great waves of European expansionism--one in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century and the other in the nineteenth century. In the first wave the […]

How did the states of Europe establish colonies throughout the world starting in the 1500s? It is one of the most important questions of global history, but our attempts to […]

From the Adriatic to the Baltic, from the Elbe to the Urals and beyond, totalitarianism has collapsed. Yet the 1989 bloodless revolution in Eastern Europe caught most observers by surprise. This essay explores the signal socio-cultural forces which contributed to the sea-change. Throughout Eastern Europe, grassroots movements emerged in the 1970s and 1980s demanding greater participation in social, economic, cultural, and political life. Thus, the rise of a new civic culture and civil society preceded and fostered the momentous changes in Eastern Europe. This essay offers a model of transition from authoritarian systems to political democracy, highlighted by 'The Menshevik Divide,' and places East European nations and the USSR on a cognitive map which indicates the relative strength of civic values and autonomous action just before the revolution (1988). Curiously, this model also shows why the transition remains incomplete, since authoritarian values and political processes keep many post-communist systems in a twilight zone between democracy and dictatorship. Hence, the quest for universal human rights, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, and an open society is still a futuristic project in much of Eastern Europe and the Soviet successor states, suspended between democracy and 'virtual communism.'

The study examines change over time in sentiments toward out-group populations in European societies. For this purpose data were compiled from four waves of the Eurobarometer surveys for 12 countries that provided detailed and comparable information on attitudes toward foreigners between 1988 and 2000. A series of ultilevel hierarchical linear models were estimated to examine change in the effects of individual- and country-level sources of threat on anti-foreigner sentiment. The analysis shows a substantial rise in antiforeigner sentiment between 1988 and 2000 in all 12 countn'es. The rise in anti-foreigner sentiment was steep in the early period (between 1988 and 1994), then leveled off after that. Although anti-foreigner sentiment tends to be more pronounced in places with a large proportion of foreign populations and where economic conditons are less prosperous. The impact of individual-level socioeconomic charachteristics such a education has remained stable over the years, but the effect of political ideology has increased. The meaning and significance of the findings are discussed of the findings with the context of European societies.

The economic and social dimensions of change have penetrated all aspects of history like military history, the history of science and medicine, political and diplomatic history, and the history of art which were hermetically sealed within their own methodological convention, utilizing just their own criteria. The economic history has recovered from its danger of losing its own battle with its range broadened to embrace social and cultural history.

The article takes issue with current orthodoxy concerning early modern republicanism, centred on Quentin Skinner's model of classical republicanism. I argue that historians of political thought need to return to first principles in their practice in order to understand early modern republicanism, and I provide an example by using those principles to reassess one canonical text, Philippe de Plessis Mornay's Vindiciae, contra tyrannos. Reading the Vindiciae in context reveals it as a work whose radicalism lies, not in its engagement with the Roman law tradition, but in its express conviction that each and every individual is responsible for maintaining a covenanted relationship with God. My reassessment tracks the political, and specifically regicidal, consequences of commitment to that belief in England from the late sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. It destabilizes the anachronistic distinction between 'political' and 'religious' modes of thought that historians of political thought too often use to characterize early modern political discourse, and it points to the common ground shared and articulated by theorists including, inter alia, John Ponet, George Buchanan, and John Milton. The conclusion considers what this investigation reveals about republicanism as a political phenomenon in Europe and America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Long before the broomstick became popular with witches in medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by thieves and madmen in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a […]

Since the colonial era, the tomahawk has served as a symbol of Indian savagery in American arts and literature. The pipe tomahawk, however, tells a different story. From its backcountry origins as a trade good to its customization as a diplomatic device, this object facilitated European-Indian exchange, giving tangible form to spoken metaphors for war, peace, and alliance. The production, distribution, and use of the pipe tomahawk also illustrated contrasting Indian and European notions of value and utility in material objects, exposing the limits of such goods in promoting cross-cultural mediation and understanding.

Midway through Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), the protagonist asks of his teacher, Imlac: 'By what means are the Europeans thus powerful? or why, since they can easily visit Asia and [...]

Often, when people nowadays talk of ‘esotericism’, they are using this word either as more or less synonymous with ‘New Age’, or as a term for movements that are based on a secret wisdom that is only accessible to an ‘inner circle’ of initiates. In academic discussions, however, during the past fifteen years, a field of research has been established that critically engages these assumptions and applies the term ‘esotericism’ in a very different way, namely as a signifier of a number of currents in Western culture that have influenced the history of religions in manifold ways. ‘New Age’ and secret initiatory knowledge are but two aspects of these traditions, and certainly not the most important ones. In this article, the author reflects on the various scholarly approaches to the concept of ‘Western esotericism’. He proposes an analysis that takes in­to account the manifold pluralisms that have shaped Western culture—not only in modernity. He argues that the academic study of Western esotericism should be understood as part and parcel of a broader analysis of European history of religion, with all its complexities, polemics, diachronic developments, and pluralistic discourses.

The history of science and the history of medicine were, from their beginnings as subjects in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods, hostile to esoteric ideas and practices and generally excluded them from the scope of academic study. Esoteric belief systems by definition prioritize inner knowledge, knowledge that is not attainable or transferable by the standard practices of public pedagogy, but rather is acquired by direct apprehension or by internal illumination. I call these ‘belief systems’, because people who defend esoteric knowledge do so within a worldview, a physics and metaphysics that explains and makes sense of their hopes and experiences. Such belief systems can therefore be compared with other worldviews—cosmologies in the most general sense of the term—and points of tangency, or even zones of interpenetration, can be examined. It is just such points of confrontation and zones of commonality between the occult and manifest sciences which are of particular interest to historians of science, because it is here that the disciplinary boundaries of modern science are being negotiated.

THIS essay will argue for a renewed appreciation of the importance of feudalism in world history. It will argue that many of the Europe/Asia distinctions in which Europe is feudal […]

The main ideas of Jean Gottman, the President of the World Society for Ekistics, about the structure, organization and dynamics of geographical space as well as their relevance to issues like globalization, terrorism or European integration are outlined. It is observed that his ideas offer a convincing basis on the issue of iconography being the crucial European question of the coming years.

This article examines European history and Europe's ties with the United States. The author, maintaining European's are ashamed of their imperialistic history, argues the United States' current unilateral policies are offensive to Europeans, yet they have little choice but to strengthen transatlantic ties.

By challenging prevalent `realist' interpretations, this article seeks to open up a new perspective on Anglo-US efforts to create a viable Euro-Atlantic peace system after 1918. Its main thesis is that significant advances to this end did not result from enforcing the Versailles system but rather from a qualitatively new process of peaceful change: the making of the `unfinished transatlantic peace order' of the 1920s. Initiated by Anglo-US policy makers, this process led to the first `real' peace settlements after 1918, the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno pact of 1925. Crucially, these settlements fostered Germany's international reintegration on terms acceptable for France. They thus prefigured the terms on which more permanent stability was achieved after 1945.

Since the theme of this issue is `back to the future,' especially to the ways in which information formats before the age of printing anticipate and perhaps even may give [...]

Since 1957, a far-reaching transformation of politics within the Member States, commonly described as Europeanization, is said to have taken place. This article contributes to the literature on this phenomenon by focusing on the impact of integration on the democratic polity--that is, the constellation of institutions, procedures and rules of parliamentary democracy, and the political dynamics that flow from them. The empirical analysis is based on Arend Lijphart's path-breaking research on democracy. I discover that core features of the democratic polity across Europe have proved strikingly resilient in the face of the transformational effects of integration. An exception can be found among the newest democracies in the EU, which exhibit signs of modest convergence. Both of these findings are consistent with institutionalist theory. My conclusions suggest the presence of tangible limits to the reach of integration, and give cause for optimism about the continuing relevance of democratic institutions at the national level.

In this article long-term changes in homogamy during industrialization are studied. According to the 'sexual revolution thesis' of Shorter industrialization weakened homogamy mainly by changing the preferences of young people. Others point to the importance of changes in social control by parents and peers and in the opportunities of potential marriage partners to meet. Both ethnographic data on bundling and tables of occupational homogamy in Sweden in the nineteenth century are used to describe changes in homogamy and to shed light on potential causes of these changes. In particular it is tested whether homogamy weakened during industrialization and whether homogamy was weaker when parental control was less, as is the case with one parent families. The second claim was substantiated, the first claim only very partially so. Bundling with its clearly marked stages from communal nightly visits to intercourse as a prelude to marriage declined, but the proportion of men and women marrying outside their class did not rise consistently over time as industrialization progressed. Even after taking changing group sizes into account, there were no signs of decreasing homogamy. Thus the data do not support Shorter's theory of an increase in romantic love., Introduction Courtship and marriage have been prominent on the research agendas of demographers, ethnographers, historians and sociologists alike, and, recently, on those of economists too. Mate selection is important for [...]

Ruins of Crusader castles located throughout the Middle East are described. Muslims recall their lessons in school that the Crusaders came for economic reasons, taking their lands and giving them nothing.

Analysis of quantitative European relations using two-dimensional simplex diagrams is presented. Insight is also provided into quantitative similarities and dissimilarities between member states of the European Union.

History of European culture with focus on European philosophy from the Greek pre-Socratic times onwards, is presented.

Introducing a concept of real, as opposed to nominal, inequality of income or wealth suggests some historical reinterpretations, buttressed by a closer look at consumption by the rich. The purchasing powers of different income classes depend on how relative prices move. Relative prices affected real inequality more strongly in earlier centuries than in the twentieth. Between 1500 and about 1800, staple food and fuels became dearer, while luxury goods, especially servants, became cheaper, greatly widening the inequality of lifestyles. Peace, industrialization, and globalization reversed this inegalitarian price effect in the nineteenth century, at least for England.

This article explores routine life in monasteries during the Middle Ages, suggesting that monastic culture rejected or ignored the urban communities that emerged in northwestern Europe during this era and persisted until the late 12th century when urban institutions began to wield more authority in order to maintain order and the status quo. The author argues that monks, with their lives traditionally centered around obedience and stability, continued to see cities in a feudal guise, as being fortified spaces.

This article discusses urban policy in Northern Europe using spatial theory in order to better understand urban life in the medieval and early modern era. The authors suggest that this was a crucial time in the formation of urban spaces, when they gained power and produced new social possibilities while eliminiating others.

A 'NEW EUROPE' OR 'DEAD LANDS'? In Britain during 1916, a periodical called The New Europe appeared. Believing that the Great War offered an unique opportunity to destroy the dynastic [...]

Throughout the world, in preparations for the fifth centenary of the discovery of (or lucky find of, or cultural encounter with) the continent of America and the many events planned [...]

John Gerson had positioned himself as being able to discern true spiritual revelations from false and was notable for attacking women's spirituality as being false. Surprisingly, he came to the defense of Joan of Arc, but his weak defense may have harmed her case more than it helped.

This article examines the changing political models of 20th century Europe. The author argue historians researching Europe must treat democracy as an evolving political practice rather than a stagnate model.

This study explores the dynamics between visual images and expectations for feminine monasticism in northern Europe via two paintings from the Cistercian convent of Flines. It argues that abbess Jeanne [...]

The historically documented burial samples of the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties allow a detailed analysis of the circumstances that led to dismemberment, evisceration, disturbance, exhumation and reburial over a millennium. The results may provide deeper and more broadly applicable insights into relevant cultural formation processes of elite burials. Key-words: Habsburg, Babenberg, Maya, mortuary behaviour, secondary burial, formation processes, Introduction Distinguishing various formation processes that shape the state of burials is a major challenge for archaeologists. One such process is secondary burial. In many archaeological reports the term is [...]

A new series of radiocarbon measurements on three sewn-plank boats from North Ferriby, Yorkshire, has provided consistent new dating for these craft, which suggests that the appearance of such boats may fall in the early Bronze Age. Key-words: Yorkshire, boat. radiocarbon dating, Bronze Age, exchange, Introduction The Ferriby boats (F1, F2 and F3) were discovered on the Humber foreshore between 1937 and 1963 (Wright & Wright 1939; Wright 1990; FIGURES 1 & 2). All three [...]