John Connelly's Long March through East European History

Gary B Cohen

doi:10.1017/s0067237821000175

Abstract

John Connelly, a member of the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last quarter century, has produced what will surely stand as a landmark among grand syntheses on the modern history of Eastern Europe. The book title uses the geographical designation favored during the Cold War, but the subject is more precisely East Central Europe, a term that Connelly uses interchangeably with Eastern Europe to designate the lands lying between Germany and Austria in the west and the former components of the Soviet Union to the east.

Highlights

John Connelly, a member of the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last quarter century, has produced what will surely stand as a landmark among grand syntheses on the modern history of Eastern Europe
A number of survey histories of the region appeared during the Cold War and soon after its end, most of them intended for college or university instruction and much shorter than Connelly’s
Many of these remained in print for only a short period

Summary

Introduction

John Connelly, a member of the history faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, for the last quarter century, has produced what will surely stand as a landmark among grand syntheses on the modern history of Eastern Europe. Berend’s more analytic and interpretive three volumes, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 2003); Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (Berkeley, 1998); and Central and Eastern Europe 1944–1993: Detour from the Periphery to the Periphery (Cambridge, 1996), totaling some 1,070 pages of text with all three volumes still available at this time.

Results

Conclusion