Revolution In Europe Research Articles

Allegory and Impasse: Revolutionary History and Revolutionary Modernity in Marx and Engels

Paul de Man’s “Literary History and Literary Modernity” serves as a telling point of departure for reexamining the configuration of revolutionary history and revolutionary modernity in polemical writings written by Marx and Engels in the aftermath of the 1848–1849 European Revolutions. What de Man calls “literature” models an impasse between modernity understood as an aspiration to pure action free from the mediation of history and history understood as the inevitable recursivity through which such action finds itself caught in reflections on—and repetitions of—the past. Marx’s early “Letters to Ruge” already hints at the potential conflict and co-implication of a backward looking-left melancholia with a forward-driving revolutionary project. These issues get taken up not only in the much cited Eighteenth Brumaire but in the more purely polemical writings of Marx and Engels’s London exile. In these writings, Marx and Engels explore how the anarchic putschist fantasies of their fellow communists (August Willich and Karl Schapper) paradoxically converge with the most retrograde apologetics of their liberal opponents (Gottfried Kinkel and Arnold Ruge). They detail the short circuit between calls for an immediate renewal of revolutionary action and a nostalgic retreat from any action into secondhand literary posturing. At the same time, Marx and Engels’s own relation to that short circuit proves difficult to stabilize. Their allegory of history as long-term struggle does not conceal their ironic imbrication in the aporias they delineate. The conclusion is not that revolutionary Marxism has no alternative but to reiterate the same short circuit, but rather that it must recognize, with Marx and Engels, how revolution inevitably turns on the impasse as it takes place in a disjunction of time with itself: a conjuncture whose status remains radically undecidable.

Problems with the Word Made Flesh: The Great Tradition of the Scientific Revolution in Europe

Abstract The Great Tradition of writing about what came to be called The Scientific Revolution developed in the mid-twentieth century and helped to shape what came to be termed “early modern” Europe. At least two fundamental structural elements of the framework were that a small group of independent minds had been set free to grasp new truths, and that rivalries among many groups in Europe never allowed “European civilization” to achieve homeostasis, thus continuing to encourage innovation in conditions of freedom. It is worth noting, however, that the first of these structural elements had religious overtones that were important in the early stages of the Cold War, and that the second placed innovation within a tradition of great texts rather than material culture and practice. Both changed the earlier conversation of the 1930s, which had been about political economies, connecting the new history of science to a history that offered to explain European superiority on the basis of the search for truth. Recent developments in global history, which are rooted in economic histories, challenge such a framing. The brand-name of The Scientific Revolution is common and will remain a useful short-hand, but its meaning requires major revision and should not be limited to the history of Europe.

Book Review: Mi Gyung Kiim: The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe

Book Review: Mi Gyung Kiim: <i>The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe</i>

Gluten-Free Rome: Celiac disease in the bioarchaeological record

Celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder triggered by consumption of the gluten protein, is theorized to have originated alongside the domestication of wheat during the European Agricultural Revolution, ca. 8 000 BCE (Freeman 2013). Human conditions that primarily affect soft tissue, like celiac disease, do not leave tangible evidence on the skeleton and therefore it is difficult to prove their presence. However, recent analyses have employed a suite of macroscopic, molecular, and chemical techniques to establish that a Roman Imperial (100–300 CE) individual from Cosa, Italy, likely suffered from celiac disease. This paper analyzes the works of these researchers and argues that this case study exemplifies modern bioarchaeology, which frequently requires an arsenal of methods beyond visual observation. Using similar syntheses of techniques bioarchaeologists can possibly identify celiac disease in individuals predating 100 CE, recreating the origins of celiac disease as well as tackling other previously ‘impossible’ research questions in this field.

France and the Polish-Soviet War, 1919–1920

Abstract France emerged victorious from the First World war but had to face complex international problems of territorial, ideological, and military nature. The former Russian ally—a counterweight to a defeated but powerful Germany—was in the throes of a civil war, and the Bolsheviks were proclaiming a European revolution. The Red army advancing westward clashed with the nascent Polish state. To the Poles it was a conflict with both Communism and perennial Russian imperialism. The French army assisted Poland, viewed as a “place d’armes” against the Bolsheviks, and it contributed to some extent to Polish victory, but the Paris government was ambivalent as to contested territorial issues. To appreciate the nature of this Franco-Russian-Polish “triangle” it needs to be seen in a larger historical context in which the Poles were never an equal partner of the French.

Machineries of Data Power: Manual versus Mechanical Census Compilation in Nineteenth-Century Europe

AbstractThe advent both of punch cards and of the electric tabulating machine, which was invented in 1889, are typically described as key milestones in the development of modern data processing, bringing about a fundamental and inexorable transformation of information technology. This essay aims to decenter the American Hollerith revolution by assessing precisely how punch cards and machine processing transformed established manual techniques and practices of census compilation. By focusing on the Prussian census bureau and its long-standing reluctance to mechanize, this essay reveals an unremarked European revolution in data processing during the 1860s, when a new notion of “data,” novel paper tools, and a carefully nurtured workforce, including many women working from home, yielded unprecedentedly refined census statistics. The essay argues that manual concepts, technologies, and practices of data power—rather than punch cards and Hollerith machines—heralded the modern information age.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil WarBelligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil WarDefining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home FrontCivil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil WarBelligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil WarDefining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home FrontCivil War Nurse Narratives, 1863–1870

Myths of military revolution: European expansion and Eurocentrism

This article critiques explanations of the rise of the West in the early modern period premised on the thesis that military competition drove the development of gunpowder technology, new tactics, and the Westphalian state, innovations that enabled European trans-continental conquests. Even theories in International Relations and other fields that posit economic or social root causes of Western expansion often rely on this “military revolution” thesis as a crucial intervening variable. Yet, the factors that defined the military revolution in Europe were absent in European expeditions to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and conventional accounts are often marred by Eurocentric biases. Given the insignificance of military innovations, Western expansion prior to the Industrial Revolution is best explained by Europeans’ ability to garner local support and allies, but especially by their deference to powerful non-Western polities.

Внешнеполитические успехи и поражения Николая I (по воспоминаниям современников)

The article is devoted to the successes and failures of Russian foreign policy during the reign of Nicholas I. The key sources of the research are memoires of people who were in close attendance on the Emperor, foreign diplomats, travelers and members of European royal families. They noted some traits of his personality, political views, commitment to order and military service. They left valuable remembrance about all important foreign-policy cases the Russian Emperor was involved in: Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829), contacts with the Balkan states, Eastern Question within the framework of the Russian role in the course of events of the Egyptian–Ottoman War (1832–1833); hostility against French Revolutions and contacts with the allied Prussia and the Austrian Empire. These reminiscences make it possible to discover the attitude of Nicolas I to the European revolutions in the first half of XIX-th and illegitimate monarchs in Europe. They let us track the way the foreign policy influenced the Russian inner policy. The sources are very informative to explain the different steps of Russian foreign policy in the most important points – in the Middle East, in Europe and in Turkey.

Rendezvous With a Revolution: British Socialists in Portugal 1974–5

This essay traces the presence of British left-wing radicals in Portugal during the Carnation Revolution of 1974–5, a phase of significant sociopolitical change that fired the imagination of layers of activists across Europe. The revolution, sparked by a captain’s coup within the military, also effectively ended Portugal’s colonial wars, and with its new armed forces movement and proliferation of workers’ commissions, held out the possibility of revolutionary socialism – and not simply the transition to a Western-style democracy. The revolution acquired wider international significance given the shock to the global Left of the right-wing military coup in Chile in September 1973. Moreover, British respondents refer to the period as a key moment of “revolutionary tourism” in the arc of revolt that swept the 1960s and 1970s. Groups such as the International Socialists sent delegations to Portugal to forge links with trade unions and left parties, and numerous individuals came as observers, or indeed to participate more fully in the events. Beyond generic analyses on the course and impact of the Portuguese Revolution, I conduct an oral and archival history which identifies the visitors’ motivations and experiences, their exchanges with Portuguese militants, the “lessons learned” and any political reorientation of the British radical Left prompted by the uprising. Indeed, the military counter-coup of 1975 proved a decisive moment, leading ultimately to a “normalization” of Portuguese society, and dashing the hopes of the European radical Left. For some on the British Left, Portugal 1975 came to represent the end of the European revolutionary movement that had begun in the late 1960s.

Benjamin Fagan. The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation.

Benjamin Fagan bases The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation on the primary narrative thread of black chosenness. He defines and defends this premise as a connecting theme present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American newspapers. Working from this standpoint, Fagan pinpoints black newspaper publishers, several of whom were ministers, as the proponents of his black chosenness argument. The author also advances a secondary theme, arguing that a black nation existed within the American nation through the auspices of black newspaper articles and editorials. According to Fagan, the black chosen nation was alternately the New Israel, Babylon, or the wilderness, depending on the timing of the Civil War years (before, during, and after) and the readership of the individual black newspapers. Fagan’s unique text, which includes comparative American literature excerpts and biblical illustrations, primarily focuses on five African American periodicals, four printed in New York and one published in Canada. The author begins his study of black newspapers and black newspapermen by looking at Freedom’s Journal, America’s original African American paper, and its co-founders, the Reverend Samuel Cornish and the abolitionist John Brown Russworm. Fagan argues that the goal of their newspaper was to bring the Lord’s word to black readers by educating them in the social proprieties of white elite society. The author interprets Cornish’s didactic editorials as tutorials on “how to act chosen” (22). Expounding on this idea, Fagan uses biblical passages to suggest that Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper had the same intent: promotion of the black chosen nation. The author cites Douglass’s reporting of the French Revolution of 1848 as an example of the renowned abolitionist disagreeing with American exceptionalism but still supporting black chosenness. Fagan deduces that the North Star offered proof of the chosen black prophecy of deliverance, similar to the Israelites fighting against their Egyptian oppressors. The author insists that the North Star showed an interest in successful European revolutionary strategies in France and the British West Indies because it wanted to imitate these uprisings in slave-owning oppressive America. Fagan makes transnational connections throughout the pages of the North Star, including the formatting of newspaper columns and the ancestry of Douglass’s Scottish printer. The author, clarifying his black nation theme with examples of scripture, determines that the North Star had “uncoupled the promise of black chosenness from American identity” (94). Fagan could have strengthened this engaging historical position by situating the North Star’s Rochester newspaper office inside its western New York burned-over district. Free Soil Party newspapers, such as the Seneca County Courier, a paper Douglass supported because of its antislavery, temperance, and pro–woman’s rights stance, could have offered further contemporary interpretations of black chosenness.

Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and the British World, by Ryan A. Vieira

This ambitious and provocative book aims to show how the emergence of ‘modern’ understandings of time influenced the reform of parliamentary procedure in Britain and the ‘British World’ during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting in a transition from deliberative to ‘executive-centred’ legislatures that continues to shape contemporary political cultures. From the early nineteenth century, Ryan Vieira claims, the use and effectiveness of ‘parliamentary time’ became a subject of intense debate at Westminster (p. 46); meanwhile in the wider culture there emerged a new conception of linear time, whose distancing of the present from the past was reinforced by a sense of profound discontinuity evoked by revolution in Europe, famine in Ireland and the growth of railway travel. As a result, Parliament came to be viewed as ‘excessively slow and de-synchronized from the nation’ (p. 72); but the self-consciously modern critique of legislative procedure that this helped to frame was constrained by an ideal of ‘respectable masculinity’ wherein the inefficient use of time was a failure of character of individual MPs, rather than of Parliament itself (p. 74). All this changed after the Second Reform Act, and particularly through the tactics of obstruction deployed by Parnell’s Irish Nationalists, in response to which Gladstone introduced a series of procedural reforms in 1882 that included, for the first time, the investment in the Speaker of the power of ‘closure’ over debates. The passage of these reforms was also abetted by the emergence of an imperial ideal of ‘martial masculinity’ wherein defeat of obstruction was a test of national, rather than merely private, character (pp. 112–13). The result, Vieira argues, was that Britain entered parliamentary modernity: appeals to tradition lost their normative force, and the deliberative function of the legislature was overtaken by its ‘instrumentally rational’ subordination to the executive (p. 120)—a historical tide that present-day reformers seeking to restore the autonomy of representative institutions will attempt to reverse in vain (pp. 178–9).

The Role of Professors in the Formation of Finnish Parliamentary Life: The Struggle between Two Conceptions of Parliament

The Frankfurt Parliament (1848–49) was subsequently dismissively referred to as the “Professors’ Parliament” due to its heavy representation of scholars and the academic style of its lengthy discussions. Professors have played a prominent role in the deliberations and development of other European assemblies, too. This article examines the role of professors in the formation of Finnish parliamentary life. It moreover underlines the close relationship between the academia and national politics in late nineteenth-century Finland, starting from the European revolutions of 1848. The article highlights how politically active professors, together with the newspaper press, were crucial in transferring European ideas to Finnish debates. Professors promoted ideological conceptions of parliamentary politics, which were inspired by their scholarly interests and formulated by applying European discussions and concepts selectively to the Finnish context. The article focuses on a debate between Finnish professors and their competing conceptions of parliament. The struggle between the Hegelian philosopher J. V. Snellman and the liberal Professor of Law Leo Mechelin reflects a wider European debate on the role and purposes of parliaments as national representative and deliberative institutions. The article evaluates the role of Snellman’s and Mechelin’s conceptions of parliament in Finnish parliamentary culture in the longer term.

Ivan IV’s Professional Infantry, The Harquebusiers (Strel’tsy): A Question of Numbers

ABSTRACTThe early modern European Military or Gunpowder Revolution did not exclude Muscovy, although the chronology and extent of its impact on Muscovy varied from Western Europe. This article examines the first step in that process, the creation of a standing army of gunpowder infantry, the harquebusiers (strel’tsy). It attempts to measure the influence of this development by determining the number of harquebusiers who served during Ivan’s reign. Previous studies of this question have overlooked the most detailed available data in the military registers for Ivan’s 1577 campaign in Livonia. Although it is impossible to compute an exact number, analysis leads to the conclusion that a field army could contain between 5,000 and 7,000 harquebusiers, which might constitute as much as 20 percent of the troops. However, this total does not include un-mobilized garrison harquebusiers, whose number remains unknown. The creation of the harquebusiers reflects a strategic decision to establish and increase professional gunpowder infantry, a reflection of the Military Revolution.

Extraterritorial Dreams: European citizenship, Sephardi Jews and the Ottoman twentieth century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Reviewed by: Extraterritorial Dreams: European citizenship, Sephardi Jews and the Ottoman twentieth century by Sarah Abrevaya Stein Aviva Ben-Ur Extraterritorial Dreams: European citizenship, Sephardi Jews and the Ottoman twentieth century. By Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Extraterritorial Dreams explores the convoluted legal history of European protégé status and its consequences for Ottoman Jews and their descendants in the waning empire, and in twentieth-century Europe and its overseas colonies and protectorates, with particular attention to the interwar and wartime periods. Given its relative neglect by scholars of Jewish, colonial and legal studies, this coveted patent of protection merits some prefatory remarks. Protégé status was a form of extraterritorial European citizenship granted to Ottoman subjects, most of whom had never set foot in the metropoles of the world's second smallest continent. However, this form of naturalization originated not in Europe, but in the Ottoman Empire, and was initially granted not to the empire's subjects, but rather to European foreigners residing on Ottoman soil. Originally bestowed upon European states by Ottoman rulers, this legal status was known to the former as capitulations (after the capitula or chapters comprising the document) and to the latter as ahdnameler (denoting "pledges," or "letters of promise") or imtiyazat ("privileges"). More specifically, the ahdnameler were implemented in the sixteenth century as arbitrarily rescindable and unilateral contracts conferred by the Sultan upon Europe's Christian monarchs. They were devised to circumvent sharia law, which banned recognition of non-Muslim political entities and their treatment as sovereign and equal. Nonreciprocal and, unless otherwise specified, temporally unbinding, the ahdnameler allowed non-Muslim foreigners to reside and conduct business in Ottoman territories and served the purpose of advancing imperial commerce and reinforcing political alliances with the West. Non-Muslim foreigners with protégé status in Ottoman lands enjoyed freedom of religion and movement, tax exemptions, immunity from local Islamic law, and jurisdiction by European consular courts. Over time, however, under the pressure of European legal scholars, the ahdnameler took on the nature of bilateral treaties that significantly expanded the powers of the protégé. And, as a consequence of both migration and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, protected status spread beyond the empire's culminating borders, with increasing numbers of protégés appearing in successor states and elsewhere in Europe and its overseas colonies and protectorates. Eventually, even Muslims, including those living in the Russian Empire and proselytes to Islam, counted among recipients of European protected status. Curiously, neither the official abolition of the protégé system in 1914 by Mehmed V and again in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, nor even the complete denaturalization of Jews during World War II, entirely extinguished the political force of the capitulatory regime. Much like the Ottoman Empire, the European expression of the ahdnameler outlived itself, whether in the hands of state officials or in the memories of the protected and their descendants, into the mid-twentieth century. While historians and legal scholars have devoted most of their attention to early modern European protégés living and trading within Ottoman territory, and while Jewish historians have studied such protégés in a single European metropole or Ottoman or Middle Eastern urban setting, Sarah Abrevaya Stein is more interested in the expression of protected status for Jews living in a broad range of locales in the late nineteenth century and especially in the first half of the twentieth. The book is divided into four main chapters, respectively devoted to Salonika, late Ottoman Palestine/Syria, France and the British Empire. The last two chapters are revised versions of articles that appeared in the American Historical Review and Past and Present. Extraterritorial Dreams is a landmark work that accomplishes precisely what it sets out to do. First and foremost, it broadens and complicates our understanding of the relationship of Jews to citizenship, which historians have typically envisioned within the framework of Jewish Emancipation, as an unevenly executed privilege and eventually inalienable right systematically conferred and sometimes retracted by metropolitan states, and first emerging in late eighteenth-century revolutionary Europe. Stein demonstrates how overseas consulates and Foreign Offices, in negotiation with Jewish applicants and...

Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century ed. by Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou

Reviewed by: Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century ed. by Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou Evdoxios Doxiadis (bio) Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou, editors, Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2016. Pp. xiii + 217. Paper $29.95. Mediterranean Diasporas is a great example of the value of collaborative efforts in presenting and analyzing themes that span across national historiographies, languages, and disciplinary categories. Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou, the editors of this volume, elected to focus their investigation on what they call diasporic intellectuals and, by so doing, succeeded in revealing a new perspective on Mediterranean history in the nineteenth century. The contributors in the volume problematize notions of nationality, imperial allegiances, and the nation state, often rejecting common understandings of the reception of Western ideas in the region. This volume breaks down the compartmentalization of national historiographies that has proven remarkably durable and challenging to the efforts of many historians of the region over recent decades. [End Page 264] As Thomas Gallant states in a thoughtful afterword, the chapters of this volume contribute to a significant revision of our understanding of diaspora, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, as well as to the history and transmission of ideas around the Mediterranean world and Europe (207). The first three chapters ("Letters from Spain: The 1820 Revolution and the Liberal International" by Juan Luis Simal, "An Itinerant Liberal: Almeida Garrett's Exilic Itineraries and Political Ideas in the Age of Southern European Revolutions (1820–34)" by Gabriel Paquette, and "Learning Lessons from the Iberian Peninsula: Italian Exiles and the Making of a Risorgimento Without People, 1820–48" by Grégoire Bron) discuss the impact of the Iberian revolutions of the 1820s and the subsequent civil strife that lasted into the 1830s in both Spain and Portugal. Placing their discussion within a larger context of questions about national sovereignty and political liberty in a post-Napoleonic world, they draw attention to the role of political exiles in crafting a discourse throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. All three chapters show the impact of the promulgation of the Cadiz Constitution in Southern Europe, the effect of the failures of the Spanish and Portuguese constitutional regimes of the 1820s, and the eventual successes of liberalism in the 1830s and 1840s—all of which has not been sufficiently considered by Greek historians within the context of Greek political developments. Bron's chapter in particular acts as a wonderful bridge from Iberia to Italy by considering these effects on the Italian exiles who took part in the events of the Iberian Peninsula. In chapter 4, "Mediterranean Liberals? Italian Revolutionaries and the Making of a Colonial Sea, ca. 1800–1830," Maurizio Isabella turns to the examination of several Italian (or Italo-Greek) intellectuals whose ideas were influenced by travel and exile, as well as by the presence of the new French and British imperial projects in the Mediterranean. Through the careers of intellectuals like Vittorio Barzoni, Ugo Foscolo, Alfio Grassi, or Gianbattista Marochetti, Isabella is able to explore the nature of early nineteenth-century liberalism, and imperial liberalism in particular, going beyond the traditional approach that examines such figures within Italian (or Greek) nationalism and situating them instead within a broader framework of Mediterranean liberalism, where contradictions—such as combining strong philhellenic ideas with praise for the Ottoman Empire, as in Grassi's case—can easily exist (86). Chapter 5, "Ottomans on the Move: Hassuna D'Ghies and the 'New Ottomanism' of the 1830s" by Ian Coller, is a welcome extension to North Africa of some of the themes presented by the earlier authors. The concept of mobility is once more crucial in Coller's discussion of "New Ottomanism" through the experiences of D'Ghies, a man of North African origins, who was educated [End Page 265] in Europe and advocated independence from the Ottoman Empire. Later, he would enter Ottoman service and, as the editor of Le Moniteur Ottoman, would embrace the cause of Ottoman revival and reform. Unfortunately, Coller's chapter is the only one dealing directly with North Africa and would have benefited by the inclusion of another chapter, possibly on Egypt, which...

High-resolution reconstruction of the 20th century history of trace metals, major elements, and organic matter in sediments in a contaminated area of Lake Geneva, Switzerland

Toxic trace metals in lacustrine sediments are of major concern since they can be hazardous to biota and human health. A high-resolution multiproxy study, including trace metals and major elements (measured by ICP-MS and XRF), total organic carbon, mineral carbon, Hydrogen Index, Oxygen Index, and C/N ratios, was performed on a sediment core from Vidy Bay in Lake Geneva. This bay has been affected by hazardous compounds released via the sewage effluent of a major wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). Anthropogenic trace metals, such as Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, and Hg, increased following the industrial revolution in Europe. The highest amounts of these toxic metals, together with Ni, Cr, Co, Ag, Bi, and Fe, were recorded in sediments from 1964, the date of the WWTP implementation. During this period, all trace elements exceeded the sediment quality guideline “probable effect concentration” (PEC), with the following maximum concentrations (in mg kg−1): Pb 4000, Cd 23, Cu 1200, Zn 8600, Hg 11, Ni 140, Cr 270, Ag 130, and Bi 310. The geochemistry of detrital elements (Al, Si, Ca, Ti, K, Zr, Rb, and Sr), as well as S, Fe, P, and the nature and quality of organic matter were clearly also affected by the effluent. The sedimentary record revealed that, after some improvements in the wastewater treatment processes and the relocation of the outlet pipe, the sediments tended to return to concentrations similar to those prevailing before the WWTP implementation. However, despite the reduction in the contamination load from the WWTP, which could be reinforced with the construction of a new plant in the near future, the sediments deposited in Vidy Bay represent a major contaminant legacy that constitutes a potential threat to the lake biota in the case of sediment remobilization.

From Farmer Al Falfa to the Hopperdozer: Medicago sativa in North American Folkways

Alfalfa was integral to the agricultural revolution in Europe because of the plant’s soil nitrifying properties and was widely introduced throughout North America. American folkways eventually addressed planting, harvesting, plant protection, and uses of alfalfa as animal forage and human medicine. Tall tales and folk heroes featured the plant, and it was viewed as bringing luck and success. Alfalfa festivals, including Alfalfa Queens and Princesses (both human and livestock), became widespread in the West and Midwest. “Alfalfa” was used to name fictitious as well as historical persons and places. Alfalfa, the world’s most important forage legume, is scarcely represented in standard folkloristic references, a deficiency corrected by this compilation of North American folkways.

Über die Ursprünge unserer ökologischen Krise

The Anthropocene has become the most important environmentalist concept of our times. In contrast to this I argue that we have to speak instead of the Capitalocene. I want to address three questions: 1) What is the character of 21st century ecological crisis? 2) When did that crisis originate? and 3) What forces drive that crisis? Therefore, I analyze the revolutions in the technics of appropriating Cheap Natures, especially the Four Cheaps of food, labor, energy, and raw materials in Europe as well as via imperialistic dominance in overseas territories since the 15th century. Cheap Nature reveals as a system of domination, appropriation, and exploitation. Capital, power, and nature entwine, and this development started much sooner than with the Industrial Revolution in Europe. We have to conceptualize the global transformations of human and extra-human natures, enabled by the emergence of new ways of seeing and organizing the unpaid work of humans and the rest of nature over the past five centuries.

Revolutions, wars and the Jewish and Christian contribution to redemptive cosmopolitanism in Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

This article addresses the important contribution of Judaism and Christianity to cosmopolitanism through the works of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. It argues that while the usual approach to cosmopolitanism is to consider its philosophical origins, the European roots of cosmopolitanism as an actual process are deeply indebted to the central importance of redemption within the Jewish and Christian faiths. Whereas Rosenzweig explores the mutual interdependence and respective social significance of Jews and Christians (in spite of the fundamental inimicalness between these two faiths), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy argues that the messianic logic inherent in the redemptive tradition also spawned the messianic aspirations behind the great European revolutions, including the anti-Christian and atheistic French and Russian. The article concludes by looking at the United States after the Second World War as continuing the ‘mission’ of redemptive cosmopolitanism.