Product Description: Danubian Europe presented constant and serious security risks for European peace and stability and, for that reason, contrary to conventional wisdom, it commanded the attention of British diplomacy with a view to appeasing local conflicts...read more

Product Description: From the end of the thirteenth century onwards, European towns exhibited a significant increase in the use of writing as a tool for administrative and economic purposes, as well as for social communication. The medieval towns of Poland are no exception to this pattern...read more

Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and Romania was a Communist backwater where "history had virtually stopped" since World War II. In Bucharest, Romania's capital, Kaplan discovered that few Westerners were reporting on the country-one of the darkest corners of Europe during the Cold War. In an intense and cinematic travelogue, Kaplan explores the history and culture of the only country in the West where the leading intellectuals have been right-wing, rather than left-wing; a country that gave rise to the dictator Ion Antonescu, Hitler's chief foreign accomplice during WWII; a country where the Latin West mixes with the Greek East, producing a fascinating fusion of cultures. IN EUROPE'S SHADOW is a deep and vivid immersion into one place, a country that is a metaphor for Europe's current challenge in confronting Vladimir Putin's Russia. With the brilliant, insightful Kaplan as our narrator and eyewitness, this book is a shorthand masterpiece about imperialism and a country critical to our understanding of the last century in Europe. Robert D. Kaplan is the author of 16 books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including the THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY; Monsoon; Balkan Ghosts; and Warrior Politics. He has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for over three decades. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan among the world's "100 Top Global Thinkers."

Analyzing the political relations between the Kingdom of Poland and the Hasidic movement, this book examines plans formulated by the government and by groups close to government circles regarding hasidim, and describes how a hasidic body politic developed in response. The book demonstrates that the rise of Hasidism was an important factor in shaping the Jewish policy of both central and provincial authorities and shows how the creation of socio-political conditions that were advantageous to the Hasidic movement accelerated its growth. While concentrating on the dynamic that developed in the Kingdom of Poland, the discussion is informed by a consideration of the relationship between the state and the Hasidic movement from its inception in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that, whereas most analyses of political culture concentrate on states and societies with well-established electoral systems of representation, this book focuses on the under-researched area of political relations between a non-democratic state and a low-status community lacking authorized representation. Applying concepts more often associated with cultural history, the analysis draws a distinction between the terms of reference of high-level political debate and the actual implementation of policy middle- and low-level officials. Similarly, in analyzing hasidic responses, the book differentiates between high-level hasidic representations in the state and the grassroots politics of the community. This combination enables a broad contextualization of the whole subject, integrating the social and cultural history of Polish Jewry with that of Polish society in general. *** "...a path-breaking contribution....Wodzinski brings to bear both printed and archival Polish sources as well as internal Jewish sources written in Hebrew and thus he is able to offer an extremely original and comprehensive depiction. This book is crucial to any collection that deals with Hasidism and East European Jewish religious life but it is no less important for the study of religion and politics in general." - Religious Studies Review, Vol.40, No.3, September 2014Ëœ