ABOUT THE SERIES
Interwar Crisis: Europe, 1918-1939
is the public facing, student authored weblog of a modern European
history course which is being taught by Dr. Brian J Griffith at
University of California, Los Angeles during the Spring 2021 quarter
(March 29-June 11, 2021). The course, which shares the same name as this
Open Access volume, explores the various political, economic, social,
and cultural upheavals which took place in Europe between the two world
wars, and asks its participants to consider the various parallels
between developments during the 1920s and 1930s and today’s
international community.
The course features a series of four book talks that, in one way or another, impinge upon the history of Europe’s interwar crisis.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZER
Brian J. Griffith
is the inaugural Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in
European History at University of California, Los Angeles. His interests
include modern Europe, modern Italy, Fascism, consumerism,
(trans)national identities, and the digital humanities.
BOOK TALKS
Dominique Kirchner Reill, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard, 2020)
“The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis.”
CLICK HERE to watch or listen to the recorded discussion.
Stephen Bittner, Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commisar (Oxford, 2021)
“
Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar illuminates the ideas, controversies, political alliances, technologies, business practices, international networks, and, of course, the growers, vintners, connoisseurs, and consumers who shaped the history of wine in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than two centuries.”
CLICK HERE to watch or listen to the recorded discussion.
Claudio Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (Palgrave, 2021)
“This book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the‘making of’ Italians. It re-interprets key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and challenges interpretations of Italian collective identity as incomplete.”
CLICK HERE to watch or listen to the recorded discussion.
Edward B. Westermann, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Cornell University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021)
“In
Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe.”
CLICK HERE to watch or listen to the recorded discussion.