What does it mean to label someone a fascist? Today, it is equated with denouncing him or her as a Nazi. But as intellectual historian Paul E. Gottfried writes in this provocative yet even-handed study, the term's meaning has evolved over the years. Gottfried examines the semantic twists and turns the term has endured since the 1930s and traces ......
During the Nazi regime in Germany, all police forces were centralised under the command of Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The political police (Gestapo), the criminal police (Kripo), and the security service (SD) were all brought together under the RSHA umbrella in 1939, commanded by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich. Using RSHA in Berlin as the ......
In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle argues that the charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused of embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal democratic values, and its support ......
Whose Middle Ages? is an interdisciplinary collection of short, accessible essays intended for the nonspecialist reader and ideal for teaching at an undergraduate level. Each of twenty-two essays takes up an area where digging for meaning in the medieval past has brought something distorted back into the present: in our popular entertainment; in ......
Purges delves into one of the key tactics that autocrats deploy to maintain power: the removal of individuals from within the regime. From Kim Jong Un's execution of his uncle to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's removal of over a hundred Turkish generals, purges bear significant consequences for the survival and endurance of autocrats. Yet much remains ......
Purges delves into one of the key tactics that autocrats deploy to maintain power: the removal of individuals from within the regime. From Kim Jong Un's execution of his uncle to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's removal of over a hundred Turkish generals, purges bear significant consequences for the survival and endurance of autocrats. Yet much remains ......
The world has changed since the 1930s, but human nature has not. What can we learn when comparing far-right populism in the United States to far-right populism elsewhere? How can we better understand the underlying ideas and ideologies that seem to transcend time and place? How can we best address them? How can we communicate what we have learned ......
In 1963, nearly two decades after the end of the most destructive war in human history, George L. Mosse assembled a group of interdisciplinary scholars from diverse backgrounds to answer a seemingly simple question: What is fascism? The landmark seminar that followed, held at Stanford University, came to define the intellectual conversation about ......
Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil
How Brazil's reckoning with the memory of military dictatorship shapes today's political divides and populist revival. Brazil's military dictatorship ended in 1985, but its history still looms large over the country. Since the restoration of democracy, national politics have been shaped by heated contestation over the dictatorship's legacy. ......