Description
Oxford University Press, 1996. Hardcover, 339 pp. First Edition, (with full number line). Very good in very good dust jacket. Grey Paper over Boards with black cloth and copper lettering on spine. light scuffing and fading to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few tiny nicks and light creasing to edges. light overall scuffing and fading to jacket as well. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] Throughout the Cold War era, the Iron Curtain divided Central Europe into a Communist East and a democratic West, and we grew accustomed to looking at this part of the world in bipolar ideological terms. Yet many people living on both sides of the Iron Curtain considered themselves Central Europeans, and the idea of Central Europe was one of the driving forces behind the revolutionary year of 1989 as well as the deteriora- tion of Yugoslavia and its ensuing wars. Central Europe provides a broad overview and comparative analysis of key events in a historical region that encompasses contemporary Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia. Starting with the initial conversion of the “pagan” peoples of the region to Christianity around 1000 A.D. and concluding with the revolutions of 1989 and the problems of post-Communist states today, it illuminates the distinctive nature and peculiarities of the historical development of this region as a cohesive whole. Lonnie R. Johnson introduces readers to Central Europe’s heritage of diversity, the interplay of its cultures, and the origins of its malicious ethnic and national conflicts. History in Central Europe, he shows, has been epic and tragic. Throughout the ages, small nations struggled valiantly against a series of imperial powers—Ottoman Turkey, Habsburg Austria, imperial Germany, czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union—and they lost regularly. Johnson’s account is present- minded in the best sense: in describing actual historical events, he illustrates the ways they have been remembered, and how they contribute to the national assumptions that still drive European politics today.