Rethinking History, Dictatorship and War

Richard Overy's work has focused on three of the most important themes in modern history: the ways in which history is written, the nature of dictatorships, and how modern European powers have fought their wars. All three themes are reflected in this collection of essays written by his friends, colleagues and former pupils and edited by Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, which has now appeared to mark his sixtieth birthday. Each of the three sections is devoted to one of these themes, and the collection is introduced by the edited transcript of a long interview with Overy in which he discusses such questions as why he became a historian, why his work has focused on the inter-war period and the Second World War, how history should be written and how it is written, and what makes for good (and bad) history. Chapters by Jeremy Black on the compilation of The Times Atlas of the World, Ulrike Ehret on Martin Spahn and Hilaire Belloc as fascist fellow travellers, by Patricia Clavin on the underrated work of the League of Nations’ Economic and Financial Organisation, and by the editor himself on the impact of local and regional studies on our understanding of Nazism and the Holocaust, address the theme of how history has been written. They also consider what that can tell us about how the society that produced that history saw itself. Studies about the nature of dictatorships range equally widely. Michael Rowe's contribution examines the parallels between the regime that Napoleon established in France and the fascist and communist dictatorships of inter-war Europe. Neville Wylie analyses the reasons why the Germans treated British prisoners of war comparatively well, concluding that the answer was rooted in Germany's ‘national conservative value system’, rather than springing from the principle of reciprocity. Nicholas Terry's chapter focuses on the impact of the Nazi occupation on those areas of Soviet Russia occupied by the Wehrmacht and shows that what was effectively a civil war in which Russians fought Russians disfigured much of occupied Soviet territory. Collaboration and resistance existed side by side

Archaeology · Art history · Democracy · Dictatorship · Diplomatic history · International relations · League · Management · Nazism · Parallels · Political history · Political science · Politics · ROWE · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theme (computing · World War II · Classics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law