Explores the role of public memory and images of the past in the Jewish communities of Germany, France, and Hungary as they faced changing political and social conditions. With the rise of Fascism in Europe, and particularly the ascent of Germany’s Nazi Party, Jews in Germany and eastern and western Europe were forced to cope with an eroding civil and social status, increasing daily limitations, and a dark future on the horizon. This reality looked very different from the recent past of emancipation, in which Jewish citizens had enjoyed civic equality and the advance of social integration. In The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary, author Guy Miron examines how Jewish spokespeople from three European communities—Germany, France, and Hungary—confronted these challenges, and whether they coped by holding onto historical perceptions that materialized during the emancipation era or by adopting new views. Miron demonstrates that pre-Holocaust Germany, France, and Hungary make interesting case studies because of the divergence of the starting points for emancipation in each country, their unique and complex political cultures both during the golden age of emancipation and after its decline, and the distinct relationship each held between church and state. In three sections, Miron considers the three countries in turn, with two chapters devoted to how each community came to terms with the crisis in relation to its internal diversity and political divisions. To analyze the evolving Jewish public discourse in each country, Miron consults numerous primary sources, including articles and essays that appeared in Jewish journals and periodicals as well as literature, mostly popular, published by Jewish publishing houses. Along the way, Miron addresses wider questions of Jewish identity and self-consciousness and the cultural memory of Jewish emancipation during the rise of Fascism. Miron’s examination of the range of Jewish responses to the waning of emancipation will contribute to the discourse on politics of representation of the past in each of the three countries and also draw attention to the internal diversity and political divisions within each. Scholars of Jewish and European history will benefit from the careful research in this volume.

This volume unpacks the long history and varied meanings of the emancipation of American slaves.

A stereotypical image of manumission is that of a benign plantation owner freeing his slaves on his deathbed. But as Stephen Whitman demonstrates, the truth was far more complex, especially in border states where manumission was much more common. Whitman analyzes the economic and social history of Baltimore to show how the vigorous growth of the city required the exploitation of rural slaves. To prevent them from escaping and to spur higher production, owners entered into arrangements with their slaves, promising eventual freedom in return for many years' hard work. The Price of Freedom reveals how blacks played a critical role in freeing themselves from slavery. Yet it was an imperfect victory. Once Baltimore's economic growth began to slow, freed blacks were virtually excluded from craft apprenticeships, and European immigrants supplanted them as a trained labor force.

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie's Freedom's Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon and serves as an important contribution to our understanding of the remaking of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Americas. Drawing on decades of research into slave and emancipation societies, Kerr-Ritchie is attentive to those who sought but were not granted freedom, and those who resisted enslavement individually as well as collectively on behalf of their communities. He explores the many roles that fugitive slaves, slave soldiers, and slave rebels played in their own societies. He likewise explicates the lives of individual freedmen, freedwomen, and freed children to show how the first free-born generation helped to shape the terms and conditions of the post-slavery world. Freedom's Seekers is a signal contribution to African Diaspora studies, especially in its rigorous respect for the agency of those who sought and then fought for their freedom, and its consistent attention to the transnational dimensions of emancipation.

Hungarian Jews, the last major Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence by 1944, constituted the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide Ferenc Laczó draws on hundreds of scholarly articles, historical monographs, witness accounts as well as published memoirs to offer a pioneering exploration of how this prolific Jewish community responded to its exceptional drama and unprecedented tragedy. Analysing identity options, political discourses, historical narratives and cultural agendas during the local age of persecution as well as the varied interpretations of persecution and annihilation in their immediate aftermath, the monograph places the devastating story of Hungarian Jews at the dark heart of the European Jewish experience in the 20th century.

Jacob and Esau is a profound new account of two millennia of Jewish European history that, for the first time, integrates the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with that of traditional Jews and Jewish culture. Malachi Haim Hacohen uses the biblical story of the rival twins, Jacob and Esau, and its subsequent retelling by Christians and Jews throughout the ages as a lens through which to illuminate changing Jewish-Christian relations and the opening and closing of opportunities for Jewish life in Europe. Jacob and Esau tells a new history of a people accustomed for over two-and-a-half millennia to forming relationships, real and imagined, with successive empires but eagerly adapting, in modernity, to the nation-state, and experimenting with both assimilation and Jewish nationalism. In rewriting this history via Jacob and Esau, the book charts two divergent but intersecting Jewish histories that together represent the plurality of Jewish European cultures.

"In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire in the 1860s. Initially, indenture caused scandal and was viewed as a covert revival of slavery. But soon enough, a changing economic landscape in the colonies altered how it was perceived, and it was increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how, over time, the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work in sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad was justified as a supposed force for progress. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of "freedom" in a post-abolition world"--

Between Freedom and Bondage looks at the fluctuations of black suffrage in the ante-bellum North, using the four states of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Rhode Island as examples. In each of these states, a different outcome was obtained for blacks in their quest to share the vote. By analyzing the various outcomes of state struggles, Malone offers a framework for understanding and explaining how the issue of voting rights for blacks unfolded between the drafting of the Constitution, and the end of the Civil War.