The World is Born From Zero is an investigation into the relationship between video games and science fiction through the philosophy of speculation. Cameron Kunzelman argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their aesthetic strategies and the cultural context those strategies emerge from, Kunzelman investigates a diverse array of games like The Last of Us, VA-11 Hall-A, and Civilization VI in order to explore what science fiction video games can tell us about their genres, their ways of speculating, and how the medium of the video game does (or does not) direct us down experiential pathways that are both oppressive and liberatory. Taking a multidisciplinary look at these games, The World is Born From Zero offers a unique theorization of science fiction games that provides both science fiction studies and video game studies with new tools for thinking how this medium and mode inform each other.

Mass violence comes not only from states, but also from people. By analyzing mass violence as social interaction through survivor accounts and other sources, this book presents understudied agents, aims and practices of direct violence and ways of action of those under persecution. Sound history - examining the noises of mass violence and persecution - is particularly telling about such practices. This volume shows that violence can become socially hegemonic, and some people claim a freedom to kill as a political right. To scrutinize indirect violence, which is often imperialist in character and claims many victims, the book proposes the concept of conditions of violence. These conditions are produced by definable groups of actors and foreseeably harm definable groups (which differs from the anonymous and static 'structural violence'). This is exemplified in a case study concerning famines in World War II and another on COVID-19 as mass violence. Less global in character, other case studies in this volume deal with Rwanda, Bangladesh/East Pakistan and the Soviet Union.

Shifting Sovereignties explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereignties shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered. From these observations, the authors derive a historical conceptualisation which makes change and contingency core aspects of the understanding of sovereignty. Rather than understanding sovereignty as a characteristic of individual states, Mihatsch and Mulligan propose the notion of sovereignty regimes frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody what the authors call system sovereignty. Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent. This process of change forms the core of the book. Shifting Sovereignties thus contributes a practical, historical perspective on a concept which is foundational in political science, international relations, and international law.

Executive editor: Ingo Loose; English-language edition prepared by: Elizabeth Harvey, Russell Alt-Haaker, Johannes Gamm, Georg Felix Harsch, Dorothy Mas, and Caroline Pearce

By 1941, most of the Jews in the Polish territories annexed to the Reich - Danzig-West Prussia, the Wartheland, District Bialystok, Zichenau (Ciechanów) and eastern Upper Silesia - were incarcerated in ghettos and camps: the largest ghettos were Litzmannstadt and Bialystok. This volume documents the situation in the ghettos, the deportations to extermination camps, the Jewish resistance in the ghettos and even at the extermination camp Kulmhof.

Learn more about the PMJ on https: //pmj-documents.org/

The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from 1600 to the present. The incest discussion for each period is complemented with a presentation of dominant kinship structures and changes, without arguing for causal relations.

Part I deals with the legacy of ecclesiastical marriage prohibitions of the Middle Ages: Historians dealing with the Reformation have wondered about the political and social implications of theological debates about the incest rules, the Enlightenment opted for sociological considerations of the household and a new anthropology based on the passions, Baroque discourse focused upon sexual relations among kin by marriage, while Enlightenment and Romantic discussions worried the intimacy of siblings.

The first section of Part II deals with the six decades around 1900, during which European and American cultures obsessed about the sexuality of women. Almost everyone concurred in the idea that mother made the family what it was; that she configured the household, kept the lines of kinship vibrant, and stood at the threshold as stern gatekeeper, and many thought that she managed these tasks through her sexuality and an eroticized relationship with sons. Another story line, taken up in the section Intermezzo, this one about the physical and mental consequences of inbreeding, appeared after 1850. To what extent do close-kin marriages pose risks for progeny? At its center, lay the incest problematic, now restated: Is avoidance of kin genetically programmed? Do all cultures know about risks of consanguinity? As for the twenty-first century, evolutionary and genetic assumptions are challenged by a living world population containing roughly one billion offspring of cousin marriages.

Part III deals with one of the perhaps most remarkable reconfigurations of Western kinship in the aftermath of World War I: The shift from an endogamous to an exogamous alliance system centered on the nuclear family. An historical anomaly, this family form began to dissolve almost as soon as it came together and, in the process, shifted the focus of incest concerns to a new pairing: father and daughter. By the 1970s, when the father/daughter problematic swept all other considerations of incest aside, that relationship had come to be modeled, for the most part, around power and its abusive potential. As for incest, its representations in the last three decades of the twentieth century no longer focused on biologically damaged progeny but rather on power abuses in the nuclear family: sexual abuse. By the mid-1990s, Western culture at least partly redirected its gaze away from father and daughter towards siblings, especially towards brothers and sisters and the sexual boundaries and erotics of their relationships. Correspondingly, siblings became a model organism for psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, and the science of genetics.

Following the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in spring 2014 - 160 years after the Crimean War - and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Black Sea region has again become the focus of world history. In this handbook, international scholars from various historical and cultural disciplines provide deep historical insights into the structures of conflict, cooperation, and interrelations between the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe in the space referred to as the Black Sea world. The trans-maritime communication and intra-regional circulations, spanning from Antiquity to the present day via, Byzantium, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Crimean Khanate, the Venetian, Safavid, Ottoman, and Romanov empires, two World Wars, and the Cold War, highlight the autonomy of this historical region in the larger transcontinental setting - designated in various times and varying languages as the Pontus Euxinus, the Mare Maggiore, the Kara Deniz, the Chernoe More, or the Black Sea.

This voluminous edition sheds real light upon the history of the Black Sea region from antiquity until the end of the 20^th century. Not only does this first-rate book provide a host of excellent historical essays across time, it also devotes considerable attention to important questions regarding how the Black Sea region is conceptualized and theorized. A very useful contribution. (James H. Meyer, Montana State University)

In the wake of several research projects, monographs and journals, this is the first groundbreaking handbook on the cohesive history of the Black Sea as a historical meso-region. It gathers 39 excellent contributions that provide the conceptual apparatus, survey the history of the region from a Greek to Byzantine to Ottoman lake, to conflicting rivalries, to its recent transformation from a quasi-Soviet to a quasi-NATO lake, examine the ideas that underpin the various national, ethnic and religious identities, research the different mobilities through migration, transport,
infrastructure, and take stock of its turbulent history through conflicts and war. (Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Mostly the work of scholars from Central Europe and the Black Sea region, this massive volume focuses on the relationship between historical research and memory, in particular the difficulty of certain groups living in the region when confronted with empires and nation states, whose centers may be quite distant from the Black Sea. Attentive readers may thus view the present handbook not merely as a work of reference on history, memory and movement, but also as a testimony to the historical perspectives developed by a significant number of Central European and Black Sea scholars during the first quarter of the twenty-first century. (Suraiya Faroqhi, Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul)

The Handbook Ideologies in National Socialism is also available online. Read the introduction in full length here.

Handbook Ideologies in National Socialism. Vol. 1: Ideologies and Individuals is an interdisciplinary study of the beliefs and practices that underpinned, inspired, and were inspired by the Nazi worldview. As the title suggests, these are examined not in the abstract, but rather from the perspective of the different theoreticians and practitioners of National Socialism. Eschewing a single, binding definition of Nazi ideology, the volume demonstrates that it was often interpreted differently by the actors who appear in it, and thus adds multiple new angles to the already sizable literature on the topic.

This volume introduces key terms of public history and makes them accessible via the most important subject areas and central research perspectives. It is aimed at students, teachers and practitioners who deal with history in the public sphere and offers approaches to the theoretical foundation of public history as part of historical cultural studies.

Counting on Computers: New Information Technologies and Curricular Change in East Germany, 1960s to 1990 is a compelling exploration of socialist ambitions for a computerised future and how computer technology was imagined to reshape education and socialist society in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It delves into the positive visions of a computerised future embraced by the country's one-party leadership, and examines how these visions influenced educational policy and curricula as computers were introduced into workplaces and schools.

The book provides readers with a comprehensive perspective on the historical development of computer education in the GDR, highlighting the crucial links between the integration of computers in different sectors of the educational system, as well as in society and the socialist economy at large. By uncovering this lesser-known aspect of East German history, the book sheds light on the intricate and multifaceted relationship between technology, ideology, and education.

Walking the Footsteps of a Forgotten Revolution details the bold and audacious insurrection in the opening phase of the German Revolution of 1848-1849. Friedrich Hecker, the most gifted young politician of his day, attempted to lead a group of rebels through Southwest Germany in hopes of fomenting a full-fledged revolution. The forces in play during the ten-day insurrection lay bare the larger historical factors that would plague German aspirations for freedom and democracy for the next hundred years. Steven Fuller's engaged theory beautifully unfolds as he walks the actual two-hundred-mile route of the insurrection, simulating the conflict in real-time and in the real landscape of the rebellion. Skillfully combining elements of pure historical narrative and high theory, with the best aspects of travel literature, the author creates an engaging and readable story filled with drama and a cast of colorful characters; while at the same time, using the events of one hundred seventy-five years ago to weave in today's issues of political engagement and violent insurrection.

Migration is often viewed as a one-way process, from the country of origin to the place of arrival, but recent academic research shows that this presumption is fundamentally flawed. Migration has always been characterized by return movements, as a glance into history reveals - from transatlantic returns in the 19th century to the back-and-forth of migrant workers and refugees in the 20th century, and numerous other forced and voluntary migrations. This volume invites to reconceptualize studies in migration history by shifting away from the focus on going away to a more complex one revolving around a plurality of issues of leaving, returning, moving on and traveling again, belonging and fluid identities in third spaces.
Structured in three parts, the contributions in this volume shed light on the close connection between power dynamics and return migration as well as how migration processes shape individual planning abilities, social relationships, and complex spatial dynamics.The methodological part of the volume further encourages readers to reflect on growing data collections and possibilities for digital research on return migration.

Germany was the epicenter of the Cold War. Across the Iron Curtain, hundreds of thousands of soldiers faced each other, and if World War III were to break out, contemporaries feared, surely it would happen here. The country's frontline status made it an El Dorado for spies, who gathered information on military targets, penetrated political parties, and trained partisans for stay-behind operations. For the Americans, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) came to take the lead in this silent - and sometimes not so silent - contest. In the heyday of the Cold War, the agency's German station employed nearly two thousand officers - in addition to countless spies and informants. Ultimately, this covert empire reported to the CIA station chief in West Germany and his deputy. And for many years, either of those positions was held by Gordon Matthews Stewart.

Gordon Stewart was well prepared for this assignment. He studied German history and literature during the 1930s and lived in Munich and Hamburg as a visiting student. Here, he personally witnessed the Nazi takeover, even catching a glimpse of Adolf Hitler at one of his notorious rallies. When the United States entered the war in 1941, the newly established Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recruited him as a specialist on German affairs. In the summer of 1945, he arrived in Germany with an OSS detachment. Eventually, the OSS morphed into the CIA, and Gordon Stewart would run the agency's espionage organization in Germany for some twenty years.

From CIA headquarters in Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, and eventually, Bonn, Mr. Stewart directed all intelligence operations in central Europe. Initially, he hunted down Nazi war criminals, but the Cold War compelled him to bend his efforts toward the Soviet bloc. During the 1950s, Mr. Stewart directed espionage operations against East Germany, organized the training of Ukrainian partisans at U.S. bases in Bavaria, and participated in a scheme to dig a tunnel into East Berlin to eavesdrop on Soviet and East German communications. He also recruited and handled sources inside the West German government, including the chief of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Reinhard Gehlen; the highest-ranking West German military officer, General Adolf Heusinger; and top policy-makers of the Christian and social democratic parties.

Mr. Stewart's memoirs, introduced by renowned intelligence scholar Thomas Boghardt, offer not only a fascinating look inside the CIA's largest overseas station; they also tell the story of a deeply conscientious and highly accomplished intelligence officer, whose experience, intellect, and moral compass shaped American policy toward Germany and Europe during the turbulent years of the early Cold War.

Modern China in Flux heralds a transformative epoch in historical research, spotlighting the innovative methodology of network analysis. As the digital age unfolds, historians encounter both an unparalleled opportunity and a daunting challenge: navigating the vast digital repositories of historical data. Central to this volume's discourse is the imperative for a methodological shift in examining modern China's historical research. By embracing the digital evolution, this volume highlights the promise of network analysis as a model for historians.

Modern China, rich in tales of socio-political upheavals, economic transformations, and cultural shifts, emerges as a nuanced tapestry of intertwined narratives. Capturing its intricacies necessitates an approach that illuminates the multiple connections, alliances, and conflicts that shaped its course. Here, network analysis proves invaluable. By exploring textual databases and archival documents, and leveraging the capabilities of full-text historical sources, historians can craft a dynamic, interconnected narrative of modern China. Previously obscured relationships come into sharp focus, revealing the delicate balance of power, influence, and change.

Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others is a thought-provoking collection that brings together a diverse range of contributions inspired by research from the Hamburg's (post-)colonial legacy research center. The authors explore new perspectives in provenance research by situating it within the broader contexts of global history, colonial history, and postcolonial studies.

This volume goes beyond simply tracing the origins of objects, considering the significant impact on the societies from which these objects originate. It also critically examines how these objects were used in collections and museums and how the process of musealization shaped collecting practices. With its multiperspective approach, Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others encourages readers to reflect on the deep connections between past and present and to consider responsible ways of engaging with colonial collections.

What is history? What are historians doing, when we create our histories? The need for answers is more urgent than ever. We live in an era when history is often rejected or ignored, and when all teachers of history confront formidable challenges. In the culture of screen capitalism and social media, historical knowledge is evaded in an expanding present-minded consciousness. How can history be defended, and what is it that we are defending?
This book argues that history is a mode of thinking, a form of imaginative reasoning with its own informal logic. In non-technical language and using examples from important works of history, the book defines core elements in historical thinking. These include contingency, complexity, temporality, parts and wholes, consilience, perspectives, analogy, and abduction. These elements are subsumed into the concept of imaginative reasoning. The overall argument echoes the work of hermeneutic philosophers. History is a disciplined imagination, tempered and empowered by its forms of reasoning. It embraces ethical imperatives that the historian has a duty to declare. Equipped with such understanding, historians may answer the many rejections of history and secure its place in our shared futures.

In studying the Late Antique period there are different approaches: political history (fall of the West Roman Empire and its replacement by the Successor States), socio-economic history (e.g. collapse of an imperial aristocracy or the impact of plague), history of the weaking of classical culture, and a religious history of the establishment of the Church. None of these aspects stands alone, and they are all considered in this volume.

Until 1979, homosexual men were systematically exempt from military service in the Bundeswehr. Although homosexuality alone was no longer a cause for being unfit for service, the principle applied to homosexual soldiers was: compulsory military service yes, career no. In most cases, same-sex orientation made it impossible to become an officer. And it was classified as a security risk. It was not until 2000 that the Federal Ministry of Defense changed its course.

Klaus Storkmann is the first to examine the Bundeswehr's handling of homosexual soldiers on the basis of interviews, court records and papers of the Federal Ministry of Defense. A comparison with other armed forces and the public service in the Federal Republic of Germany places the Bundeswehr actions in a larger context. The study proves that homosexuality has always been an issue in the military and continues to be so in many places; it is based on retrospective views on former German armed forces, in particular the National People's Army of the GDR, and includes side glances at armies of other states.

The history of Europe is marked not only by violence and division but also by efforts to reduce the destructiveness of war. In this volume, the authors explore the meaning of 'Europe' within war and peace discourses from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. They examine imagined wars, the post-1815 security order, the portrayal of Russian and Muslim 'Others, ' double standards in international law, pacifist rhetoric, and the role of 'Europe' in war propaganda and resistance movements. The authors demonstrate how both war and peace practices have shaped the concept of 'Europe' over time.

The book focuses on the extension of quality-assured measurement and metrology into psychological and social domains. This is not only feasible and achievable, but also a pressing concern. Significant progress in developing a common conceptual system for measurement across the sciences has been made in recent collaborations between metrologists and psychometricians, as reported in the chapters of this book. Modeling, estimation, and interpretation of objectively reproducible unit quantities that support both general comparability and adaptation to unique local circumstances are demonstrated in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, justice, and beauty perception.

Detention camps exceed the juridical concept of punishment and crime. This book comprises two parts: 1. a collected volume that discusses camps not as something of the past, but as a paradigmatic political space in which ordinary law is completely suspended, and 2. an Italian-English parallel text of the war diary of an Italian prisoner during his confinement at the Stalag X-B internment camp near Sandbostel from 1943-1945.

1. The Human Condition of Exception: Collected Essays
Edited by Aisling Reid and Valentina Surace

Written in Italian and English, the essays collected in this volume explore the issue of camps and suffering from various perspectives, including philosophical inquiry, literary analysis, historical description and legal assessment.
As Agamben suggests, the camp embodies the state of exception. A dehumanising camp life will therefore emerge every time such a structure is created. What happens in camps exceeds the juridical concept of punishment, as well as that of crime. Prisoners are faced with a 'useless' pain (Levinas) as it is not the expiation of a fault. Prisoners attempt to describe their extreme suffering through their diaries. Their experience, however, cannot be entirely communicated. Even their screams, which express humanity at the extreme limit of its un-power, are silenced. Given the recent popularity of right-wing politics, as well as the centenary of Mussolini's march on Rome, such research is more urgent than ever. The book will appeal to readers with an interest in philosophy as well as Irish history scholars studying internment during Partition and The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

2. Aldo Quarisa's Diary: An Italian-English Edition
Edited by Aisling Reid and Valentina Surace. Transcribed and with a preface by Galileo Sartor. Translation of the diary by Aisling Reid (Italian-English).

In 1943, Aldo Quarisa worked at a military school in Florence, where he taught literature. In October of that year, one month after Italy had surrendered to the Allied forces, the Italians declared war on the Germans.
In Florence, the German occupiers responded quickly, by arresting and deporting people with military connections to numerous concentration camps in Austria. Quite suddenly, Aldo was detained and deported through a network of camps, including Benjaminovo and the Stalag X-B internment camp, near the German village of Sandbostel.
For two years, he found himself imprisoned alongside other Italians, including the celebrated journalist Giovannino Guareschi, who secretly kept a diary that was later published as his Diario Clandestino 1943-1945 in 1946. Much like Guareschi, Aldo also kept a diary and excerpts are published here in both Italian and English for the first time. The diary describes in unprecedented detail the monotony of camp life, the cruelty of the guards and the prisoners' struggle to survive.
The text is an important document that preserves the memory and voices of all those who suffered during the war and will inevitably be of interest to readers with an interest in World War II.