Murders and madness

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Wolfgang Schivelbusch

"History may be written by the victors, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in his new book, but the losers often have the final word. Focusing on three seminal cases of defeat - the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I - Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations to the experience of military defeat.". "Drawing on reaction from every level of society, Schivelbusch investigates the sixty-year period in which the world moved from regional to global conflagration, and from gentlemanly conduct of war to total mutual destruction. He shows how conquered societies question the foundations of their identities and strive to emulate the victors: the South to become a "better North," the French to militarize their schools on the Prussian model, the Germans to adopt all things American. He charts the losers' paradoxical equation of military failure with cultural superiority as they generate myths to glorify their pasts and explain their losses: the nostalgic "plantation legend" after the collapse of the Confederacy, the new cult of Joan of Arc in vanquished France, the fiction of the stab in the back by "foreign" elements in postwar Germany. From cathartic epidemics of "dance-madness" to the revolutions that so often follow battlefield humiliation, Schivelbusch finds remarkable similarities across cultures."--BOOK JACKET.

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P. Huerre, M. Pagan-Reymond, J.M. Reymond

L'enfance, l'âge adulte, la vieillesse existent assurément. Mais l'adolescence? S'agit-il d'un passage obligé, fatal, ou bien, au contraire, d'un phénomène socio-culturel qui reflète tous les signes du malaise de plus en plus visible d'un monde en mutation? L'adolescence est, en effet, un concept récent dans l'histoire des hommes. Les sociétés primitives ne le connaissent pas et des sociétés très évoluées -la Grèce, Rome, la France du Moyen Age et des Temps modernes- l'ont ignoré. Mettant en évidence le caractère relatif et artificiel de cet entre-deux-âges par l'observation de ses manifestations et de ses avatars au fil des temps, depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à nos jours, cet essai montre que l'on assiste à une mise en scène de l'adolescence où ce sont tour à tour (ou simultanément) la nature, l'Etat, la famille, la religion, l'économie, la démographie, les concepts éducatifs ... qui lui décrivent son rôle.

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William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts

Fear of fire, flood, plague, invasion by the infidel, purgatory, death, witchcraft - these are just some of the fears that plagued the early modern world which are dealt with in this fascinating well-integrated collection of essays, based on extensive and ground-breaking new research. Drawing on British and Continental examples, the volume explores the panoply of personal and communal tragedies which tormented and terrified both elite and popular communities in this period, and shows how they formed strategies for dealing both practically and psychologically with their fears; it tells of the creation of the first fire service in France, of dog-massacres in times of plague in England, and of flood emergency plans in Holland.

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Cheryl Paradis

Paradis draws back the curtain on the fascinating world of forensic psychology and revisits the most notorious and puzzling cases she has handled in her multifaceted career.--Introduction.