Book cover of The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350

Book description

From our twentieth-century perspective, we tend to think of the Europe of the past as a colonizer, a series of empires that conquered lands beyond their borders and forced European cultural values on other peoples. This provocative book shows that Europe in the Middle Ages was as much a product…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Making of Europe as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This captivating book, with its broad vision, puts the crusades in context in a way that no other has done. Bartlett’s magisterial overview of the expansion of Latin Christendom remains the most engaging work on how conquest, migration, and religion transformed and laid the foundations for the Europe we know today. Erudite, scholarly, and packed with detail, but also accessible and enjoyable, his thematic approach pulls together examples from diverse regions to make a compelling (and at times controversial) case for how a shared European culture was created as the bounds of Christendom were pushed in all directions. It’s an…

From Aleksander's list on the cultural impact of the crusades.

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A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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