100 Books Like European Regions and Boundaries

My first point of concern is the fact that ideas and concepts are historical products altered in time.

In his book, Professor Andrén provides a historical context for the ideas of Europe and their sources that have emerged over the last two centuries. He neatly shows the historicity of the thoughts as constructs linked to the regional and global conditions of their time.

He highlights the visions of Europe in the 19th century marked by revolutions and unifications; in the first half of the 20th century, marked by wars and crises. He then examines the visions in the second half of the century characterized by the search for peace and prosperity, European integration and a pan-European identity.

Let us navigate from Andrén's point of view that ideas about Europe did not die out, but evolved into more current constructs in modern European history.

Especially in the 20th century, the development and recognition of the ideas of Europeanism depended on developments beyond Europe in a global context.

It is impossible to understand the development of European integration and its pan-Europeanist rationale without understanding the history of colonialism, nationalism, the international socialist movement, and, of course, war. Against this background, Hobsbawm discusses, among other things, how the European project was promoted as an alternative to, and in turn threatened by, extremisms, particularly nationalism.

I am captivated by this powerful analysis done on a very large scale. Perhaps this is why the founders of the House of European History in Brussels acknowledge the influence of Hobsbawm and this book in their narrative.

How was the common European memory constructed in the second half of the 20th century and how does it serve the common understanding of Europeanness?

Transforming memory constructions into a common European culture of remembrance requires political will and capacity, which today is mostly represented by the EU and its nation states. By analysing the speeches of political elites at commemorative events, Sierp shows how 'European memory' was materialised between pan-European and national initiatives after the Second World War, and how regional conceptions of the Holocaust and its perpetrators were transformed into a common understanding.

The book also recalls the historicity of European memory and its function for the project of European identity.

Critical approaches are essential for the democratic formation of a common European and national memory.

The integration of the components (events and their commemoration) into a common European memory runs the risk of homogenising the descriptions and transforming them into a discourse in support of national or continental supremacy. With this in mind, Stefan Berger, Wulf Kansteiner and many of the contributors under their editorship explore how an agonistic approach to memory, a logic proposed in opposition to nationalist, teleological, and progressivist memory politics, can serve European memory culture.

The collection is based on a completed project, analysing the confrontation between agonistic memory and war memory in well-known European museums. All in all, memory politics should stimulate local democratic participation, promote ethical development, and influence social dynamics for collective solidarity.

When we think of maps, we usually assume they are about established geography, but that is completely wrong. Maps have been used to hold and elucidate everything about human behavior, especially politics and world affairs, and they vary dramatically in their presentations; the word “geopolitics” is spot on. 

You might envision the world as a blue, green, and brown sphere, but geographers (and world leaders and their kind) then load on every layer possible about how humans divide up this global space. Think of nations, names of continents, where people live, what they eat. And then think of maps that illustrate over the global landscape where we get sick (or not), what we eat, what we grow, how we earn money, where we shop—it’s mindboggling how geography can explain much of what people do, and how that can be exploited.  

During much of our lives, we don’t even think about… show more.

This is a brilliant, wide-ranging, deeply-sourced study of the dynamics that underpinned and justified early modern colonization of the Americas. Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels is the prehistory of the horrors of colonization; the sources at the heart of Davies’s study are colonization’s architecture: maps, book illustrations, freestanding prints, published texts, letters, journals, and on. With nuance and care, Davies rewrites the intellectual history of this period, confronting the dehumanizing, demonizing, monsterizing visual and textual rhetoric of colonial enterprises (which directly contributed to large-scale violence), but also looking carefully at nuances, differences, and shifts in this rhetoric over the course of the Renaissance.

When the story of Christopher Columbus gets told, it’s typically as a tale of his having sailed west to get quickly to the east. But in this gorgeously produced, exhaustively researched study, Nicolás Wey-Gómez argues that to understand Columbus and his story properly, you have to understand it as a story about voyages to the south. Columbus inherited a powerful set of assumptions about the nature and peoples found in southern latitudes, and it’s those assumptions, Wey-Gómez contends, that allowed Columbus and the many Europeans that followed him to the New World to justify their various colonial enterprises.

A solid grasp of crusading geography is essential for anyone who wishes to understand these complex holy wars, and this book is unsurpassed in providing such information in a clear and comprehensible manner. Its many maps and charts, each beautifully drawn and accompanied by insightful commentary and, in most cases, relevant illustrations and excerpts from primary sources, make this an indispensable resource that belongs in every crusade historian’s library. If you can find a used copy of this out-of-print treasure, buy it without hesitation. Be careful, there is another so-called atlas of the crusades out there by someone who is not a crusade historian, and it is filled with numerous errors.   

Part of my job when writing historical fiction is to know the "lay of the land." That means understanding regional maps, the geography, the climate, and the flora and fauna of the era and location of my story. I turned to this book so often that some of the pages are falling out. Beautifully illustrated with color photos, maps, and drawings, this book describes the history and main features of twelve main geographical regions in the Holy Land and connects them to major events in the Old and New Testaments. It's an accessible resource that functions more as a cultural atlas than simply as a map atlas.

Climate change and urban transformation are global phenomena. It is, therefore, always great to broaden your horizons and learn from other regions of the world.

This book from Simone Sandholz offers great insights into the situation in Asia and Latin America, both regions with a strong dynamic of urbanization and urban centers where high density with correlating high diversity of sometimes conflicting urban functions meet urban cultural heritage. She embraces a holistic understanding of this heritage and focuses on the integration of heritage in urban planning and development.

I highly recommend this book not only for scholars and students who are working on urban issues in Asia and Latin America but also for any urban planner, urban analyst, urban geographer, or heritage scientist who wants to learn from experiences in these parts of the world.

For me, this book opened my eyes to the challenges that urban centers in Asia… show more.