Popular accounts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contact with the film industry often spin a tale of professional decline. But rather than ruining his talent, time spent in Hollywood benefited Fitzgerald by providing the financial and creative resources he needed during a complex moment in American cultural life. Furthermore, rather than being revenge tracts, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood fiction and his unfinished novel offer some of the early examples of American film theory by carefully examining studio culture and the writer's place within it. While it is true that Fitzgerald had his share of troubles as a screenwriter, many of these difficulties were of his own devising. Fitzgerald was heavily invested in the notion of the artist as a solitary man of genius. His collaborators often resented his claims to superior taste and judgment, especially since his scripts often weren’t filmic enough. But from the beginning of his career he was a hard-working professional writer who was savvy about making money – especially from the film industry – on the commodities he produced. Hollywood wasn't the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed second act; it was part of the same successful performance.

European integration is not the result of a preconceived plan. It rather consists of messy procedures and heated discussions. Ad hoc decision-making, crises and even utter chaos have been constants in the history of the European Union (EU). This complex reality has induced scholars to zoom in on its infamous ‘muddling through’ to better understand what is going on in European integration. Consequently, the primary focus of research has been on ways, means and outcomes: inter-state bargaining, and the resulting treaties and European institutions. However, this focus on institutional ways and means, and on the outcomes of inter-state bargaining, has implied that ideas about Europe’s future mostly have been treated as proxies of specific, rather one-dimensional, state, or institutional, interests. This leads to distorted images of history. If the recent crisis years made one thing very clear, it is this: that it proves quite complex to adequately analyse the multilevel, multipolicy and demoi-cracy muddling through that characterises the EU’s laborious management of crises and day-to-day politics and policies, let alone that a mere focus on institutional interests would be sufficient.

From the 1760s to the 1790s, the upheavals of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were connected to revolutionary changes in ideas and power on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter explains the paralysis of the Commonwealth and traces the fiery trajectory of its final three decades. The Enlightenment revealed much in the Polish-Lithuanian world in need of renewal, but it also lit up potential for growth. Ideas generated abroad interacted fruitfully with home-grown intellectual traditions. The dilemma posed by the ancient Roman historian Sallust – “perilous liberty” or “tranquil servitude”? – briefly seemed capable of resolution as “orderly freedom,” after the Four Years’ Sejm (parliament) of 1788-1792 had acclaimed the Constitution of May 3, 1791. However, the country’s neighbors – Russia, Prussia and Austria – destroyed this felicitous future by the second and third partitions in 1793 and 1795. The chapter is framed by the figure of Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746-1817), hero of the War of American Independence and leader of the 1794 insurrection in Poland-Lithuania against Russian dominance, “the purest son of liberty” (according to Thomas Jefferson), who personified the “Atlantic Revolution” on both sides of the ocean.

This chapter focuses in the collapse of the Spanish Empire in continental America in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, focusing on the viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, which was replaced by four independent republics: Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The essay explains this outcome by integrating into a single narrative a political history that is quite often accounted for separately by each national historiography. It also stresses the revolutionary nature of this process: the creation of new states was only one of the novelties of the period, which witnessed major political, economic, and cultural changes. This was also a social revolution. Although the elites led the process, the decisive involvement of many peasants, rural laborers, artisans, urban plebeians, enslaved people, and members of the indigenous communities granted them an opportunity to pursue other goals. The chapter starts with a brief description of the region in late colonial times, and then analyses the imperial crisis in the beginning of the century, the coming of revolution and the war that ensued, the emergence of rival revolutionary projects, the crooked way into independence, and the fall of the revolutionary regimes, which opened a new period.

In the century of nationalism, the House of Habsburg ruled over a vast territory in East Central Europe. Second only to Russia in size on the European continent, the Habsburg lands stretched from the Alps to the foothills of the eastern Carpathians and from the shores of the Adriatic to the Sudetes mountain range on the border with Saxony. The core of this territory in the Alps, corresponding roughly to what is today Austria and Slovenia, had been ruled by the Habsburgs from the High Middle Ages. In 1526, the Habsburgs made a decisive step to become East Central Europe’s leading power by acquiring the Bohemian and the Hungarian crowns. After one and a half centuries of warfare against the Ottoman Empire, the long eighteenth century witnessed the Habsburgs’ decisive eastern expansion. First, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they reconquered central Hungary and Transylvania from the Ottomans.

While most critics focus their attentions elsewhere, A Passage to India is at least partly a book about tourism and about the sort of interactions that regularly take place between myriad groups as a consequence of this pastime. There is quite a lot of evidence for reading the novel in this way. The first two of the three sections in the book begin with short chapters written loosely in the form of a guidebook introducing geography, geology, history, and cultural differences. Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested are ultimately tourists anxious “about seeing the real India.”1 Their arrival in Chandrapore spawns relationships and drama around which the plot revolves, including a pivotal crisis experienced during an ill-fated excursion to see the Marabar Caves. The book ends with the contrast of religious festival and touristic gaze as the English characters, along with Muslim protagonist Dr. Aziz, watch a festival related to Lord Krishna.

The aim of this chapter is to study the main political-military events of the struggle for independence in the Southern Cone, specifically in current Buenos Aires, Santiago and Lima. These three cities experienced both a profound political revolution, and a bloody civil war in the period 1808-1824. The fact that this revolution was also a military conflict in which a significant number of South Americans participated on both sides of the battlefield suggests that independence was not a struggle for national liberation. A second hypothesis proposes that independences were consummated in the early 1820s once the three fledgling countries declared their sovereignty not only in relation to Spain, but also to their neighbors. Those who once fought together against the Madrid authorities gradually distanced themselves from each other, which is why the “Americanist” projects (both of José de San Martín and Simón Bolívar) lost legitimacy as time went by. Understanding the loss of that legitimacy is key when analyzing the origins of the South American national states. Indeed, thinking about Argentina, Chile and Peru requires not taking their existence for granted.

The birth of the nation in South Asia is inextricably linked to the sundering of our past and our communities along religious lines, a fracturing rehearsed endlessly in the bloodbaths of repeated partitions, riots, and pogroms, in the banality of daily lynchings. For South Asians today, “India” before the Raj is indeed a foreign country. Let me recount a tale from this faraway land, which cannot be located on modern maps, to show how wondrously strange it is.

On 1 April 1597, Gonçalo Toscano was arrested in Portuguese India.1 The Inquisition classified Toscano by “caste” as being “Muslim [mouro], originating from Balaghat [a range of foothills in present-day Maharashtra], freedman [forro], single,” and about twenty-three years of age. Some nine years before, after being baptized and owing to disagreements he had with “his friend,” a certain Matheus Carvalho, he had left the city of Bassein (Baçaim) to return to his hometown of Kalyan (Galiana, near Thane).

The First World War was a fundamental watershed in the history of Europe and the world, causing deep and long-lasting shifts in politics, society, the economy, and the cultural sphere. The human costs were enormous. More than 70 million soldiers were mobilized between 1914 and 1918, of whom up to 9.3 million died. Many more were hurt and often had to live with their injuries and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. The civilian casualties were unprecedented, too: almost 8 million non-combatants fell victim to the direct and indirect consequences of the war, including displacement, captivity, and forced labor, but also starvation and epidemics. The experience of loss and destruction, of economic decline and social deprivation, traumatized whole generations for many years to come.

Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

Before the Great War of 1914–18 ended, the successor states of four Eurasian empires split into conservative, liberal and revolutionary camps; ideological battles that had been waged for nearly a century were resumed like trench warfare in the streets of cities, in diplomatic salons, in the pages of broadsheets and in parliamentary halls. By the middle of the 1930s these ideological battles had again brought forth a civil war, this time in Spain, which came as an augury, tragic and bloody, conjoining the past, present and future in a grim garden of forking paths. This was the setting after the Second World War in which some western European nations sought to lay the basis for what would come to be called ‘an ever closer union’, whilst a rather different ‘union’ settled upon their eastern neighbours under Soviet rule. The processes of unification in eastern and western Europe were reactions and stimuli to the diminution of European power during the post-war period.

Fundamentals of our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), where these quotations are from, was published by Japan’s education ministry in March 1937, months before the nation plunged into war against China and, subsequently, the Second World War.1 A portable canon of imperial ideology, the Fundamentals attacked the alien ideas that had become too prominent in Japanese society, particularly “individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental ideologies.”2 Yet the booklet contained more than simple propaganda; by instructing the imperial subjects to reaffirm their loyalty to the emperor and the nation, it reflected the Japanese state’s attempt to enlist citizens in its revolt against the West. As such, the pamphlet provides a useful historic vantage point. It illuminates, retrospectively, what had gone wrong in Japan’s quest for modernity over the preceding eight decades, which ended in an all-out confrontation with the Allied powers.

Saint-Domingue was at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, because people enslaved in this French Caribbean colony launched the Haitian Revolution, which ended slavery, defeated French colonialism, and created Haiti, the second independent nation-state in the Americas. Beyond this extraordinary achievement, the factors that helped bring about the Haitian Revolution were also important in other aspects of the Atlantic revolutionary age. Saint-Domingue had the largest enslaved population in the Caribbean and developed a white superiority ideology that was unique in the region. It had an unusually large free population of color, with leaders who tried to claim their civil rights. The colony’s planters had a unique preoccupation with slave poisoning, which they traced to an escaped slave named Macandal. The colony experienced unique environmental stresses, including an anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of people. Saint-Domingue’s sugar and molasses tempted North Americans to break British colonial trade laws, which helped produce the American Revolution. The colony also led the Caribbean in the capitalistic production of sugar and coffee, which were at the heart of Europe’s consumer revolution. Saint-Domingue’s indigo dye and cotton helped launch industrial textile manufacturing.

In 2000 the European Union (EU) entered the new millennium after two substantial treaty reforms, those of Maastricht and of Amsterdam, that had significantly expanded its mission and objectives, capacity for internal and external action and democratic credentials. Two fundamental treaty objectives, Economic and Monetary Union and the Area of Freedom Security and Justice (AFSJ), had been added, with the first resulting in the successful introduction of the euro on 1 January 2001 and the second equipping it in time with possibilities for action in a common European response to the new challenges of global terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that was unprecedented in terms of the range of instruments used.