This short piece reflects on the reception of the reissue of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ in 2016, and serves as an end piece to a collection of articles on ‘Mein Kampf’ curated by the German Historical Institute, London, in 2017. The collection appears in the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute and can be accessed in its entirely on the…[Read more]

This article is a brief set of reflections on the problems associated with trying to read and interpret Hitler’s text ‘Mein Kampf’ historically 70 years after it came out of copyright. The context is the wider set of conversations about the place of ‘Mein Kampf’ in German history and contemporary political culture prompted by the republication…[Read more]

Russian translation of “Russian-Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled?” published in NLO

NLO discussion: David-Fox’s response to the commentaries on “Russian-Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled?” [in Russian] by 11 anthropologists, literary scholars, political scientists, and historians (Timur Atnashev, Andy Byford, Alexander Etkind, Bruce Grant, Catriona Kelly, Ilya Kalinin, Kirill Kobrin, Stephen Lovell, Ale…[Read more]

first para: When Kritika published a special issue in 2001 on the state of the field ten
years after the end of communism, it was logical to include a reassessment of
the October Revolution and two pieces on the rapidly developing investigation
of the Stalin period. Transnational history went unmentioned, along with
international and…[Read more]

Orig. English version of NLO article translated and published in Russian translation as: “Modernost’ v Rossii i SSSR: otsutstvuiushchaia, obshchaia, al’ternativnaia, perepletennaia?”)

first para: Grappling with the relationship between intellectuals and communism
after 1917 calls to mind two topics long treated as almost entirely distinct.
The first concerns non-Soviet, generally noncommunist intellectuals
around the world and, in particular, intense twentieth-century debates
over the pro-Soviet “fellow travelers” in the…[Read more]

First para: Do new biographies of the dictator provoke deeper analysis of the Soviet
system? Will the life of Stalin open up new ways of understanding Stalinism?
Past experience, it has to be said, raises doubts. Of all the biographies of Stalin,
few have integrated, much less altered, the state of the art in Soviet history.1
The main reason…[Read more]

First para: The German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941 brought with it the most
extreme conditions of the short twentieth century. Suddenly, the existence of
the Soviet state was no longer assured. What the regime did in response tells
us much about Stalinism and the Soviet order. In an enormous swathe of territory
from the western and…[Read more]

This article argues that during World War I, the Syrian and Lebanese periodical press in the American mahjar created new space for transnational political activism. In São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York City, diasporic journalists and political activists nurtured a new nationalist narrative and political culture in the press. In a public…[Read more]

Established in 1920, al-Nadi al-Homsi in Sao Paulo, Brazil was a young men’s club devoted to ˜Syrian patriotic activism and culture in the American mahjar (diaspora). Founded by a transnational network of intellectuals from Homs, the fraternity committed itself to what it saw as a crucial aspect of Syrian national independence under Amir Fa…[Read more]

For half a million ‘Syrian’ Ottoman subjects living outside the empire, the First World War initiated a massive political rift with Istanbul. Beginning in 1916, Syrian and Lebanese emigrants from both North and South America sought to enlist, recruit, and conscript immigrant men into the militaries of the Entente. Employing press items, cor…[Read more]