REVIEW ARTICLE: Peter H WILSON: "The Thirty Years War, 1618–1648: A Quatercentenary Perspective" (German History XXXVII (2019), Nr. 2, 227-245)

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

First paragraph:

The past few years have produced a cluster of important historical anniversaries, the most prominent of which has been the centenary of the First World War. The bicentenary of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era witnessed a prolonged cycle of events between 1989 and 2015, while 2017 saw the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Earlier history has also been remembered, most notably with an entire decade dedicated to the Reformation, culminating in the Luther Year of 2017, but also with the tercentenaries of the births of Frederick II of Prussia (2012) and the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa (2017). Each has proved a valuable impetus for fresh research, as well as providing...

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REVIEW ARTICLE: Jeremy BLACK, "The First World War Reconsidered" (European History Quarterly XLIX (2019), No. 1 (Jan))

(image source: Sage)

Prof. Jeremy Black (Exeter), a prolific scholar of IR history, has published a review article on the First World War in the journal European History Quarerly (Sage). The article reviews five books:

• Bruno Cabanes, August 1914 (Yale UP, 2016)
• Tim Gale, The French Army's Tank Force (Ashgate, 2013)
• William Mulligan, The Great War of Peace (Yale UP, 2014)
• Thomas Otte, July Crisis (CUP, 2014)
• Thomas Otte, An Historian in Peace and War (Ashgate, 2014)

Read more here.

PAPER: Christopher Tomlins on Duncan Kennedy's "Presence and Absence of the Legal Mind"

(image source: Duke)

The Legal History Blog signals a paper by Christopher Tomlins (Berkeley), forthcoming in Law and Contemporary Problems (2015).

Abstract:

In the last couple of years Duncan Kennedy’s 2006 essay, “Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850-2000,” has been used to kickstart a debate on the nature of “contemporary legal thought” through workshops organized at the University of Colorado Law School and at Harvard Law School. This is a debate that will continue. In this commentary I consider whether “Three Globalizations” supplies a credible history for the contemporary. Returning to his famous “The Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought,” Kennedy’s “Three Globalizations” considers the international dissemination of classical legal thought, and of its successor (socially-oriented legal thought). It also sketches the outlines of a third globalization – modern legal consciousness – apparent in the wake of the decomposition of social-oriented legal thought after 1968. My commentary argues that legal historians should take Kennedy’s work very seriously as legal history, but also that strange bedfellows – Milton Friedman and Michel Foucault - may provide an equally persuasive guide to contemporary legal thought.

 See text on SSRN.