Reviews – Andrew S. Tompkins

Rezension: Gerst et al., Grenzforschung

18/11/2021

Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult (18.11.2021). Zusammenfassung: Die Beiträge eignen sich am besten zur eigenständigen Lektüre der einzelnen Themen, die allerdings klar mit übergeordneten Fragen verbunden sind. Entsprechend dem Ansatz der Herausgeber:innen, die Bandbreite der Grenzforschung vor allem in theoretischer und methodischer Hinsicht darzustellen, überwiegen insgesamt Perspektiven aus Soziologie und Anthropologie; weitere Disziplinen wie Geschichts-, Rechts-, Wirtschafts-,…
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Review: Augustine, Taking on Technocracy

01/02/2021

Reviewed for German Studies Review 44 (1), 2021 (pp. 208-210). Summary: Taking on Technocracy covers a broad range of developments in the domains of technology, policy, and protest, analyzing them with nuance in the different contexts of East and West Germany. For those wanting to understand why the issue of nuclear power has remained such…
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Review: Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain

26/01/2021

Reviewed for German History (2021, forthcoming). Summary: West Germany and the Iron Curtain is an ambitious re-examination of German history from its literal margins. Eckert’s methodologically innovative analysis not only straddles the East-West divide but interrogates 1945 and 1989/90 as chronological caesuras. Refracted through the environmental history of these borderlands, Germany’s political, social, and cultural…
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Review: Milder, Greening Democracy

05/08/2020

Reviewed for H-German (August 2020). Summary: Throughout Greening Democracy, Milder stresses that antinuclear activism was about more than the Greens and that it did more than just bring ’68ers into the fold of liberal, parliamentary democracy. These are welcome arguments, and Milder misses no opportunity to show how people of different generations and with no…
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Binding the Nation, Bounding the State: Germany and its Borders

04/01/2019

Review article for German History Vol. 37, No. 1 (2019), examining seventeen recent publications on the borders of Germany and of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Review: Smith, Terror and Terroir

29/09/2018

Reviewed in French History. Summary: In the summer of 1907, France’s Midi rouge (the ‘red South’) was in revolt, with regular Sunday protests in towns throughout the region drawing as many as 600,000 participants. After protesters torched buildings in Narbonne, the military occupied the town, leading to the deaths of six people and the mutiny…
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Review: Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders

19/12/2017

Reviewed in Social History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2018), pp. 156-158. Summary: Davey convincingly argues that tiers-mondisme and sans-frontiérisme were never so far apart as their advocates subsequently claimed, showing that they always shared key points of reference (the post-colonial third world, the Second World War) and even key practices (e.g. ‘speaking out’, ‘the refusal…
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Review: Naples and Bickham Mendez, Border Politics

04/04/2017

Reviewed in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2017), pp. 474-476. Summary: This interdisciplinary volume weds social movement studies, which remains largely embedded in the social sciences, with border studies, a growing field with roots in geography, anthropology and women’s studies. The editors take an intersectional approach, looking at how social movements are…
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Review: Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties

01/09/2014

Reviewed in German History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2014), pp. 507-509. Summary: Brown offers an incisive critique of many supposedly ‘transnational’ studies published in the last decade, focused as they are on the accumulation of national case studies. His own ‘transnational’ tells us far more about how Germans drew on ‘the global’ than about how…
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Tagungsbericht: Phantomgrenzen in Ostmitteleuropa. Zwischenbilanz eines neuen Forschungskonzeptes.

16/04/2014

Published 16 April 2014 in H-Soz-u-Kult online.

Category: Reviews