Changing places : society, culture, and territory in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, 1870-1946 /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Murdock, Caitlin E.
Imprint:Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2010.
Description:x, 275 p. : maps ; 24 cm.
Language:English
Series:Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany
Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany.
Subject:Borderlands -- Germany -- Saxony -- History.
Borderlands -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- History.
Transnationalism -- History.
Nationalism -- History.
Borderlands.
Boundaries.
Nationalism.
Politics and government.
Social conditions.
Transnationalism.
Saxony (Germany) -- Boundaries -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia.
Bohemia (Czech Republic) -- Boundaries -- Germany -- Saxony.
Saxony (Germany) -- Social conditions.
Bohemia (Czech Republic) -- Social conditions.
Saxony (Germany) -- Politics and government.
Bohemia (Czech Republic) -- Politics and government.
Czech Republic -- Bohemia.
Germany -- Saxony.
History.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/8053481
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780472117222 (cloth : alk. paper)
047211722X (cloth : alk. paper)
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description
Summary:

" Changing Places is an interesting meditation on the varying identities and rights claimed by residents of borderlands, the limits placed on the capacities of nation-states to police their borders and enforce national identities, and the persistence of such contact zones in the past and present. It is an extremely well-written and engaging study, and an absolute pleasure to read."
---Dennis Sweeney, University of Alberta

" Changing Places offers a brilliantly transnational approach to its subject, the kind that historians perennially demand of themselves but almost never accomplish in practice."
---Pieter M. Judson, Swarthmore College

Changing Places is a transnational history of the birth, life, and death of a modern borderland and of frontier peoples' changing relationships to nations, states, and territorial belonging. The cross-border region between Germany and Habsburg Austria---and after 1918 between Germany and Czechoslovakia---became an international showcase for modern state building, nationalist agitation, and local pragmatism after World War I, in the 1930s, and again after 1945.

Caitlin Murdock uses wide-ranging archival and published sources from Germany and the Czech Republic to tell a truly transnational story of how state, regional, and local historical actors created, and eventually destroyed, a cross-border region. Changing Places demonstrates the persistence of national fluidity, ambiguity, and ambivalence in Germany long after unification and even under fascism. It shows how the 1938 Nazi annexation of the Czechoslovak "Sudetenland" became imaginable to local actors and political leaders alike. At the same time, it illustrates that the Czech-German nationalist conflict and Hitler's Anschluss are only a small part of the larger, more complex borderland story that continues to shape local identities and international politics today.

Caitlin E. Murdock is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach.

Jacket Credit: Cover art courtesy of the author

Physical Description:x, 275 p. : maps ; 24 cm.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9780472117222 (cloth : alk. paper)
047211722X (cloth : alk. paper)