"knowledge, sometimes intimate, sometimes more distant, of conditions in depressed and derelict areas, of the sufferings of the unwanted and uprooted-the two million unemployed at home, the Jewish and liberal fugitives from Germany. How many historians today would think of what they do, of the product of their research, as literature? Wasn't history better off, or at least a hell of a lot more readable, before it became a social science? Then consider Wedgwood's remarks that her own The first is her acknowledgement in an introduction written eighteen years after the book first appeared that "History reflects the period in which it was written as much as any other branch of literature." In her case, that period was the 1930s, marked by economic depression and rising international tensions. Wedgwood was a brilliant writer and historian of the good, old-fashioned kind, and for this post I'll highlight some of the larger points she makes. In addition to pitting Habsburg and Bourbon, Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Calvinist, and France and Spain, a little-known dispute that survives to this day pits supporters of the possessive apostrophe in the war's name against those who prefer to go without), I have learned much about why Germany was such a mess and about how Lutheranism forged ahead. Wedgwood's Thirty Years War (that punctuation in the title is per Wedgwood, or at least per the NYRB Classics edition of the book.
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