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Zusatztext Wachtel's book not only dispels the myth of the Balkans as a land of violence and ancient hatreds, but also focuses on the gradual transformation of the region from a land in-between and borderland into contemporary Southeast Europe. Informationen zum Autor Andrew Baruch Wachtel is Bertha and Max Dressler Professor of the Humanities, Dean, The Graduate School, and Director, Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies, Northwestern University. Klappentext Eminent historian Andrew Wachtel here depicts the Balkans as that borderland geographical space in which four of the world's greatest civilizations have overlapped in a sustained and meaningful way to produce a complex, dynamic, sometimes combustible, multi-layered local prvilization. It is the space in which the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, of Byzantium, of Ottoman Turkey, and of Roman Catholic Europe met, clashed and sometimes combined. The history of the Balkans is thus a history of creative borrowing by local people of the various civilizations that have nominally conquered the region. Zusammenfassung In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large as a somewhat frightening but ill-defined space. Most attempts at definition focus on geography (the actual mountain range that gives the area its name and the lands surrounding it) or, more recently, on the set of prejudices attached to the term by local and outside observers. There has been far less concern with attempting to define this space in positive terms, taking as a starting point not geography as such but rather the cultural, historical, and social threads that could allow us to see what might be merely contiguous places as a coherent, though complex, whole. The goal of this volume is to do precisely that. The Balkans should probably be defined as that borderland geographical space in which four of the world's greatest civilizations have overlapped in a sustained and meaningful way to produce a complex, dynamic, sometimes combustible, multi-layered local civilization. It is the space in which the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, of Byzantium, of Ottoman Turkey, and of Roman Catholic Europe met, clashed and sometimes combined. The history of the Balkans can be seen as a history of creative borrowing by local people of the various civilizations that have nominally conquered the region. Each civilization has thus been hybridized, modified, and amplified by other voices and traditions. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction: The Balkans as a Historical and Cultural Melting Pot Chapter 1: The Balkans from Prehistory to the Byzantine Empire Chapter 2: The Medieval Balkans Chapter 3: The Balkans under Ottoman Rule Chapter 4: The Long 19th Century (1775 -1922) Chapter 5: The 20th Century-From the Balkans to Southeast Europe Notes Chronology Further Reading Websites Index ...
