Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989

Transnational Moments of Change offers a broad introduction to the methodology and practice of transnational history. To demonstrate the value of this approach, the work focuses on Europe since World War II, a period whose study particularly benefits from a transnational vantage point. Twelve distinguished contributors from around the globe offer a range of transnational approaches to three continent-wide moments of change. The work begins with a look at the close of World War Two, when liberation from Nazi occupation offered the opportunity for social and political experiment. Next, essays explore the late 1960s as generational change and political dissatisfaction rocked urban centers from Paris to Prague. Finally, the book turns to the fall of communism, a moment of revolutionary change that not only spread rapidly from country to country, but even affected and interacted with protest movements in Western Europe and elsewhere. Together, the essays provide both a new perspective on postwar Europe and a range of models for the historian interested in using the transnational approach.

About the Author

Gerd Rainer-Horn is lecturer at the University of Warwick and the author of European Socialists Respond to Fascism: Ideology, Activism and Contingency in the 1930's and co-editor of Left Catholicism: Catholics and Society in Western Europe at the Point of Liberation, 1943-1955 . Padraic Kenney is associate professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His books include Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 and A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989