Making Merry Adventure from Sophisticated French History
France: An Adventure History remains, from cover to cover, a truly different history. It is long and densely packed with knowledge, just not told in a traditional narrative.
Steven C. Hause
Steven C. Hause is a professor emeritus of history. He taught his first class at Washington University in September 1965 and finished his last seminar as Covid arrived in December 2019. In between, his publications included four books of modern French history and three textbooks of European history. For more than a decade, he accompanied Wash U students from his freshman Focus Seminar on a trip to France and Germany, visiting such sites as Vaux-le-Vicomte, Versailles, and Verdun. Without a bicycle.
By Steven C. Hause
Touchstone Texts: The Continuing Importance of a Classic Work
To seek a more cautious understanding of fascism through scholarly literature, there is probably no place to start more respected than Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, now more than a decade old.
The Fascist Reign in Spain
Francisco Franco, perhaps the ultimate litmus test for twentieth-century political ideology, gets a new biography of merit. But in attempting a more judicious portrait of Spain's most preeminent political figure, the authors often overlook considerable atrocities.
Causes At War
"It may be important for historians to shift more attention to eastern Europe and to increase the Russian share of the collective responsibility for the war, but one cannot allow this to outweigh Germany’s primary guilt for converting a Balkan War into a “world war” rather than a regional war. McMeekin still disagrees: “Important as the German violation of Belgium was, it did not cause the First World War.” (The House of Commons would have been fascinated to learn this.)"