Jeffrey Wilson

• California State University, Sacramento

Managing Northern Europe's Forests: Histories from the Age of Improvement to the Age of Ecology. Edited by K. Jan Oosthoek and Richard Hölzl. New York: Berghahn, 2018. Pp. 420. Cloth $130.00. ISBN 978-1785336003. - Volume 51 Issue 4 - Jeffrey K. Wilson

During the nineteenth century, German intellectuals articulated the notion that the nation's identity and social peace were rooted in public access to its forests. In the late nineteenth century, however, the Prussian state sought to tighten property laws, allowing landowners to exert more control over their property and exclude interlopers. First...

The German-Polish borderlands in the late nineteenth century witnessed several attempts to establish model communities. While the Prussian state’s efforts to create model German communities through the Royal Settlement Commission (Königlicher Ansiedlungskommission) are perhaps most famous, another project has received far less attention: the refore...

ZellerThomas. Driving Germany. The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. viii + 289 pp. ISBN 978-1-84545-309-1, $85.00 (cloth). - Volume 11 Issue 2 - Jeffrey K. Wilson

The Autobahn: this term often connotes German efficiency and precision engineering, conjuring up images of Mercedes and BMWs flying through a green landscape. Although widely known to have its origins in the Nazi era, the autobahn nonetheless has come to embody the "positive" and apolitical achievements of that otherwise murderous regime. A huge pu...

The Tuchel Heath (Tucheler Heide, Bóry Tucholskie) and Kashubia (Kassubei, Kaszuby), the two regions comprising the geographical region known as Pomerelia (roughly the area of the “Polish Corridor”), came into Prussian possession with annexations from Poland in 1772, when Friedrich II seized most of what would become the provinces of Poznania and W...

Germany has a long history of political fragmentation, with regional (Heimat) identities playing a critical role in the formation of the national consciousness. The process of rallying local identities to the nation is being examined in the western parts of Germany, but the east remains largely unexplored. Addressing this issue is important because...