This is part of our special feature, Imagining, Thinking, and Teaching Europe.
When introduced in the early twentieth century at Ivy League institutions, “Western Civilization” courses were initially considered pedagogically innovative for their attempt at making European history relevant to the United States. While still taught at many universities today, Western Civilization courses are now often presented as general European history survey courses—a holdover from a bygone era. Over the course of the spring 2020 semester, students in my “The Myths of Western Civilization: Queering and Decolonizing European History” class, taught in the Honors College at Texas State University, explored how the history of “Western Civilization” has been written and taught over the course of the last century. Irrespective of publication date, each student located an affordable, used western civilization textbook that covered from antiquity to date. Using secondary sources provided by myself, students compared the ways those textbooks told Europe’s story—analyzing what was included and excluded from those narratives. Each week in the seminar, students were responsible for locating, assigning, and leading discussions about primary sources that challenged the histories found in their textbooks. As a culminating exercise, students and myself collectively wrote an article that analyzed how their various textbooks treated given historical periods, while suggesting sources that could be used to “fill in the gaps” of history. This article helps show professors ways in which they can teach survey textbooks more critically and make their course more than a stale survey of European History. The course pushed students to imagine what a meta-history of western civilization might look like while still teaching the broad scope of European history and giving students ownership of history.
—Louie Dean Valencia-García for EuropeNow
Decolonizing and queering “Western Civilization”
In recent years, right-wing ideologues have risen, clinging to an idea of “European classical heritage” to validate their own history as superior to others. Swedish YouTuber Marcus Follin, known as “The Golden One,” refers to his audience as “proud sons of Rome” and presents European heritage as a connection to the “metaphysical legacy of Rome as a pan-European thing rather than actual Rome.”[1] To better understand how someone like Follin came to see history as myth, and myth as fact, we must understand historiography, or the history of history. Too often, history textbooks reflect historians’ own biases, sometimes unintentionally, resulting in misrepresentations or omissions of history.
In the hopes of creating a comprehensive account of the past, historian James Harvey Robinson, the first proponent of western civilization-type courses as part of a core curriculum at Columbia University in the early twentieth century, argued the study of history must omit “all that was exceptional and abnormal.” He believed some histories are more important than others, resulting in the erasure of historically marginalized peoples. For Robinson, it was historians’ obligation to “bring the narrative into harmony with the most recent conceptions of the relative importance of past events and institutions.”[2] This homogenization of history erased the histories of those who are marginalized from normative society. To effectively understand the past, we must uplift the narratives of these buried voices by decolonizing and queering history. By critically studying a selection of textbooks about “Western Civilization” written over the last century we can learn more about historians’ own biases. By locating and including histories left out of these textbooks, we can bring to light the experiences of marginalized peoples and give life to those who have been forgotten.
Deciphering antiquity
In Robinson’s History of Western Europe, he wholly ignores ancient Greece, beginning instead with Roman history, and even then, focusing predominantly on Christianity’s emergence. Robinson believed “that it would not be difficult to prove that no single factor in European history, whether we regard the growth of the state or the development of culture, can in any way be compared in its constant, direct, and obvious influence with the Roman church.” He argued, “We have unwittingly permitted our modern enthusiasm for the principle of separation of church and state to effect a corresponding divorce in our historical studies.” [3] For Robinson, a medievalist, the Middle Ages were important because of perceived legal, institutional and cultural legacies directly relevant to Americans, a history Gilbert Allardyce describes as “unhistorical, Whiggish, and Eurocentric.”[4]
Despite dubious origins, by the mid-twentieth century, western civilization textbooks did include the broad ancient Mediterranean world. Western Civilization textbooks claimed the achievements of modern Europe’s neighbors, while leaving them outside of Europe. For example, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture (1955) begins with Paleolithic man, and dedicates chapters to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Persian, Hebrew, Hellenic, and Roman civilizations. The text even gives credit to the legal, artistic, technology, scholarship, and engineering achievements of those civilizations. In this narrative, the Mediterranean world was the foundation of western civilization. Hammurabi’s code became Europe’s juridical inheritance. The text argues Muslims’ intellectual achievements “were far superior to any of which Christian Europe could boast before the twelfth century.” However, even in that recognition, the author jabbed, “[I]t would be foolish to suppose that very many of the Arabs themselves were able to appreciate this cultural heritage.”
A more recent text gives an example of how studying primary sources in conjunction to textbooks critically can help readers understand violence against women historically and how it is still normalized. In Europe: A History (1996), Norman Davies begins with the “Legend of Europa,” in which Zeus transforms into a bull and kidnaps and sexually assaults a Phoenician woman, Europa—Europe’s namesake. By looking at this introduction, along with Moschus’ telling of “Europa” (c. 150) and Titiano’s “The Rape of Europa” (c. 1560), students’ perception of western civilization and authority can be destabilized.[5] Davies writes, ‘[I]n carrying the princess to Crete from the shore of Phoenicia (now south Lebanon) Zeus was surely transferring the fruits of the older Asian civilizations of the East to the new island colonies of the Aegean.”[6] Indeed, referring to Europa’s rape as simply “carrying” her off minimizes the violence. Davies even describes the episode as “a case of tit of tit”—a chauvinist attempt at humor. Davies unsurprisingly ignores the gender dynamic at play in the legend and in his own humor. In this myth, Europe’s story begins with the rape of a woman who was not from Europe; her “fruits” are the appropriated legacy of Europe’s neighbors. In a sign of evolution, Europe in the Modern World (2017) begins with this same vignette, but explicitly calls Zeus’ actions rape and underlines European prejudices.[7]
The European middle ages
Within many textbooks, the European middle ages are defined by the power and accomplishments of the Christian church in popular imagination.[8] Philosophy, science, and the arts are depicted as having been controlled by monasteries. Textbooks often include discussion of Jewish and Muslim peoples only to contextualize the Crusades and later the Spanish “Reconquest,” such as how the body of knowledge in Islamic Spain was important to introduce ancient texts to the Christians. Little space is spared to mention the artistic and scientific advancements in the Near East or in the Moorish Iberia. Both secular and religious poetic traditions in Arabic and Hebrew illuminate the personal and political lives of marginalized groups.[9] In Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture (1980), the Crusades are considered responsible for jumpstarting the stagnant middle ages. Like most textbooks, it fails to consider the perspective of those under siege in the Crusades.[10] For example, Abu al-Muzaffar al-Abiwardi’s poetry in the early thirteenth century encapsulates the aftermath of Muslims caught in the first crusade.[11] Moreover, Sephardi poet Yishaq ben Mar-Saul’s work not only contributes to revealing the artistic contributions of religious minorities, but also the contributions of queer men.[12] Mar-Saul’s poetry clearly describes his attraction to a young man, as well as the conflict between his religion and sexuality. Some textbooks surveyed do include discussion of “sexual deviancy,” but usually in the context of priests and monks taking wives, failing to mention queer people.[13]
Women in the Renaissance
The more recent Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment (2002) and A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2019) emphasize the Renaissance’s nostalgia for antiquity through art and the development of humanism. However, these textbooks perpetuate a narrative that only credits men for these developments—artists and writers like Giotto, Botticelli, Di Vinci, Michelangelo, Petrarch, and Machiavelli. Even the ancient Greek and Romans referenced—Cicero, Aristotle, and Plato—were all male. Where were the women during the Renaissance? A Short History of Europedoes not mention anything about influential women in the period, and the one time a woman was referenced, it was by Savonarola, a leader of an uprising in Florence, noting that a depiction of the Virgin Mary was dressed as a “whore.”[14]
We can look to primary sources, like a letter written by eighteen-year-old Laura Cereta—an educated woman who married at fifteen and quickly was widowed—to see womens’ role in the Renaissance. Laura Cereta’s letter to Bibulus Sempronius (a fictitious person) titled “Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women” (1488) shows a woman’s voice while demonstrating the nostalgic spirit of the Renaissance. In this letter, Cereta defends her own ability to think—and that of other women—by referring to her predecessors, women intellectuals in antiquity. She argues knowledge is gained through action and is not a predetermined gift of nature. Her list of intellectual women, like Sabba of Ethiopia, Zenobia of Egypt, and Manto of Thebes, and their skills—prophecy, teaching, writing, and persuasion—,[15] interrupts the idea that men were the only ones capable of thinking and learning.[16] Cereta positions women in history and brings light to their intellect and accomplishments, whereas these two textbooks erased their existence. Cereta’s letter serves as a guide for modern audiences to further search for other women’s experiences in the Renaissance and before.
Transatlantic Spanish colonialism and a clash of civilizations
The greatest challenge in teaching Spanish Colonialism is that almost all primary sources come from the perspective of Spanish conquistadors. However, this is not to say that their perspective is useless. Pedro de Cieza de León’s Chronicles of the Incas (1540) is a good example of a primary source that can help fill in the gaps, as it soberly describes the different aspects of the Incan social order, including their criminal justice system, economy, and census.[17] Still, the lack of primary source information from native perspectives is important to keep in mind when evaluating this subject in textbooks. Making of the West Peoples and Cultures (2012) included only three paragraphs about pre-colonial civilizations, disparagingly arguing, “The Incas … could be ruthless and conquerors.”[18] Such strong charges could better be reserved for European colonizers than those colonized. Indeed, this depiction of the Incas conflicts with the image painted in Chronicles of the Incas. The Inca’s aforementioned census accounted for “how many of the Indians were poor, the women who had been widowed, whether they were able to pay their taxes.”[19] They used this information to establish systems promoting collective welfare, contradicting negative depiction of Incan society.
Many textbooks also fail to connect what was going on in Europe and the Americas. Often, sections about the Spanish “Reconquest” of Iberia and counterreformation are in entirely different sections. Why do they not see “the repressive measures of Ferdinand and Isabella to keep Spain strictly Catholic,” and the Spanish priests trying to convert and thereby “civilize” Native Americans as part of the same ultra-Catholic, proto-nationalist project?[20] A similar connection can be made between land confiscation and deportation of Jews and Muslims in Spain and the confiscation and subjugation of Natives in the Americas. Further, textbooks like Making of the West Peoples and Cultures (2012) often leave out discussions of gender and sexuality in Spanish colonialism, with no mentions anywhere of gender non-conforming individuals, such as Erauso, the “Lieutenant Nun.”[21]
The French Revolution and the power of destitute women
Often, men are remembered as the proponents of democracy during the Enlightenment and French Revolution, despite women’s critical role in salons and the streets. In a defining moment of the French Revolution, women led the marches against the monarchy in October of 1789 in response to widespread hunger and the exorbitant bread prices, as seen in Jean François Janinet’s print, “Parisian Women March on Versailles.” Those women successfully pressed their demands on the French crown.[22] Janinet’s depiction of women storming Versailles shows the vigor of these women too often left out of western civilization textbooks. The West: Encounters and Transformation (2007), simply has no mention of Janinet’s highly influential print nor of the event that shifted the balance of power between the Third Estate and the monarchy. [23] Two years after the women marched on Versailles, Olympe de Gouges, a baker’s daughter, published her pamphlet Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. The pamphlet declared, “Law should be the expression of the general will; all female citizens and citizens should take part.”[24] De Gouges sought to normalize the political involvement of women and agitated for equality under the law. While the power and influence of the revolutionary women is apparent, many textbooks make no reference to those women.
The Industrial Revolution and transatlantic slave trade
The inhumanity and demoralization characterized in the systematic enslavement of Africans is often ignored in western civilization textbooks in favor of discussing the justifications of the act itself. Many textbooks emphasize slavery as an economic benefit for the West, placing economic gain for white Europeans over humanity. Most textbooks isolate European and US slavery, as though they had separate origins. Western Civilizations (2011) argues slave labor both contributed significantly to agricultural production while simultaneously claiming dependency on slave labor decreased as technological developments enhanced manufacturing and industrialized the West.[25] Although enslaved peoples labored primarily in agriculture, industries and urban centers largely benefited from slave labor across Europe.[26] The history of slavery cannot be separated from the industrial revolution. Indeed, even when slaves, like Louisa Jenkins, were liberated, urban cities took advantage of many legal loopholes that allowed the hiring out of free black people who had outstanding fines or debts to the city.[27] While technically slavery had ended, the legal exploitation of black people remained.
Through surveys of primary and secondary sources that more thoroughly depict the gruesomeness of the transatlantic slave trade, students can have a better understanding of slavery in a context less focused on its justifications. While important to understand reasonings behind slave trade, it is equally important to know that such rationales do not validate or excuse slavery. Detailed personal accounts like Jenkin’s and Ottobah Cugoano’s help provide an understanding of history not meant to assuage the West’s guilt or erase European culpability, but factually and reliably demonstrate the systematic acts of violence against Africans that could have been avoided if only the West valued humanity over wealth.[28]
Demagoguery and the Weimar Republic
In Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics, and Society (1989), the period of the Weimar Republic is used to bridge the German interwar period to the rise of Nazi Germany. This republican government attempted to capture the ideals of “western democracy,” but was confronted with opposition from the conservative right and the communist left.[29] This textbook provides a chronology of events that led to the dissolution of the republic, and gives the reader an understanding of the Nazi Third Reich and their political agenda. However, nowhere does the text emphatically confront the radical nationalism held by members of the conservative right during this interwar period and how their rhetoric heavily influenced the masses. The Nazi Party Program (1920) shows this rhetoric in a twenty-five-point itinerary that compels race-based nationalism, anti-Semitic hate speech, and anti-capitalistic and anti-socialist rhetoric. This source demonstrates the subtle nuances of nationalistic racism. It also contains many contradictions regarding economic theory and citizen rights and liberty that may otherwise guise themselves to the reader. Identifying these contradictions, particularly points 13-17, can be good practice in identifying fascist rhetoric; they call for nationalized land reform, profit sharing, and antitrust measures—being anti-socialist while proclaiming nationalistic goals.[30] Fascism is not always overt; it does not call for genocide or ethnic cleansings, but rather, it emphasizes purity. The Nazi Party Program can be juxtaposed with the Weimar Social Democratic Party’s Proclamation of the Council of People’s Representatives to the German People(1918) call for democratic measures such as freedom of speech and worker protection rights.[31] These declarations highlight the hyper-partisan environment in Germany during the interwar period, and help students understand the rise of the Nazi Third Reich.
Queering Nazi Germany
Both Western Civilization: A Brief History (2008) and A Short History of Europe (2019) largely ignore the Nazi’s victims, the latter only dedicating a paragraph to the Holocaust. Instead, chapters focus on military action, likening the war to a game of chess. When victims are discussed, only “Jews… Soviets, Poles, Slavs, and Roma gypsies” are acknowledged. Other minority groups, like homosexuals and people with disabilities, are not. The lack of attention to the Holocaust and the groups affected by it excludes vital narratives from history. Similarly, in Western Civilization, the war is described militarily, discussing the young German men involved in the war and how they had “such youthful enthusiasm.” Nazism had an aura of a “young man’s movement and a sense of dynamism that the other parties could not match.” Rather than confronting violence committed or sharing victims’ voices, the textbook describes the appeal of the Nazi party, emphasizing the narratives of perpetrators over those of victims.[32] Primary sources, such as Pierre Seel’s memoir, give voice to those silenced. Seel, a French teenager during the war, recalls being questioned, beaten, raped with a ruler, forced to give up other homosexuals, and thrown into jail. Seel was eventually transferred to the Schirmeck concentration camp, and recounts seeing his lover, Jo, stripped naked and eaten alive by German Shepherds as other prisoners watched. [33]This violence was tragically not unique, yet, too often, textbooks do not mention the violence against men targeted for their sexuality.
From decolonization to European integration
The end of the Second World War set into motion half a century of “decolonization.” Today, only seventeen territories remain non-self-governing, while others still live under “neocolonialism,”[34] persisting economic dominance by former colonial powers.[35] Frantz Fanon argues the long-term effects of colonialism result in the colonizer maintaining a sense of superiority over their former subjects and the former subjects internalizing this, perpetuating a vicious cycle.[36] In Fanon’s account, language is an example for internal colonization—Creole versus “proper” French—, but the same rules apply to dress, family structure, and economics.
Some textbooks discussed decolonization in detail, some nothing at all. Understanding Western Society (2015) covers the peaceful and violent shifts of power, the impact that underhanded European politicking had on the stability of new nations, and the works of activists and authors from former colonies which helped draw attention to the flaws of imperial rule. Since 2015 more than two million refugees have arrived to Europe.[37] In 2020, the majority of these refugees are from Afghanistan and Syria, which have suffered the effects of neocolonialism and colonialism. Europe has closed its borders and reception centers have long been overcrowded and underfunded.[38] While most textbooks do not cover the refugee crisis, mainly due to the recency of the events, in the future it will be important to not consider it in isolation, but as connected to the legacy of colonialism.
What lies ahead for the past?
The precision and accuracy of many western civilization texts have often erased marginal histories, as per Robinson’s original mandate. Western civilization, as a course, still has the chance to teach us lessons. Through a meta-analysis of western civilization students have the chance to better understand not just the history of Europe, but the narratives that legitimate fascistic thinking. It is only through the inclusion of those who have been traditionally marginalized, leading to a diversity of narratives and voices, will we be able to truly learn from history. The continued practice of dissecting western civilization will not only account for those not included, mentioned, abused, or oppressed by its notions, but will involve all of us in that story.
Natasha Beck-King, Cassidy Bowland, Andrea Cangas, Elle Cross, Sara Fallis, Madisen Gummer, Michael Johnson, Kayli Lord, Jacob McKee, Madelyn Mezzell, Ram Moore, Matthew Naizer, Levi Oliver, Mekenzie Primm, Grace Schlafer, Lukas Sherrard, and Patrick Stanley were students in Myths of Western Civilization: Decolonizing and Queer European History course in the Honors College at Texas State University during the spring of 2020. They endured a global pandemic and covered millennia. They study anthropology, business administration, communication studies, computer science, creative writing, criminal justice, electronic media and mass communication, English, European studies, forensic psychology, French, history, international business, international relations, international studies, journalism, mathematics, military science, music performance/guitar, physics, political science, psychology, Spanish, and writing and rhetoric.
Louie Dean Valencia-García is an Assistant Professor of Digital History at Texas State University. He is the author of Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and the editor of Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (Routledge, 2020). He has been a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University, is a Research Editor of EuropeNow and is co-chair of the Council for European Studies’ Critical European Studies Research Network. He has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the United States Library of Congress, the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory, and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.
References:
[1] The Golden One, “Europe’s Classical Heritage – Proud Sons of Rome and Macedon – What do I mean?,” September 29, 2019, video, 7:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMJ5eUFCtPs.
[2] James Harvey Robinson. An Introduction to the History of Western Europe. (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1925), iii-3.
[3] James Robinson, “Sacred and Profane History,” in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1899, I (Washington, 1900): 530.
[4] Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course.” The American Historical Review 87, no. 3 (1982): 695.
[5] Theocritus, of Phlossa near Smyrna Bion, Moschus, Moschus, and J. M. Edmonds, The Greek Bucolic Poets (Loeb Classical Library: Harvard University Press, 1970.)
[6] Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xv–xviii.
[7] Edward Berenson, Europe in the Modern World: a New Narrative History, since 1500 (Oxford University Press, 2017). xxxvii-xxxviii.
[8] For use of the term “European Middle Ages,” see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[9] Edward McNall Burns, Robert Earl Lerner, Standish Meacham, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture (New York: Norton and Company, 1980), 280, 337; Roland N. Stromberg, A History of Western Civilization, Revised Edition (Homewood, Il: The Dorsey Press, 1969), 154-156; Rabia Umar Ali, “Medieval Europe: The Myth of Dark Ages and the Impact of Islam,” Islamic Studies 51, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 155-68. Accessed March 12, 2020; Norman Roth, “‘Deal Gently with the Young Man’: Love of Boys in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Spain,” Speculum 57, no. 1 (January 1982): 20-51. Accessed March 12, 2020. doi:10.2307/2847560.
[10] Burns et al, 337; Stromberg, 141-145.
[11] Barbara H. Rosenwein, Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 277.
[12] Yishaq ben Mar-Saul, ed. Norman Roth (Speculum, 1982). https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/homo-med.asp.
[13] J.P. McKay, C.H. Crowston, E.M. Wiesner-Hangs, and J. Perry, Understanding Western Society: A History (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2015), 240-73.
[14] Thomas F. X. Noble, et al, Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 394-424; Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (New York: Penguin Books 2019), 110; Noble, Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment, 399, 411.
[15] Laura Cerata, Defense of the Liberal Instruction of Women (1488), 4-5. http://www.sjsu.edu/people/andrew.fleck/courses/Hum1bSpr15/Lecture_22%20Laura%20Cereta.pdf
[16] Noble, Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment, 396, 398, 403.
[17] Pedro Cieza de Leon, “Chronicle of the Incas,” Internet History Sourcebooks, Fordham University, Accessed March 20, 2020. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1540cieza.asp.
[18] Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, and Bonnie G. Smith, Making of the West Peoples and Cultures: to 1750, (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 457.
[19] Pedro Cieza de Leon, “Chronicle of The Incas, 1540.”
[20] Donald, Kagan, et al, The Western Heritage, 340.
[21] Catalina de Erauso, and Michele Stepto. Lieutenant Nun Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, (Beacon Press, 1997).
[22] Jean François Janinent, Parisian Women March on Versailles (5 October 1789). 1789, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge.
[23] Brian P. Levack, Edward Muir, and Meredith Veldman, The West: Encounters and Transformations (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007)
[24] Caroline Warman, ed. “Olympe De Gouges (1748-1793), Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, 1791,” Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment, 1st ed., vol. 3, Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2016, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, www.jstor.org. Accessed 13 March 2020.
[25] Judith Coffin, Robert Stacey, Joshua Cole, and Carol Symes, “Slavery and the Atlantic World,” in Western Civilizations: Their History & Their Culture (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 527; Christopher Brooks, “Western Civilization: A Concise History,” Volume 2-3 (Portland: Portland Community College, 2019); Spielvogel, Jackson J., and Jackson J. Spielvogel. “Africa: The Slave Trade.” in Western Civilization: a Brief History (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), 298–300. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2019.
[26] Midori Takagi, “The Road to Industrialization and the Rise of Urban Slavery, 1800—1840,” in Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 21-24.
[27] Carey H. Latimore IV, “A Step Closer to Slavery? Free African Americans, Industrialisation, Social Control and Residency in Richmond City, 1850—1860,” in Slavery & Abolition, vol. 33, no. 1 (March 2012), 119-121, doi: 10.1080/0144039X.2011.606631.
[28] Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery.”
[29] Perry, Western Civilization, 725.
[30] Roderick Stackelberg, and Sally Anne Winkle, “The Program of the NSDAP,” in The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts,(London: Routledge, 2002), 65.
[31] Stackelberg “Proclamation of the Council of People’s Representatives to the German People,” in The Nazi Germany Sourcebook.
[32] Jackson J. Spielvogel, Western Civilization: A Brief History, Seventh (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2008), 839-74; Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (New York, NY: PublicAffairs, n.d.), 259–70.
[33] Pierre Seel, I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Basic Books, n.d.), 24-44.
[34] United Nations, “Decolonization,” The United Nations, 2020, https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/decolonization/index.html.
[35] McKay, Crowston, Wiesner-Hanks, and Perry, 904.
[36] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2008), 2.
[37] McKay, Crowston, Wiesner-Hanks, and Perry, 898-905; “Mediterranean Situation,” Operational Data Portal, The UN Refugee Agency, April 2020, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean#_ga=2.143292853.1031912076.1588432584-121621754.1588432584.
[38] See Wim Puemans, Queer Muslims in Europe, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 28; Liz Throssell, “Greece must act to end dangerous overcrowding in island reception centres, EU support crucial,” The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/briefing/2019/10/5d930c194/greece-must-act-end-dangerous-overcrowding-island-reception-centres-eu.html.
Published on June 3, 2020.
