Alumni Travel Reading 2018-2019: Discover Eastern Europe

In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay of Hold Steady, traveled with guitar, banjoand an accord, to discover and play in the spaces of the punk rock diaspora. He travels from Poland to Mongolia and further afield to uncover the best and worst of the punk movement across Europe.

This collection of essays explores the development of a thriving hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries.

A history of Poland from the end of World War I to the present time.

Europe Faces Europe examines Eastern European perspectives on European identity.

Eastern Europe Unmapped raises questions about the area's non-contiguous--and frequently global or extraterritorial--entanglements.

A tumultous history of Czech Republic and Slovakia

This book explores the history and context of the Velvet Revolution that led to the peaceful separation of the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The essays in this book explore issues of the restoration, restitution, memorializing, and tourism that have brought present inhabitants into contact with initiatives to revive Jewish sites in Poland.

"Writing on Water" is a first-hand account of the thoughts, lives and rituals of the secretly practicing strictly religious Jews during the era of Communism in Eastern Europe (primarily in Budapest). The subject matter is unique both in the choice of the communities and its focus on sound. From the publisher.

This book provides a history of Hungarian architecture from Roman times to the present. Because much of the material in this book is derived from archives not readily available to Western scholars, Sisa and Wiebenson provide a unique perspective.

Bryan Cartledge, an ambassador to Hungary during the declining years of the communist regime, describes the country's political, economic, and cultural development spanning eleven hundred years.

An illustrated guidebook to places in present day Poland where Fryderyk Chopin stopped, stayed or lived. Many illustrations and photographs.

This is a story of Miedzianka (Województwo Dolnośląskie, Poland) that has suffered the vicissitudes of history and Poland's changing fortunes. After Stalin's post-World War II redrawing of Poland's borders, the town became a destination of the displaced. Today the town has been evacuated due to environmental degradation. Springer provides a history of this small point on today's map.

Richie presents a history of the underground Polish Home Army’s role in the liberation of Warsaw in 1944 and the brutal retaliation that followed.

Lasting for 63 days, the Warsaw Uprising was largely built with a resistance of local men and teenagers - some of them younger than sixteen. Andrew Borowiec recalls his own harrowing tale of the event.