Richard Blanke

Richard Blanke received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and spent the next forty-five years teaching and researching Modern European History at the University of Maine, with primary responsibility for Central and Eastern Europe. He regularly taught the second half of the European Civilization survey (HTY 106) and two-semester sequences in 20th Century Europe (HTY 409-410), Russia (HTY 423-424), and Germany (HTY 425-426). His principal research has been on the nature and impact of ethnic nationalism on a part of the world where its impact has been greatest, with particular attention to the long-toxic German-Polish relationship, the subject of several books: Prussian Poland in the German Empire, 1871-1900 (1981), Orphans of Versailles: Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939 (1993), and Polish-speaking Germans? Language and National Identity among the Masurians (2001).