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Books > History > European history
Rosemary Wakeman's original survey text comprehensively explores
modern European urban history from 1815 to the present day. It
provides a journey to cities and towns across the continent, in
search of the patterns of development that have shaped the urban
landscape as indelibly European. The focus is on the built
environment, the social and cultural transformations that mark the
patterns of continuity and change, and the transition to modern
urban society. Including over 60 images that serve to illuminate
the analysis, the book examines whether there is a European city,
and if so, what are its characteristics? Wakeman offers an
interdisciplinary approach that incorporates concepts from cultural
and postcolonial studies, as well as urban geography, and provides
full coverage of urban society not only in western Europe, but also
in eastern and southern Europe, using various cities and city types
to inform the discussion. The book provides detailed coverage of
the often-neglected urbanization post-1945 which allows us to more
clearly understand the modernizing arc Europe has followed over the
last two centuries.
This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand,
especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which
Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an
unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully
realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores
Rand's conception of American identity, which exalted individualism
and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American
nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and
19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded
morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the
mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse
how Rand's writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a
Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with
ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her
conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of
satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of
self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an
extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of
competing civilizations - in all these areas, Offord argues that
Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different
context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is
informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian
intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new
world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its
populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates
about countries' moral, social, and economic priorities and their
identities, inequalities, and social tensions.
This book: covers the essential content in the new specifications
in a rigorous and engaging way, using detailed narrative, sources,
timelines, key words, helpful activities and extension material
helps develop conceptual understanding of areas such as evidence,
interpretations, causation and change, through targeted activities
provides assessment support for A level with sample answers,
sources, practice questions and guidance to help you tackle the
new-style exam questions. It also comes with three years' access to
ActiveBook, an online, digital version of your textbook to help you
personalise your learning as you go through the course - perfect
for revision.
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Chernobyl
(Hardcover)
Michael Kerrigan
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R646
R578
Discovery Miles 5 780
Save R68 (11%)
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Ships in 9 - 17 working days
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On 26 April 1986, the unthinkable happened near the Ukrainian town
of Pripyat: two massive steam explosions ruptured No. 4 Reactor at
the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, immediately killing 30 people
and setting off the worst nuclear accident in history. The
explosions were followed by an open-air reactor core fire that
released huge amounts of radioactive contamination into the
atmosphere for the next nine days, spreading across the Soviet
Union, parts of Europe, and especially neighbouring Belarus, where
around 70% of the waste landed. The following clean-up operation
involved more than half a million personnel at a cost of $68
billion, and a further 4,000 people were estimated to have died
from disaster-related illnesses in the following 20 years. Some
350,000 people were evacuated as a result of the accident
(including 95 villages in Belarus), and much of the area returned
to the wild, with the nearby city of Pripyat now a ghost town.
Chernobyl provides a photographic exploration of the catastrophe
and its aftermath in 180 authentic photos. See the twisted wreckage
of No. 4 Reactor, the cause of the nuclear disaster; marvel at
historic photos of the clean-up operation, with helicopters
spraying decontamination liquid and liquidators manually clearing
radioactive debris; see the huge cooling pond used to cool the
reactors, and which today is home to abundant wildlife, despite the
radiation; explore the ghost town of Pripyat, with its decaying
apartment blocks, empty basketball courts, abandoned amusement
park, wrecked schools, and deserted streets.
This fascinating history book details the Moorish arrival, conquest
and rule over Spain and the Iberian peninsula in Europe. We hear of
how the Moors arrived and conquered the Iberian peninsula,
remaining for some 800 years. Tariq ibn-Ziyad, arriving in 711 AD,
began an upheaval never before seen in the European continent. The
Moorish brought industriousness and commerce, a sophisticated code
of laws, beautiful architecture, and outstanding scholarly
achievements in astronomy and mathematics - together, these would
forever shape the culture of Spain and Portugal. Stanley Lane-Poole
was a historian and archaeologist who worked in partnership with
the British Museum for eighteen years. Specializing in Middle
Eastern and North African culture and architecture, it was through
years of painstaking study and compilation of existing documents
that the author was able to compose this, and other histories.
The peasantry accounted for the large majority of the Russian
population during the Imperialist and Stalinist periods - it is,
for the most part, how people lived. Peasants in Russia from
Serfdom to Stalin provides a comprehensive, realistic examination
of peasant life in Russia during both these eras and the legacy
this left in the post-Soviet era. The book paints a full picture of
peasant involvement in commerce and local political life and,
through Boris Gorshkov's original ecology paradigm for
understanding peasant life, offers new perspectives on the Russian
peasantry under serfdom and the emancipation. Incorporating recent
scholarship, including Russian and non-Russian texts, along with
classic studies, Gorshkov explores the complex interrelationships
between the physical environment, peasant economic and social
practices, culture, state policies and lord-peasant relations. He
goes on to analyze peasant economic activities, including
agriculture and livestock, social activities and the functioning of
peasant social and political institutions within the context of
these interrelationships. Further reading lists, study questions,
tables, maps, primary source extracts and images are also included
to support and enhance the text wherever possible. Peasants in
Russia from Serfdom to Stalin is the crucial survey of a key topic
in modern Russian history for students and scholars alike.
In this analysis of the life of Arnost Frischer, an influential
Jewish nationalist activist, Jan Lanicek reflects upon how the
Jewish community in Czechoslovakia dealt with the challenges that
arose from their volatile relationship with the state authorities
in the first half of the 20th century. The Jews in the Bohemian
Lands experienced several political regimes in the period from 1918
to the late 1940s: the Habsburg Empire, the first democratic
Czechoslovak republic, the post-Munich authoritarian Czecho-Slovak
republic, the Nazi regime, renewed Czechoslovak democracy and the
Communist regime. Frischer's involvement in local and central
politics affords us invaluable insights into the relations and
negotiations between the Jewish activists and these diverse
political authorities in the Bohemian Lands. Vital coverage is also
given to the relatively under-researched subject of the Jewish
responses to the Nazi persecution and the attempts of the exiled
Jewish leadership to alleviate the plight of the Jews in occupied
Europe. The case study of Frischer and Czechoslovakia provides an
important paradigm for understanding modern Jewish politics in
Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making this a book of
great significance to all students and scholars interested in
Jewish history and Modern European history.
Anglo-Danish Empire is an interdisciplinary handbook for the Danish
conquest of England in 1016 and the subsequent reign of King Cnut
the Great. Bringing together scholars from the fields of history,
literature, archaeology, and manuscript studies, the volume offers
comprehensive analysis of England's shift from Anglo-Saxon to
Danish rule. It follows the history of this complicated transition,
from the closing years of the reign of King AEthelred II and the
Anglo-Danish wars, to Cnut's accession to the throne of England and
his consolidation of power at home and abroad. Ruling from 1016 to
1035, Cnut drew England into a Scandinavian empire that stretched
from Ireland to the Baltic. His reign rewrote the place of Denmark
and England within Europe, altering the political and cultural
landscapes of both countries for decades to come.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality crisis which affected
Eastern Europe and the republics of the former USSR at the time of
the transition to a market economy was arguably the major peacetime
health crisis of recent decades. Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis
in Eastern Europe and the Old USSR discusses the importance of that
crisis, surprisingly underplayed in the scientific literature, and
presents evidence suggesting a potential role of the Chernobyl
disaster among the causes contributing to it.
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