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Books > History > European history
The Communist Temptation: Rolland, Gide, Malraux, and Their Times
traces the evolution of the committed left-wing public intellectual
in the interwar period, specifically in the 1930s, and focuses on
leading left-wing intellectuals, such as Romain Rolland, Andre
Gide, and Andre Malraux, and their relationships with communism and
the broader anti-fascist movement. In that turbulent decade, Paris
also welcomed a growing number of Russian, Austrian, Italian,
Dutch, Belgian, German, and German-speaking Central European
refugees-activists, writers, and agents, among them Willi
Munzenberg, Mikhail Koltsov, Eugen Fried, Ilya Ehrenburg, Manes
Sperber, and Arthur Koestler-and Paris once again became a hotbed
of international political activism. Events, however, signaled a
decline in the high ethical standards set by Emile Zola and the
Dreyfusards earlier in the twentieth century, as many pro-communist
intellectuals acted in bad faith to support an ideology that they
in all likelihood knew to be morally bankrupt. Among them, only
Gide rebelled against Moscow, which caused ideological lines to
harden to the point where there was little room for critical reason
to assert itself.
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in April 1889, and shot himself in
a bunker in Berlin in April 1945 with Russian soldiers beating at
the door, surrounded by the ruins of the country he had vowed to
restore to greatness. Adolf Hitler: The Curious and Macabre
Anecdotes - part biography, part miscellany, part historical
overview - presents the life and times of der Fuhrer in a unique
and compelling manner. The early life of the loner son of an
Austrian customs official gave little clue as to his later years.
As a decorated, twice-wounded soldier of the First World War,
through shrewd manipulation of Germany's offended national pride
after the war, Hitler ascended rapidly through the political
system, rousing the masses behind him with a thundering rhetoric
that amplified the nation's growing resentment and brought him the
adulation of millions. By the age of 44, he had become both a
millionaire with secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Holland,
and the unrivalled leader of Germany, whose military might he had
resurrected; six years later, he provoked the world to war. Patrick
Delaforce's book is a masterly assessment of Hitler's life, career
and beliefs, drawn not only from its subject's own writings,
speeches, conversation, poetry and art, but also from the accounts
of those who knew him, loved him, or loathed him. The journey of an
ordinary young man to callous dictator and architect of the 'Final
Solution' makes for provocative and important - thought not always
comfortable - reading.
Is today's left really new? How has the European radical left
evolved? Giorgos Charalambous answers these questions by looking at
three moments of rapid political change - the late 1960s to late
1970s; the turn of the millennium; and post-2008. He challenges the
conventional understanding of a 'new left', drawing out
continuities with earlier movements and parties. Charalambous
examines the 'Long '68', symbolised by the May uprisings in France,
which saw the rise of new left forces and the widespread criticism
by younger radical activists of traditional communist and socialist
parties. He puts this side by side with the turn of the millennium
when the Global Justice Movement rose to prominence and changed the
face of the international left, and also the period after the
financial crash of 2008 and the rise of anti-austerity politics
which initiated the most recent wave of new left parties such as
Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. With a unique 'two-level'
perspective, Charalambous approaches the left through both social
movements and party politics, looking at identities, rhetoric and
organisation, and bringing a fresh new approach to radical history,
as well as assessing challenges for both activists and scholars.
This volume traces the rise of Rome and the extension of Roman
power across Europe, from the viewpoints of both conquerors and
conquered, and also Rome's barbarian heirs, covering the period
from 1000 BC through to AD 400. The book reconstructs as far as
possible the indigenous experience of contact with Rome, showing
how Roman domination impacted upon the already complex world of
Iron Age Europe, before leaving a new 'barbarian' world in its
wake. Using both literary and archaeological evidence, the eight
expert contributors analyse the transformation of Europe, and the
laying of the foundations of the Middle Ages, including chapters on
Iron Age Europe, Roman society, warfare and the army, economy and
trade, religions, and the cultural implications of Roman conquest,
as well as narrative chapters on war and politics.
This book is an interdisciplinary study aimed at re-imagining and
re-routing contemporary migrations in the Mediterranean. Drawing
from visual arts, citizenship studies, film, media and cultural
studies, along with postcolonial, border, and decolonial
discourses, and examining the issues from within a human rights
framework, the book investigates how works of cultural production
can offer a more complex and humane understanding of mobility in
the Mediterranean beyond representations of illegality and/or
crisis. Elvira Pulitano centers the discourse of cultural
production around the island of Lampedusa but expands the island
geography to include a digital multi-media project, a social
enterprise in Palermo, Sicily, and overall reflections on race,
identity, and belonging inspired by Toni Morrison's guest-curated
Louvre exhibit The Foreigner's Home. Responding to recent calls for
alternative methodologies in thinking the modern Mediterranean,
Pulitano disseminates a fluid archive of contemporary migrations
reverberating with ancestral sounds and voices from the African
diaspora along a Mediterranean-TransAtlantic map. Adding to the
recent proliferation of social science scholarship that has drawn
attention to the role of artistic practice in migration studies,
the book features human stories of endurance and survival aimed at
enhancing knowledge and social justice beyond (and notwithstanding)
militarized borders and failed EU policies.
This book challenges long-accepted historical orthodoxy about
relations between the Spanish and the Indians in the borderlands
separating what are now Mexico and the United States. While most
scholars describe the decades after 1790 as a period of relative
peace between the occupying Spaniards and the Apaches, Mark
Santiago sees in the Mescalero Apache attacks on the Spanish
beginning in 1795 a sustained, widespread, and bloody conflict. He
argues that Commandant General Pedro de Nava's coordinated
campaigns against the Mescaleros were the culmination of the
Spanish military's efforts to contain Apache aggression,
constituting one of its largest and most sustained operations in
northern New Spain. A Bad Peace and a Good War examines the
antecedents, tactics, and consequences of the fighting. This
conflict occurred immediately after the Spanish military had
succeeded in making an uneasy peace with portions of all Apache
groups. The Mescaleros were the first to break the peace,
annihilating two Spanish patrols in August 1795. Galvanized by the
loss, Commandant General Nava struggled to determine the extent to
which Mescaleros residing in ""peace establishments"" outside
Spanish settlements near El Paso, San Elizario, and Presidio del
Norte were involved. Santiago looks at the impact of conflicting
Spanish military strategies and increasing demands for fiscal
efficiency as a result of Spain's imperial entanglements. He
examines Nava's yearly invasions of Mescalero territory, his
divide-and-rule policy using other Apaches to attack the
Mescaleros, and his deportation of prisoners from the frontier,
preventing the Mescaleros from redeeming their kin. Santiago
concludes that the consequences of this war were overwhelmingly
negative for Mescaleros and ambiguous for Spaniards. The war's
legacy of bitterness lasted far beyond the end of Spanish rule, and
the continued independence of so many Mescaleros and other Apaches
in their homeland proved the limits of Spanish military authority.
In the words of Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez, the Spaniards had
technically won a ""good war"" against the Mescaleros and went on
to manage a ""bad peace.
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