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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900
Our Way of life and our very existence are under threat. Get
educated and resist.
In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, we are
provided with a view into a possible future that shows humanity
under total control. It's a world in which babies are created in
the laboratory to fit specific job functions and a small number of
savages live in the restricted wild lands. "Journey to a Brave New
World" uses examples of news reports and the real history- not
always the version taught in the classroom -to show how we are
being managed and manipulated to allow for a total tyrannical
takeover and massive depopulation that could lead us to Huxley's
vision.
For over six years, author David Watts has undertaken deep
research into the real history of the world and the ways in which
it is being manipulated toward a future that only benefits an elite
few. He provides many news reports, official documents and quotes
from the so called 'elites' to piece the puzzle together. He
presents a cohesive exploration of what to expect in the future if
we don't become involved in determining our own fate.
"Journey to a Brave New World" seeks to help everyone to put the
pieces together, deprogram, and understand both how we are being
manipulated and how we can change direction now.
No Accident, Comrade argues that chance became a complex yet
conflicted cultural signifier during the Cold War, when a range of
thinkers--politicians, novelists, historians, biologists,
sociologists, and others--contended that totalitarianism denied the
very existence and operation of chance in the world. They claimed
that the USSR perpetrated a vast fiction on its population, a
fiction amplified by the Soviet view that there is no such thing as
chance or accident, only manifestations of historical law (hence
the popular American refrain used to refer to Marxism: "It was no
accident, Comrade").
By reading an expansive range of American novels published between
1947-2005, alongside nonfiction texts by the likes of Jerzy
Kosinski, Daniel Bell, Ian Hacking, and mid-century game theorists,
No Accident, Comrade explains how associations of chance with
democratic freedom and the denial of chance with totalitarianism
circulated in Cold War America. Chance became tied to the liberties
of U.S. democracy, whereas its eradication or denial became
symptomatic of Soviet tyranny. With works by Nabokov, Ellison,
Pynchon, Didion, DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and many others, Steven
Belletto shows how writers developed innovative strategies for
dealing with and incorporating these ever-present beliefs about
chance and its role in their culture. These newly developed
narrative techniques allowed them to theorize, satirize, and make
sense of the constantly changing relationship between the
individual and the state during a largely rhetorical conflict.
Controlling Sex in Captivity is the first book to examine the
nature, extent and impact of the sexual activities of Axis
prisoners of war in the United States during the Second World War.
Historians have so far interpreted the interactions between captors
and captives in America as the beginning of the post-war friendship
between the United States, Germany and Italy. Matthias Reiss argues
that this paradigm is too simplistic. Widespread fraternisation
also led to sexual relationships which created significant negative
publicity, and some Axis POWs got caught up in the U.S. Army's new
campaign against homosexuals. By focusing on the fight against
fraternisation and same-sex activities, this study treads new
ground. It stresses that contact between captors and captives was
often loaded with conflict and influenced by perceptions of gender
and race. It highlights the transnational impact of fraternisation
and argues that the prisoners' sojourn in the United States also
influenced American society by fuelling a growing concern about
social disintegration and sexual deviancy, which eventually
triggered a conservative backlash after the war.
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Kapa'a
(Hardcover)
Marta Hulsman, Wilma Chandler, Bill Fernandez
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The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers
thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a
collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the
locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political,
cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in
Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an
anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously
conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the
contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The
five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic
movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts;
its association with particular locations and places; its
connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the
world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether
poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or
repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of
evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not
structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical,
on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not
yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent
poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms
for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be
read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a
complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically
structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single
chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its
individual readers.
Charles De Gaulle's leadership of the French while in exile during
World War II cemented his place in history. In contemporary France,
he is the stuff of legend, consistently acclaimed as the nation's
pre-eminent historical figure. But paradoxes abound. For one thing,
his personal popularity sits oddly with his social origins and
professional background. Neither the Army nor the Catholic Church
is particularly well-regarded in France today, as they are seen to
represent antiquated traditions and values. So why, then, do the
French nonetheless identify with, celebrate, and even revere this
austere and devout Catholic, who remained closely wedded to
military values throughout his life? In The Shadow of the General
resolves this mystery and explains how de Gaulle has come to occupy
such a privileged position in the French imagination. Sudhir
Hazareesingh's story of how an individual life was transformed into
national myth also tells a great deal about the French collective
self in the twenty-first century: its fractured memory, its
aspirations to greatness, and its manifold anxieties. Indeed,
alongside the tale of de Gaulle's legacy, the author unfolds a much
broader narrative: the story of modern France.
In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked
Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human
history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in
1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated
that nearly one-fourth of the country's population perished from
hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half
million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one
hundred thousand finding refuge in America. From the Land of
Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to
understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on
more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as
well as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts
in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions,
totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate
the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on
individual and collective healing. Exploring the interstices of
home and exile, forgetting and remembering, From the Land of
Shadows follows the ways in which Cambodian individuals and
communities seek to rebuild connections frayed by time, distance,
and politics in the face of this injurious history.
In the summer of 1980, the eyes of the world turned to the Gdansk
shipyard in Poland which suddenly became the nexus of a strike wave
that paralyzed the entire country. The Gdansk strike was
orchestrated by the members of an underground free trade union that
came to be known as Solidarnosc [Solidarity]. Despite fears of a
violent response from the communist authorities, the strikes spread
to more than 800 sites around the country and involved over a
million workers, mobilizing its working population. Faced with
crippling strikes and with the eyes of the world on them, the
communist regime signed landmark accords formally recognizing
Solidarity as the first free trade union in a communist country.
The union registered nearly ten million members, making it the
world's largest union to date. In a widespread and inspiring
demonstration of nonviolent protest, Solidarity managed to bring
about real and powerful changes that contributed to the end of the
Cold War. Solidarity:The Great Workers Strike of 1980 tells the
story of this pivotal period in Poland's history from the
perspective of those who lived it. Through unique personal
interviews with the individuals who helped breathe life into the
Solidarity movement, Michael Szporer brings home the momentous
impact these events had on the people involved and subsequent
history that changed the face of Europe. This movement, which began
as a strike, had major consequences that no one could have foreseen
at the start. In this book, the individuals who shaped history
speak with their own voices about the strike that changed the
course of history.
Alla Osipenko is the gripping story of one of history's greatest
ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking
truth to the Soviet state. The daughter of a distinguished Russian
aristocratic and artistic family, Osipenko was born in 1932, but
raised almost in a cocoon of pre-Revolutionary decorum and
protocol. In Leningrad she studied directly under Agrippina
Vaganova, the most revered and influential of all Russian ballet
instructors. In 1950, she joined the Mariinsky (then-Kirov) Ballet,
where her lines, shapes, movement both exemplified the venerable
traditions of Russian ballet and projected those traditions into
uncharted and experimental realms. She was the first of her
generation of Kirov stars to enchant the West when she danced in
Paris in 1956. Five years later, she was a key figure in the
sensational success of the Kirov in its European debut. But
Osipenko's sharp tongue and candid independence, as well as her
almost-reckless flouting of Soviet rules for personal and political
conduct, soon found her all but quarantined in Russia. An
internationally acclaimed ballerina at the height of her career,
she found that she would now have to prevail in the face of every
attempt by the Soviet state and the Kirov administration to humble
her. Throughout the book, Osipenko talks frankly and freely in a
way that few Russians of her generation have allowed themselves to.
She discusses her traumatic relationship to the Soviet state, her
close but often-fraught relationship with her family, her four
husbands, her lovers, her colleagues, her son's arrest for selling
dollars in Leningrad and subsequent death. This biography features
a cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and
post-Perestroika society.
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Newark
(Hardcover)
Frank Addiego
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R719
R638
Discovery Miles 6 380
Save R81 (11%)
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The history of travel has long been constructed and described
almost exclusively as a history of "European", male mobility,
without, however, explicitly making the gender and whiteness of the
travellers a topic. The anthology takes this as an occasion to
focus on journeys to Europe that gave "non-Europeans" the
opportunity to glance at "Europe" and to draw a picture of it by
themselves. So far, little attention has been paid to the questions
with which attributes these travellers endowed "Europe" and its
people, which similarities and differences they observed and which
idea(s) of "Europe" they produced. The focus is once again on
"Europe", but not as the starting point for conquests or journeys.
From a postcolonial and gender historical view, the anthology's
contributions rather juxtapose (self-)representations of "Europe"
with perspectives that move in a field of tension between
agreement, contradiction and oscillation.
In 1870, the Orthodox Bulgarian Exarchate was established by the
Sultan's decree without the consent of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople. The inability to reach a compromise led to a schism
within Orthodoxy and divided Ottoman Christian communities into
traditionalists versus nationalists, Greeks versus Slavs and Arabs.
Those conflicts were exacerbated by the Russo-Turkish war of
1877-1878, refugee movements, and the increasingly deadly rivalry
of irredentist Balkan states. Containing Balkan Nationalism focuses
on the implications of the Bulgarian national movement that
developed in the context of Ottoman modernization and of European
imperialism in the Near East. The movement aimed to achieve the
status of an independent church, separating ethnic Bulgarians from
the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Independent
church status meant cultural and legal autonomy in the Islamic
structure of the Ottoman Empire. Denis Vovchenko highlights the
efforts put forth by ecclesiastics, publicists, and diplomats in
Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Bulgaria in developing and
implementing various plans to reconcile ethnic differences within
existing religious and dynastic frameworks. The arrangements were
often inspired by modern visions of a political and cultural union
of Orthodox Slavs and Greeks. Whether put into effect or simply
discussed, they demonstrate the strength and flexibility of
supranational identities and institutions on the eve of the First
World War. The book should encourage contemporary analysts and
policymakers to explore the potential of such traditional loyalties
to defuse ethnic tensions today and to serve as organic
alternatives to generic mechanical models of power-sharing and
federation.
While in the last twenty years perceptions of Europe have been
subjected to detailed historical scrutiny, American images of the
Old World have been almost wantonly neglected. As a response to
this scholarly desideratum, this pioneering study analyzes
neoconservative images of Europe since the 1970s on the basis of an
extensive collection of sources. With fresh insight into the
evolution of American images of Europe as well as into the history
of U.S. neoconservatism, the book appeals to readers familiar and
new to the subject matters alike. The study explores how, beginning
in the early 1970s, ideas of the United States as an anti-Europe
have permeated neoconservative writing and shaped their self-images
and political agitation. The choice of periodization and
investigated personnel enables the author to refute popular claims
that widespread Euro-critical sentiment in the United Studies
during the early 21st century - considerably ignited by
neoconservatives - was a distinct post-Cold War phenomenon.
Instead, the analysis reveals that the fiery rhetoric in the
context of the Iraq War debates was merely the climax of a
decade-old development.
The 1970s marked the end of the years in which the United States
was the guarantor of a free world trade order, while Western Europe
made efforts to catch up with the economic superpower. In this
book, Dr La Barca explains how the trade environment and trade
policies in the United States and in the European Community during
the 1970s were more complex than frequently acknowledged. In
particular, he examines the promotion of greater governmental
protection of national industries and the relationship between such
tendencies and the negotiations aimed at reducing trade barriers.
This analysis shows how the United States and the European
Community agreed to pursue their protectionist practices, thereby
creating a barrier to serious efforts to enable free trade.
The extraordinary story of Captain Llewellyn Wynne Jones' 1918
service in East Africa told through his personal military campaign
diary and photograph albums. Llewellyn's granddaughter, born some
36 years after his death, researches his military life and family
history to uncover the fascinating, courageous and ultimately
tragic story of his life. The book is beautifully illustrated with
original photographs from Llewellyn's campaign albums and from a
rich family photographic archive. It includes family artefacts,
letters, newspaper reports and interviews which combine to bring
this exceptional young man's few years to life once more 100 years
on.
"Contemporary Japan: History, Politics and Social Change since the
1980s" presents a comprehensive examination of the causes of the
Japanese economic bubble in the late 1980s and the socio-political
consequences of the recent financial collapse. Represents the only
book to examine in depth the turmoil of Japan since Emperor
Hirohito died in 1989, the Cold War ended, and the economy
collapsed Provides an assessment of Japan's dramatic political
revolution of 2009 Analyzes how risk has increased in Japan,
undermining the sense of security and causing greater disparities
in society Assesses Japan's record on the environment, the
consequences of neo-liberal reforms, immigration policies, the
aging society, the US alliance, the Imperial family, and the
'yakuza' criminal gangs Selected as a 2011 Outstanding Academic
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