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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900
The disastrous Buffalo Creek Treaty of 1838 called for the Senecas'
removal to Kansas (then part of the Indian Territory). From this
low point, the Seneca Nation of Indians, which today occupies three
reservations in western New York, sought to rebound. Beginning with
events leading to the Seneca Revolution in 1848, which transformed
the nation's government from a council of chiefs to an elected
system, Laurence M. Hauptman traces Seneca history through the New
Deal. Based on the author's nearly fifty years of archival
research, interviews, and applied work, Coming Full Circle shows
that Seneca leaders in these years learned valuable lessons and
adapted to change, thereby preparing the nation to meet the
challenges it would face in the post-World War II era, including
major land loss and threats of termination. Instead of emphasizing
American Indian decline, Hauptman stresses that the Senecas were
actors in their own history and demonstrated cultural and political
resilience. Both Native belief, in the form of the Good Message of
Handsome Lake, and Christianity were major forces in Seneca life;
women continued to play important social and economic roles despite
the demise of clan matrons' right to nominate the chiefs; and
Senecas became involved in national and international competition
in long-distance running and in lacrosse. The Seneca Nation also
achieved noteworthy political successes in this period. The Senecas
resisted allotment, and thus saved their reservations from breakup
and sale. They recruited powerful allies, including attorneys,
congressmen, journalists, and religious leaders. They saved their
Oil Spring Reservation, winning a U.S. Supreme Court case against
New York State on the issue of taxation and won remuneration in
their Kansas Claims case. These efforts laid the groundwork for the
Senecas' postwar endeavor to seek compensation before the Indian
Claims Commission and pursuit of a series of land claims and tax
lawsuits against New York State.
Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet
sings a solitary "Song of Myself," much of the most enduring
American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and
its pleasures, contradictions, and discontents. Beautiful Enemies
examines this obsession with the problems and paradoxes of
friendship, tracing its eruption in the New American Poetry that
emerges after the Second World War as a potent avant-garde
movement. The book argues that a clash between friendship and
nonconformity is central to postwar American poetry and its
development. By focusing on of some of the most important and
influential postmodernist American poets-the New York School poets
John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri
Baraka-the book offers a new interpretation of the peculiar
dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of
the individual within them. At the same time, this study challenges
both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the
idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary
camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion. Beautiful
Enemies foregrounds a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of
experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to individualism
and dynamic movement that runs directly counter to an equally
profound devotion to avant-garde collaboration and community.
Delving into unmined archival evidence (including unpublished
correspondence, poems, and drafts), the book demonstrates that this
tense dialectic-between an aversion to conformity and a poetics of
friendship-actually energizes postwar American poetry, drives the
creation, meaning, and form of important poems, frames the
interrelationships between certain key poets, and leaves
contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate.
Combining extensive readings of the poets with analysis of
cultural, philosophical, and biographical contexts, Beautiful
Enemies uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and
the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of
twentieth-century American poetry
Drawing from newspapers, journals, government reports, and archival
records, Terry Copp - one of Canada's leading military historians -
tells the story of how citizens in Canada's largest city responded
to the challenges of the First World War. Montreal at War addresses
responses to the outbreak of war in Europe and the process of
raising an army for service overseas. It details the shock of
intense combat and heavy casualties, studies the mobilization of
volunteers, and follows the experience of battalions from Montreal
to the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Challenging long-held assumptions,
Montreal at War aims to understand the war experience as it
unfolded, approaching history from the perspective of those who
lived through it.
Since 2008, there has been a flood of literature worrying about the
state of democracy in the United States and abroad. Observers
complain that democratic institutions are captured by special
interests, incompetent in delivering basic services, or overwhelmed
by selfish voters. Lurking in the background is the global
resurgence of authoritarianism, a wave bolstered by the Western
democracies' apparent mishandling of the global financial crisis.
In Four Crises of Democracy, Alasdair Roberts locates the recent
bout of democratic malaise in the US in historical context. Malaise
is a recurrent condition in American politics, but each bout can
have distinctive characteristics. Roberts focuses on four "crises
of democracy," explaining how they differed and how government
evolved in response to each crisis. The "crisis of representation"
occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
was centered on the question of whether the people really
controlled their government. This period was dominated by fears of
plutocracy and debates about the rights of African Americans, women
and immigrants. The "crisis of mastery" spanned the years
1917-1948, and was preoccupied with building administrative
capabilities so that government could improve its control of
economic and international affairs. The "crisis of discipline,"
beginning in the 1970s, was triggered by the perception that voters
and special interests were overloading governments with
unreasonable demands. In the final part of his analysis, Roberts
asks whether the United States is entering a "crisis of
anticipation," in which the question is whether democracies can
handle long-term problems like global warming effectively.
Democratic institutions are often said to be rigid and slow to
change in response to new circumstances. But Roberts suggests that
history shows otherwise. Preceding crises have always produced
substantial changes in the architecture of American government. The
essential features of the democratic model-societal openness,
decentralization, and pragmatism-give it the edge over
authoritarian alternatives. A powerful account of how successive
crises have shaped American democracy, Four Crises of Democracy
will be essential reading for anyone interested in the forces
driving the current democratic malaise in the US and throughout the
world.
Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of
World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three
minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in
Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome colour film. More than seventy years
later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of
home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community,
an entire culture that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three
Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four year journey
to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His
search takes him across the United States to Canada, England,
Poland, and Israel. To archives, film preservation laboratories,
and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates
seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty six
year old man who appears in the film as a thirteen year old boy.
Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents,
and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny,
harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven
survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir,
David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a
vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film,
Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and
improbable survival, a monument to a lost world.
The term the Cold War has had many meanings and interpretations
since it was originally coined and has been used to analyse
everything from comics to pro-natalist policies, and science
fiction to gender politics. This range has great value, but also
poses problems, notably by diluting the focus on war of a certain
type, and by exacerbating a lack of precision in definition and
analysis. The Cold War: A Military History is the first survey of
the period to focus on the diplomatic and military confrontation
and conflict. Jeremy Black begins his overview in 1917 and covers
the 'long Cold War', from the 7th November Revolution to the
ongoing repercussions and reverberations of the conflict today. The
book is forward-looking as well as retrospective, not least in
encouraging us to reflect on how much the character of the present
world owes to the Cold War. The result is a detailed survey that
will be invaluable to students and scholars of military and
international history.
This book discusses WWI-era music in a historical context,
explaining music's importance at home and abroad during WWI as well
as examining what music was being sung, played, and danced to
during the years prior to America's involvement in the Great War.
Why was music so important to soldiers abroad during World War I?
What role did music-ranging from classical to theater music, rags,
and early jazz-play on the American homefront? Music of the First
World War explores the tremendous importance of music during the
years of the Great War-when communication technologies were
extremely limited and music often took the place of connecting
directly with loved ones or reminiscing via recorded images. The
book's chapters cover music's contribution to the war effort; the
variety of war-related songs, popular hits, and top recording
artists of the war years; the music of Broadway shows and other
theater productions; and important composers and lyricists. The
author also explores the development of the fledgling recording
industry at this time. Provides an excellent resource for students
investigating music during the First World War as well as for
adults interested in WWI-era history or music of the pre-twenties
Documents the variety of reasons songs were sung by soldiers in
wartime-to cheer themselves up, boost courage, poke fun at or
stimulate hatred of their enemies, or express grievances or protest
against the war or against authority Covers stage music of the WWI
era, including music hall (British), vaudeville, revues, operettas,
and musicals
Robert Knight's book examines how the 60,000 strong Slovene
community in the Austrian borderland province of Carinthia
continued to suffer in the wake of Nazism's fall. It explores how
and why Nazi values continued to be influential in a post-Nazi era
in postwar Central Europe and provides valuable insights into the
Cold War as a point of interaction of local, national and
international politics. Though Austria was re-established in 1945
as Hitler's 'first victim', many Austrians continued to share
principles which had underpinned the Third Reich. Long treated as
both inferior and threatening prior to the rise of Hitler and then
persecuted during his time in power, the Slovenes of Carinthia were
prevented from equality of schooling by local Nazis in the years
that followed World War Two, behavior that was tolerated in Vienna
and largely ignored by the rest of the world. Slavs in Post-Nazi
Austria uses this vital case study to discuss wider issues relating
to the stubborn legacy of Nazism in postwar Europe and to instill a
deeper understanding of the interplay between collective and
individual (liberal) rights in Central Europe. This is a
fascinating study for anyone interested in knowing more about the
disturbing imprint that Nazism left in some parts of Europe in the
postwar years.
This edited volume examines the experience of World War I of small
nations, defined here in terms of their relative weakness vis-a-vis
the major actors in European diplomacy, and colonial peripheries,
encompassing areas that were subject to colonial rule by European
empires and thus located far from the heartland of these empires.
The chapters address subject nations within Europe, such as Ireland
and Poland; neutral states, such as Sweden and Spain; and overseas
colonies like Tunisia, Algeria and German East Africa. By combining
analyses of both European and extra-European experiences of war,
this collection of essays provides a unique comparative perspective
on World War I and points the way towards an integrated history of
small nations and colonial peripheries. Contributors are Steven
Balbirnie, Gearoid Barry, Jens Boysen, Ingrid Bruhwiler, William
Buck, AUde Chanson, Enrico Dal Lago, Matias Gardin, Richard Gow,
Florian Grafl, Donal Hassett, Guido Hausmann, Roisin Healy, Conor
Morrissey, Michael Neiberg, David Noack, Chris Rominger, Danielle
Ross and Christine Strotmann.
A BARACK OBAMA AND A BILL GATES SUMMER READING PICK 2022 A NEW YORK
TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER 'This book helped me
understand modern politics better' - Bill Gates, Summer Reading
Pick 2022 'Superbly researched and written' - Francis Fukuyama, The
Washington Post 'It's been a long time since I learned so much from
one book.' - Rutger Bregman author of Utopia for Realists 'Powerful
[and] intelligent.' - Fareed Zakaria, CNN America's political
system isn't broken. The truth is scarier: it's working exactly as
designed. In Why We're Polarized, Ezra Klein reveals the structural
and psychological forces behind America's deep political divisions,
revealing how a system filled with rational, functional parts can
combine into a dysfunctional whole. Neither a polemic nor a lament,
this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything
from Trump's rise to the Democratic Party's leftward shift to the
politicisation of everyday culture. Klein shows how and why
American politics polarised in the twentieth century, what that
polarisation did to Americans' views of the world and one another,
and how feedback loops between polarised political identities and
polarised political institutions drive the system toward crisis.
This revelatory book will change how you look at politics, and
perhaps at yourself.
WINNER OF THE 2017 MARTIN A. KLEIN PRIZE In his in-depth and
compelling study of perhaps the most famous of Portuguese colonial
massacres, Mustafah Dhada explores why the massacre took place,
what Wiriyamu was like prior to the massacre, how events unfolded,
how we came to know about it and what the impact of the massacre
was, particularly for the Portuguese empire. Spanning the period
from 1964 to 2013 and complete with a foreword from Peter Pringle,
this chronologically arranged book covers the liberation war in
Mozambique and uses fieldwork, interviews and archival sources to
place the massacre firmly in its historical context. The Portuguese
Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-2013 is an
important text for anyone interested in the 20th-century history of
Africa, European colonialism and the modern history of war.
What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the
killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into
a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people
defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to
police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black
people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests
appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence.
Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in
America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors-and any
attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with
the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many
Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in
the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness
and equality. Hinton's sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether
different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in
1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart
the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary
consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical
corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope
applied to events that can only be properly understood as
rebellions-explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and
violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions
that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a
post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion,
America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to
poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police
violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the "War on
Crime," sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black
neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality,
residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered
local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton
draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography
of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to
Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from
these eruptions-that police violence invariably leads to community
violence-continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further
criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying
socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing
and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today.
Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation's enduring
strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely
continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the
consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until
an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice
and equality.
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