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Books > History > World history > From 1900
France, 1940. The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with
spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to
Hitler's Wermacht. For Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall,
Consuelo de Saint-Exupery, and scores of other cultural elite who
have been denounced as enemies of the Third Reich the fear of
imminent arrest, deportation, and death defines their daily life.
Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a chateau outside
Marseille where a group of young people will go to extraordinary
lengths to keep them alive.
A powerfully told, meticulously researched true story filled
with suspense, drama, and intrigue, "Villa Air-Bel" delves into a
fascinating albeit hidden saga in our recent history. It is a
remarkable account of how a diverse intelligentsia--intense,
brilliant, and utterly terrified--was able to survive one of the
darkest chapters of the twentieth century.
This is a story of David vs. Goliath in international relations.
The Bolivian Revolution and the United States, 1952 to the Present
recounts how Bolivia, after its Revolution of 1952, interacted with
the United States. In the wake of its victory in the Second World
War, the United States had started to undertake ambitious
nation-building projects in the Third World using the tool of
economic aid, as it had successfully done with the Marshall Plan
for Western Europe. Bolivia represented the first of these
experiments, and its process and outcome have much to tell us about
the limits of U.S. power. Bolivia proved capable not only of
achieving compromises in reaction to U.S. initiatives but also of
influencing U.S. policy through its own actions. Unlike most other
studies of the Revolution, this book follows the story through the
early 1970s and traces the shifting relationships between the two
countries over a longer span of time. Anyone who wants to
understand the significance of the election of Evo Morales in 2006,
which represented a return to the original revolutionary spirit of
1952, and the nature of Bolivian-U.S. relations today will find
this book to be essential reading.
A firsthand exploration of the cost of boarding the bus of change
to move America forward--written by one of the Civil Rights
Movement's pioneers. At 18, Charles Person was the youngest of the
original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. Civil Rights
Movement who left Washington, D.C. by bus in 1961, headed for New
Orleans. This purposeful mix of black and white, male and female
activists--including future Congressman John Lewis, Congress of
Racial Equality Director James Farmer, Reverend Benjamin Elton Cox,
journalist and pacifist James Peck, and CORE field secretary
Genevieve Hughes--set out to discover whether America would abide
by a Supreme Court decision that ruled segregation unconstitutional
in bus depots, waiting areas, restaurants, and restrooms
nationwide. Two buses proceeded through Virginia, North and South
Carolina, to Georgia where they were greeted by Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., and finally to Alabama. There, the Freedom Riders found
their answer: No. Southern states would continue to disregard
federal law and use violence to enforce racial segregation. One bus
was burned to a shell, its riders narrowly escaping; the second,
which Charles rode, was set upon by a mob that beat several riders
nearly to death. Buses Are a Comin' provides a front-row view of
the struggle to belong in America, as Charles Person accompanies
his colleagues off the bus, into the station, into the mob, and
into history to help defeat segregation's violent grip on African
American lives. It is also a challenge from a teenager of a
previous era to the young people of today: become agents of
transformation. Stand firm. Create a more just and moral country
where students have a voice, youth can make a difference, and
everyone belongs.
"Rome's genial new book . . . brings to life another era."
--Nicholas Lemann, "The New Yorker
"
The first Earth Day is the most famous little-known event in modern
American history. Because we still pay ritual homage to the planet
every April 22, everyone knows something about Earth Day. Some
people may also know that Earth Day 1970 made the environmental
movement a major force in American political life. But no one has
told the whole story before.
The story of the first Earth Day is inspiring: it had a power, a
freshness, and a seriousness of purpose that are difficult to
imagine today. Earth Day 1970 created an entire green generation.
Thousands of Earth Day organizers and participants decided to
devote their lives to the environmental cause. Earth Day 1970
helped to build a lasting eco-infrastructure--lobbying
organizations, environmental beats at newspapers,
environmental-studies programs, ecology sections in bookstores,
community ecology centers.
In "The Genius of Earth Day," the prizewinning historian Adam Rome
offers a compelling account of the rise of the environmental
movement. Drawing on his experience as a journalist as well as his
expertise as a scholar, he explains why the first Earth Day was so
powerful, bringing one of the greatest political events of the
twentieth century to life.
The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917 is the most comprehensive
book on the epic uprising that toppled the tsarist monarchy and
ushered in the next stage of the Russian Revolution. Hasegawa
presents in detail the intense drama of the nine days of the
revolution, including the workers' strike, soldiers' revolt, the
scrambling of revolutionary party activists to control the
revolution, and the liberals' conspiracy to force Tsar Nicholas II
to abdicate. Based on his previous work, published in 1981, the
author has revised, enlarged, and reinterpreted the complexity of
the February Revolution, resulting in a major and timely
reassessment on the occasion of its centennial. See inside the
book.
Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a
colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major
contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has
relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West
Africa's largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today's Equatorial
Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled
this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until
1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several
hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract
workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces
the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes,
paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their
financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing
workers to the island. Martino combines multi-sited archival
research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a
detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop,
shift and collapse through the recruiters' own techniques, such as
large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a
pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal
credit structures and exchange practices in African history.
Since the 1960s, many influential Latin Americans, such as the
leaders of student movements and unions, and political authorities,
participated in exchange programs with the United States to learn
about the American way of life. In Brazil, during the international
context of the Cold War, when Brazil was governed by a military
dictatorship ruled by generals who alternated in power, hundreds of
union members were sent to the United States to take union
education courses. Did they come back "Americanized" and able to
introduce American trade unionism in Brazil? That is the question
this book seeks to answer. It is a subject that is as yet little
explored in the history of Latin American labor and international
relations: the influence of foreign union organizations on national
union politics and movements. Despite the US's investment in
advertising, courses, films and trips offered to Brazilian union
members, most of them were not convinced by the American ideas on
how to organize an "authentic" union movement - or, at least, not
committed to applying what they learned in the States.
An American journalist with the German Army
Until the United States of America came into the First World War
on the side of the Allies in 1917, it was a neutral nation
considered, in theory at least, to have no interest in the outcome
of the war. This enabled American journalists to visit both sides
of the battle lines and this in turn enabled the author of this
book, Edward Lyell Fox, to gain access to the German war effort in
considerable depth and detail. Accounts of the Great War from the
German perspective are not common in the English language and so
this book provides interesting insights from a neutral viewpoint.
Fox visited the Western Front and was present as the conflict at
Ypres broke out. He also accompanied the German Army through the
Flanders campaign and later visited the Russian Front with German
forces. He was an eyewitness at the Battle of Augustowo Wald in
East Prussia-an overwhelming German victory. Fox concludes his book
with an account of the work of the American Red Cross on the battle
front. This is an interesting book for students who seek both a
different view of the conflict and an examination of less familiar
battles fronts.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each
title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our
hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their
spines and fabric head and tail bands.
What were the consequences of the German occupation for the economy
of occupied Europe? After Germany conquered major parts of the
European continent, it was faced with a choice between plundering
the suppressed countries and using their economies to produce what
it needed. The decision made not only differed from country to
country but also changed over the course of the war. Individual
leaders; the economic needs of the Reich; the military situation;
struggles between governors of occupied countries and Berlin
officials, and finally racism all had an impact on the outcome. In
the end, in Western Europe and the Czech Protectorate, emphasis was
placed on production for German warfare, which kept these economies
functioning. New research, presented for the first time in this
book, shows that as a consequence the economic setback in these
areas was limited, and therefore post-war recovery was relatively
easy. However, plundering was characteristic in Eastern Europe and
the Balkans, resulting in partisan activity, a collapse of normal
society and a dramatic destruction not only of the economy but in
some countries of a substantial proportion of the labour force. In
these countries, post-war recovery was almost impossible.
Now in its fifth edition, this book explores the ways in which the
industrial revolution reshaped world history, covering the
international factors that helped launch the industrial revolution,
its global spread and its impact from the end of the eighteenth
century to the present day. The single most important development
in human history over the past three centuries, the industrial
revolution continues to shape the contemporary world. Revised and
brought into the present, this fifth edition of Peter N. Stearns'
The Industrial Revolution in World History extends his global
analysis of the industrial revolution. Looking beyond the West, the
book considers India, the Middle East and China and now includes
more on key Latin American economies and Africa as well as the
heightened tensions, since 2008, about the economic aspects of
globalization and the decline of manufacturing in the West. This
edition also features a new chapter on key historiographical
debates, updated suggestions for further reading and boxed debate
features that encourage the reader to consider diversity and
different viewpoints in their own analysis, and pays increased
attention to the environmental impacts. Illustrating the
contemporary relevance of the industrial revolution's history, this
is essential reading for students of world history and economics,
as well as for those seeking to know more about the global
implications of what is arguably the defining socioeconomic event
of modern times.
The United Kingdom faces a historic turning point in 2014. A 'Yes'
vote in the referendum on Scottish independence would see the
break-up of the 300-year-old union, adding a constitutional crisis
to a deep economic crisis. An accessible polemic written for
progressives both north and south of the border, Yes argues that
independence can reinvigorate campaigns against austerity across
Britain and deal a blow to the imperialist ambitions of the British
state. An urgent and invigorating political intervention, Yes
argues that even if the referendum result is 'no', a progressive
independence campaign will alter the political landscape. Written
by leading activists from the Radical Independence Campaign, Yes
will be a unique contribution to the referendum debate.
Providing an indispensable resource for students and policy makers
investigating the Bosnian catastrophes of the 1990s, this book
provides a comprehensive survey of the leaders, ideas, movements,
and events pertaining to one of the most devastating conflicts of
contemporary times. In the three years of the Bosnian War, well
over 100,000 people lost their lives, amid intense carnage. This
led to unprecedented criminal prosecutions for genocide, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity that are still taking place
today. Bosnian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide is the first
encyclopedic treatment of the Balkan conflicts of the period from
1991 to 1999. It provides broad coverage of the nearly decade-long
conflict, but with a major focus on the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.
The book examines a variety of perspectives of the conflicts
relating to Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and
Kosovo, among other developments that took place during the years
spotlighted. The entries consider not only the leaders, ideas,
movements, and events relating to the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 but
also examine themes from before the war and after it. As such,
coverage continues through to the Kosovo Intervention of 1999,
arguing that this event, too, was part of the conflict that
purportedly ended in 1995. This work will serve university students
undertaking the study of genocide in the modern world and readers
interested in modern wars, international crisis management, and
peacekeeping and peacemaking. Provides nearly 150 entries-written
in a clear and concise style by leading international
authorities-that summarize the roles of the leaders involved in the
Bosnian Conflict of 1992-1995 and beyond as well as contextualizing
essays on various facets of the Bosnian Conflicts Considers and
evaluates the various strategies adopted by members of the
international community in trying to bring the war to an end Edited
by renowned genocide scholar, Paul R. Bartrop, PhD
Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy is an
historical study of democratic life and institutions and their
decline in the early years of the Russian Revolution. Rather than
an event-by-event description of this period, it is an attempt at
interpretation and synthesis of the vast and relatively recent
specialist literature on a subject usually neglected by those
analysing Soviet politics for the public at large.
When the Second World War broke out, ballet in Britain was only a
few decades old. Few had imagined that it would establish roots in
a nation long thought to be unresponsive to dance. Nevertheless,
the war proved to be a boon for ballet dancers, choreographers and
audiences, for the nation's dancers were forced to look inward to
their own identity and sources of creativity. As author Karen Eliot
demonstrates in this fascinating book, instead of withering during
the enforced isolation of war, ballet in Britain flourished,
exhibiting a surprising heterogeneity and vibrant populism that
moved ballet outside its typical elitist surroundings to be seen by
uninitiated, often enthusiastic audiences. Ballet was thought to
help boost audience morale, to render solace to the soul-weary and
to afford entertainment and diversion to those who simply craved a
few hours of distraction. Government authorities came to see that
ballet could serve as a tool of propaganda; the ways it functioned
within the larger public discourse of propaganda and sacrifice, and
how it answered a public mood of pragmatism and idealism, are also
topics in this story of the development of a national ballet
identity. This narrative has several key players- dance critics,
male and female dancers, producers, audiences, and choreographers.
Exploring the so-called "ballet boom" during WWII, the larger story
of this book is one of how art and artists thrive during conflict,
and how they respond pragmatically and creatively to privation and
duress.
The Shock of America is based on the proposition that whenever
Europeans contemplated those margins of their experience where
change occurred over the last 100 years or more, there, sooner or
later, they would find America. How Europeans have come to terms
over the decades with this dynamic force in their midst, and what
these terms were, is the story at the heart of this text. Masses of
Europeans have been enthralled by the real or imaginary prospects
coming out of the USA. Important minorities were at times deeply
upset by them. Sometime the roles were reversed or shaken up. But
no-one could be indifferent for long. Inspiration, provocation,
myth, menace, model: all these categories and many more have been
deployed to try to cope with the Americans. Attitudes and
stereotypes have emerged, intellectual resources have been
mobilised, positions and policies developed: all trying to explain
and deal with the kind of radiant supremacy the Americans built in
the course of the twentieth century. David Ellwood combines
political, economic, and cultural themes, suggesting that American
mass culture is a distinctively incisive form of American power
over time. The book is structured in three parts; a separation
based on the proposition that America's influence as a decisive
force for or against innovation was present most conspicuously
after Europe's three greatest military-political conflicts of the
contemporary era: the Great War, World War II, and the Cold War. It
concludes with the emotional upsurge in Europe which greeted the
arrival of Obama on the world scene, suggesting that in spite of
all the disappointments and frictions of the years, the US still
retained its privileged place as a source of inspiration for the
future across the Western world.
In May 1945, as World War II drew to a close in Europe, some 30,000
Russian Cossacks surrendered to British forces in Austria,
believing they would be spared repatriation to the Soviet Union.
The fate of those among them who were Soviet citizens had been
sealed by the Yalta Agreement, signed by the Allied leaders a few
months earlier. Ever since, mystery has surrounded Britain's
decision to include among those returned to Stalin a substantial
number of White Russians, who had fled their country after the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and found refuge in various European
countries. They had never been Soviet citizens, and should not have
been handed over. Some were prominent tsarist generals, on whose
handover the Soviets were particularly insistent. General Charles
Keightley, the responsible British officer, concealed the presence
of White Russians from his superiors, who had issued repeated
orders stipulating that only Soviet nationals should be handed
over, and even then only if they did not resist. Through a
succession underhanded moves, Keightley secretly delivered up the
leading Cossack commanders to the Soviets, while force of
unparalleled brutality was employed to hand over thousands of
Cossack men, women, and children to a ghastly fate. Particularly
sinister was the role of the future British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan, whose own machinations are scrutinized here. Following
the publication of Count Nikolai Tolstoy's last book on the subject
in 1986, the British government closed ranks, and three years later
an English court issued a GBP1,500,000 judgment against him for
allegedly libeling the British chief of staff who issued the fatal
orders. Since then, however, Count Tolstoy has gradually acquired a
devastating body of heretofore unrevealed evidence filling the
remaining gaps in this tragic history. Much of this material
derives from long-sealed Soviet archives, to which Tolstoy received
access by a special decree from the late Russian President Boris
Yeltsin. What really happened during these murky events is now
revealed for the first time.
The quantity of journalism produced during World War I was unlike
anything the then-budding mass media had ever seen. Correspondents
at the front were dispatching voluminous reports on a daily basis,
and though much of it was subject to censorship, it all eventually
became available. It remains the most extraordinary firsthand look
at the war that we have. Published immediately after the cessation
of hostilities and compiled from those original journalistic
sources-American, British, French, German, and others-this is an
astonishing contemporary perspective on the Great War. This replica
of the first 1919 edition includes all the original maps, photos,
and illustrations, lending an even greater immediacy to readers a
century later. Volume V covers March 1918 through September 1918 on
the Western Front, from the American "invasion" of France to the
first German bid for peace. American journalist and historian
FRANCIS WHITING HALSEY (1851-1919) was literary editor of The New
York Times from 1892 through 1896. He wrote and lectured
extensively on history; his works include, as editor, the
two-volume Great Epochs in American History Described by Famous
Writers, From Columbus to Roosevelt (1912), and, as writer, the
10-volume Seeing Europe with Famous Authors (1914).
Boom - Crisis - Heritage, these terms aptly outline the history of
global coal mining after 1945. The essays collected in this volume
explore this history with different emphases and questions. The
range of topics also reflects this broad approach. The first
section contains contributions on political, social and economic
history. They address the European energy system in the globalised
world of the 20th and 21st centuries as well as specific social
policies in mining regions. The second section then focuses on the
medialisation of mining and its legacies, also paying attention to
the environmental history of mining. The anthology, which goes back
to a conference of the same name at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum
Bochum, thus offers a multi-faceted insight into the research field
of modern mining history.
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