Italy played a vital role in the Cold War dynamics that shaped the Middle East in the latter part of the 20th century. It was a junior partner in the strategic plans of NATO and warmly appreciated by some Arab countries for its regional approach. But Italian foreign policy towards the Middle East balanced between promoting dialogue, stability and cooperation on one hand, and colluding with global superpower manoeuvres to exploit existing tensions and achieve local influence on the other. Italy and the Middle East brings together a range of experts on Italian international relations to analyse, for the first time in English, the country's Cold War relationship with the Middle East. Chapters covering a wide range of defining twentieth century events - from the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Lebanese Civil War, to the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - demonstrate the nuances of Italian foreign policy in dealing with the complexity of Middle Eastern relations. The collection demonstrates the interaction of local and global issues in shaping Italy's international relations with the Middle East, making it essential reading to students of the Cold War, regional interactions, and the international relations of Italy and the Middle East.

Turbulent Times: Selected Readings on World Politics in the Twenty-First Century provides students with timely and thought-provoking articles that underscore the complexities of global politics and their far-reaching impacts on the rest of the world. The anthology is divided into seven distinct parts. The readings in Part I examine the impact of female presidents on political activity. Part II explores the concept of globalization and more specifically, the rise of China as a potential challenge to the legitimacy of liberalism and the new international order established in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Part III discusses the rise of non-traditional actors in the international system and the challenges they present to nation-states throughout the world. In Part IV, students read about power competition and the rise of autocratic states. Part V examines two Communist countries' trajectories-Cuba and the Soviet Union. In the final sections, students learn about less developed and newly industrialize economies of the world and are challenged to envision the future of democracy. Turbulent Times is ideal for courses in international relations, comparative politics, international studies, and world politics.

This thought-provoking collection of essays analyses the complex, multi-faceted, and even contradictory nature of Stalinism and its representations. Stalinism was an extraordinarily repressive and violent political model, and yet it was led by ideologues committed to a vision of socialism and international harmony. The essays in this volume stress the complex, multi-faceted, and often contradictory nature of Stalin, Stalinism, and Stalinist-style leadership, and. explore the complex picture that emerges. Broadly speaking, three important areas of debate are examined, united by a focus on political leadership: * The key controversies surrounding Stalin's leadership role * A reconsideration of Stalin and the Cold War * New perspectives on the cult of personality Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism is a crucial volume for all students and scholars of Stalin's Russia and Cold War Europe.

Recognizing that women often find themselves overlooked in written and oral history, Filling in the Pieces: Women Tell Their Stories of the Twentieth Century provides readers with personal narratives from women across the globe. The text includes observations and insights from women who were born in the earliest years of the twentieth century to those who witnessed two world wars, landing on the moon, the birth of the internet, and much more. As an oral history project, students of Michaela Reaves collected individual narratives of the events of one woman's life. Each narrative reflects the cultural mores of the world she inhabited, as well personal reflections on particular periods of her life. The text is organized chronologically and divided into four distinct parts with each part centering about a particular time period between 1900 and 2000. Each includes an introduction to provide readers with valuable historical context followed by a collection of interviews of women who lived across the globe, from Singapore to Estonia, San Francisco to Calcutta, Holland to Louisiana, and everywhere in between. Discussion questions throughout the text encourage critical thought and meaningful conversation. Filling in the Pieces is an ideal resource for courses in 20th century history. It transcends the traditional structure of only dates and wars to give voice to those living the "underside" of history.

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the twentieth century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost five decades. A century of enormous change, encompassing two world wars, four monarchs (Edward VII, George V, George VI and the Queen), the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the Labour Party, women's suffrage, the birth of the NHS, the march of suburbia and the clearance of the slums. It was a period that saw the work of the Bloomsbury Group and T. S. Eliot, of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, of the end of the post-war slump to the technicolour explosion of the 1960s, to free love and punk rock and from Thatcher to Blair. A vividly readable, richly peopled tour de force, it is Peter Ackroyd writing at his considerable best.

I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I was beginning my first LSD experience...

This volume assembles the papers presented at the conference The International Context of the Galician Language Brotherhoods and the Nationality Question in Interwar Europe (Council of Galician Culture, Santiago de Compostela, October 2016). The different contributions, written by historians, political scientists and linguists, shed new light on the political development of the nationality question in Europe during the First World War and its aftermath, covering theoretical developments and debates, social mobilization and cultural perspectives. They also address the topic from different scales, blending the global and transnational outlook with the view from below, from the local contexts, with particular attention to peripheral areas, whilst East European and West European nationalities are dealt with on an equal footing, covering from Iberian Galicia to the Caucasus. Contributors are: Bence Bari, Stefan Berger, Miguel Cabo, Stefan Dyroff, Lourenzo Fernandez Prieto, Johannes Kabatek, Joep Leerssen, Ramon Maiz, Xose M. Nunez Seixas, Malte Rolf, Ramon Villares, and Francesca Zantedeschi.

Born on January 17, 1863, in Manchester, England, David Lloyd George is perhaps best known for his service as prime minister of the United Kingdom during the second half of World War I. While many biographies have chronicled his life and political endeavors, few, if any, have explored how his devotion to democratic doctrines in the Church of Christ shaped his political perspectives and choices both before and during the First World War. In David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction, Jerry L. Gaw bridges this gap in scholarship, showcasing George's religious roots and their impact on his politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a comprehensive narrative that spans more than a century, Gaw's book ranges beyond typical biography and examines how the work and theology of Alexander Campbell, a founder of the Stone-Campbell Movement in America, influenced a prominent world leader. George's twelve diaries and the more than three thousand letters he wrote to his brother between 1886 and 1943 provide the foundation for Gaw's thorough analysis of George's beliefs and politics. Taken together, these texts illuminate his lifelong adherence to the Church of Christ in Britain and how his faith, in turn, contributed to his proclivity for championing humanitarian, egalitarian, and popular political policies beginning with the first of his fifty-five years in the British Parliament. Broadly, Gaw's study helps us to understand how the Stone-Campbell tradition-and later, Churches of Christ-became contextualized in the British Isles over the course of the nineteenth century. His significant mining of primary materials successively reveals a lesser-known side of David Lloyd George, in large part explaining how he arrived at the political decisions that helped shape history.

In this book the territory of Pechenga, located well above the Arctic circle between Russia, Finland and Norway, holds the key to understanding the geopolitical situation of the Arctic today. With specific focus on the local nickel industry of the region, Lars Rowe explores the interaction between commercial and state security concerns in the Soviet Union. Through the lens of this local industry a larger historical context is unravelled - the nature of Soviet-Finnish relations after the Russian Revolution, Soviet international relations strategies during the Second World War and the nature of the Stalinist economy in the early post-war years. By presenting this environmentally focused history of a small corner of the Arctic, Rowe offers the historical context needed to understand the current geopolitical climate of the Polar North.

Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 recodified the state's long-standing racial hierarchy as a more rigid Black-white binary. Then, Virginia officials asserted that no Virginia Indians could be other than legally Black, given centuries of love and marriage across color lines. How indigenous peoples of Virginia resisted erasure and built their identities as Native Americans is the powerful story this book tells. Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions. Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Laura J. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities. Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives' sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.