More than 150,000 American Jews served in the air war during World War II. Despite acts of heroism and commendations, they were subject to bigotry and scorn by their fellow servicemen. Jews were considered disloyal and cowardly, malingering in the slanderous (and non-existent) ""Jewish Quartermaster Corps"" or sitting out the war in easy assignments. Based on interviews with more than 100 Jewish air veterans, this oral history features the recollections of pilots, crew members and support personnel in all theaters of combat and all branches of the service, including Jewish women of the Women Airforce Service Pilots. The subjects recall their combat experiences, lives as POWs and anti-Semitism in the ranks, as well as human interest stories such as encounters with the Tuskegee airmen.

The peasantry accounted for the large majority of the Russian population during the Imperialist and Stalinist periods - it is, for the most part, how people lived. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin provides a comprehensive, realistic examination of peasant life in Russia during both these eras and the legacy this left in the post-Soviet era. The book paints a full picture of peasant involvement in commerce and local political life and, through Boris Gorshkov's original ecology paradigm for understanding peasant life, offers new perspectives on the Russian peasantry under serfdom and the emancipation. Incorporating recent scholarship, including Russian and non-Russian texts, along with classic studies, Gorshkov explores the complex interrelationships between the physical environment, peasant economic and social practices, culture, state policies and lord-peasant relations. He goes on to analyze peasant economic activities, including agriculture and livestock, social activities and the functioning of peasant social and political institutions within the context of these interrelationships. Further reading lists, study questions, tables, maps, primary source extracts and images are also included to support and enhance the text wherever possible. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom to Stalin is the crucial survey of a key topic in modern Russian history for students and scholars alike.

Surveillance in America provides a historical exploration of FBI surveillance practices and policies since 1920 based on recently declassified FBI files. Using the new information available through these documents, Ivan Greenberg sheds light on the activities and beliefs of top FBI officials as they develop and implement surveillance practices. Paying particular attention to the uses of the media, Greenberg provides a thorough reconsideration of the Watergate scandal and the role of W. Mark Felt as "Deep Throat." He exposes new evidence which suggests that Felt led a faction at the FBI that worked together to bring down President Nixon. The book concludes with an in-depth treatment of surveillance practices since the year 2000. He considers the question of "surveillance as harassment" and looks at the further erosion of privacy. stemming from Obama's counter-terror policies which extend those of the Bush Administration's second term. The startling increase in surveillance since the events of September 11th, reveal the extent to which America is losing the battle for civil liberties.

In this analysis of the life of Arnost Frischer, an influential Jewish nationalist activist, Jan Lanicek reflects upon how the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia dealt with the challenges that arose from their volatile relationship with the state authorities in the first half of the 20th century. The Jews in the Bohemian Lands experienced several political regimes in the period from 1918 to the late 1940s: the Habsburg Empire, the first democratic Czechoslovak republic, the post-Munich authoritarian Czecho-Slovak republic, the Nazi regime, renewed Czechoslovak democracy and the Communist regime. Frischer's involvement in local and central politics affords us invaluable insights into the relations and negotiations between the Jewish activists and these diverse political authorities in the Bohemian Lands. Vital coverage is also given to the relatively under-researched subject of the Jewish responses to the Nazi persecution and the attempts of the exiled Jewish leadership to alleviate the plight of the Jews in occupied Europe. The case study of Frischer and Czechoslovakia provides an important paradigm for understanding modern Jewish politics in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making this a book of great significance to all students and scholars interested in Jewish history and Modern European history.

Through interviews with developers, gamers, and journalists examining the phenomena of bedroom coding, arcade gaming, and format wars, mapped onto enquiry into the seminal genres of the time including driving, shooting, and maze chase, Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames examines how 1980s Britain has become the culture of work in the 21st century and considers its meaning to contemporary society. This crucial and timely work fills a lacuna for students and researchers of sociology, media, and games studies and will be of interest to employees of the videogames and media industries. Research into videogames have never been greater, but exploration of their historic drivers is as elided as the technology is influential, giving rise to a range of questions. What were the social and economic conditions that gave rise to a billion dollar industry? What were the motivations of the early 'bedroom coders'? What are the legacies of the seminal videogames of the 1980s and how do they inform the current social, political and cultural landscape? With a focus on the characteristics of the UK videogame industry in the 1980s, Wade explores these questions from perspectives of consumption, production and leisure, outlining the construction of a habitus unique to this time.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality crisis which affected Eastern Europe and the republics of the former USSR at the time of the transition to a market economy was arguably the major peacetime health crisis of recent decades. Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe and the Old USSR discusses the importance of that crisis, surprisingly underplayed in the scientific literature, and presents evidence suggesting a potential role of the Chernobyl disaster among the causes contributing to it.

The dispossessed people of Colonial America included thousands of servants who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up serving as agricultural, domestic, skilled, and unskilled laborers in the northern, middle, and southern British American colonies as well as British Caribbean colonies. Thousands of people arrived in the British-American colonies as indentured servants, transported felons, and kidnapped children forced into bound labor. Others already in America, such as Indians, freedmen, and poor whites, placed themselves into the service of others for food, clothing, shelter, and security; poverty in colonial America was relentless, and servitude was the voluntary and involuntary means by which the poor adapted, or tried to adapt, to miserable conditions. From the 1600s to the 1700s, Blacks, Indians, Europeans, Englishmen, children, and adults alike were indentured, apprenticed, transported as felons, kidnapped, or served as redemptioners. Though servitude was more multiracial and multicultural than slavery, involving people from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, far fewer books have been written about it. This fascinating new study of servitude in colonial America provides the first complete overview of the varied lives of the dispossessed in 17th- and 18th-century America, examining colonial American servitude in all of its forms. Illustrates how a majority of residents in Colonial America at any given time from 1607 to 1776 were dispossessed of basic freedoms Explains how the dispossessed Colonial American, deprived of basic rights, generated principles of freedom and equality that resulted in the American Revolution Shows that the basic rights of children were ignored in Stuart and Georgian England, which resulted in their transportation to America Describes how thousands of inhabitants of Colonial America were felons reprieved of the death penalty and prisoners of war

George Pitt-Rivers began his career as one of Britain's most promising young anthropologists, conducting research in the South Pacific and publishing articles in the country's leading academic journals. With a museum in Oxford bearing his family name, Pitt-Rivers appeared to be on track for a sterling academic career that might even have matched that of his grandfather, one of the most prominent archaeologists of his day. By the early 1930s, however, Pitt-Rivers had turned from his academic work to politics. Writing a series of books attacking international communism and praising the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Pitt-Rivers fell into the circles of the anti-Semitic far right. In 1937 he attended the Nuremberg Rally and personally met Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazis. With the outbreak of war in 1940 Pitt-Rivers was arrested and interned by the British government on the suspicion that he might harm the war effort by publicly sharing his views, effectively ending his academic career. This book traces the remarkable career of a man who might have been remembered as one of Britain's leading 20th century anthropologists but instead became involved in a far-right milieu that would result in his professional ruin and the relegation of most of his research to margins of scientific history. At the same time, his wider legacy would persist far beyond the academic sphere and can be found to the present day.

Lisa Pine assembles an impressive array of influential scholars in Life and Times in Nazi Germany to explore the variety and complexity of life in Germany under Hitler's totalitarian regime. The book is a thematic collection of essays that examine the extent to which social and cultural life in Germany was permeated by Nazi aims and ambitions. Each essay deals with a different theme of daily German life in the Nazi era, with topics including food, fashion, health, sport, art, tourism and religion all covered in chapters based on original and expert scholarship. Life and Times in Nazi Germany, which also includes 24 images and helpful end-of-chapter select bibliographies, provides a new lens through which to observe life in Nazi Germany - one that highlights the everyday experience of Germans under Hitler's rule. It illuminates aspects of life under Nazi control that are less well-known and examines the contradictions and paradoxes that characterised daily life in Nazi Germany in order to enhance and sophisticate our understanding of this period in the nation's history. This is a crucial volume for all students of Nazi Germany and the history of Germany in the 20th century.

Friendships between women and gay men captivated the American media in the opening decade of the 21st century. John Portmann places this curious phenomenon in its historical context, examining the changing social attitudes towards gay men in the postwar period and how their relationships with women have been portrayed in the media. As women and gay men both struggled toward social equality in the late 20th century, some women understood that defending gay men - who were often accused of effeminacy - was in their best interest. Joining forces carried both political and personal implications. Straight women used their influence with men to prevent bullying and combat homophobia. Beyond the bureaucratic fray, women found themselves in transformed roles with respect to gay men - as their mothers, sisters, daughters, caregivers, spouses, voters, employers and best friends. In the midst of social hostility to gay men during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, a significant number of gay women volunteered to comfort the afflicted and fight reigning sexual values. Famous women such as Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand threw their support behind a detested minority, while countless ordinary women did the same across America. Portmann celebrates not only women who made the headlines but also those who did not. Looking at the links between the women's liberation and gay rights movements, and filled with concrete examples of personal and political relationships between straight women and gay men, Women and Gay Men in the Postwar Period is an engaging and accessible study which will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th- and 21st century social and gender history.