The May Fourth movement (1915-1923) is widely considered a watershed in the history of modern China. This book is a social history of cultural and political radicals based in China's most important hinterland city at this pivotal time, Wuhan. Current narratives of May Fourth focus on the ideological development of intellectuals in the seaboard metropoles of Beijing and Shanghai. And although scholars have pointed to the importance of the many cultural-political societies of the period, they have largely neglected to examine these associations, seeing them only as seedbeds of Chinese communism and its leaders, like Mao Zedong. This book, by contrast, portrays the everyday life of May Fourth activists in Wuhan in cultural-political societies founded by local teacher and journalist Yun Daiying (1895-1931). The book examines the ways by which radical politics developed in hinterland urban centers, from there into a nation wide movement, which ultimately provided the basis for the emergence of mass political parties, namely the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The book's focus on organizations, everyday life, and social networks provides a novel interpretation of where mechanisms of historical change are located. The book also highlights the importance of print culture in the provinces. It demonstrates how provincial print-culture combined with small, local organizations to create a political movement. The vantage point of Wuhan demonstrates that May Fourth radicalism developed in a dialogue between the coastal metropoles of Beijing and Shanghai and hinterland urban centers. The book therefore charts the way in which seeds of political change grew from individuals, through local organizations into a nation-wide movement, and finally into mass-party politics and subsequently revolution. The book thus connects everyday experiences of activists with the cultural-political ferment which gave rise to both the Chinese Communist party and the Nationalist Party.

A comprehensive overview of Mexico's military history from 1810 to the present day, including rare facts and information not found online. Mexico's past is riddled with stories of struggle-military battles, internal rebellions, revolutions, and drug wars. This in-depth reference provides a complete military history of that country since its War of Independence in 1810 through the present day. From the evolution of combat in the region, to the motivations and tensions behind recurrent conflicts, to the dubious beginnings of drug gangs and warlords, this is the only book of its kind to explore Mexican warfare in such great depth. This detailed study consists of an alphabetical compilation of roughly 300 entries dealing with different facets of hostile encounters throughout the country's history. In addition to covering key places and people, regional expert and author David F. Marley offers unique insights into more obscure topics such as the 1913 aerial bombardments at the port of Guaymas, visits from American luminaries, colorful Mexican military slang, and the songs that identify various political factions. The work includes a host of important historical documents, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography to encourage further research on the subject. Contains 300 entries covering every aspect of military history ranging from weapons to terminology to practices Includes a wealth of hard-to-find information compiled and translated from obscure Mexican and French sources Features key primary sources, including 10 of the most important documents related to the military history of Mexico Reveals the role music played in creating and establishing personal, military, and national identities

Alter L. Litvin tells describes what life was really like for professional Soviet historians under regimes from Lenin to Gorbachev, and assesses the efforts made since 1991 to create a more truthful picture of the Russian past. Passionate yet fair-minded, this is the first account of the subject to appear in English.

This book challenges generally accepted views by concluding that the critical press, so often characterized by pro-New Deal historians as conservative or reactionary, was in fact a good deal more liberal than Roosevelt and his advisors. Without its opposition to Roosevelt's policies during the years before Congress began to reassert its constitutional responsibilities, the United States might well have deviated considerably from the path of constitutional and democractic government.

From 1933 to 1938 the critical press (both newspapers and journalists) fulfilled much of the function of (and perceived of itself as) the equivalent of a parliamentary opposition to Roosevelt's policies and programs, since this was a period when the Republican opposition was moribund and Congress was generally submissive to the executive branch. Best describes the reaction of the critical press to FDR's domestic policies toward enhancement of the power of the White House at the expense of Congress and the Supreme Court. This enhancement gradually led many in the press to conclude that the basis for dictatorial rule was being laid by Roosevelt and/or those around him. This study will be of interest to historians and students of history.

Alastair Thompson here challenges the view of German Liberalism as the helpless victim of mass mobilization and political polarization in Wilhelmine Germany. He reveals the influence of a party that was the third largest in German politics by 1914 and which effectively wrote the Weimar Constitution. His study is central to understanding increasing Left Liberal support on the eve of war, and why liberal values could not be consolidated after 1918.

This volume is devoted to the shaping of British foreign and defence policymaking in the twentieth century and illustrates why it's relatively easy for states to lose their way as they grope for a safe passage forward when confronted by mounting international crises and the antics of a few desperate men.

Under Mussolini's leadership, Fascist Italy sought to increase its influence in the Middle East. This volume, now available for the first time in paperback, examines the motivations behind Italy's policy, the diverse methods the regime employed and the reasons why Italian efforts ultimately failed. By looking at the interplay between foreign, colonial, cultural and military policies, Fascist Italy and the Middle East provides a new and challenging interpretation of the ambitions and contradictions that characterized Mussolini's Italy. It analyses the ways in which the Fascist regime sought to befriend the Islamic world and looks at how Italian policies were propagated and received by Middle Eastern societies. It also uncovers for the first time the grandiose plans that were prepared in the summer of 1940 for Fascist territorial expansion in Africa and the Middle East.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around "Indianthusiasm." Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis' racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

The beginning of filmmaking in the German colonies coincided with colonialism itself coming to a standstill. Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies were welcomed by organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society). The films triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events. This book is the first in-depth analysis of colonial filmmaking in the Wilhelmine Era.

Earth's fractured geology is visible in its fault lines. It is along these lines that earthquakes occur, sometimes with disastrous effects. These disturbances can significantly influence urban development, as seen in the aftermath of two earthquakes in Messina, Italy, in 1908 and in the Belice Valley, Sicily, in 1968. Following the history of these places before and after their destruction, this book explores plans and developments that preceded the disasters and the urbanism that emerged from the ruins. These stories explore fault lines between "rural" and "urban," "backwardness" and "development," and "before" and "after," shedding light on the role of environmental forces in the history of human habitats.

The primary objective of Maguire's study is to consider the evolution of women's role in the Conservative Party since the time of Disraeli and try to assess whether it has always been one of progress. To do this she examines not only the attitude of women to the party and the official attitude of the party towards women but also the degree of acceptance that Conservative men have shown towards women members. It considers women at all levels, from that of the voter to the grassroots organization to national politics.

Although China is generally considered to have suffered continuous deforestation over most of its history, forests were protected or even planted and maintained for centuries in some places. This study identifies six such cases. It uses historical evidence to show that individuals and communities act to manage resources sustainably for a number of reasons including economic benefit, religious or symbolic purposes, and that sustainability of the management system depends on the form of control exerted over the resource.

Although the history of crowds in modern European history has been one of the most hotly debated subjects since E.P. Thompson's pioneering work of the 1960s, the crowd in Irish history has been largely neglected. This is the first study of the subject during the most turbulent period of Ireland's history. The introduction proposes an outline history of the crowd in Ireland and is followed by eight specialist studies of crowd activity by new and innovative scholars in the field. A special feature of the volume is that it incorporates discussions from a Colloquium held in Belfast in 1998 which was attended by the contributors and senior Irish and British historians.

The Weimar Republic began at 2:00 PM on November 9, 1918 when Philip Scheidemann declared from a second-story window in the Reich Chancellery to his hearers below that the German Reich was now a republic. It ended at 11:00 AM on January 30, 1933 when President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler Chancellor. The Cultural Chronicle of the Weimar Republic is an account of significant cultural events in Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic. Weimar, already a German cultural mecca because Goethe and Schiller had lived and worked there 120 years earlier, emerged as a unique and experimental culture. Weimar culture was responsible for producing such icons as actress Marlene Dietrich, novels like All Quiet on the Western Front, musicals like The Threepenny Opera, the political cabaret, the Bauhaus School, and films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis. There were hundreds of premieres, performance debuts, exhibitions, works of fiction, and other cultural events that marked the Republic as Western Civilization's first modernist society. Modernism took many forms: the Einstein Tower in Berlin, the symphonies of Paul Hindemith, the paintings of Max Beckmann, the drawings of Kathe Kollwitz, the novels of Alfred Doeblin, the industrial designs of Ferdinand Porsche, the choreography of Mary Wigman, the acting of Ernst Deutsch, the plays of Expressionism. The Cultural Chronicle of the Weimar Republic presents these and scores of other modernist inscriptions worthy of note, while providing notations that inform readers of connections among individuals, art works, related cultural activities, and significant political and economic developments.

During the War of Independence, faced with an armed insurrection it couldn't stop, the British government introduced increasingly harsh penalties for suspected republicans, including internment without trial. This led to the incarceration of thousands of men in camps around the country, including the Rath and Hare Park Camps at the Curragh in County Kildare. Interned is the first book to tell the story of the men who were held in the Curragh internment camps, which housed republicans from all over Ireland. Faced with harsh conditions, unforgiving guards and inadequate and often inedible food, the prisoners maintained their defiance of the British regime and took whatever chances they could to defy their gaolers, including a number of escapes. The most audacious of these was in September 1921, during the Truce period, when sixty men escaped through a tunnel. This unique book is the first to investigate the Curragh Internment Camps, which housed thousands of republicans from all over Ireland. It contains a list of names and addresses of some 1,500 internees, which will be fascinating to their descendants and those interested in local history, as well as an exploration and details of the 1921 escape, which was one of the largest and most successful IRA escape in history.

Bringing together scholars from the fields of musicology and international history, this book investigates the significance of music to foreign relations, and how it affected the interaction of nations since the late 19th century. For more than a century, both state and non-state actors have sought to employ sound and harmony to influence allies and enemies, resolve conflicts, and export their own culture around the world. This book asks how we can understand music as an instrument of power and influence, and how the cultural encounters fostered by music changes our ideas about international history.

Searching for a job has been an everyday affair in both modern and past societies, and employment a concern for both individuals and institutions. The case studies in this volume investigate job search and placement practices in European countries, Australia, and India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors explore how looking for work becomes a means by which participants (individuals, placement agents, trade unions, municipalities, administrations, state authorities, and schools) articulated specific interests, perspectives, and agendas. Taking an exploratory approach, the chapters illustrate different approaches to the history of employment and job searching, ranging from organizational and regulatory histories to the analysis of practices and autobiographical accounts. In the process, they uncover the interrelations of search practices and attempts to arrange placement services.

"The West" is a central idea in German public discourse, yet historians know surprisingly little about the evolution of the concept. Contrary to common assumptions, this volume argues that the German concept of the West was not born in the twentieth century, but can be traced from a much earlier time. In the nineteenth century, "the West" became associated with notions of progress, liberty, civilization, and modernity. It signified the future through the opposition to antonyms such as "Russia" and "the East," and was deployed as a tool for forging German identities. Examining the shifting meanings, political uses, and transnational circulations of the idea of "the West" sheds new light on German intellectual history from the post-Napoleonic era to the Cold War.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today's eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more "self-critical" memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term "collective memory" is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.

This book is the first systematic study of the genealogy, discursive structures, and political implications of the concept of 'Greater India', implying a Hindu colonization of Southeast Asia, and used by extension to argue for a past Indian greatness as a colonial power, reproducible in the present and future. From the 1880s to the 1960s, protagonists of the Greater India theme attempted to make a case for the importance of an expansionist Indian civilisation in civilizing Southeast Asia. The argument was extended to include Central Asia, Africa, North and South America, and other regions where Indian migrants were to be found. The advocates of this Indocentric and Hindu revivalist approach, with Hindu and Indian often taken to be synonymous, were involved in a quintessentially parochial project, despite its apparently international dimensions: to justify an Indian expansionist imagination that viewed India's past as a colonizer and civilizer of other lands as a model for the restoration of that past greatness in the future. Zabarskaite shows that the crucial ideologues and elements used for the formation of the construct of Greater India can be traced to the svadesi movement of the turn of the century, and that Greater India moved easily between the domains of the scholarly and the popular as it sought to establish itself as a form of nationalist self-assertion.

The issue of alcohol has never been far from British politics. Initially, governments needed to control its sale for public order reasons and because it was a major source of revenue. Then in Victorian times a powerful temperance movement arose which sought to prohibit or severely curb the ''Demon Drink". This in turn aroused the hostility of the "Trade" and the issue became one of fierce electoral politics. After 1890 drink was interpreted more as a social reform question and then in the First World War, after a major moral panic, far-reaching measures of direct state control were imposed in the interests of national efficiency. Later in the twentieth century alcohol use came to be seen as an aspect of leisure and town planning and, more recently, as a health issue. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources, John Greenaway uses the complex politics of the issue to shed light upon the changing political system and to test various theories of the policymaking process. Both historians and political scientists will be interested in this study.

The largest Japanese community outside East Asia in the 1930s and one long neglected in English-language scholarship was in Brazil. Drawing heavily on little-used sources, including the Japanese-language press of Brazil, Stewart Lone explores the growth of expatriate settlements, small businesses, schools, civic groups, and sports and leisure. Lone reinterprets issues of Japanese identity and relations with other peoples.

In this book Hera Cook traces the path of sexuality in England, and shows how its route was determined by the gradual exertion of control over fertility. Most sexual activity had major economic and social costs, the most fundamental of which was the physical cost of children upon women's bodies. Around 1800 birth rates reached historical heights. Using a combination of demographic and qualitative sources, Dr Cook examines the connection between the struggle to lower fertility and the increasing repression of sexuality throughout the nineteenth century. Contraception became a viable option in the early twentieth century. The book charts the resulting slow relaxation of attitudes to sexuality and the remaking of heterosexual physical behaviour, culminating in the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Providing a comprehensive history of Italy from around 1800 to the present, Italy in the Modern World traces the social and cultural transformations that defined the lives of Italians during the 19th and 20th century. The book focuses on how social relations (class, gender and race), science and the arts shaped the political processes of unification, state building, fascism and the postwar world. Split up into four parts covering the making of Italy, the liberal state, war and fascism, and the republic, the text draws on secondary literature and primary sources in order to synthesize current historiographical debates and provide primary documents for classroom use. There are individual chapters on key topics, such as unification, Italians in the world, Italy in the world, science and the arts, fascism, the World Wars, the Cold War, and Italy in the 21st century, as well as a wealth of useful features for students, including: * Comprehensive bibliographic essays covering each of the four parts * 23 images and 12 maps Italy in the Modern World also firmly places both the nation and its people in a wider global context through a distinctly transnational approach. It is essential reading for all students of modern Italian history.