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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > General
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.
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.
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.
How a new generation of counterculture talent changed the landscape
of Hollywood, the film industry, and celebrity culture. By 1967,
the commercial and political impact on Hollywood of the sixties
counterculture had become impossible to ignore. The studios were in
bad shape, still contending with a generation-long box office slump
and struggling to get young people into the habit of going to the
movies. Road Trip to Nowhere examines a ten-year span (from 1967 to
1976) rife with uneasy encounters between artists caught up in the
counterculture and a corporate establishment still clinging to a
studio system on the brink of collapse. Out of this tumultuous
period many among the young and talented walked away from
celebrity, turning down the best job Hollywood-and America-had on
offer: movie star. Road Trip to Nowhere elaborates a
primary-sourced history of movie production culture, examining the
lives of a number of talented actors who got wrapped up in the
politics and lifestyles of the counterculture. Thoroughly put off
by celebrity culture, actors like Dennis Hopper, Christopher Jones,
Jean Seberg, and others rejected the aspirational backstory and
inevitable material trappings of success, much to the chagrin of
the studios and directors who backed them. In Road Trip to Nowhere,
film historian Jon Lewis details dramatic encounters on movie sets
and in corporate boardrooms, on the job and on the streets, and in
doing so offers an entertaining and rigorous historical account of
an out-of-touch Hollywood establishment and the counterculture
workforce they would never come to understand.
'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.
A Queer Way of Feeling gathers an unexplored archive of fan-made
scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs to explore how girls
coming of age in the United States in the 1910s used cinema to
forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy,
and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos into personal scrapbooks
and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, girl fans
from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic
conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense
of feeling "queer" or "different from the norm." These material
testimonies show how a forgotten audience engendered terminologies,
communities, and creative practices that became cornerstones of
media fan reception and queer belonging.
French composer Maurice Ravel was described by critics as a
magician, conjurer, and illusionist. Scholars have been aware of
this historical curiosity, but none so far have explained why Ravel
attracted such critiques or what they might tell us about how to
interpret his music. Magician of Sound examines Ravel's music
through the lens of illusory experience, considering how timbre,
orchestral effects, figure/ground relationships, and impressions of
motion and stasis might be experienced as if they were conjuring
tricks. Applying concepts from music theory, psychology,
philosophy, and the history of magic, Jessie Fillerup develops an
approach to musical illusion that newly illuminates Ravel's
fascination with machines and creates compelling links between his
music and other forms of aesthetic illusion, from painting and
poetry to fiction and phantasmagoria. Fillerup analyzes scenes of
enchantment and illusory effects in Ravel's most popular works,
including Bolero, La Valse, Daphnis et Chloe, and Rapsodie
espagnole, relating his methods and musical effects to the practice
of theatrical conjurers. Drawing on a rich well of primary sources,
Magician of Sound provides a new interdisciplinary framework for
interpreting this enigmatic composer, linking magic and music.
A rich account that combines media-industry history and cultural
studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers'
contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV:
comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense
anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of
television was still being defined, women writers navigated
pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled
traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's
point of view was essential to television as an art form. The shows
they authored allegorize these professional and personal pressures
and articulate a nascent second-wave feminist consciousness. Annie
Berke brings to light the long-forgotten and under-studied stories
of these women writers and crucially places them in the historical
and contemporary record.
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