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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > General
The third and final volume of Kevin Morgan's widely acclaimed
series Bolshevism and the British Left centres around the figure of
Alf Purcell (1872-1935), who between the wars was one of the
leading personalities in the British and international labour
movement. A long-term member of the TUC General Council, Purcell
became chairman of the general strike committee in 1926 - and this
could have been his hour of glory. But when it was called off
ignominiously he experienced the obloquy of defeat. Purcell was
most famous as one of TUC 'lefts' of the 1920s. But he was also
Labour MP for both the Forest of Dean and Coventry, as well as
being the founder of a working guild in the spirit of guild
socialism, the controversial president of the International
Federation of Trade Unions and the man who moved the formation of
the British communist party. A sometime syndicalist and associate
of Tom Mann, his experiences in the militant Furnishing Trades gave
rise to the uncompromising trade-union internationalism which
features so centrally in these chapters. But with the squeezing of
his syndicalist approach, as the labour movement polarised into
Labour and communist currents, Purcell died a politically broken
figure. Morgan also deploys the life of Purcell as a biographical
lens, a way of exploring wider controversies - among them the rival
modernities of Bolshevism and Americanism; the reactions to
Bolshevism of anarchists like Emma Goldman (who called Purcell
'that damn fake'); and the roots of political tourism to the USSR
in the British labour delegations in which Purcell featured so
prominently. The volume also includes a major challenge to existing
interpretations of the general strike, which it compellingly
presents, not as the last fling of the syndicalists, but as a first
and disastrously ill-conceived imposition of social-democratic
centralism by Ernest Bevin.
Incorporating a wide range of visual and translated written
sources, The Modern Spain Sourcebook documents Spain's history from
the Enlightenment to the present. The book is thematically arranged
and includes six key primary sources on ten significant areas of
Spanish history, including the arts, work, education, religion,
politics, sexuality and empire. As well as the book's overarching
introduction, there are theme-specific introductions and vital
historical context sections provided for the sources that are
presented. There are also useful suggested analytical questions and
helpful web link lists included throughout. The Modern Spain
Sourcebook covers political and economic history, but moves beyond
this to provide a more complete picture of Spanish history through
the sources selected with gender history, social history and
cultural history coming to the fore. This is a crucial text
containing a vital trove of primary material for all students of
Spain and its history.
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, dazzled with its
new rainbow-colored electric lights. It showcased an array of
wonders, like daredevils attempting to go over Niagara Falls in a
barrel, or the "Animal King" putting the smallest woman in the
world and also terrifying animals on display. But the
thrill-seeking spectators little suspected that an assassin walked
the fairgrounds, waiting for President William McKinley to arrive.
In Margaret Creighton's hands, the result is "a persuasive case
that the fair was a microcosm of some momentous facets of the
United States, good and bad, at the onset of the American Century"
(Howard Schneider, Wall Street Journal).
In this succinct one-volume account of the rise and fall of the
English press, Jeremy Black traces the medium's history from the
emergence of the country's newspaper industry to the Internet age.
The English Press focuses on the major developments in the world of
print journalism and sets the history of the press in wider
currents of English history, political, social, economic and
technological. Black takes the reader through a chronological
sequence of chapters, with a final chapter exploring possible
scenarios for the future of print media. He investigates whether we
are witnessing the demise or simply a crisis of the press in the
aftermath of the News of the World scandal and Levinson Inquiry. A
new title by one of the most eminent historians of Britain and a
leading expert on the history of the press, The English Press will
appeal to undergraduate students of British and media history and
journalism, as well as to the general reader with an interest in
the history of England and the media.
In this revised edition of A Short History of the Spanish Civil
War, Julian Casanova tells the gripping story of the Spanish Civil
War. Written in elegant and accessible prose, the book charts the
most significant events and battles alongside the main players in
the tragedy. Casanova provides answers to some of the pressing
questions (such as the roots and extent of anticlerical violence)
that have been asked in the 70 years that have passed since the
painful defeat of the Second Republic. Now with a revised
introduction, Casanova offers an overview of recent
historiographical shifts; not least the wielding of the conflict to
political ends in certain strands of contemporary historiography
towards an alarming neo- Francoist revisionism. It is the ideal
introduction to the Spanish Civil War.
This multi-disciplinary volume is one of the few collections about
social change covering various cases of mass violence and genocide.
In life under persecution, social relations and social structures
were not absent and not simply replaced by an ethno-racial order.
The studies in this book show the influence of social structures
like gender, age and class on life under persecution. Exploring
practices in family and labor relations and of collective action,
they counter claims of an atomization of society or total
uprootedness of victims. Despite being exposed to poverty and want
and under the permanent threat of political violence, persecuted
people tried to develop their own agency. Case studies are about
the Jewish and Armenian persecutions, Rwanda, the war of
decolonization in Mozambique and civilian refuges in Belarus during
World War II. The authors are a mix of experienced scholars and
young researchers.
The accepted narrative of the interwar U.S. Navy is one of
transformation from a battle-centric force into a force that could
fight on the ""three planes"" of war: in the skies, on the water,
and under the waves. The political and cultural tumult that
accompanied this transformation is another story. Ryan D. Wadle's
Selling Sea Power explores this little-known but critically
important aspect of naval history. After World War I, the U.S. Navy
faced numerous challenges: a call for naval arms limitation, the
ascendancy of air power, and budgetary constraints exacerbated by
the Great Depression. Selling Sea Power tells the story of how the
navy met these challenges by engaging in protracted public
relations campaigns at a time when the means and methods of
reaching the American public were undergoing dramatic shifts. While
printed media continued to thrive, the rapidly growing film and
radio industries presented new means by which the navy could
connect with politicians and the public. Deftly capturing the
institutional nuances and the personalities in play, Wadle tracks
the U.S. Navy's at first awkward but ultimately successful
manipulation of mass media. At the same time, he analyzes what the
public could actually see of the service in the variety of media
available to them, including visual examples from progressively
more sophisticated - and effective - public relations campaigns.
Integrating military policy and strategy with the history of
American culture and politics, Selling Sea Power offers a unique
look at the complex links between the evolution of the art and
industry of persuasion and the growth of the modern U.S. Navy, as
well as the connections between the workings of communications and
public relations and the command of military and political power.
Before the First World War there existed an intellectual turmoil in
Britain as great as any in Germany, France or Russia, as the
debates over Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early
modernism reveal. With the rise of fascism after 1918, these
debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist
philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviours from bourgeois
decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of
barbarism. Breeding Superman looks at several of the leading
Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished
belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested
in race. The result is a study of radical ideas which are
conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture
of the period.
How many lives can one man save? Never enough, Horton realized. As
his ship backed away from Smyrna's wharf, he could better see the
helpless, teeming crowd on the waterfront trapped between the sea
and a raging inferno. He was not consoled by rescuing his shipload
of refugees, nor by the many other Christian, Jewish, and Muslim
lives he had saved during his service as American consul. His focus
was on the people before him threatened with fire, rape, and
massacre. Their persecution, he later said, made him ashamed he
"belonged to the human race." Helping them would not be easy,
however. His superiors were blocking humanitarian aid and covering
up atrocities with fake news and disinformation to win Turkish
approval for American access to oil. When Horton decried their
duplicity and hard-heartedness, they conspired to destroy his
reputation. Undaunted, Horton pursued his cause until it went to
the President and then Congress for decisions that would set the
course for America's emergence as a world power. At stake was the
outcome of WWI, the stability and liberality of the Middle East,
and the likelihood of more genocide.
The early 20th-century world experienced a growth in international
cooperation. Yet the dominant historical view of the period has
long been one of national, military, and social divisions rather
than connections. International Cooperation in the Early Twentieth
Century revises this historical consensus by providing a more
focused and detailed analysis of the many ways in which people
interacted with each other across borders in the early decades of
the 20th century. It devotes particular attention to private and
non-governmental actors. Daniel Gorman focuses on international
cooperation, international social movements, various forms of
cultural internationalism, imperial and anti-imperial
internationalism, and the growth of cosmopolitan ideas. The book
incorporates a non-Western focus alongside the transatlantic core
of early 20th-century internationalism. It interweaves analyses of
international anti-colonial networks, ideas emanating from
non-Western sites of influence such as Japan, China and Turkey, the
emergence of networks of international indigenous peoples in
resistance to a state-centric international system, and diaspora
and transnational ethno-cultural-religious identity networks.
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