The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the emergence of a controversial school of Russian thinkers, led by the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov and united in the conviction that humanity was entering a new stage of evolution in which it must assume a new, active, managerial role in the cosmos. In the first account in English of this fascinating tradition, George M. Young offers a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the lives and ideas of the Russian Cosmists.
Suppressed during the Soviet period and little noticed in the West, the ideas of the Cosmists have in recent decades been rediscovered and embraced by many Russian intellectuals and are now recognized as essential to a native Russian cultural and intellectual tradition. Although they were scientists, theologians, and philosophers, the Cosmists addressed topics traditionally confined to occult and esoteric literature. Major themes include the indefinite extension of the human life span to establish universal immortality; the restoration of life to the dead; the reconstitution of the human organism to enable future generations to live beyond earth; the regulation of nature to bring all manifestations of blind natural force under rational human control; the transition of our biosphere into a "noosphere," with a sheath of mental activity surrounding the planet; the effect of cosmic rays and currently unrecognized particles of energy on human history; practical steps toward the reversal and eventual human control over the flow of time; and the virtues of human androgyny, autotrophy, and invisibility.
The Russian Cosmists is a crucial contribution to scholarship concerning Russian intellectual history, the future of technology, and the history of western esotericism.

This invaluable work traces the role of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, the core group of Himmler's murder units involved in the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," during and immediately after the German campaign in Poland in 1939. In addition to relevant Einsatzgruppen reports, the book includes key documents from other sources, especially eyewitness accounts from victims or onlookers. Such accounts provide an alternative, often much more realistic, perspective on the nature and consequences of the actions previously known only through documentation generated by the perpetrators. With carefully selected primary sources contextualized by the authors' clear narrative, this work fills an important gap in our understanding of a crucial period in the evolution of policies directed against Jews, Poles, and others deemed dangerous or inferior by the Third Reich. Supplemented by maps and photographs, this book will be an essential reference and research tool.

This book aims to study the departure and reception of refugees in 19th-century Europe, from the Congress of Vienna to the 1870-1880s. Through eight chapters, it draws on a transnational approach to analyze migratory movements across European borders. The book reviews the chronology of exile and shows how European states welcomed, selected, and expelled refugees. In addition to presenting the point of view of nation-states, it reflects the experience of those migrating. The book addresses departure into exile, captured through the material circumstances of crossing borders in the 19th century, and examines the emergence of new ways to pursue political commitments from abroad. The outcasts are considered in all their diversity, with a prominent place accorded to women and children, many of whom also moved under duress. The book aims to shed light on the forced migrations of Europeans across Europe, while also considering the global dimension, looking at exile to the Americas or the French colonies. A final chapter examines the impossibility or difficulty of returning from exile to one's country of origin, as well as the a posteriori memorial constructs around that crucial experience.

This book explores the historiography, ports, and peoples of the Persian Gulf over the past two centuries, offering a more inclusive history of the region than previously available. Restoring the history of minority communities which until now have been silenced, the book provides a corrective to the 'official story' put forward by modern states.

Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper was a former slave who rose to become the first African American graduate of West Point. While serving as commissary officer at Fort Davis, Texas, in 1881, he was charged with embezzlement and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. A court-martial board acquitted Flipper of the embezzlement charge but convicted him of conduct unbecoming. He was then dismissed from the service of the United States. The Flipper case became known as something of an American Dreyfus Affair, emblematic of racism in the frontier army. Because of Flipper's efforts to clear his name, many assumed that he had been railroaded because he was black.In The Fall of a Black Army Officer, Charles M. Robinson III challenges that assumption. In this complete revision of his earlier work, The Court-Martial of Lieutenant Henry Flipper, Robinson finds that Flipper was the author of his own problems. The taint of racism on the Flipper affair became so widely accepted that in 1999 President Bill Clinton issued a posthumous pardon for Flipper. The Fall of a Black Army Officer boldly moves the arguments regarding racism--in both Lt. Flipper's case and the frontier army in general--beyond political correctness. Solidly grounded in archival research, it is a thorough and provocative reassessment of the Flipper affair, at last revealing the truth.

In this fascinating book, the planning and building of Yad Vashem, Israel's central and most important institution for commemorating the Holocaust, merits an outstanding in-depth account. Following the development of Yad Vashem since 1942, when the idea to commemorate the Holocaust in Eretz-Israel was raised for the first time, the narrative continues until the inauguration of Nathan Rapoport's Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial in 1976. The prolonged and complicated planning process of Yad Vashem's various monuments reveals the debates, failures and achievements involved in commemorating the Holocaust. In reading this thought-provoking description, one learns how Israel's leaders aspired both to fulfill a moral debt towards the victims of the Holocaust a well as to make Yad Vashem an exclusive center of Holocaust commemoration both in the Jewish world and beyond.

Today, most remember ""California Girl"" Lillian Frances Smith (1871-1930) as Annie Oakley's chief competitor in the small world of the Wild West shows' female shooters. But the two women were quite different: Oakley's conservative ""prairie beauty"" persona clashed with Smith's tendency to wear flashy clothes and keep company with the cowboys and American Indians she performed with. This lively first biography chronicles the Wild West showbiz life that Smith led and explores the talents that made her a star. Drawing on family records, press accounts, interviews, and numerous other sources, historian Julia Bricklin peels away the myths that enshroud Smith's fifty-year career. Known as ""The California Huntress"" before she was ten years old, Smith was a professional sharpshooter by the time she reached her teens, shooting targets from the back of a galloping horse in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West. Not only did Cody offer $10,000 to anyone who could beat her, but he gave her top billing, setting the stage for her rivalry with Annie Oakley. Being the best female sharpshooter in the United States was not enough, however, to differentiate Lillian Smith from Oakley and a growing number of ladylike cowgirls. So Smith reinvented herself as ""Princess Wenona,"" a Sioux with a violent and romantic past. Performing with Cody and other showmen such as Pawnee Bill and the Miller brothers, Smith led a tumultuous private life, eventually taking up the shield of a forged Indian persona. The morals of the time encouraged public criticism of Smith's lack of Victorian femininity, and the press's tendency to play up her rivalry with Oakley eventually overshadowed Smith's own legacy. In the end, as author Julia Bricklin shows, Smith cared more about living her life on her own terms than about her public image. Unlike her competitors who shot to make a living, Lillian Smith lived to shoot.

Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed "Yellow Dirt," "will break your heart. An enormous achievement--literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism--illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we've become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become" ( "The Christian Science Monitor" ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and some babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government, but were told it was a mess too expensive to clean up.
Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning "Los Angeles Times" series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. "Yellow Dirt" is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of neglect and the Navajos' fight for justice.

From the Cold War to the Persian Gulf War, the high drama of America's contemporary foreign policy crises comes to life in this collection of primary documents designed for use by high school and college students. The comprehensive work dramatizes, through memoirs and diaries of the major players as well as key public documents, eight major crises: The Origins of the Cold War, the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49, the Korean War, the Berlin Crises of 1958 and 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-80, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War with Iraq. The selection of documents for each crisis dramatizes the tension between the opposing nations and illuminates the process of decision-making by U.S. policymakers. Meticulously culled from a wide variety of sources and voices, many of the 382 documents are available in no other resource. Following a general introduction on contemporary American foreign relations, each crisis begins with a narrative introduction and chronology of events. The story of each crisis unfolds through chronologically organized documents, each of which is preceded by an explanatory headnote. The section on each crisis concludes with a suggested reading list. Among the variety of voices heard are memoirs and official statements of every president from Truman to Bush, and memoirs, diaries, and reminiscences of key players including General Douglas MacArthur, Dean Acheson, Robert Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Nikita Krushchev, Andrei Gromyko, the Shah of Iran, and Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell. The variety of documents includes government reports and policy statements, private correspondence and memos, laws, speeches, positionstatements of interest groups, treaties and agreements, CIA directives, and interviews with key players. This basic research tool provides students with a rich panoply of voices, viewpoints, and key public documents that illuminate a crucial period in American and world history.

Classrooms and Clinics is the first book-length assessment of the development of public school health policies from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Great Depression. Richard A. Meckel examines the efforts of early twentieth-century child health care advocates and reformers to utilize urban schools to deliver health care services to socioeconomically disadvantaged and medically underserved children in the primary grades. Their goal, Meckel shows, was to improve the children's health and thereby improve their academic performance. Meckel situates these efforts within a larger late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century public discourse relating schools and schooling, especially in cities and towns, to child health. He describes and explains how that discourse and the school hygiene movement it inspired served as critical sites for the constructive negotiation of the nature and extent of the public school's-and by extension the state's-responsibility for protecting and promoting the physical and mental health of the children for whom it was providing a compulsory education. Tracing the evolution of that negotiation through four overlapping stages, Meckel shows how, why, and by whom the health of schoolchildren was discursively constructed as a sociomedical problem and charts and explains the changes that construction underwent over time. He also connects the changes in problem construction to the design and implementation of various interventions and services and evaluates how that design and implementation were affected by the response of the civic, parental, professional, educational, public health, and social welfare groups that considered themselves stakeholders and took part in the discourse. And, most significantly, he examines the responses called forth by the question at the heart of the negotiations: what services are necessitated by the state's and school's taking responsibility for protecting and promoting the health and physical and mental development of schoolchildren. He concludes that the negotiations resulted both in the partial medicalization of American primary education and in the articulation and adoption of a school health policy that accepted the school's responsibility for protecting and promoting the health of its students while largely limiting the services called for to the preventive and educational.

Looking at defining moments in Winston Churchill's life and revealing his key principles, philosophies and decisions, this book will teach you how to think just like Churchill. Remembered for his leadership during the Second World War, Churchill's commitment to 'never surrender', as well as his stirring speeches and radio broadcasts, helped inspire British resistance to the Nazi threat when Britain stood alone against an occupied Europe. As well as a hugely successful politician, Churchill was an officer in the British Army, a journalist, historian and a writer, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. As one of the few voices warning about Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he returned to government to play his part in defeating Nazism, becoming one of the defining figures of the twentieth century. Studying how and why he accomplished what he did, how he overcame personal and professional adversity and stood strong in the face of overwhelming odds, with quotes and passages by and about the great man, you too can learn to think like Churchill. Other books in the series include: How to Think Like Stephen Hawking, How to Think Like Sherlock and How to Think Like Steve Jobs

As the state of America's children and families continues to degenerate, the human services system struggles to render the support it was designed to provide. Despite such efforts, American families have difficulty accessing services; they are forced to navigate an incomprehensible system where quantity is often deemed insufficient and quality is compromised. Simultaneously, expenditures on human services have soared to record levels, further spurring both concerns and efforts to reform and better integrate a sadly dysfunctional system. In the first comprehensive synthesis of the history, theory, and practice of service integration, Sharon Lynn Kagan, with Peter R. Neville, explores why past efforts to reform the human service system have had only isolated triumphs and marginal impact in improving the quality of life for children and families. Tracing the history of human services in America from the colonial period to the present, the author analyzes the underlying assumptions, barriers, and strategies that have characterized the service integration movement. Drawing on history, empirical research, and intellectual theory, as well as on the personal experiences of practitioners and leaders, the author extracts principles and insights that offer new directions for future social service reform. Published in cooperation with the National Center for Service Integration

During and immediately after the First World War, there was a merging of Christian and nationalist traditions of martyrdom, expressed in the design of war cemeteries and war memorials, and the state funeral of the Unknown Warrior in 1920. John Wolffe explores the subsequent development of these traditions of 'sacred' and 'secular' martyrdom, analysing the ways in which they operated - sometimes in parallel, sometimes merged together and sometimes in conflict with each other. Particular topics explored include the Protestant commemoration of Marian and missionary martyrs, and the Roman Catholic campaign for the canonization of the 'saints and martyrs of England'. Secular martyrdom is discussed in relation to military conflicts especially the Second World War and the Falklands. In Ireland there was a particularly persistent merging of sacred and secular martyrdom in the wake of the Easter Rising of 1916 although by the time of the Northern Ireland 'Troubles' in the later twentieth-century these traditions diverged. In covering these themes, the book also offers historical and comparative context for understanding present-day acts of martyrdom in the form of suicide attacks.

Latin eugenics was a scientific, cultural and political programme designed to biologically empower modern European and American nations once commonly described as 'Latin', sharing genealogical, linguistic, religious, and cultural origins. With the emergence of eugenics in the late 19th century, this common cultural and scientific identity became a fundamental component of an internationally influential Latin version of eugenics. Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective offers a comparative, nuanced approach to eugenics as a scientific program as well as a cultural and political phenomenon. It examines the commonalities of eugenics in 'Latin' Europe and Latin America. The book also analyses the component ideas of Latin eugenics, such as Catholic eugenics, population and family policies, maternal and infant health, preventive medicine, social hygiene and public health. As a program to achieve the social and political goals of modern welfare systems, Latin eugenics strongly influenced the complex relationship of the state to the individual.Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources in many languages, this book offers the first history of Latin eugenics in Europe and the Americas.

On the eve of the centennial of the Wright brothers' historic flights at Kitty Hawk, a new generation will learn about the other man who was once hailed worldwide as the conqueror of the air--Alberto Santos-Dumont. Because the Wright brothers worked in secrecy, word of their first flights had not reached Europe when Santos-Dumont took to the skies in 1906. The dashing, impeccably dressed inventor entertained Paris with his airborne antics--barhopping in a little dirigible that he tied to lampposts, circling above crowds around the Eiffel Tower, and crashing into rooftops. A man celebrated, even pursued by the press in Paris, London, and New York, Santos-Dumont dined regularly with the Cartiers, the Rothschilds, and the Roosevelts. But beneath his lively public exterior, Santos-Dumont was a frenzied genius tortured by the weight of his own creation.Wings of Madness chronicles the science and history of early aviation and offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary and tormented man, vividly depicting the sights and sounds of turn-of-the-century Paris. It is a book that will do for aviation what The Man Who Loved Only Numbers did for mathematics.

The landscape of memory studies has been transformed by a growing consciousness of global interconnectedness and the politics of human rights. The essays in this volume of the Mass Dictatorship project explore the entangled pasts of dictatorships, the tensions between de-territorializing and re-territorializing memories, and the competitive construction of memories of the intersubjective past from a world-wide perspective. Written from a variety of differing historical perspectives, cultural positions, and disciplinary backgrounds, the collection searches for historical accountability across the generations of the post-war era.

This book examines genealogies of contagion in between contagion as microbe and contagion as affect. It analyzes how and why hygiene became authoritative and succeeded in becoming a part of the broader social and cultural vocabulary within the colonialist, anti-colonial, as well as modernist discourses.

In 1929, tens of thousands of south eastern Nigerian women rose up against British authority in what is known as the Women's War. This book brings togther, for the first time, the multiple perspectives of the war's colonized and colonial participants and examines its various actions within a single, gendered analytical frame.

A captivating look at a bygone era through the lens of a single, surprisingly momentous American year one century ago. 1908 was the year Henry Ford launched the Model T, the Wright Brothers proved to the world that they had mastered the art of flight, Teddy Roosevelt decided to send American naval warships around the globe, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series (a feat they have never yet repeated), and six automobiles set out on an incredible 20,000 mile race from New York City to Paris via the frozen Bering Strait.

A charming and knowledgeable guide, Rasenberger takes readers back to a time of almost limitless optimism, even in the face of enormous inequality, an era when the majority of Americans believed that the future was bound to be better than the past, that the world's worst problems would eventually be solved, and that nothing at all was impossible. As Thomas Edison succinctly said that year, "Anything, everything is possible."

This pioneering study focuses on an area of Soviet and socialist studies until now largely neglected in the literature: social change. The author contends that while most standard analyses of communist regimes purport to be about social change, they are in fact analyzing economic and political developments rather than transformation in the class structure of society. Because economic and political factors are the least stable, Brucan argues, they are therefore the least explanatory and predictive factors if we are to understand long term trends in the evolution of socialism. Brucan instead explores the social forces at work in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe--classes, professional groups, and so on--tracing the evolution of class and class policy from the time of the 1917 revolution through the present leadership of Gorbachev. Students of international affairs and sociology will find in Brucan's work important new insights into the likely future direction of the world's major communist societies.

Beginning with a detailed historical analysis of class and class policy in the East, Brucan examines issues such as forced collectivization, the new working class, wage policy, the state take-over, and KhruscheV's openings. Turning to a discussion of the relationship between social structure and the scientific-technological revolution, the author shows that communist regimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China have demonstrated a deliberate and systematic pattern of overvaluation of manual work and undervaluation of scientific and technical work--explaining their lack of preparation for rapid scientific and technical change. Brucan relates the historical analysis of social change to questions about whether reforms in the East can be achieved, arguing that no analysis of the East's economic and political history can be fully understood without considering social structure. In the final section, the author addresses the current period of perestroika, suggesting that GorbacheV's real challenge will be to dislodge the current social structure that was consolidated in the late 1970s. He concludes that a new class alignment in socialism has led to a crisis of the communist party itself.

"Advertising in the Age of Persuasion "documents and analyzes the implementation of the American strategy of consumerism during the 1940s and 1950s, and its ongoing ramifications. Beginning with World War II, and girded by the Cold War, American advertisers, brand name corporations, and representatives of the federal government institutionalized a system of consumer capitalism which they called free enterprise. In their system, government and business worked together to create consumer republics, democracies based on the mass consumption of brand name goods using advertising across all major media to sell products and distribute information. Many of the free enterprise evangelists believed it represented the fulfillment of America's god-ordained mission. They envisioned an American lead global consumer order supported by advertising based media where the brand took precedence over the corporation that owned it; and advertising, propaganda and public relations were considered the same thing. To support this system, they created a network and process for disseminating persuasive information that survives into the 21st Century.

Yugoslavia and Political Assassinations is the first book in English to analyse how and why the Yugoslav State Security Service carried out multiple targeted assassinations, over the country's forty-six years of existence, under the pretext of protecting the Yugoslav communist party-state. Offering a detailed history of the programme, from the inception of the State Security Service to the recent trials of individuals involved, it draws on Christian Axboe Nielsen's unique wealth of experience and research as an academic and as an expert witness in numerous criminal trials. The result is a ground-breaking contribution to the history of targeted assassinations, communist history, state security services and related criminal trials.

A collection of new, scholarly articles on the Jewish Workers' Bund - the first modern Jewish political party in Eastern Europe - written by prominent academics from eight countries. This work represents a broad range of perspectives, Jewish and non-Jewish, sympathetic to the Bund and critical of its work. The articles in this volume are fresh, make use of previously unused source material, and provide us with new perspectives on the significance of the Bund and its ideas.