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Books > Humanities > History > European history > From 1900 > General
'Barcelona is colour, noise, heat, dust, violent traffic and
quick-moving people. Many of the men carry rifles slung on their
backs...' Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a pioneer of the
International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and commander of
the British Battalion in the bloody Battle of Jarama in February
1937, at which he was wounded. English Captain is Wintringham's own
startling account of his service to the cause of the Spanish
republic. '[Wintringham] was a remarkable man of ideas; the
foremost Marxist expert on warfare, a published poet, a brilliant
propagandist... He was also a man of action who believed that few
things in life could be achieved unless you were prepared to fight
for them.' Hugh Purcell, History Today
This book examines the relations between the Vatican and the
Fascist regime in Italy, 1929-1932.
This book, which consists of essays by leading scholars in the
field of twentieth century international history, examines the
wider context of one of the most bitter and bloody civil wars in
European history - the Spanish Civil War. The chapters discuss all
of the major debates that surround the ideological and political
context of the war, including the extent to which it could be
regarded as a 'dress rehearsal' for the Second World War. The book
also debates the nature of civil war in the twentieth century and
as such will be of interest to military and international
historians as well as to historians of the history of ideas.
For this book a distinguished team of economists and historians--R.
W. Davies, Paul R. Gregory, Andrei Markevich, Mikhail Mukhin,
Andrei Sokolov, and Mark Harrison--scoured formerly closed Soviet
archives to discover how Stalin used rubles to make guns. Focusing
on various aspects of the defense industry, a top-secret branch of
the Soviet economy, the volume's contributors uncover new
information on the inner workings of Stalin's dictatorship,
military and economic planning, and the industrial organization of
the Soviet economy. Previously unknown details about Stalin's
command system come to light, as do fascinating insights into the
relations between Soviet public and private interests. The authors
show that defense was at the core of Stalin's system of rule;
single-minded management of the defense sector helped him keep his
grip on power.
In response to Soviet advances in science and engineering education, the country’s top scientists with the support of the federal government in 1956 launched an unprecedented program to reform pre-college science education in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, John Rudolph traces the origins of two of the leading projects in this movement in high school physics and biology. Rudolph describes how the scientists directing these projects drew on their wartime experiences in weapons development and defense consultation to guide their foray into the field of education and he reveals how the broader social and political conditions of the 1950s Cold War America fundamentally shaped the nature of the course materials they eventually produced.
It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black
Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are
virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a
regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells
the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with
Important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt
centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also
provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing
two Black German subjects for her book. In the end the author comes
face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship
between the history of Black Germans and those of other black
communities? The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans
essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be
black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone
with non-German blood as raclally impure at best.
The age of nationalism has often been declared a bygone era. But it
is by far not at its end. In the years 1990-1993, more nation
states than ever before came into being within a short period of
time 15 hybrid ethno-national states and three fragile states of
federated nations. Since then, of the latter, the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia fell apart and the other two are imperiled by
ethno-national movements. State and ethnic nationalism have
combined in each country in curious forms, allowing for a gradual
national consciousness, which aims at multinational federalism or
national autonomy as an alternative to national secession. In this
volume, authors from the East and the West discuss the results of
many years of research on nationalism, as well as the new
approaches to the understanding of a nation. In addition, the
failure of the multinational states the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia,
the partial national state German Democratic Republic, and
presumably also Bosnia and Herzegovina are analyzed. After the
breakdown of the multinational states and the polyethnic empires
some decades ago, the question is raised: Will an integrated
European Union succeed in finding an adequate answer to nationalism
and the nationalities problem?
The twentieth-century history of few countries has been so
profoundly marked by breaks, discontinuities, and ruptures as has
Germany's--the radical breaks between the Wilhelmine empire, the
Weimar Republic, and the National Socialist period; the "end of
history" in 1945 and the dual reconstruction from "Year Zero,"
followed by the reunification of post-1989 German. This special
issue of "South Atlantic Quarterly" focuses on the many dimensions
of these discontinuities--social, political, cultural, aesthetic,
psychological, and physical--as well as the continuities that are
equally, if less apparently, implied by them.
The contributions presented here include Fredric Jameson's
"Ramblings in Old Berlin," Gunter Grass's "Lonesome Capitalism,"
and Peter Weiss's "Aesthetics of Resistance." Among the topics
discussed in the volume are the debate over Holocaust memorials in
Germany and the significance of their connections to the German
past, the problematic continuity that identifies the new unified
Germany with the former Federal Republic; the dangers to women
posed by the neoliberal project; the legacy of the avant-garde in
today's media theory; "Ars nova" and "Doktor Faustus;" nostalgia
for the old German Democratic Republic; and reflections on
traumatic memory and history as trauma.
"Contributors. "Ulrich Baer, Michael Geyer, Gunter Grass, Frigga
Haug, Julia Hell, Fredric Jameson, Juliet Koss, Andreas Michel,
Martin Morris, Arkady Plotnitsky, Pierra Vidal-Naquet, Peter Weiss,
James E. Young
This work addresses a central but often ignored question in the
history of modern France and modern colonialism: how did the Third
Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values,
allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal
of a civilizing ideology with distinct racist overtones? By
focusing on a particular group of colonial officials in a specific
setting the governors general of French West Africa from 1895 to
1930 the author argues that the ideal of a special civilizing
mission had a decisive impact on colonial policymaking and on the
evolution of modern French republicanism generally. French ideas of
civilization simultaneously republican, racist, and modern
encouraged the governors general in the 1890 s to attack such
feudal African institutions as aristocratic rule and slavery in
ways that referred back to France s own experience of revolutionary
change. Ironically, local administrators in the 1920 s also invoked
these same ideas to justify such reactionary policies as the
reintroduction of forced labor, arguing that coercion, which
inculcated a work ethic in the lazy African, legitimized his loss
of freedom. By constantly invoking the ideas of civilization,
colonial policy makers in Dakar and Paris managed to obscure the
fundamental contradictions between the rights of man guaranteed in
a republican democracy and the forcible acquisition of an empire
that violates those rights.
Did Fascism have a significant following in France in the 1930s?
Were its supporters predominantly from the political right or left?
This book, in conjunction with its predecessor, "French Fascism:
The First Wave, 1924-33", argues the notion that Fascism never took
hold in France. Robert Soucy argues that France has a long-standing
Fascist tradition, one that arose more from counter-revolutionary
forces on the right than from forces on the left. Analyzing Fascist
"double-talk", Soucy underscores the social and economic
conservatism of such mass movements as Francisme, the Solidarite
Francaise, the Parti Populaire Francais, and the Croix de Feu - as
well as the ideological and membership crossovers between them.
Examining police reports of the era, he penetrates beneath the
"socialist" rhetoric of these movements and describes their
financial backing from the steel and electricity industries and the
middle- and lower-middle-class constituencies (rather than workers)
who provided most of their recruits. Soucy investigates why
thousands of French men and women found Fascist ideas attractive
during this period and what fuelled the more authoritarian and
brutal aspects of French Fascism. According to Soucy, these
tendencies (seen most recently in the right-wing activity of
Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front) periodically emerge from
perceived threats from "alien" elements in French society - whether
they be communists, socialists, immigrants, Jews, feminists,
hedonists, democrats or liberals "soft" on Marxism and secularism.
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