From the moment the United States seized Puerto Rico, in 1898, to the 1950s, the islanders employed various forms of resistance against American colonial rule. Starting in the 1930s a group of Nationalists was determined to free Puerto Rico, by armed struggle if necessary. A Nationalist revolution took full force in 1950. A commando of men and women attacked the governor's residence and assaulted police stations throughout the island. Others attempted to assassinate President Truman In Washington. In 1954, Dolores Lebron led three male companions in an attack on the U.S. House of Representatives in which five congressmen were shot for keeping Puerto Rico in bondage. Massive arrests followed and forty-one women were detained, two of whom were sentenced to life in prison. While the male Nationalists have been celebrated as heroes in Puerto Rico, the women have gone unmentioned This book seeks to rescue the stories of the women who gave up their freedom in the quest to liberate their homeland.

Hitler's autobahn was more than just the pet project of an infrastructure-friendly dictator. It was supposed to revolutionize the transportation sector in Germany, connect the metropoles with the countryside, and encourage motorization. The propaganda machinery of the Third Reich turned the autobahn into a hyped-up icon of the dictatorship. One of the claims was that the roads would reconcile nature and technology. Rather than destroying the environment, they would embellish the landscape. Many historians have taken this claim at face value and concluded that the Nazi regime harbored an inbred love of nature. In this book, the author argues that such conclusions are misleading. Based on rich archival research, the book provides the first scholarly account of the landscape of the autobahn.

Thomas Zeller is an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he teaches the history of technology, environmental history, and science and technology studies. He is the author of Strasse, Bahn, Panorama (2002) and has co-edited the volumes How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (2005), Germany's Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (2005), The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe (2008) and Rivers in History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America (2008). His current research project, consuming Landscapes, has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and the Program in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

Dylan Riley reconceptualizes the nature and origins of interwar fascism in this remarkable investigation of the connection between civil society and authoritarianism.

From the late nineteenth century to World War I, voluntary associations exploded across Europe, especially among rural non-elites. But the development of this "civil society" did not produce liberal democracy in Italy, Spain, and Romania. Instead, Riley finds that it undermined the nascent liberal regimes in these countries and was a central cause of the rise of fascism. Developing an original synthesis of Gramsci and Tocqueville, Riley explains this surprising outcome by arguing that the development of political organizations in the three nations failed to keep pace with the proliferation of voluntary associations, leading to a crisis of political representation to which fascism developed as a response. His argument shows how different forms of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania arose in response to the divergent paths taken by civil society development in each nation.

Presenting the seemingly paradoxical argument that the rapid development of civil society facilitated the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania, Riley credibly challenges the notion that a strong civil society necessarily leads to the development of liberal democracy. Scholars and students interested in debates about the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, democratization, civil society, and comparative and historical methods will find his arguments compelling and his conclusions challenging.

This book is a comprehensive reconstruction of the successful attempt by rural professionals in late imperial Russia to engage peasants in a common public sphere. Covers a range of aspects, from personal income and the dynamics of the job market to ideological conflicts and psychological transformation. Based on hundreds of individual life stories.

British knowledge about China changed fundamentally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating these changes in British understanding as if Anglo-Sino relations were purely bilateral, this study looks at how British imperial networks in India and Southeast Asia were critical mediators in the British encounter of China.

In spite of having been short-lived, "Weimar" has never lost its fascination. Until recently the Weimar Republic's place in German history was primarily defined by its catastrophic beginning and end - Germany's defeat in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933; its history seen mainly in terms of politics and as an arena of flawed decisions and failed compromises. However, a flourishing of interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture is uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption. This collection offers new perspectives from leading scholars in the disciplines of history, art history, film studies, and German studies on the vibrant political culture of Germany in the 1920s. From the traumatic ruptures of defeat, revolution, and collapse of the Kaiser's state, the visionaries of Weimar went on to invent a republic, calling forth new citizens and cultural innovations that shaped the republic far beyond the realms of parliaments and political parties.

Kathleen Canning is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, Women's Studies, and German at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914 (2nd ed., University of Michigan Press 2002) and Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Cornell University Press 2006). She is currently a board member of Central European History and the Journal of Modern History.

Kerstin Barndt is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Sentiment und Sachlichkeit. Der Roman der Neuen Frau in der Weimarer Republik (Bohlau 2004) and several articles on German modernism, gender theory, and the history of reading. Her current book project Exhibition Time. History, Memory, and Aesthetics in Germany focuses on contemporary exhibition culture against the backdrop of national unifi cation, migration, and deindustrialization.

Kristin McGuire is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan and co-Director of the Global Feminisms Project based at the University of Michigan. She is the co-author of Global Feminisms through a Virtual Archive (SIGNS 2010). She is currently working on a book manuscript, Activism, Intimacy and Selfhood which offers a comparative historical analysis of women activists in Germany and Poland from 1890-1918; and co-editing a volume of translated essays entitled Women on Nietzsche, Gender, and Sexuality: An Anthology of European Women's Writings, 1880-1920. Cover image: Marianne Brandt, Es wird marschiert (1928)"

The book examines the history of Czechoslovakia in the seventy years since its founding by T.G.Masaryk. It analyses the profound changes which took place during the First Republic, the Nazi occupation, postwar liberation and communist rule, including both the Stalinist years, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the subsequent period of normalization to 1988 .

Red Arctic tells the history of Stalinist Russia's massive campaign to explore and develop its Northern territories during the 1930s. McCannon tells the dramatic stories of the polar expeditions - conducted by foot, ship, and plane - which were the pride of Stalinist Russia, to expose the reality behind them: chaotic blunders, bureaucratic competition, and the eventual rise of the GULAG as the dominant force in the North. Dramatic stories of the first polar explorations, the record-breaking flights and rescues by both foot and ice-breaker. First examination of the Stalinist creation of the myth of the arctic in the face of the rise of the GULAG.

Sexual revolutions have transformed American culture, society, and politics-not to mention individual lives-throughout the twentieth century. Sex radicals challenged Victorian restraint and championed sexual liberation. In the process, they confronted a tightly knit web of legal restrictions on sexual expression and conduct designed to keep sex out of the public realm and to allow public officials to police sex in private spaces. The American Civil Liberties Union has stood at the center of these battles, using the Constitution to create an expansive body of sexual rights that helped lay the old order to rest. How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is the first book to show how ACLU leaders and attorneys forged legal principles that advanced the sexual revolution. It explains how, why, and to what effect ACLU activists developed and revised their own policies, adopted sexual expression and practice as civil liberties, persuaded courts to do the same, and joined with commercial media and others to promote these understandings of sexuality to a broader public. Through its influence over public discourse as well as law, the ACLU helped to establish a liberal, rights-based sexual ethos in the United States. It played a prominent role in nearly every major court decision related to sexuality and also reached beyond the courtroom to promote its agenda through grassroots activism, political action, advertising campaigns, and public education. Thanks to its work, abortion and birth control are legal, coerced sterilization is rare, sexually explicit material is readily available, and gay rights are becoming a reality. Using rich archival sources and interviews with major players, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty tells the story of the men and women who built the legal foundation for the sexual revolution. It explores how private lives shaped approaches to public policy and illuminates the importance of debates among activists-as well as between activists and their opponents-in shaping what we now consider to be our sexual rights. A story of tragedy as well as of triumph, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty shows how the ACLU helped to create our polarized sexual culture by collapsing old distinctions between public and private and privileging access to sexual expression over protection from it. Realizing how the result-a culture saturated with sex and a citizenry armed with sexual rights-liberates and also limits our sexual choices could help to transform fights over rights into productive conversations about how to shape the public world we share.

From the Fashoda incident in 1898 to the current Blair-Jospin "entente," this book reviews one century of Franco-British relations. Friend or foe? Partner or rival? Model or counter-model? The two countries have continually wavered between two extremes. Yet, these essays show they have always had more things in common than suspected in the first place, and there has always been a strong case for cooperation.

France and the Nazi Menace examines the French response to the challenge posed by National Socialist Germany in the years 1933-1939. Jackson argues that the German threat was far from the only challenge facing French national leaders in an era of economic depression and profound ideological discord. Only after the national humiliation at the Munich Conference did the threat from Nazi Germany take precedence over France's internal problems in the making of policy.

Lenin's politics continue to reverberate around the world even after the end of the USSR. His name elicits revulsion and reverence, yet Lenin the man remains largely a mystery. This biography shows us Lenin as we have never seen him, in his full complexity as revolutionary, political leader, thinker, and private person.

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, the son of a schools inspector and a doctor's daughter, Lenin was to become the greatest single force in the Soviet revolution--and perhaps the most influential politician of the twentieth century. Drawing on sources only recently discovered, Robert Service explores the social, cultural, and political catalysts for Lenin's explosion into global prominence. His book gives us the vast panorama of Russia in that awesome vortex of change from tsarism's collapse to the establishment of the communist one-party state. Through the prism of Lenin's career, Service focuses on dictatorship, the Marxist revolutionary dream, civil war, and interwar European politics. And we are shown how Lenin, despite the hardships he inflicted, was widely mourned upon his death in 1924.

Service's Lenin is a political colossus but also a believable human being. This biography stresses the importance of his supportive family and of its ethnic and cultural background. The author examines his education, upbringing, and the troubles of his early life to explain the emergence of a rebel whose devotion to destruction proved greater than his love for the "proletariat" he supposedly served. We see how his intellectual preoccupations and inner rage underwent volatile interaction and propelled his career from young Marxist activist to founder of the communistparty and the Soviet state--and how he bequeathed to Russia a legacy of political oppression and social intimidation that has yet to be expunged.

"As well as being physical journeys, they were explorations and reworkings, through travel, of the writers' own sense of Italian and Fascist identity. Indeed, one of the most interesting suggestions of this original and important book is that the identity of Fascist Italy was built out of comparisons with other places...a fascinating book on Italian travel writing of the Fascist period." . Times Literary Supplement

..".this is a highly recommended book for those wishing to expand their knowledge of the cultural and political roles of travel writing, as well as the perceptions, ambitions, inconsistencies, contradictions and areas of ambiguity prevailing among Italian elites under Fascism." . Journal of Contemporary European Studies

" a]smoothly written, thoughtful study" . H-Net

..".a sophisticated and very well researched study that] makes a significant contribution to the growing corpus of studies of fascist culture and of the often subtle and varied ways in which the regime's goals and messages were transmitted to the general public. It is well organized and well written and is intelligently structured." . Christopher Duggan, University of Reading

During the twenty years of Mussolini's rule a huge number of travel texts were written of journeys made during the interwar period to the sacred sites of Fascist Italy, Mussolini's newly conquered African empire, Spain during the Civil War, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and the America of the New Deal. Examining these observations by writers and journalists, the author throws new light on the evolving ideology of Fascism, how it was experienced and propagated by prominent figures of the time; how the regime created a utopian vision of the Roman past and the imperial future; and how it interpreted the attractions and dangers of other totalitarian cultures.

The book helps gain a better understanding of the evolving concepts of imperialism, which were at the heart of Italian Fascism, and thus shows that travel writing can offer an important contribution to historical analysis.

Charles Burdett, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, specializes on Italian culture under Fascism. He is the author of Vincenzo Cardarelli and his Contemporaries (Oxford University Press, 1999). He is the editor with Claire Gorrara and Helmut Peitsch of European Memories of the Second World War (Berghahn Books, 1999) and with Derek Duncan, of Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing of the 1930s (Berghahn Books, 2002)."

Enforced disarmament has often been ignored by historians, diplomats, and strategic analaysts. Yet the democracies have imposed some measure of disarmament on their enemies after every major victory since 1815. In many cases, forced disarmament was one of the most important, if not the most important, of their war aims. The demilitarization of Germany and Japan, for example, was one of the most significant post-war measures agreed by the Soviet Union, Britain, and the USA in 1945, whilst the debate on the disarmament measures imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War continues to rage. The efficacy and durability of enforced disarmament measures, and the resistance they are likely to encounter are thus issues of central strategic and political importance. Philip Towle examines the most important peace settlements from the time of Napoleon to Saddam Hussein, in the first major history of this fascinating subject.

An engrossing account of the city where Nazism took root, the place that put Hitler on the road to power.

The capital of the Nazi movement was not Berlin but Munich. So said the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, of this handsome Bavarian town on the banks of the Isar River. Why did Nazism flourish in the "Athens of the Isar"?

In exploring this question David Clay Large begins in Munich's "golden age," the four decades before World War I when its culture generated some of the outstanding works of the modernist spirit. But here he finds a dark side, a proto-fascist cultural heritage that proved fertile soil for Hitler's movement. From the violent experience of the Munich Soviet in 1918-19 through Hitler's failed Beer-Hall Putsch of 1923 and on to his appointment as German chancellor in 1933, Large weaves a harrowing narrative of the rise of Nazism. As he did in his previous book, Between Two Fires: Europe's Path in the 1930s (Norton), Large succeeds here in "putting the story back into history for these dreadful years" (Choice).

"David Clay Large knows how to write. . . . He has a sense of drama equal to that of another popular historian, William Manchester."—Frank J. Prial, New York Times Book Review

This book investigates the significance of historical narratives in Soviet and post-Soviet space. Encompassing reform under Mikhail Gorbachev and retrenchment under Vladimir Putin, it explains the political, social, and cultural importance of a polity's myths. Charting the rise of anti-Soviet and anti-communist narratives under perestroika, and their eventual marginalization in post-Soviet Russia, the book argues that changes in symbolic politics must be examined within cultural, socio-political, and international contexts. Of particular relevance is the interactive relationship between state and society. The study of historical discourse must focus not only on how and why the state imposes its discursive preferences on society, thereby shaping public memory, but also on why and how the state itself is constructed by prevailing narratives in society.

China and Taiwan have similar political cultures. However, the Chinese intellectual and political elite have failed to democratize the Middle Kingdom since the 4 May 1919 Movement; whilst their Taiwanese counterpart succeeded in making the island state fairly democratic in just over four decades since the 28 February 1947 Uprising.;After an examination of the approaches they applied, the author finds that the former have pursued a culturalist route by trying to change the psycho-cultural make-up of the Chinese people. Conversely, Taiwan followed an institutional road in which they tried to win elections and to set up political organizations, such as parties.

Although the years 1921-48 saw a gradual strengthening of the so-called 'special relationship' between the United States and Great Britain, anglophobia remained a potent force in American political life throughout that period. In Twisting the Lion's Tail , John E. Moser examines this phenomenon, showing how traditional American images of King George III and the redcoats were revived by immigrants, farmers and other groups hoping to advance an anti-British agenda.

On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Burgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Burgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

Drawing on secret and therefore candid coded telegraphs exchanged between Communist Party leaders around the world and their overseers at the Communist International (Comintern) headquarters in Moscow, this book uncovers key aspects of the history of the Comintern and its significant role in the Stalinist ruling system during the years 1933 to 1943. New information on aspects of the People's Front in France, civil wars in Spain and China, World War II, and the extent of the Comintern's cooperation with Soviet intelligence is brought to light through these archival records, never examined before.

The study of welfare can illuminate debate about many themes in modern Italian history - the question of the success or failure of nation-building, the question of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the state, the question of continuity and discontinuity from liberalism to fascism, and the question of the actual impact of fascist rule on Italian society. This book aims to contribute to scholarship on the social history of modern Italy by examining welfare thinking and policies from the nineteenth century to the fascist period.

The exodus of refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s has received far more attention from historians, social scientists, and demographers than many other migrations and persecutions in Europe. However, as a result of the overwhelming attention that has been given to the Holocaust within the historiography of Europe and the Second World War, the issues surrounding the flight of people from Nazi Germany prior to 1939 have been seen as Vorgeschichte (pre-history), implicating the Western European democracies and the United States as bystanders only in the impending tragedy. Based on a comparative analysis of national case studies, this volume deals with the challenges that the pre-1939 movement of refugees from Germany and Austria posed to the immigration controls in the countries of interwar Europe. Although Europe takes center-stage, this volume also looks beyond, to the Middle East, Asia and America. This global perspective outlines the constraints under which European policy makers (and the refugees) had to make decisions. By also considering the social implications of policies that became increasingly protectionist and nationalistic, and bringing into focus the similarities and differences between European liberal states in admitting the refugees, it offers an important contribution to the wider field of research on political and administrative practices.

Frank Caestecker read history at the University of Ghent and worked as an eligibility officer for UNHCR and the Belgian asylum institution. He completed his graduate studies at the European University Institute in Florence and is now affiliated to the University of Ghent and the University College Ghent, focusing his research on alien policy in the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries and the influence this policy has on migration dynamics.

Bob Moore is Professor of Twentieth-Century European History at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively on the History of the Second World War, and specifically on the Holocaust, the Netherlands, and Prisoners of War. He is currently completing a book about the rescuers of Jews in Western Europe during the Nazi occupation.

Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire provides the first wide-ranging environmental history of the heyday of European imperialism, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the colonial era. It focuses on the ecological dimensions of the explosive growth of tropical commodity production, global trade, and modern resource management-transformations that still visibly shape our world today-and how they were related to broader social, cultural, and political developments in Europe's colonies. Covering the overseas empires of all the major European powers, Corey Ross argues that tropical environments were not merely a stage on which conquest and subjugation took place, but were an essential part of the colonial project, profoundly shaping the imperial enterprise even as they were shaped by it. The story he tells is not only about the complexities of human experience, but also about people's relationship with the ecosystems in which they were themselves embedded: the soil, water, plants, and animals that were likewise a part of Europe's empire. Although it shows that imperial conquest rarely represented a sudden bout of ecological devastation, it nonetheless demonstrates that modern imperialism marked a decisive and largely negative milestone for the natural environment. By relating the expansion of modern empire, global trade, and mass consumption to the momentous ecological shifts that they entailed, this book provides a historical perspective on the vital nexus of social, political, and environmental issues that we face in the twenty-first-century world.

For decades after the Second World War, historians and writers depicted cultural life in Germany's Weimar Republic (1919-1933) as an unstable mixture of avant-garde experimentation, decadence, and proto-fascist tendencies. Their limited definition of "culture" as a canon of works by elites hindered the study of everyday cultural forms. A younger generation of scholars now takes the broad view of culture as not merely the work of elite artists and intellectuals, but as constructed in everyday practice and thorough popular participation. This is the first book to offer an accessible cross-section of these "new cultural history" approaches to the Weimar Republic. The essays in this volume recover the everyday by focusing on visual and political culture, transnational currents in the mass media, and the intense popular interest in sports, health, and nature. "Weimar Culture Revisited" attests to the extraordinarily multi-faceted nature of democracy in interwar Germany.