In August 1906, black soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas, were accused of going on a lawless rampage in which shots were fired, one man was killed, and another wounded. Because the perpetrators could never be positively identified, President Theodore Roosevelt took the highly unusual step of discharging without honor all one hundred sixty-seven members of the black battalion on duty the night of the shooting. This book investigates the controversial action of an otherwise much-lauded president, the challenge to his decision from a senator of his own party, and the way in which Roosevelt's uncompromising stance affected African American support of the party of Lincoln. Using primary sources to reconstruct the events, attorney Harry Lembeck begins at the end when Senator Joseph Foraker is honored by the black community in Washington, DC, for his efforts to reverse Roosevelt's decision. Lembeck highlights Foraker's courageous resistance to his own president. In addition, he examines the larger context of racism in the era of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, pointing out that Roosevelt treated discrimination against the Japanese in the West much differently. He also notes often-ignored evidence concerning the role of Roosevelt's illegitimate cousin in the president's decision, the possibility that Foraker and Roosevelt had discussed a compromise, and other hitherto overlooked facts about the case. Sixty-seven years after the event, President Richard Nixon finally undid Roosevelt's action by honorably discharging the men of the Brownsville Battalion. But, as this thoroughly researched and engrossing narrative shows, the damage done to both Roosevelt's reputation and black support for the Republican Party lingers to this day.

Forming minorities in five adjacent countries for 74 years, Kurds have been fighting for independence or autonomy against governments reluctant to accede either. The Kurdish saga is one of periodic insurrections, partial victories, misfortunes, defeats, betrayal, national repression, clashing personalities, changing allegiances and a mixture of heroism and expediency. This book examines both political and military aspects of the struggle, and of the motives and machinations of key figures involved.

In Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, Vera Shevzov draws on a rich variety of previously untapped archival sources to reconstruct the religious world of the lay people. She traces the means by which men and women shaped their religious lives in an ecclesiastical system that was dominated by bureaucrats and monastic bishops. Focusing on various "centres" of their religious life - the temple, chapels, feasts, icons, and the Virgin Mary - she follows the religious processes and communal dynamics that lent these centres meaning. Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution breaks new ground by giving voice to the previously ignored common people during one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of the church - and immediately preceding one of the most important events of the twentieth century.

Covering the time period from 1807, when John Colter first discovered the wonders of the Yellowstone Plateau to the 1920s when tourists sped between luxury hotels in their automobiles, these tales of Wonderland come from the letters, journals, and diaries kept by early visitors and later tourists. The earliest stories recount mountain men's awe at geysers hurling boiling water hundreds of feet into the air and their encounters with the native inhabitants of the region. The latest stories reflect the "civilizing" of the park and reveal the golden age of tourist travel in the area.

This book is about grasping power and once achieving it, using that power to assassinate all challengers to the power gained. The Warren Commission Report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and was not part of a conspiracy, and went on to say that there is no evidence of a conspiracy. This report pacified the American public for the last 49 years. Logic and Reason dictates otherwise. Each of us have the ability to use our own logic to determine who had the most to gain from the President John F. Kennedy assassination. However it seems unreasonable that he could do it alone and get away with it. So it doesn't pass the reason test. Therefore, logic again comes into the equation that would require a co-conspirator capable of providing a complete cover-up, so the conspirators will never be caught. The co-conspirators need only patsies to take the blame with promises of a fee or fame or whatever satisfies their weaknesses. With the Kennedy assassination completed and blamed on Lee Harvey Oswald, who is murdered before he can utter more that "I'm just a patsy" the American population seems satisfied that he paid for his crime, while the conspirators remain free. Using the same procedure of patsies to take the rap, the logical conspirators assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy, a leading Democratic Candidate for President in 1968, and got away with it. Your use of logic and reason may lead you to the same conclusion that a conspiracy of the highest magnitude took the lives of these three idealists.

Though persistently overshadowed by the Great War in historical memory, the two Balkan conflicts of 1912-1913 were among the most consequential of the early twentieth century. By pitting the states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro against a diminished Ottoman Empire-and subsequently against one another-they anticipated many of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare even as they produced the tense regional politics that helped spark World War I. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this volume applies the social and cultural insights of the "new military history" to revisit this critical episode with a central focus on the experiences of both combatants and civilians during wartime.

For over a century, Yellowstone National Park has been a monument to wildness in America. But long before flames swept through Yellowstone in 1988, that wildness had come under fire from encroachments that were making the park one of our nation's most commodified pieces of real estate.

For as long as they've existed, parks like Yellowstone have been the scene of some of the most intensive commercial activity in the American West. Selling Yellowstone recounts the story of such activities in our oldest park from the 1870s through the 1960s. It is the first book to examine critically the place of business in the development of America's national parks, demonstrating the prominent role played by profit-driven entrepreneurs in shaping the physical landscape of what is generally perceived as unaltered wilderness.

Challenging popular perceptions that our national parks are protected from commercialism, Mark Barringer reveals how businessmen, with the support of the National Park Service, marketed Yellowstone as a museum of mythology: a landscape created to look like what Americans wanted to believe the Old West once was. Together, the NPS and the concessionaires--particularly Harry W. Child's Yellowstone Park Company--altered the park repeatedly to fit a desired image and then creatively promoted it for mass consumption. As a result, the concessionaires virtually owned Yellowstone, selling it piecemeal to receptive customers as if it were an inexhaustible commodity.

First marketed as a nature museum to be viewed from the comfort of stagecoach seats or hotel room windows, the park was transformed from a wilderness preserve to a series of roadside attractions. Roads were built to geysers and waterfalls; wolves were eliminated and bison were bred; visitors were given a choice between comfortable hotels and more rustic lodges and camps. The Yellowstone Park Company sought to meet all of the public's expectations, reaping the profits from satisfying American idealizations.

Contemporary environmental attitudes eventually forced significant policy changes in the parks, but shifting political winds continue to determine such matters as snowmobile access to Yellowstone. Barringer's book contributes to the ongoing debate over the character and limits of the social construction of nature as it raises important questions about what our national parks represent, why so many people continue to feel so strongly about them, and what must be done to protect them.

Are Americans entitled to a Manifest Destiny? This book explores 13 key issues of Western expansion from the early 1800s through the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Expert commentary and 73 primary documents represent a variety of views on each issue. Documents include presidential letters and speeches, first-person accounts and letters, newspaper and magazine opinion pieces, court decisions, and congressional debates. Voices range from those of presidents to ordinary people caught up in the events of the time.

Some of the major topics considered are:

Lewis and Clark's expedition

Indian and Mexican land claims

The effect of western expansion on slavery

Importing Chinese laborers to help build the transcontinental railroad

Government opposition to Mormons settling in the West

Texas annexation

The Homestead Act

The Sand Creek Massacre

The Battle of Little Big Horn

The creation of Yellowstone National Park

Wounded Knee 1890

A narrative overview of each event, an annotated bibliography following each event, and a timeline of key events make this volume an indispensable resource.

This insightful volume offers a radical reassessment of the infamous "Gulag Archipelago" by exploring the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost originally established in the 1930s as a prison camp complex. Author Alan Barenberg's eye-opening study reveals Vorkuta as an active urban center with a substantial nonprisoner population where the borders separating camp and city were contested and permeable, enabling prisoners to establish social connections that would eventually aid them in their transitions to civilian life. With this book, Barenberg makes an important historical contribution to our understanding of forced labor in the Soviet Union and its enduring legacy.

In the aftermath of the Great War, a wave of tourists and pilgrims visited the battlefields, cemeteries and memorials of the war. The cultural history of this 'battlefield tourism' is chronicled in this absorbing and original book, which shows how the phenomenon served to construct memory in Britain, as well as in Australia and Canada. The author demonstrates that high and low culture, tradition and modernism, the sacred and the profane were often inter-related, rather than polar opposites. The various responses to the actual and imagined landscapes of battlefields are discussed, as well as bereavement and how this was shaped by gender, religion and the military experience. Individual memory and experience combined with nationalism and 'imperial' identity as powerful forces informing the pilgrim experience. But this book not only analyzes travel to battlefields, which unsurprisingly paralleled the growth of the modern tourist industry; it also looks closely at the transformation of national war memorials into pilgrimage sites, and shows how responses both to battlefields and memorials, which continue to serve as potent symbols, evolved in the years after the Great War.

Speaking the Earth's Languages brings together for the first time critical dis-cussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple languages, landscapes, and dis-ciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of 'a nomad poetics' - not only for under-standing Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the prob-lems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes. The book begins by critiquing canon-ical examples of non-indigenous post-colonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915-2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally. The book's final part develops an 'emerging synthesis' of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958-) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973-). Speaking the Earth's Languages uses these fascinating links between Abori-ginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian-Chilean post-colonial poetics. "The central argument of this book," the author writes, "is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a gen-uinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn't continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispos-session and environmental exploitation."

The 3 volumes in this set, originally published between 1934 and 1975 are written by one of Ireland's most respected historians. In the light of problems in recent years with the devolved power-sharing Agreement in Northern Ireland and the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly, these volumes have an enduring relevance and shed important historical perspective on contemporary political issues in both Northern Ireland and Ireland. They discuss: The implications of Anglo-Irish relations in the wider context of nationalist-imperial conflicts The (historical) practical operation of devolution in Northern Ireland And provide Critical analysis of government in the Irish Free State.

The New York War Crimes Tribunal on Central America and the Caribbean was convened in October, 1984 to hear testimony from victims and eyewitnesses of human rights abuses, war crimes and other violations of international and domestic law in Central America and the Caribbean. This volume presents the edited statements of approximately 26 witnesses, including North American academics, church people, journalists, medical workers, Latin American students, human rights workers, refugees, labor leaders, and peasant organizers. Witnesses include Rigoberta Menchu, exiled Guatemalan Indian leader; Richard Alan White, author of "The Morass: United States Intervention in Central America"; Judy Butler, researcher with Nicaragua Research and Documentation Center for the Atlantic Coast; Ramon Flores, Salvadoran medical student, former prisoner and torture victim; and David MacMichael, former CIA analyst on Central America. The countries covered in this comprehensive volume are El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua.

For nearly two centuries interaction between Spain and the United States was characterized by cultural and political differences, mutually perceived conflicts of national interest, and an asymmetry of power. Botero identifies the period from 1945 to 1953 as a watershed in relations, as the two countries moved from a hostile posture towards a friendly rapprochement. He shows why, in spite of political differences, mutual distrust, and reciprocal grievances, both governments found it in their best interest to reach an agreement on the issue of European defense. This study documents, for the first time, the extraordinary lengths to which the Franco regime was prepared to go to improve its relations with the United States.

Beginning with the Spanish monarchy's decision to assist the thirteen colonies in their struggle for independence, Botero examines treaty negotiations in 1795 and 1821 that involved Spain's territorial possessions in North America. He then looks at how friction over events in Cuba culminated in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Several decades of mutual disengagement followed until the two nations again clashed over the early pro-Axis sympathy of the Franco regime. The fear of Soviet aggression would finally unite the two in the post-World War II era with a bilateral agreement to establish military bases in Spain as part of strategic arrangements to defend Western Europe.

When author Steven P. Locke was a twelve-year-old boy growing up in Canal Winchester, Ohio, he witnessed something extraordinary-a championship football season, coached by his father Mike, that for a brief moment captivated a small Ohio town.

A combination memoir and sports history, "Little Locke and the Mighty Indians of 1975" chronicles the high school football team's winning year from the perspective of the coach's son. It paints a portrait of the town and its people as it was at the time-the way people lived, the music they listened to, the television shows they watched, their politics, and the mores of the time. It also focuses on the ten-game season-how football was practiced and played, the grueling nature of two-a- days, his father's coaching style, the growing attention paid to the team as each victory led to more pressure to succeed the following week, and the town that followed and cheered them on in summer heat, driving rain, bitter cold, and disappointment.

A snapshot of a town, its people, and their way of life in the second half of the twentieth century, "Little Locke and the Mighty Indians of 1975" provides a firsthand look into the sense of wonderment and excitement of the experience from the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy

Imagine a traditional Jewish community on the eve of the 19th century, and you will most likely picture the Eastern European shtetl. This prevailing European-oriented view obscures the fact that Jewry is a coat of many colors, with many diverse yet traditional manifestations, including the numerous Jewish communities of North Africa and Southwest Asia. While we know that in recent centuries such countries as Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco contained a large proportion of the Jewish people, and that communities such as Fez, Aleppo, Tunis, and Baghdad were major centers of Jewish culture, our detailed knowledge of these Jewries remains limited.

Jews Among Muslims gathers together some of the most insightful work describing the life and culture of Jews in the traditional Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Spanning the vast belt from Morocco to Afghanistan, which has been dominated by Islam since the seventh and eighth centuries, Jewish communities have long coexisted alongside their Muslim neighbors. Revealing Jewish life in such countries as Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, Syria, and Kurdistan, Jews Among Muslims tells us much about Jewish religious life and leadership, economic status, connections to the state, social relations with surrouding ethnic groups, internal community organization, and family and gender roles.

Focusing on the major cases of genocide in twentieth-century Europe, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and genocide in the former Yugoslavia, as well as mass killing in the Soviet Union, this book outlines the internal and external roots of genocide. Internal causes lie in the rise of radical nationalism and the breakdown of old empires, while external causes lie in the experience of mass violence in European colonial empires. Such roots did not make any case of genocide inevitable but did create models for mass destruction. The book enables students to assess the interplay between general causes of violence and the specific crises that accelerated moves towards radical genocidal policies. Chapters on the major cases of twentieth-century European genocide will each describe and analyse several key themes: acts of genocide; perpetrators, victims and bystanders; and genocide in particular regions. Using the voices of the human actors in genocide, often ignored or forgotten, provides arresting new insights. The conclusion frames European genocide in a global perspective, giving students an entry point to discussion of genocide in other continents and historical periods.

Triggered into action by the shock effect of the Nazi rise to power in Germany, socialists throughout Western Europe entered an unusually active period of reorientation and debate over political strategy which helped determine the contours of European politics up to the outbreak of the Second World War and beyond.