This controversial and timely book about the American experience in Vietnam provides the first full exploration of the perspectives of the North Vietnamese leadership before, during, and after the war. Herbert Y. Schandler offers unique insights into the mindsets of the North Vietnamese and their response to diplomatic and military actions of the Americans, laying out the full scale of the disastrous U.S. political and military misunderstandings of Vietnamese history and motivations. Including frank quotes from Vietnamese leaders, the book offers important new knowledge that allows us to learn invaluable lessons from the perspective of a victorious enemy. Unlike most military officers who served in Vietnam, Schandler is convinced the war was unwinnable, no matter how long America stayed the course or how many resources were devoted to it. He is remarkably qualified to make these judgments as an infantry commander during the Vietnam War, a Pentagon policymaker, and a scholar who taught at West Point and National Defense University. His extensive personal interviews with North Vietnamese are drawn from his many trips to Hanoi after the war. Schandler provides not only a definitive analysis of the American failure in Vietnam but a crucial foundation for exploring the potential for success in the current guerrilla wars the United States is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This book is basic for any attempt to understand interwar Polish Jewry as well as the holocaust period and offers many new points of view."
--"Religious Studies Review"

The Bund was the first modern Jewish political party in Eastern Europe and, arguably, the strongest Jewish party in Poland on the eve of the Second World War. Though 100 years have passed since its inception, the Bund and its legacy continue to be of abiding interest.

Founded illegally and operated under the most adverse conditions, the Bund grew dramatically in the years immediately after its 1897 creation in Czarist Russia. It helped to organize the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, it organized armed self-defense groups to fight against pogroms, and it played a significant role in the Russian Revolution of 1905. The Bundist became for many the symbol of the new Jew--enlightened, willing to fight for Jewish rights and needs, and unwilling to accept the status quo of Jewish communities dominated by the orthodox and the wealthy, and of a Russia oppressed by the Czar. Later, Bundist members were among those who contributed substantially to armed resistance in Nazi occupied Poland.

"Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe" makes use of previously unexamined source materials to offer a range of new perspectives on the significance of the Bund and its ideas. Its fresh and insightful approaches will be of interest to all those concerned with Eastern European Jewry, Russian, Polish, and Ukranian history, and the history of socialist and labor movements.

An examination of the long-ignored vicious side to the legend of Brazilian President Getulio Dornelles Vargas, this is the tale uncovered by the first civilian to spend months in the secret police archives of Rio de Janeiro. Rose has utilized new eyewitness testimony and insider information in offering explanations to several events that proved pivotal in Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s. During Vargas's tenure, the quality and quantity of human rights abuses reached unprecedented heights. Violence, as a means of coercing the public, was evident in all sectors of the security apparatus. Several tools of torture developed during the hunt for communists are still in use today. Almost by definition, politicians have to offer a semblance of providing something for each different sector of society. Vargas was better at this than his predecessors in that with ease he proudly wore the various vestments of dictator, fascist, democrat, and populist as necessary. For the poor, he was the paternalistic benefactor; for the middle class, he was the one who brought stability; and for the wealthy, he supported the status quo. This ability to juggle forces and interests was grounded in his security apparatus. Beginning with the unsuccessful Communist Revolution of 1935, the nation's police forces redefined and in some cases reinvented the torture that had occurred in Brazil from colonial times onward. The harshness of their methods was matched only by the ardor of their example for coming generations.

Germans of various disciplines not only encouraged but actively framed a discourse that gendered India through voyeuristic descriptions of the male and female body. This study challenges the German's claim to an encounter with India projected on a spiritual plane of communion between kindred spirits and shows that such supposedly apolitical encounters are really strategies of domination. German participation in European Expansion can be perceived as collusion with the British imperialist administration inasmuch as it provided the latter with a justification for existing colonial rule and anticipated future colonial activity. Despite the optimism placed in the post of post-colonialism, the continued presence of European Orientalism can be felt in the late 20th century, hidden under the mantel of global capitalism. Although Germany did not colonize India territorially, Germans of various disciplines not only encouraged but actively framed a discourse that gendered India through voyeuristic descriptions of the male and female body. German orientalist experiences of Hindu India have typically been excluded from post-colonial debates concerning European expansion, but this study challenges the German's claim to an encounter with India projected on a spiritual plane of communion between kindred spirits and shows that such supposedly apolitical encounters are really strategies of domination. German participation can be perceived as collusion with the British imperialist administration inasmuch as it provided the latter with a justification for existing colonial rule and anticipated future colonial activity. Murti sheds light on the role that missionaries and women, two groups that have been ignored or glossed over until now, played in authorizing and strengthening the colonial discourse. The intertextual strategies adopted by the various partners in the colonialist dialog clearly show that German involvement in India was not a disinterested, academic venture. These writings also betray a bias against women that has not been regarded, until now, as a key issue in the literature discussing Orientalism. Missionaries often actively fostered the British colonial agenda, while women travelers, even those who traveled as a means of escaping patriarchal structures at home, invariably abetted the colonizer. Despite the optimism placed in the post of post-colonialism, Murti concludes that the continued presence of European Orientalism can be felt in the late 20th century, hidden under the mantel of global capitalism.

The Irish Civil War and Society sheds new light on the social currents shaping the Irish Civil War, from the 'politics of respectability' behind animosities and discourses; to the intersection of social conflicts with political violence; to the social dimensions of the war's messy aftermath.

Since the Revolution, Americans have debated what action the military should take toward civilians suspected of espionage, treason, or revolutionary activity. This important book-the first to present a comprehensive history of military surveillance in the United States-traces the evolution of America's internal security policy during the past two hundred years. Joan M. Jensen discusses how the federal government has used the army to intervene in domestic crises and how Americans have protested the violation of civil liberties and applied political pressure to limit military intervention in civil disputes. Although movements to expand and to constrain the military have each dominated during different periods in American history, says Jensen, the involvement of the army in internal security has increased steadily. Jensen describes a wide range of events and individuals connected to this process. These include Benedict Arnold's betrayal of West Point; the colonial wars in Cuba, where Lt. Andrew Rowan, the nation's first officer spy, won a medal for carrying a "Message for Garcia"; the development of "War Plans White" in the 1920s to guide the army's response in the event of domestic rebellion; the activities of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the 1950s and 1960s; the use of the National Guard in the South at the height of the civil rights movement; and the surveillance of and violence against protesters during the Vietnam War. Scrutinizing the historic workings of the American government at closer range than has ever been done before, Jensen creates a vivid picture of the growing invisible intelligence empire within the United States government and of the men who created it.

On December 3, 2009, Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last living American survivor of World War I, testified before the United States Senate in support of creating a National WWI Memorial in Washington DC. The 108-year-old veteran's visit to Capitol Hill was covered in-depth by the Associated Press and CNN, among others, calling attention to his status as a last living survivor--the "last leaf" of an event that forever changed American history. But Frank Buckles is not alone. While his personal story is unique, Frank, now 109, belongs to an elite group of last living survivors who have experienced some of the most impactful, tragic, heroic, glamorous, and awe-inspiring events in modern American history. Their stories are eloquently chronicled in their own passionate--and often chilling--words, in this book. This unique oral history book records the stories told to him personally by people who witnessed many of history's most famous events. Among many others, the author interviewed: the final three Civil War widows (one Union and two Confederate), the final pitcher to surrender a home run to Babe Ruth, the last suffragette, the last living person to fly with Amelia Earhart, the final American World War I soldier, and the last surviving employees of Thomas Edison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Harry Houdini. The wide-ranging stories involve humor (the 1920 Olympic medalist who stole the original Olympic flag), tragedy (the last survivor of the 1915 Lusitania sinking), heroism (the final Medal of Honor recipient for actions on Pearl Harbor Day), and eyewitnesses to great events (one of the last scientists at the first nuclear chain reaction, and the final Iwo Jima flag raiser).
In more than three-dozen chapters, the author blends background information in a lively narrative with the words of the interviewees, so that readers not familiar with the historical episodes described can understand what occurred and the long-term significance of the events. A book that truly makes the past come alive, The Last Leaf will fascinate not only history buffs, but anyone who likes a good story.

Over the past decade, Africa's center of gravity in world politics has shifted from mere humanitarianism to a strategic view that posits the centrality of the continent as energy and natural resources supplier, in the fight against terrorism and other security threats, and in the globalization of culture. Besides these considerations, this shift is reflective of two defining dynamics. On one hand, political and economic reforms have contributed to the growth of democracy, an improvement in the economic outlook, and the strengthening of regional governance. On the other hand, the ongoing diffusion of global power is setting the stage for a new international order in which Africa will increasingly matter. This book probes the importance and significance of these developments and their implications for Africa's international relations.

Covering the period between the Munich Agreement and the Communist Coup in February 1948, this volume provides the first full account of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London. In examining attitudes towards the Jews during World War 2 and its aftermath Jan Lani ek explores the notion that Czechoslovak treatment of the Jews was shaped by resurgent Czech and Slovak nationalism/s caused by the war and by the experience of the occupation by the German army. He challenges the official history of Czechoslovak policy towards the Jews between 1918 and 1948, which still presents Czechoslovakia as an exceptional case study of an East-Central European state that rejected antisemitism and treated the Jews decently. This groundbreaking work offers a novel, provocative analysis of the political activities and plans of the Czechoslovak exiles during and after the war years, and of the implementation of the plans in liberated Czechoslovakia after 1945.

Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany argues that political aesthetics and mass spectacles were no invention of the Nazis but characterized the period from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. In so doing, it re-examines the role of state representation and propaganda in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship.

With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany's secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.

Abraham Kuyper is known as the energetic Dutch Protestant social activist and public theologian of the 1898 Princeton Stone Lectures, the Lectures on Calvinism. In fact, the church was the point from which Kuyper's concerns for society and public theology radiated. In his own words, ''The problem of the church is none other than the problem of Christianity itself.'' The loss of state support for the church, religious pluralism, rising nationalism, and the populist religious revivals sweeping Europe in the nineteenth century all eroded the church's traditional supports. Dutch Protestantism faced the unprecedented prospect of ''going Dutch''; from now on it would have to pay its own way. John Wood examines how Abraham Kuyper adapted the Dutch church to its modern social context through a new account of the nature of the church and its social position. The central concern of Kuyper's ecclesiology was to re-conceive the relationship between the inner aspects of the church-the faith and commitment of the members-and the external forms of the church, such as doctrinal confessions, sacraments, and the relationship of the church to the Dutch people and state. Kuyper's solution was to make the church less dependent on public entities such as nation and state and more dependent on private support, especially the good will of its members. This ecclesiology de-legitimated the national church and helped Kuyper justify his break with the church, but it had wider effects as well. It precipitated a change in his theology of baptism from a view of the instrumental efficacy of the sacrament to his later doctrine of presumptive regeneration wherein the external sacrament followed, rather than preceded and prepared for, the intenral work grace. This new ecclesiology also gave rise to his well-known public theology; once he achieved the private church he wanted, as the Netherlands' foremost public figure, he had to figure out how to make Christianity public again.

"A cut above most workplace histories. Looking at the separate but sometimes overlapping development of European and African-American hairdressing from the early twentieth century to the present, Willett shows how race shaped different trajectories for black and white salons."
--"Lingua Franca"

"Offers an unusually comprehensive look at a significant twentieth-century industry and female preoccupation"
--"American Historical Review"

"Refreshing to read a history so firmly historicized and grounded in working-class and Afro-American history"
-- "Journal of Social History"

"Carefully nuanced and [a] compelling history."
-- Nan Enstad, "The Journal of American History"

Throughout the twentieth century, beauty shops have been places where women could enjoy the company of other women, exchange information, and share secrets. The female equivalent of barbershops, they have been institutions vital to community formation and social change.

But while the beauty shop created community, it also reflected the racial segregation that has so profoundly shaped American society. Links between style, race, and identity were so intertwined that for much of the beauty shop's history, black and white hairdressing industries were largely separate entities with separate concerns. While African American hair-care workers embraced the chance to be independent from white control, negotiated the meanings of hair straightening, and joined in larger political struggles that challenged Jim Crow, white female hairdressers were embroiled in struggles over self-definition and opposition to their industry's emphasis on male achievement. Yet despite their differences, black and whitehairdressers shared common stakes as battles were waged over issues of work, skill, and professionalism unique to women's service work.

Permanent Waves traces the development of the American beauty shop, from its largely separate racial origins, through white recognition of the "ethnic market," to the present day.

By the early 20th century, Gypsies in Germany and Italy were pushed outside the national community and subjected to the arbitrary whims of executive authorities. This book offers an account of these exclusionary policies and their links to the rise of nationalism, liberalism, and the modern bureaucratic state.

"Art in the Service of Colonialism" throws new light on how nothing in the Moroccan French Protectorate (1912-1956) escaped the imprints of metropolitan ideology and how the French transformed and dominated Moroccan society by looking at how the arts and crafts were transformed in the colonial period. Hamid Irbouh argues that during the Moroccan Protectorate (1912-1956), the French imposed their domination through a systematic modernisation and regulation of local arts and crafts. They also stewarded Moroccans into industrial life by establishing vocational and fine arts schools. The French archives, Arabic sources, and oral testimonies, which Irbouh used, demonstrate complex relationships between colonial administrators of both genders and their interactions with Moroccan officials, notables, and the poor. The French co-opted some locals into joining these educational institutions, which respected and reinforced familiar pre-Protectorate social structures. The artisans become The Best Workers in the French Empire, and artists exhibited abroad and cultivated a European and American clientele. The contradictions between reformist goals and the old order, nevertheless, added to social dislocations and led to rebellion against French hegemony. Irbouh focuses on how French women infiltrated the feminine Moroccan milieu to buttress colonial ideology, and how, at critical moments, Moroccan women and their daughters rejected traditional passive roles and sabotaged colonial plans. France's legacy in Moroccan arts and crafts provoked a backlash in the postcolonial period. After independence local artists, searching for their own identities, sought to reclaim their authenticity. The struggle to define a pristine visual heritage still rages, and the author, by underlining French contributions to Moroccan artistic and craft production, challenges the conclusions of the artists and critics who have argued for the establishment of an unadulterated art devoid of most or even all foreign influences. As in so many areas of Moroccan society, this book reveals that the weight of colonial history remains heavily present. In this well-conceived book based on original archival sources Hamid Irbouh investigates how French colonial administrators employed French women to inculcate colonial ideology by establishing new craft schools for notable and poor families in Moroccan cities. The French intended not only to teach modernized versions of old Moroccan crafts, but also wanted to instill new work habits and modern concepts of time into the girls and young women who attended their schools. Dr. Irbouh demonstrates how French women administrators took the lead in this effort and also shows how Moroccan women absorbed their lessons, but also resisted the colonial enterprise. His is a novel approach to colonial art history, situating Moroccan art production in large social, political and ideological contexts.

This book provides a significant history of Italy's brutal occupation of Libya. Using the lens of the life of the iconic resistance fighter Mohamed Fekini, it tells the story of Libya under Ottoman and Italian rule from the point of view of the colonized. The story begins with the onset of Italian occupation in 1911-12, includes the crucial period of the anti-Italian jihad, from 1921 to 1930, and continues through the postwar creation of a united Libya under King Idris in 1947.

"That's a crazy book " Albert Einstein said in the early 1950s, when asked his impression of Alfred Korzybski's 1933 work "Science and Sanity." More than a decade later, Richard Feynman found Korzybski's notion of "time-binding" crucial for answering the question "What is science?."

Feynman didn't know that it was Alfred Korzybski who had coined the term "time-binding" in his first, 1921, book "Manhood of Humanity" to label what he considered the defining characteristic of humans: the potential of each generation to start where the former leaves off and thus to accumulate useful knowledge at an ever-accelerating rate. In the exact sciences and technology, time-binding seems to work reasonably well. In the rest of human life, not so much. Korzybski, a patriotic Polish nobleman and an engineer who had lived under Tsarist tyranny and had seen the horrors of World War I on the Eastern Front before coming to the United States, realized the results of the disparity between rapid but narrow scientific-technological advancement and broader but snail-paced ethical-social development: a seemingly endless cycle of crises, revolutions and wars. Seeking a way out, he studied a broad range of disciplines from physics to psychiatry-fields that others felt had little to do with each other-and discovered factors of sanity in physico-mathematical methods. Comparing the ways of thinking that scientists and mathematicians exemplify when working at their best and the ways of thinking that they and other people unsanely or insanely tend to use the rest of the time, Korzybski linked science and sanity in a new world outlook with an accompanying methodology (labeled 'general semantics')-simple enough to teach children.

Traces of Korzybski's pioneering work can be found today in a variety of fields such as cognitive science, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, communication, media ecology, medicine, organizational development, philosophical counseling and philosophy, etc. In spite of this, Korzybski's radically interdisciplinary work remains relatively unassimilated into standard academic fields and hard to accurately fit into familiar popular categories. Thus, Korzybski, who originated the saying "The map is not the territory," remains a relatively neglected and misunderstood figure, shrouded in controversy: some people have considered him a genius while others have called him a crank. Drawing on an array of sources including Korzybski's personal correspondence, notes, scrapbooks, and both published and unpublished writings, as well as personal discussions and interviews with some of Korzybski's closest co-workers, Bruce I. Kodish situates Korzybski's contributions in the context of his times and provides surprising insights into his work as a whole. Kodish's clear prose provides a compellingly readable narrative of Korzybski's very busy, sometimes too busy, exciting and exhausting life while making accessible some of the most complex areas of Korzybski's thought. For years to come, this outstanding biography will remain the standard work on Alfred Korzybski's extraordinarily adventurous and significant life and work.

'It's damned hard lines asking for bread and only getting a bullet!' The dramatic and chaotic events surrounding the Russian Revolution have been studied and written about extensively for the last hundred years, by historians and journalists alike. However, some of the most compelling and valuable accounts are those recorded by eyewitnesses, many of whom were foreign nationals caught in Petrograd at the time. Drawing from the Bodleian Library's rich collections, this book features extracts from letters, journals, diaries and memoirs written by a diverse cast of onlookers. Primarily British, the authors include Sydney Gibbes, English tutor to the royal children, Bertie Stopford, an antiques dealer who smuggled the Vladimir tiara and other Romanov jewels into the UK, and the private secretary to Lord Milner in the British War Cabinet. Contrasting with these are a memoir by Stinton Jones, an engineer who found himself sharing a train compartment with Rasputin, a newspaper report by governess Janet Jeffrey who survived a violent confrontation with the Red Army, and letters home from Labour politician, Arthur Henderson. Accompanied by seventy contemporary illustrations, these first-hand accounts are put into context with introductory notes, giving a fascinating insight into the tumultuous year of 1917.

This edited volume brings together historians of education and comparative education researchers to study the educational reconstruction projects that Americans have launched in post-conflict settings across the globe. For well over a century Americans have seen the reform of schools as key to creating social stability and conditions of peace. The contributors to this volume examine the ideals embedded in and effectiveness of American education reform projects in the Philippines and Cuba after the Spanish-American War, in Europe after World War I, in Japan and Germany after World War II, in the aftermath of the Cold War, as well as U.S. initiatives currently underway in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Organized around the office of the president, this study focuses on American behavior at home and abroad from the Great Depression to the onset of the end of the Cold War, two key points during which America sought a re-definition of its proper relationship to the world. Domestically, American society continued the process of industrialization and urbanization that had begun in the 19th century. Urban growth accompanied industrialism, and more and more Americans lived in cities. Because of industrial growth and the consequent interest in foreign markets, the United States became a major world power. American actions as a nation, whether as positive attempts to mold events abroad or as negative efforts to enjoy material abundance in relative political isolation, could not help but affect the course of world history.

Under President Hoover, the federal government was still a comparatively small enterprise; challenges of the next six decades would transform it almost beyond belief, touching in one way or another almost every facet of American life. Before the New Deal, few Americans expected the government to do anything for them. By the end of the Second World War and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, however, Americans had turned to Washington for help. Even the popular Reagan presidency of the 1980s, the most conservative since Hoover, would fail to undo the basic New Deal commitment to assist struggling Americans. There would be no turning back the clock, at home or abroad.

This book deals with three main aspects of the history of Indian business: The relationship between business and politics, the position of merchants and businessmen in the economy and society of late colonial India, and how particular merchant networks extended the range of their operations to the entire subcontinent and the wider world.