It's only human to be fascinated by disasters--and uplifted by reports of survival in the face of overwhelming circumstances. History writer Ellsworth S. Grant takes you back to Connecticut's most catastrophic events, vividly re-creating the moments that changed the Nutmeg State forever. The twenty-two true stories in Connecticut Disasters are a chilling reminder to expect the unexpected and to respect the powerful, often deadly forces of nature. Experience the drama of: Benedict Arnold's traitorous burning of New London in 1781
The fight for survival and liberty waged by enslaved Africans aboard the AmistadThe blizzard of 1888--New England's benchmark winter storm
The great 1938 hurricane that tore apart more than 700 shoreline homes
The 1944 Hartford fire that engulfed a circus tent, killing 168The 1978 collapse of the Hartford Civic Center--just hours after an event

This is the book nobody wants you to read.
"The persecution of Dr. Mirzayanov stands in direct contradiction of the Clinton Administration's commitment to strengthen democratization efforts in the former Soviet Union, and halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. I am confident that you share my deep concern over the treatment of this courageous scientist, and I call on you to personally appeal for his release."
- From the Letter of John Conyers, Jr., Chairman of the Congressional Legislation and National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, to Warren Christopher, the U.S. Secretary of State, October 19, 1993.
"I personally feel a strong common bond with this courageous man, recognizing that his motives are the same as those that led me to release the Pentagon Papers. The Mirzayanov case is an immediate legal litmus test of emerging Russian democracy. He is an individual in the true tradition of Andrei Sakharov, a man persecuted under the former regime for telling the truth, but now, rightfully, universally honored."
- By Dan Ellsberg, author of "Secrets - A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"
"I was proud to add my voice to that of the many scientific and human rights organizations that have worked to free Dr. Mirzayanov.
- Senator Patrick Moynihan, U.S. Senate (Congressional Record. Proceedings and Debates of the 103d Congress, First Session. Vol.140, No. 28. Washington, Tuesday, March 15, 1994.)
.,."in recognition of his courage and his singular demonstration of the moral responsibility of individual scientists in uphold the integrity of scientific knowledge in an emerging democratic society." The1994 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientific Award of The New York Academy of Sciences.
- Signed by Chairman Cyril M. Harris and President Joshua Lederberg.
"Cavallo Foundation Inc. takes great pleasure in presenting a Certificate of Special Recognition for Moral Courage in Business and Government to Vil Mirzayanov"
- From the Text of the Award in June 1993.
"For his integrity as a scientist, strength of character, and exceptional personal courage that served to promote the health, safety, and welfare of the Russian people and of all humankind"
- From the Text of the 1995 AAAS Freedom and Responsibility Award.

This concise introduction offers an overview of the global rise and spread of nationalism since the late 18th century. Reflecting on key themes and existing scholarship it presents case studies and primary sources to track the emergence of the modern nation, and understand how nationalism has given rise to phenomena such as identity-based conflict, authoritarian politics and populist movements. Debating Nationalism uses an inclusive perspective that goes beyond a Western European focus to explore how nationalism has expressed itself in nation states and influenced a range of political ideologies over the last 300 years. It engages with the key debates within nationalism studies such as the origins of nations, the mechanisms and actors that reinforce it and the dynamics of ethnic conflict. Using a historical lens to shed light on contemporary issues, it also considers debates around migration, diversity and authoritarian politics found in new nationalism in the modern day. This book includes a dedicated chapter as a guide to key debates and further reading alongside a glossary of terms to help students achieve a holistic understanding of the history of nationalism.

On April 1, 1946, shortly after sunrise, the town of Hilo on the island of Hawai'i was devastated by a series of giant waves. Traveling 2,300 miles from the Aleutian Islands in less than five hours, the waves struck without warning and claimed 159 lives. Fourteen years later, on May 22, 1960, a massive earthquake occurred off of the coast of Chile. The earthquake generated giant waves that sped across the Pacific at 442 miles per hour, reaching Hilo in just fifteen hours. The first wave to hit the town was a modest four feet higher than normal, the second nine feet. Before the third wave could arrive, a tidal phenomenon known as a bore smashed into the Hilo bayfront, with thirty-five foot waves that wrenched buildings off their foundations. That day several city blocks were swept clean of all structures and 61 people died. The first edition of Tsunami!, published in 1988, provided readers with a complete examination of the tsunami phenomenon in Hawai'i. This second edition adds many eyewitness accounts of the tsunamis of 1946 and 1960 and expands its coverage to include major tsunamis in the Mediterranean and off the coasts of Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Fiji, Alaska, California, Newfoundland, and the Caribbean, as well as the 1998 devastation in Papua New Guinea. Dramatic photographs and accounts of experiencing a tsunami firsthand are placed within the framework of the how and why of tsunamis, our scientific understanding of these phenomena, and the current status of the Tsunami Warning System, which is widely used to forecast and measure tsunamis and prepare coastal areas for potentially deadly tsunami strikes.

This bilingual catalogue (in English and Greek) accompanied an exhibition organized by the Gennadius Library on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Greek Revolution of 1821 to explore the relations and connections between Greece and the United States from the American Revolution of 1776 to the Cretan revolt of 1866. The hundred objects of the exhibition, fully illustrated in the catalogue, include rare archival material, paintings, watercolors, artworks, and several Philhellenic artifacts from the Gennadius Library and other collections in Athens. The themes of the exhibition, presented in the catalogue by curator Maria Georgopoulou, delve on how the impact of the Enlightenment, the poetry of Lord Byron, as well as the atrocities committed by the Ottomans against the Greeks, motivated American Philhellenes to join the revolutionaries, to collect money and supplies for humanitarian aid to Greece, and even to adopt orphaned Greek children. Once freed, Greece built its educational infrastructure with the support of American missionaries, who set up successful schools on Greek soil. Finally, the plight of Greek slaves fueled abolitionist discourse in the U.S., as the story of Hiram Powers's sculpture The Greek Slave amply demonstrates. Five original essays by experts offer a wider scholarly perspective: Pericles S. Vallianos speaks to the political affinities between the American and the Greek Revolution due to the Enlightenment; Photini Tomai hails the contributions of American Philhellenes to the Greek cause; Curtis Runnels explores the response of the Americans to the ordeals of the Greeks; Vangelis Karamanolakis studies the contributions of American Protestants to the educational development of Greece; and Peter Wirzbicki presents the impact of the Greek War of Independence on the discourse of abolitionism.

An oral history of the West Virginia Mine Wars published to coincide with the centennial of the Battle of Blair Mountain. In 1972 Anne Lawrence came to West Virginia at the invitation of the Miners for Democracy movement to conduct interviews with participants in, and observers of, the Battle of Blair Mountain and other Appalachian mine wars of the 1920s and '30s. The set of oral histories she collected-the only document of its kind-circulated for many years as an informal typescript volume, acquiring an almost legendary status among those intrigued by the subject. Key selections from it appear here for the first time as a published book, supplemented with introductory material, maps, and photographs. The volume's vivid, conversational mode invites readers into miners' lived experiences and helps us understand why they took up arms to fight anti-union forces in some of the nation's largest labor uprisings. Published to coincide with the celebration of the Blair Mountain centennial in 2021, On Dark and Bloody Ground includes a preface by public historian Catherine Venable Moore and an afterword by Cecil E. Roberts of the United Mine Workers of America.

WINNER OF THE 2025 JOHN BURROUGHS MEDAL FOR DISTINGUISHED NATURAL HISTORY WRITING

'Vast and arresting' SPECTATOR

'A remarkably human take on the geological world' NEW STATESMAN

Rocks are the record of our creative planet reinventing itself for four billion years. Nothing is ever lost, just transformed.

Marcia Bjornerud's life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world. As one of few women in her field, she witnessed the shift in our understanding of the Earth, from solid object to an entity in a constant state of transformation. In the most tumultuous times of her own life, a deep understanding of our rocky planet imbued her life with meaning.

The lives of rocks are long and complex, spanning billions of years and yet shaping our own human lives in powerful, invisible ways. Sandstone that filters out pathogens creating underground oases in aquifers of clean water. Ecologite is "the chosen rock" whose formation keeps the planet running. Earth is not just a passive backdrop, or a source of resources to be mined, extracted, and carved out. Rocks are full of wisdom, but somewhere along the way many of us have forgotten how to hear it.

When we are uncertain about where to find truth, a geocentric worldview reminds us that we are Earthlings, part of a planetary community where we can find wisdom in the most unlikely places.

More praise for TURNING TO STONE:
'Marcia Bjornerud writes evocatively' COUNTRY LIFE
'A nuanced celebration of the language of stone' DAVID GEORGE HASKELL
'A unique and timeless book' ROBERT HALZEN

In the years before the Russian Revolution, diplomats across Europe were widely condemned for lacking the skills needed to cope in the international environment. They were also frequently criticized for being out of touch with public opinion and too ready to clothe their activities in a veil of secrecy. This book suggests that these charges were unfair and that in both Britain and Russia the role of diplomats and foreign ministry officials was governed by changes in the domestic political environment. While they played an important part in determining the foreign policy of their countries, their influence was often much weaker than their critics assumed.

Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southwardd towards the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart," the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent. Since the start of the twentieth century, Argentina, Britain, and Chile have made overlapping sovereignty claims, while the United States and Russia have reserved rights to the entire continent. The environment has been at the heart of these disputes over sovereignty, placing the Antarctic Peninsula at a fascinating intersection between diplomatic history and environmental history. In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which imperial powers have used the environment to support their political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region. British officials argued that the production of useful scientific knowledge about the Antarctic helped to justify British ownership. Argentina and Chile made the case that the Antarctic Peninsula belonged to them as a result of geographical proximity, geological continuity, and a general sense of connection. Despite various challenges and claims, however, there has never been a genuine decolonization of the Antarctic Peninsula region. Instead, imperial assertions that respective entities were conducting science "for the good of humanity" were reformulated through the terms of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, and Antarctica's "frozen empires" remain in place to this day. In arguing for imperial continuity in the region, Howkins counters the official historical narrative of Antarctica, which rests on a dichotomy between "bad" sovereignty claims and "good" scientific research. Frozen Empires instead suggests that science, politics, and the environment have been inextricably connected throughout the history of the Antarctic Peninsula region-and remain so-and shows how political prestige in the guise of conducting "science for the good of humanity" continues to influence international climate negotiations.

Despite the controversial reputation of Hizbullah in the West, and the significant role this powerful Islamist organization plays in Lebanese politics, there are few reliable, published English translations of the party's primary documents. With this extensive work, Joseph Alagha seeks to remedy this problem and rectify the distortions and misrepresentations that have resulted from inaccurate translations. Through privileged access to the party, Alagha was able to compile and meticulously translate a host of original primary documents, from the party's 1985 Open Letter; through its eight clandestine conclaves from 1989 to 2009; to all of its election programs from 1992 to 2010, as well as all of the agreements, understandings, and pacts the party has ratified over the years; ending with the 2009 Political Manifesto. This firsthand portrait of Hizbullah's metamorphosis, especially in the past decade, is complete with thorough footnotes, commentary, background information, chronology, and a detailed introductory chapter that maps the party's transformation by analytically comparing the Open Letter with the 2009 Manifesto. This volume will be an invaluable companion for both scholars and policy makers.

Continually Working tells the stories of Black working women who resisted employment inequality in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the 1940s to the 1970s. The book explores the job-related activism of Black Midwestern working women and uncovers the political and intellectual strategies they used to critique and resist employment discrimination, dismantle unjust structures, and transform their lives and the lives of those in their community. Moten emphasizes the ways in which Black women transformed the urban landscape by simultaneously occupying spaces from which they had been historically excluded and creating their own spaces. Black women refused to be marginalized within the historically white and middle-class Milwaukee Young Women's Christian Association (MYWCA), an association whose mission centered on supporting women in urban areas. Black women forged interracial relationships within this organization and made it, not without much conflict and struggle, one of the most socially progressive organizations in the city. When Black women could not integrate historically white institutions, they created their own. They established financial and educational institutions, such as Pressley School of Beauty Culture, which beautician Mattie Pressley Dewese opened in 1946 as a result of segregation in the beauty training industry. This school served economic, educational and community development purposes as well as created economic opportunities for Black women. Historically and contemporarily, Milwaukee has been and is still known as one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Black women have always contested urban segregation, by making space for themselves and others on the margins. In so doing, they have transformed both the urban landscape and urban history.

Its Past, Present and People. This timeline will appeal to a wide audience - Inhabitants, tourists, visitors and anyone who has an interest in the city and capital of the United Kingdom. The timeline explores the fascinating history since its earliest beginnings, how it has developed from a small town on a riverbank to the vast city of today. This unique work reveals an amazing amount of information about a city that has so many facets to reveal. London is a city of contrasts where authors, film makers, painters, playwrights and poets have all been inspired by the city and used as a setting.

This book analyses not only Arctic organisation and background but also the way in which current regional development draws upon the extensive history of polar research and exploration. The book defines the discourse of the Arctic as it is manifested in the political region-building of the area, in the boom from the 1970s to the present, and traces this development and related conceptions historically, into polar history and the period of romanticism in the 1800s and earlier.

The book traces the conceptual lens of historical-cultural 'survivals' from the late 19th-century theories of E.B. Tylor, James Frazer, and others, in debate with monotheistic 'degenerationists' and Protestant anti-Catholic polemicists, back to its origins in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions as well as later more secularized forms in the German Enlightenment and Romanticist movements. These historical sources, particularly the 'dual faith' tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, significantly shaped both Tsarist and later Soviet ethnography of Muslim Central Asia, helping guide and justify their respective religious missionary, social-legal, political and other imperial agendas. They continue impacting post-Soviet historiography in complex and debated ways. Drawing from European, Central Asian, Middle Eastern and world history, the fields of ethnography and anthropology, as well as Christian and Islamic studies, the volume contributes to scholarship on 'syncretism' and 'conversion', definitions of Islam, history as identity and heritage, and more. It is situated within a broader global historical frame, addressing debates over 'pre-Islamic Survivals' among Turkish and Iranian as well as Egyptian, North African Berber, Black African and South Asian Muslim Peoples while critiquing the legacy of the Geertzian 'cultural turn' within Western post-colonialist scholarship in relation to diverging trends of historiography in the post-World War Two era.

In C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution, A. Javier Trevino reconsiders the opinions, perspectives, and insights of the Cubans that Mills interviewed during his visit to the island in 1960. On returning to the United States, the esteemed and controversial sociologist wrote a small paperback on much of what he had heard and seen, which he published as Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. Those interviews--now transcribed and translated--are interwoven here with extensive annotations to explain and contextualize their content. Readers will be able to ""hear"" Mills as an expert interviewer and ascertain how he used what he learned from his informants. Trevino also recounts the experiences of four central figures whose lives became inextricably intertwined during that fateful summer of 1960: C. Wright Mills, Fidel Castro, Juan Arcocha, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The singular event that compelled their biographies to intersect at a decisive moment in the history of Cold War geopolitics--with its attendant animosities and intrigues--was the Cuban Revolution.

Using rare archival material from the Alkazi Collection, together with supplementary visuals, these essays re-evaluate the official reading of the Uprising. Linked accounts negotiate Mutiny landscapes and architecture: the internal dynamic of the rebellion decoded through topography and monuments. Along with rebels, British troops and their determined generals, and various professional and amateur photographers, the dramatic vista of the Uprising in these essays is also inhabited by a range of significant characters central to the action, including the warrior queen Lakshmi Bai, the exiled last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and the poet Mirza Ghalib. Published in association with the Alkazi Collection of Photography.

This book focuses on the western Balkans in the period 1800-1912, in particular on the peoples and social groups that subsequent national histories would later identify as Albanians, providing a revisionist exploration of national identity prior to the establishment of the nation-state. Isa Blumi posits that such an identity was politically mobilized, and, that prior to the 1912 Balkan war it was culturally opaque and ideologically fluid. In relation to the competition among various state and power structures, be it in the shape of great power intervention, attempts at building new states, or the Ottoman political center, Blumi shows that Ottoman reforms were successful in encouraging most state subjects to commingle local interest with the fate of the empire itself, meaning that parochial concern for the survival of the immediate community, as it transformed over time, was directly linked to the survival of the Ottoman state.

This book develops a novel way of thinking about crises in world politics. By building on ontological security theory, this work conceptualises critical situations as radical disjunctions that challenge the ability of collective agents to 'go on'. These ontological crises bring into the realm of discursive consciousness four fundamental questions related to existence, finitude, relations and autobiography. In times of crisis, collective agents such as states are particularly attached to their ontic spaces, or spatial extensions of the self that cause collective identities to appear more firm and continuous. These theoretical arguments are illustrated in a case study looking at Serbia's anxiety over the secession of Kosovo. The author argues that Serbia's seemingly irrational and self-harming policy vis-a-vis Kosovo can be understood as a form of ontological self-help. It is a rational pursuit of biographical continuity and a healthy sense of self in the face of an ontological crisis triggered by the secession of a province that has been constructed as the ontic space of the Serbian nation since the late 19th century.

In 1906, from the ice fields northwest of Greenland, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted an unknown land in the distance. He called it "Crocker Land". Scientists and explorers agreed that Peary had found a new continent. Several years later, two of his disciples, George Borup and Donald MacMillan-with the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History-assembled a team to investigate. They pitched their two-year mission as a scientific tour de force to fill in the last blank space on the globe. But the Crocker Land Expedition became a five-year ordeal that endured a fatal boating accident, a drunken captain, a shipwreck, marooned rescue parties, disease, dissension and a crewman-turned-murderer. Based on a trove of unpublished letters, diaries and field notes, A Wretched and Precarious Situation is a harrowing adventure.

Many disenchanted Kashmiris continue to demand independence or freedom from India. Written by a leading authority on Kashmir's troubled past, this book revisits the topic of independence for the region (also known as Jammu and Kashmir, or J&K), and explores exactly why this aspiration has never been fulfilled. In a rare India-Pakistan agreement, they concur that neither J&K, nor any part of it, can be independent. Charting a complex history and intense geo-political rivalry from Maharaja Hari Singh's leadership in the mid-1920s to the present, this book offers an essential insight into the disputes that have shaped the region. As tensions continue to rise following government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, Snedden asks a vital question: what might independence look like and just how realistic is this aspiration? -- .