This book tells the compelling story of a Christian noblewoman named Tamta in the thirteenth century. Born to an Armenian family at the court of queen Tamar of Georgia, she was ransomed in marriage to nephews of Saladin after her father was captured during a siege. She was later raped and then married by the Khwarazmshah and held hostage by the Mongols, before being made an independent ruler under them in eastern Anatolia. Her tale stretches from the Mediterranean to Mongolia and reveals the extraordinary connections across continents and cultures that one woman could experience. Without a voice of her own, surviving monuments - monasteries and mosques, caravanserais and palaces - build up a picture of Tamta's world and the roles women played in it. The book explores how women's identities changed between different courts, with shifting languages, religions and cultures, and between their roles as daughters, wives, mothers and widows.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, street gang members from the impoverished Segundo Barrio in El Paso, Texas, united in the Texas prison system to create the Barrio Aztecas gang. They quickly rose to power in the Texas prison system and ultimately became a powerful transnational criminal organization. Kolb describes the prison dynamic of predator and prey and the need for the prey to unify for protection against gangs such as the Texas Syndicate and Texas Mexican Mafia, also known as the Mexikanemi. The protective cocoon formed by this group soon morphed into a criminal enterprise that would be headquartered in the Coffield Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, where the gang would engage in drug sales and violent crimes while behind bars. The skill sets they acquired served members well as they were released from custody and went on to exploit US immigration policies as well as friends and familial ties in Ciudad JuArez, Mexico. There they established alliances with regional drug trafficking organizations such as Vicente Carrillo Fuentes (Juarez cartel), to whom they would serve as foot soldiers in the proxy war that would consume Ciudad JuArez and turn it into the "Murder Capital of the World." Blood Ties describes the Azteca's organizational structure and ranks, identifying characteristics such as tattoos and code words, and how the organization appropriated Aztec culture to form the basis for their identity. Some of the gang's most horrific crimes are revealed here, and the author explores how Azteca's leadership was eroded through the violation of the very tenets that served as the gang's foundation.

Historians have broadened the somewhat simplistic interpretation of the Civil War as a battle between the North and the South by revealing the "many Souths" that made up the Confederacy, but the "North" has remained largely undifferentiated as a geopolitical term. In this welcome collection, seven Civil War scholars offer a unique regional perspective on the Civil War by examining how a specific group of Northerners- Midwesterners, known as Westerners and Middle Westerners during the 1860s-experienced the war on the home front-experienced the war on the home front. From the exploitation of Confederate prisoners in Ohio to wartime college enrollment in Michigan, these essays reveal how Midwestern men, women, families, and communities became engaged in myriad war-related activities and support. Agriculture figures prominently in the collection, with several contributors exploring the agricultural power of the region and the impact of the war on farming, farm families, and farm women. Contributors also consider student debates and reactions to questions of patriotism, the effect of the war on military families' relationships, issues of women's loyalty and deference to male authority, as well as the treatment of political dissent and dissenters. Bringing together an assortment of home front topics from a variety of fresh perspectives, this collection offers a view of the Civil War that is unabashedly Midwestern.

Initially expected to bring efficiency to the Russian economy and prosperity to Russian society, the shock therapy of price liberalization, privatization and macroeconomic stabilization introduced under Boris Yeltsin was quickly condemned as having worsened the lives of most Russians. Based on conversations with more than two dozen women in a provincial Russian capital, this book takes a retrospective look at these economic policies and explores how they transformed the trajectory of the lives of these women- both positively and negatively- in the family and in the workplace. McKinney considers the everyday experiences of the women as they provided for their families, established businesses, travelled abroad, and adjusted to the new economic, political and social environment of the Late Soviet and Post-Soviet era. Through their divergent experiences, Russian Women and the End of Soviet Socialism casts light on how these women view issues of gender, ethnicity, domestic and international politics, and the end of the Soviet experiment. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, sociology, economics and history, will find this book of interest.

The revolutions that began to sweep across countries in North Africa and the Middle East in December 2010 - like other revolutions in diverse modern historical contexts - have often been articulated, internally and externally, in black and white terms of success or failure, liberation or constraint, for or against, friend or enemy. These internal and external cliches are perpetuated by what Jellel Gasteli has called 'icons of revolutionary exoticism'. Paying particular attention to works from the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, this book examines a diverse body of art including photography, sculpture, graffiti, performance, video and installation by over twenty-five artists. Examining how art can evoke the idea of revolution, Art and the Arab Spring reveals a new way of understanding these revolutions, their profound cultural impact, and of the meaning of the term 'revolution' itself.

Translated from the original German Lenin Neuentdecken and available in English for the first time, this volume rediscovers Lenin as a strategic socialist thinker through close examination of his collected works and correspondence. Brie opens with an analysis of Lenin's theoretical development between 1914 and 1917, in preparation for his critical decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 in a struggle for power. This led from the dialectics of revolutionary practice and social analysis to a new understanding of socialism, which is compared and contrasted to the alternative Marxist ideas and conceptions of the state posited by Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Rediscovering Lenin then moves to 1921, when Lenin begins a new stage of his theoretical development concerned with resolving the reversal of the revolution's aims and its results. This process remains unfinished, and the questions raised a hundred years ago remain: How can one intervene successfully and responsibly in social and political crises? What role do social science theories, ideological frameworks, and other practices play in transforming the economic, political and cultural power structures of a society? Brie concludes with a retrospective on the ideas developed by Marx and in the Second International, and their impact on Lenin's strategic thinking. Placing Lenin's writing itself in the foreground and arguing from inside his own self-learning, Rediscovering Lenin focuses on the reflective relationship between ideology, theory, and practice.

The Italian Army's participation in Hitler's war against the Soviet Union has remained unrecognized and understudied. Bastian Matteo Scianna offers a wide-ranging, in-depth corrective. Mining Italian, German and Russian sources, he examines the history of the Italian campaign in the East between 1941 and 1943, as well as how the campaign was remembered and memorialized in the domestic and international arena during the Cold War. Linking operational military history with memory studies, this book revises our understanding of the Italian Army in the Second World War.

This monograph traces the history of the dissident as a transnational phenomenon, exploring Soviet dissidents in Communist Central Europe from the mid-1960s until 1989. It argues that our understanding of the transnational activist would not be what it is today without the input of Central European oppositionists and ties the term to the global emergence and evolution of human rights. The book examines how we define dissidents and explores the association of political resistance to authoritarian regimes, as well as the impact of domestic and international recognition of the dissident figure. Turning to literature to analyse the meaning and impact of the dissident label, the book also incorporates interviews and primary accounts from former activists. Combining a unique theoretical approach with new empirical material, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary history, politics and culture in Central Europe.

The Holocaust and the Nakba are foundational traumas in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian societies and form key parts of each respective collective identity. This book offers a parallel analysis of the transmission of these foundational pasts in Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian societies by exploring how the Holocaust and the Nakba have been narrated since the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. The work exposes the existence and perpetuation of ethnocentric victimhood narratives that serve as the theoretical foundations for an ensuing minimization - or even denial - of the other's past. Three established realms of societal memory transmission provide the analytical framework for this study: official state education, commemorative acts, and mass mediation. Through this analysis, the work demonstrates the interrelated nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the contextualization of the primary historical events, while also highlighting the universal malleability of mnemonic practices.

In Gullah Spirituals musicologist Eric Crawford traces Gullah Geechee songs from their beginnings in West Africa to their height as songs for social change and Black identity in the twentieth century American South. While much has been done to study, preserve, and interpret Gullah culture in the lowcountry and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, some traditions like the shouting and rowing songs have been all but forgotten. This work, which focuses primarily on South Carolina's St. Helena Island, illuminates the remarkable history, survival, and influence of spirituals since the earliest recordings in the 1860s.Grounded in an oral tradition with a dynamic and evolving character, spirituals proved equally adaptable for use during social and political unrest and in unlikely circumstances. Most notably, the island's songs were used at the turn of the century to help rally support for the United States' involvement in World War I and to calm racial tensions between black and white soldiers. In the 1960s, civil rights activists adopted spirituals as freedom songs, though many were unaware of their connection to the island. Gullah Spirituals uses fieldwork, personal recordings, and oral interviews to build upon earlier studies and includes an appendix with more than fifty transcriptions of St. Helena spirituals, many no longer performed and more than half derived from Crawford's own transcriptions. Through this work, Crawford hopes to restore the cultural memory lost to time while tracing the long arc and historical significance of the St. Helena spirituals.

For Land and Liberty is a comparative study of the history and contemporary circumstances concerning Brazil's quilombos (African-descent rural communities) and their inhabitants, the quilombolas. The book examines the disposition of quilombola claims to land as a site of contestation over citizenship and its meanings for Afro-descendants, as well as their connections to the broader fight against racism. Contrary to the narrative that quilombola identity is a recent invention, constructed for the purpose of qualifying for opportunities made possible by the 1988 law, Bowen argues that quilombola claims are historically and locally rooted. She examines the ways in which state actors have colluded with large landholders and modernization schemes to appropriate quilombo land, and further argues that, even when granted land titles, quilombolas face challenges issuing from systemic racism. By analyzing the quilombo movement and local initiatives, this book offers fresh perspectives on the resurgence of movements, mobilization, and resistance in Brazil.

Towards the end of the Cold War, the last great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the end of detente, and escalated into the most dangerous phase of the conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Aaron Donaghy examines the complex history of America's largest peacetime military buildup, which was in turn challenged by the largest peacetime peace movement. Focusing on the critical period between 1977 and 1985, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped dramatic foreign policy reversals by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He explains why the Cold War intensified so quickly and how - contrary to all expectations - US-Soviet relations were repaired. Drawing on recently declassified archival material, The Second Cold War traces how each administration evolved in response to crises and events at home and abroad. This compelling and controversial account challenges the accepted notion of how the end of the Cold War began.

This book offers an in-depth case study of Romania's land and agricultural reforms from mid-19th century and up to 2000, offering a historical account of agricultural reforms in post-communist Romania in the light of more than a century of social and economic development experiments. Taking a 'dual economy' analytic perspective, the book examines the impact of structural and agricultural reforms on the country's economic development and provides an analysis of the ideas and models that stood behind policy reforms aiming at the modernization of an economy and society defined by dualism and late development.

In 1927, Paul Morand -- a French diplomat and noted European author -- made two extended trips to the Caribbean, Latin America and the American South. Published in 1929, his travel account begins as a diary about his experience of Venezuela, Curacao, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica and Cuba and ends with a lengthy essay on Mexico. Morand was already a prolific, cosmopolitan writer but he had not yet acquired his controversial post-war reputation. The stylish writing of 'Caribbean Winter' fizzes with an acute intelligence and a rich -- though sometimes elliptical -- allusiveness (which is why this translation includes explanatory notes). It maps not just Morand's vivid impressions but also his main preoccupations, particularly with the shifting place of Europe in the new world order. Although he avoids all direct mention of the ethnocidal clearing of the 'New World' or the African American slave-trade, he is obsessed by the perceived threats posed to Europe's own future by mass migration and miscegenation. Morand was, above all, an uber-European and his work betrays the pseudo-scientific racialism of his time and background. Yet despite this blindness he was, at least, glimpsing the right questions to ask about the future of his world. And he knew that the Caribbean held most of the answers. He seems to have even intuited some of those answers and so parts of his commentary are startlingly modern and prescient. Much of Morand's pre-war non-fiction seems to have warranted about seven decades of political quarantine. But the twenty-first century is gradually re-discovering its significance, both in French and in translation. Interestingly, while almost all of his work has by now made its way into English, this is the first translation -- into any language -- of 'Hiver Caraibe'.

This book offers a unique approach to memory studies by focusing on local memory work conducted across the divide of the fall of Communism, whereas other histories have consistently used 1989 as a watershed moment. By examining the ways in which the Holocaust has been exhibited in Krakow, it investigates the impact local memory work has had on Polish collective memory and problematizes the importance of the fall of Communism for memory work. Using the Polish case study, it contributes to international debates on the nature of urban memory. It brings to the fore the role of mid-ranking governmental and municipal activists for local remembrance, investigates the relationship between the form and the content of the exhibitions, and highlights the importance of authenticity and emotional evocations for Holocaust remembrance. In particular, it focuses on the emergence of cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust, a process with local, Krakow, sources.

British interest in the Arctic has returned to heights not seen since the end of the Cold War; concerns about climate change, resources, trade, and national security are all impacted by profound environmental and geopolitical changes happening in the Arctic. Duncan Depledge investigates the increasing geopolitical significance of the Arctic and explores why it took until now for Britain - once an 'Arctic state' itself - to notice how close it is to these changes, what its contemporary interests in the region are, and whether the British government's response in the arenas of science, defence, and commerce is enough. This book will be of interest to both academics and practitioners seeking to understand contemporary British interest and activity in the Arctic.

In its classic union of gleaming silver and blue turquoise, Native American jewellery of the Southwest is an iconic art form. Internationally recognized and locally significant, Native American jewellery has a compelling history--it represents the persistence of tradition while encapsulating the vitality of Native American communities and the continuously transforming nature of the jewellery makers' art. Author Henrietta Lidchi focuses on jewellery in the cultural economy of the Southwest, exploring jewellery making as a decorative art form in constant transition. She describes the jewellery as subject to a number of desires, controlled at different times by government agencies, individual entrepreneurs, traders, curators, and Native American communities. Lidchi explores the jewellery as craft, material culture, commodity, and adornment. Considering the impact of tourism, she discusses fakes in the market and the artists' desires to codify traditional styles, explaining how these factors can affect stylistic development and value. Surviving Desires suggests the complexity and reinvention innate to Native American jewellery as a commercial craft. Drawing on the author's archival research and on interviews she conducted with Native American jewellers and with traders, dealers, and curators, this volume examines British collecting, exchanges between British and American institutions, and the development of the British Museum's contemporary collection. Lavishly illustrated with 300 color photographs of jewellery in the British Museum, the National Museums Scotland, and major collections in the United States, Surviving Desires presents many previously unpublished pieces and showcases works by Native American jewellers who include the best-known names in the field today. The volume is a visually stunning exploration of the symbolic, economic, and communal value of jewellery in the American Southwest.

Legal and political theorist, common lawyer and parliamentary leader, historian and polyglot, John Selden (1584-1654) was a formidable figure in Renaissance England, whose real importance and influence are now being recognized once again. John Selden and the Western Political Tradition highlights his important role in the development of such early modern political ideas as modern natural law and natural rights, national identity and tradition, the political integration of church and state, and the effect of Jewish ideas on Western political thought. Selden's political ideas are analysed in the context of his contemporaries Grotius, Hobbes and Filmer. The book demonstrates how these ideas informed and influenced more familiar works of later thinkers like Burke.

Contributions by Destiny O. Birdsong, Jean W. Cash, Kevin Catalano, Amanda Dean Freeman, David Gates, Richard Gaughran, Rebecca Godwin, Joan Wylie Hall, Dixon Hearne, Phillip Howerton, Emily D. Langhorne, Shawn E. Miller, Melody Pritchard, Nick Ripatrazone, Bes Stark Spangler, Scott Hamilton Suter, Melanie Benson Taylor, Jay Varner, and Scott D. Yarbrough Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers: New Voices, New Perspectives, an anthology of critical essays, introduces a new group of fiction writers from the American South. These fresh voices, like their twentieth-century predecessors, examine what it means to be a southerner in the modern world. These writers' works cover wide-ranging subjects and themes: the history of the region, the continued problems of the working-class South, the racial divisions that have continued, the violence of the modern world, and the difficulties of establishing a spiritual identity in a modern context. The approaches and styles vary from writer to writer, with realistic, place-centered description as the foundation of many of their works. They have also created new perspectives regarding point of view, and some have moved toward the inclusion of ""magic realism"" and even science fiction in their work. The nineteen essays in Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers feature a handful of fiction writers who are already well known, such as National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Michael Farris Smith, and Inman Majors. Others deserve greater recognition, and, in many cases, works in this anthology will be the first pieces of analysis dedicated to writers and their work. Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers aims to alert scholars of southern literature, as well as the reading public, to an exciting and varied group of writers, while laying a foundation for future examination of these works.

Davida Malo's Mo'olelo Hawai'i is the single most important description of pre-Christian Hawaiian culture. Malo, born in 1795, twenty-five years before the coming of Christianity to Hawai'i, wrote about everything from traditional cosmology and accounts of ancestral chiefs to religion and government to traditional amusements. The heart of this two-volume work is a new, critically edited text of Malo's original Hawaiian, including the manuscript known as the "Carter copy," handwritten by him and two helpers in the decade before his death in 1853. Volume 1 provides images of the original text, side by side with the new edited text. Volume 2 presents the edited Hawaiian text side by side with a new annotated English translation. Malo's text has been edited at two levels. First, the Hawaiian has been edited through a careful comparison of all the extant manuscripts, attempting to restore Malo's original text, with explanations of the editing choices given in the footnotes. Second, the orthography of the Hawaiian text has been modernized to help today's readers of Hawaiian by adding diacritical marks ('okina and kahako, or glottal stop and macron, respectively) and the punctuation has been revised to signal the end of clauses and sentences. The new English translation attempts to remain faithful to the edited Hawaiian text while avoiding awkwardness in the English. Both volumes contain substantial introductions. The introduction to Volume 1 (in Hawaiian) discusses the manuscripts of Malo's text and their history. The introduction to Volume 2 contains two essays that provide context to help the reader understand Malo's Moolelo Hawaii. "Understanding Malo's Moolelo Hawaii" describes the nature of Malo's work, showing that it is the result of his dual Hawaiian and Western education. "The Writing of the Moolelo Hawaii" discusses how the Carter copy was written and preserved, its relationship to other versions of the text, and Malo's plan for the work as a whole. The introduction is followed by a new biography of Malo by Kanaka Maoli historian Noelani Arista, "Davida Malo, a Hawaiian Life," describing his life as a chiefly counselor and Hawaiian intellectual.

Persian served as one of the primary languages of historical writing over the period of the early modern Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals. Historians writing under these empires read and cited each other's work, some moving from one empire to another, writing under different rival dynasties at various points in time. Emphasising the importance of looking beyond the confines of political boundaries in studying this phenomenon, Sholeh A. Quinn employs a variety of historiographical approaches to draw attention to the importance of placing these histories not only within their historical context, but also historiographical context. This comparative study of Persian historiography from the 16th-17th centuries presents in-depth case analyses alongside a wide array of primary sources written under the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals to illustrate that Persian historiography during this era was part of an extensive universe of literary-historical writing.

From a Christian, Greek- and Armenian-speaking land to a predominantly Muslim and Turkish speaking one, the Islamisation of medieval Anatolia would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a world power and ultimately the modern Republic of Turkey. Bringing together previously unpublished sources in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, Peacock offers a new understanding of the crucial but neglected period in Anatolian history, that of Mongol domination, between c. 1240 and 1380. This represents a decisive phase in the process of Islamisation, with the popularisation of Sufism and the development of new forms of literature to spread Islam. This book integrates the study of Anatolia with that of the broader Islamic world, shedding new light on this crucial turning point in the history of the Middle East.

This radical new reading of British Conservatives' fortunes between the wars explores how the party adapted to the challenges of mass democracy after 1918. Geraint Thomas offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between local and national Conservatives' political strategies for electoral survival, which ensured that Conservative activists, despite their suspicion of coalitions, emerged as champions of the cross-party National Government from 1931 to 1940. By analysing the role of local campaigning in the age of mass broadcasting, Thomas re-casts inter-war Conservatism. Popular Conservatism thus emerges less as the didactic product of Stanley Baldwin's consensual public image, and more concerned with the everyday material interests of the electorate. Exploring the contributions of key Conservative figures in the National Government, including Neville Chamberlain, Walter Elliot, Oliver Stanley, and Kingsley Wood, this study reveals how their pursuit of the 'politics of recovery' enabled the Conservatives to foster a culture of programmatic, activist government that would become prevalent in Britain after the Second World War.

The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. This volume shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates how new modes of memorialisation were embodied in texts, material objects, images, physical buildings, rituals, and bodily gestures. Attentive to the roles played by denial, amnesia, and fabrication, it also considers the retrospective processes by which the English Reformation became identified as an historic event. Examining dissident as well as official versions of this story, this richly illustrated, interdisciplinary collection traces how memory of the religious revolution evolved in the two centuries following the Henrician schism, and how the Reformation embedded itself in the early modern cultural imagination.