'History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.' One day in 1988, an enigmatic priest knocks on Pieter Waterdrinker's door with an unusual request: will he smuggle seven thousand bibles into the Soviet Union? Pieter agrees, and soon finds himself living in the midst of one of the biggest social and cultural revolutions of our time, working as a tour operator ... with a sideline in contraband. Thirty years later, from his apartment on Tchaikovsky Street in Saint Petersburg, where he lives with his Russian wife and three cats, Pieter reflects on his personal history in the Soviet Union, as well as the century of revolutions that took place in and around his street. A master storyteller, he blends history with memoir to create an ode to the divided soul of Russia and an unputdownable account of his own struggles with life, literature, and love.

Martin Middlebrook is the only British historian to have been granted open access to the Argentines who planned and fought the Falklands War. It ranks with Liddell Hart's The Other Side of the Hill in analyzing and understanding the military thinking and strategies of Britain's sometime enemy, and is essential reading for all who wish to understand the workings of military minds.returncharacterreturncharacterThe author has managed to avoid becoming involved in the issue of sovereignty and concentrates entirely upon the military story. He has produced a genuine 'first' with this balanced and unique work. Among the men he met were the captain of the ship that took the scrap-metal merchants to South Georgia; the admiral in charge of planning the Falklands invasion; the marine commander and other members of the invasion force; two brigadier-generals, five unit commanders and many other men of the large army force sent to occupy and defend the islands.; the officer in charge of the Argentine garrison at Goose Green; and finally the brigadier-general responsible for the Defence of Port Stanley and soldiers of all ranks who fought the final battles.

From the romantic liaisons of Peter the Great to the birth of the Russian 'queen', this collection of essays presents recent research from the new field of Russian masculinity studies. Peasant patriarchs, aristocratic dandies, anxious young bureaucrats, workers in search of father figures, heroic warriors, promiscuous bathhouse attendants and vodka-soaked athletic stars populate this volume. Its essays take as a starting point the notion that masculinity, like femininity, has a history.

Prohibition, with all its crime, corruption, and cultural upheaval, ran its course after thirteen years in most of the rest of the country-but not in Memphis, where it lasted thirty years. Patrick O'Daniel takes a fresh look at those responsible for the rise and fall of Prohibition, its effect on Memphis, and the impact events in the city made on the rest of the state and country. Prohibition remains perhaps the most important issue to affect Memphis after the Civil War. It affected politics, religion, crime, the economy, and health, along with race and class. In Memphis, bootlegging bore a particular character shaped by its urban environment and the rural background of the city's inhabitants. Religious fundamentalists and the Ku Klux Klan supported Prohibition, while the rebellious youth of the Jazz Age fought against it. Poor and working-class people took the brunt of Prohibition, while the wealthy skirted the law. Like the War on Drugs today, African Americans, immigrants, and poor whites made easy targets for law enforcement due to their lack of resources and effective legal counsel. Based on news reports and documents, O'Daniel's lively account distills long-forgotten gangsters, criminal organizations, and crusaders whose actions shaped the character of Memphis well into the twentieth century.

The vivid discussion on civil society in Eastern Europe that flourished during the late 1980s and early 1990s has faded somewhat, and been partly replaced by new attempts to conceptualise the nature of social change taking place in these countries. This book strives to continue and go beyond the civil society discourse by analysing the interrelationship between education and civic culture in post-communist countries. The volume offers detailed case studies, written by specialists from the region and from Western Europe and North America, examining everyday patterns of civic culture; the linkage between education and national identity, ethnicity, gender and religion; the experience and attitudes of youth; and attempts to render education systems better suited to the demands of post-communist society.

Have you ever driven through a small town with an intriguing name like Wyandotte or Cuyamungue and wondered where that name came from? Or how such well-known placenames as Tucson, Waco, or Tulsa originated?

Native American placenames like these occur all across the American Southwest. This user-friendly guide--covering Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas--provides fascinating information about the meaning and origins of southwestern placenames. With its unique regional approach and compact design, the handbook is especially suitable for curious travelers.

Written by distinguished linguist William Bright, the handbook is organized alphabetically, and its entries for places--including towns, cities, counties, parks, and geographic landmarks--are concise and easy to read. Entries give the state and county, along with all available information on pronunciation, the name of the language from which the name derives, the name's literal meaning, and relevant history.In their introduction to the handbook, editors Alice Anderton and Sean O'Neill provide easy-to-understand pronunciation keys for English and Native languages. They further explain basic linguistic terminology and common southwestern geographical terms such as "mesa," "canyon, " and "barranca."

The book also features maps showing all counties in each of the southwestern states, a list of Native languages and language families, and contact information for tribal headquarters throughout the Southwest.

The first major territorial struggle in the late Soviet period involved Nagorno-Karabagh, an Armenian inhabited territory that had been assigned to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. In the early 1920s. Armenian protests calling for reunification with Armenia in 1988 led to Azerbaijani pogroms against Armenians and later to armed conflict that claimed over twenty thousand lives. The struggle remains unresolved. A distinguished group of historians and social scientists analyze the Karabagh struggle in this unique volume that covers one of the world's strategic, oil-rich regions.

In 1838, a rebellion began in northern Mexico. A loose collective sought to establish a "Republic of the Rio Grande": the rebellion lasted two years, failed, and was then forgotten by history. This regional effort to establish an independent republic achieved some fleeting victories, although they were flanked by triumphs of the Supreme Government. Initially fed by a desire to defend the federalist system against a consolidated and unsupportive central government, zealous leaders such as Antonio Zavala and Antonio Canales led the popular uprising. As the skirmishes continued, these norteamericanos resorted to increasingly desperate measures, including soliciting aid from the newfound Republic of Texas, which supplied covert support for the rebel cause in the form of manpower, funding, and supplies. When the chastened Anglo Texans finally fled back to their homeland with the tacit compliance of the government of the Republic of Mexico, the states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas became entirely free of the norteamericanos, who faced almost unanimous hatred in Mexico by the time of their departure. Leaders from both Mexican factions in the civil conflict then sought peace and partnership against the threatened aggrandizement of the Republic of Texas. In that regard, this inconclusive regional revolt had many precursive elements to the aggression of the United States that resulted in war against Mexico from 1845 to 1848, fulfilling the imperial dreams previously uttered by Anglo Texans during this federalist revolt of 1838-1840. Searching for the Republic of the Rio Grande reads the smoke that would soon fan into the flames of open war against the Mexican Republic.

At the heart of Memphis lies Overton Park, a 342-acre public space that contains the world-class Memphis Zoo, an old-growth forest, the Memphis College of Art, an amphitheater, and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, among other beloved amenities. Founded in 1901, the park has been at the center of both celebration and controversy. Performers like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash have dazzled audiences there, while local children have long enjoyed its playgrounds and runners its jogging trails. During the civil rights era, desegregating the park became a major goal of local activists, and the park's Greensward was the scene of protests against the Vietnam War. Late in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, when the proposed route of Interstate 40 threatened the park, concerned citizens banded together to fight the plan-a struggle that reached the Supreme Court and eventually saved the park for future generations. This delightfully informative book, filled with historic photos, offers a history of the park from the perspective of those who lived it. Brooks Lamb interviewed nearly a score of Memphians-from civil rights activist Johnnie Turner to U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen, from artist Martha Kelly to retired zookeepers Kathy Fay and Richard Meek-to learn what the park has meant to them and to discover the transformations they have witnessed. The stories they tell reveal a dynamic place that remains, despite changes and challenges, a people's park and, in the words of one resident, "the heartbeat of Memphis."

Illustrator Jules Scheele teams up with Dr Laura Locker in this comic-book introduction to the political history of the Land of Opportunity.

How did a political outsider like Trump win the 2016 presidential election? Why do some Americans feel so strongly about gun rights? Is there a role for more than two political parties in the system?

Politics isn’t something that just occurs in the West Wing or the gleaming Capitol building – it comes from the interaction between state and society, the American people living their daily lives. In this unique graphic guide, we follow modern citizens as they explore everything from the United States’ political culture, the Constitution and the balance of power, to social movements, the role of the media, and tensions over race, immigration, and LGBT rights.

Step right up, and see what lies beneath the pageantry and headlines of this great nation.

This book examines how the Russian Empire expanded across the barrier of the Caucasus mountains to take control of the Georgian lands at the close of the eighteenth century. With no organized plan for conquest, Imperial policy fluctuated based both on personnel changes in the Imperial government and strategic re-evaluations of Imperial interests. Particular attention is paid to the role of two significant individuals - Princes Potemkin and Tsitsianov - in pushing the Empire toward total incorporation.

This new collection of original essays by leading academics explores major issues in Russia's relations with the wider world since the seventeenth century. The emphasis is not on Russian foreign policy per se, but on the different levels of interaction between Russia, its immediate neighbours, and the wider global community, including cultural, political and economic relations. The book has been produced in honour of the distinguished historian, Professor Paul Dukes.

Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898-1920 examines the rise and fall of organized socialism in West Virginia through an exploration of the demographics of membership, oral interview material gathered in the 1960s from party members, and the collapse of the party in the wake of the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek coal-mining strike of 1912. The first local branch of the West Virginia Socialist Party was established in Wheeling in 1901 and by 1914 several thousand West Virginians were dues-paying members of local branches. By 1910 local Socialists began to elect candidates to office and in 1912 more than 15,000 West Virginian voters cast their ballots for Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. The progress that West Virginia socialists achieved on the electoral front was a reflection of the party's strategy of increasing class-consciousness by working with existing unions to build the power of the labor movement. The party appealed to a fairly broad cross section of wage earners and its steady growth also owed much to the fact that many members of the middle class were attracted to the cause. Several factors combined to send the party into rapid decline, most importantly deep fissures between class and craft factions of the party and 1915 legislation making third party political participation difficult. Working Class Radicals offers insight into the various internal and external forces that doomed the party and serves as a cautionary tale to contemporary political leaders and organizers.

In the interwar period, Red Army commanders headed by Tukhachevskii developed a new raw doctrine of mobile warfare and "deep operations." The military requirements of armaments and industrial production in the event of war was a central parameter in Stalinist industrialization. Based on recently opened Russian archives, this book analyzes military dimensions of Soviet long-term economic and military reconstruction plans from the mid-1920s until 1941. It presents a new framework for estimating the Soviet war-economic preparedness, drastically underestimated by contemporaries.

In the 1830s Russia was facing a crisis. The army was poorly organized, the administration was underdeveloped, inefficient, and corrupt, and the state was too poor to bear the strain. This crisis was the principal driving force behind Russia's reforms of the 1830s, and Nicholas' policies can only be understood within the context of that crisis. Within this context, Frederick Kagan's The Military Reforms of Nicholas I , examines Nicholas' fundamental reorganization of the Russian military administration from 1832-1836, bringing about the birth of the modern Russian army.

Between the Nazi occupation and the anti-communist revolution of 1956, Poland underwent twelve years of Stalinist rule. Using recently-opened archives, historians and social scientists from four countries give the first analysis of the rise and fall of this system. The book is organised in three parts: Construction (external and domestic), Conflicts (above all, communists against the Church and peasantry) and Collapse (during 1956). An Epilogue reviews the whole period in the light of contemporary political debates.

In 1910 - hoping that the study of penguin eggs would provide an evolutionary link between birds and reptiles - a group of explorers left Cardiff by boat on an expedition to Antarctica. Not all of them would return. Written by one of its survivors, "The Worst Journey in the World" tells the moving and dramatic story of the disastrous expedition.

Crimes never solved, eerie sightings never explained and paranormal events that stretch the limits of the mind -- read about the mysteries that continue to baffle British Columbians to this day.

Over the past two decades in the West there has been a substantial re-appraisal of the Stalinist period. Social historians, in particular, have focused their attention on the social dynamics of Stalinism. This collection of essays is based on a conference held at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, the University of London, on 'Stalin and Stalinism'. The contributors have analysed specific areas of the research available on Stalin and Stalinism in the USSR debate. Their work should be placed within the context of current scholarship in the field, both in the Former Soviet Union and the West. This groundbreaking text will be critical in stimulating interest in the subject and providing material for further debate.

Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier's hold on power in Haiti, initially tenuous, grew stronger as American confrontations with Cuba under President Kennedy fostered a fear that Communism could sweep Haiti if "Papa Doc" were ousted. Nonetheless, several groups of daring rebels took on the formidable task of overthrowing the dictator. The mini-revolutions had little chance of success, but one thing was guaranteed: brutal retribution if the rebels were caught by the Duvalier regime and its militia, the Tontons Macoutes. For the first time, journalist Bernard Diederich reveals the names and personal stories of these rebels, adding color and detail to the tangled storyline of the Duvalier years. This volume continues the chilling history begun in The Price of Blood, which chronicles the years 1957-1961.

An examination of the early Soviet period of the Russian (Soviet) Academy of Sciences which focuses on the reactions of individual members of the academy to the new situation in which they found themselves after October 1917. Based on the extensive use of documents from the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author discusses how the academicians justified their cooperation with the Bolsheviks and the ideological basis of the regime's policy towards the academy in the 1920s.

A detailed examination of economic policy-making in the USSR during the period of the Second Five-Year Plan (1933-1937). The work examines the process by which the plan was formulated and implemented, through a series of detailed case-studies, based on archival material, examining the role of the Politburo, the Soviet government, Gosplan and the main economic commissariats. It examines the relationship between the conflicts within the economic commissariats and the unleashing of the Great Purges 1936-38. The work aims towards a new conceptualisation of the Stalinist state.

Communist humor is the strangest, funniest, most enchanting and meaningful legacy of the eighty years of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. The valiant and sardonic citizens of the former Communist countries surrounded by secret police, threatened with arrest, imprisonment and forced labor, a failed economic system, and bombarded with ludicrous propaganda turned joke-telling into an art form, using them as a coded way of speaking the truth and coping with the absurdity of the system. In this poignant and historically revealing book, rare and previously unpublished archival material, including cartoons, caricatures, photographs, and oral transcripts take the reader on a unique journey through the real experience of the Communist era."

Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820 explores methods of cure during a time when the South relied more heavily on homespun remedies than on professionally prescribed treatments. Bringing to light several previously unpublished primary sources, Kay K. Moss inventories the medical ingredients and practices adopted by physicians, herb women, yeoman farmers, plantation mistresses, merchants, tradesmen, preachers, and quacks alike. Moss shows how families passed down cures as heirlooms, how remedies crossed cultural and ethnic boundaries, and how domestic healers compounded native herbs and plants with exotic ingredients. Moss assembles her picture of domestic medical practice largely from an analysis of twelve commonplace books--or repositories of information, medical and otherwise--kept by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southerners. She reveals that men and women of all social classes collected medical guidance and receipts in handwritten journals. Whether well educated or unlettered, many preferred home remedies over treatment by the region's few professional physicians. Of particular interest to natural historians, an extensive guide to medicinal plants, their scientific names, and their traditional uses is also included.