A collection of nine articles written by leading scholars in Britain, Ireland, Italy and the USA on various aspects of the city of St Petersburg during the important first century and a quarter of its existence, from its founding in 1703 to the end of the reign of Alexander I. Cartography, architecture, social history and foreign perceptions are some of the subjects covered in these lively and informed essays.

Part of the What Everyone Needs to Know (R) series, David Day's book on Antarctica examines the most forbidding and formidably inaccessible continent on Earth. Antarctica was first discovered by European explorers in 1820, and for over a century following this, countries competed for the frozen land's vast marine resources-namely, the skins and oil of seals and whales. Soon the entire territory played host to competing claims by rival nations. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 was meant to end this contention, but countries have found other means of extending control over the land, with scientific bases establishing at least symbolic claims. Exploration and drilling by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Japan, and others has led to discoveries about the world's climate in centuries past-and in the process intimations of its alarming future. Delving into the history of the continent, Antarctic wildlife, arguments over governance, underwater mountain rangers, and the continent's use in predicting coming global change, Day's work sheds new light on a territory that, despite being the coldest, driest, and windiest continent in the world, will continue to be the object of intense speculation and competition.

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.

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.

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.

The twelfth century CE was a watershed moment for mysticism in the Muslim West. In al-Andalus, the pioneers of this mystical tradition, the Mu'tabirun or 'Contemplators', championed a synthesis between Muslim scriptural sources and Neoplatonic cosmology. Ibn Barrajan of Seville was most responsible for shaping this new intellectual approach, and is the focus of Yousef Casewit's book. Ibn Barrajan's extensive commentaries on the divine names and the Qur'an stress the significance of God's signs in nature, the Arabic bible as a means of interpreting the Qur'an, and the mystical crossing from the visible to the unseen. With an examination of the understudied writings of both Ibn Barrajan and his contemporaries, Ibn al-'Arif and Ibn Qasi, as well as the wider socio-political and scholarly context in al-Andalus, this book will appeal to researchers of the medieval Islamic world and the history of mysticism and Sufism in the Muslim West.

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.

The rural roads that led to our planet-changing global economy ran through the American South. That region's impact on the interconnected histories of business and ecological change is narrated here by acclaimed scholar Bart Elmore, who uses the histories of five southern firms-Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America-to investigate the environmental impact of our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy. Drawing on exclusive interviews with company executives, corporate archives, and other records, Elmore explores the historical, economic, and ecological conditions that gave rise to these five trailblazing corporations. He then considers what each has become: an essential presence in the daily workings of the global economy and an unmistakable contributor to the reshaping of the world's ecosystems. Even as businesses invest in sustainability initiatives and respond to new calls for corporate responsibility, Elmore shows the limits of their efforts to "green" their operations and offers insights on how governments and activists can push corporations to do better. At the root, Elmore reveals a fundamental challenge: Our lives are built around businesses that connect far-flung rural places to urban centers and global destinations. This "country capitalism" that proved successful in the US South has made it possible to satisfy our demands at the click of a button, but each click comes with hidden environmental costs. This book is a must-read for anyone who hopes to create an ecologically sustainable future economy.

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.

While a number of books document Polish social and political history, few works comprehensively chronicle Poland's long-term constitutional history, and even fewer analyze Poland's contemporary struggle to establish a constitutional democracy. This book, by examining the recent development of constitutionalism in Poland in the light of her deeper constitutional heritage, addresses both areas.

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 recent years, Detroit has been touted as undergoing a renaissance, yet many people have been left behind. A People's Atlas of Detroit, edited by Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safransky, and Tim Stallmann comes from a community-based participatory project called Uniting Detroiters that sought to use collective research to strengthen the organizing infrastructure of the city's long-vibrant grassroots sector and reassert residents' roles as active participants in the development process. Drawing on action research and counter-cartography, this book aims to both chart and help build movements for social justice in the city. A People's Atlas of Detroit is organized into six main chapters. Chapter 1 excavates three centuries of Detroit's past to unearth the histories of racial citizenship that have shaped the city. Chapter 2 adopts a ground-level view of Detroit's contemporary landscapes and highlights the meanings that land holds for residents. Chapter 3 highlights urban farming as one of the key ways that Detroiters have been repurposing vacant land over the last several decades. Chapter 4 analyzes struggles over governance and finances between the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit and other majority African American cities. Chapter 5 moves beyond the gentrification debate-a dominant paradigm since the 1980s-which is neither the only nor the most important factor behind displacement. Chapter 6 focuses on residents' plans and mobilizations to reclaim and rethink public services in the city, including water, transit, and schools. As a whole, the book seeks to highlight and explain current visions for radical change-both in Detroit and cities around the world. A People's Atlas of Detroit weaves together maps, poetry, interviews, photographs, essays, and stories by over fifty residents, activists, and community leaders who offer alternative perspectives on the city's past, present, and future. This volume will reinforce conversations being had by scholars of many disciplines and will inspire communities to continue to raise their voices in the name of representation and change.

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.

A century before Columbus arrived in America, two brothers from Venice are said to have explored parts of the New World. They became legends during the Renaissance, and then the source of a great scandal that would discredit their story. Today, they have been largely forgotten.
In this very original work--part history, part travelogue--Andrea di Robilant chronicles his discovery of a travel narrative published in 1558 by the Venetian statesman Nicolo Zen. The text and its fascinating nautical map re-created the travels of two of the author's ancestors, brothers who claimed to have explored the North Atlantic in the 1380s and 1390s. Di Robilant sets out to discover why the Zens' account later came under attack as one of the greatest frauds in geographical history. Was their map--and even their journey--partially or perhaps entirely faked?

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.

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.

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.

This revised guide to the Canadian battlefields of the First World War in France and Belgium offers a brief, critical history of the war and of Canada's contribution, drawing attention to the best recent books on the subject. It focuses on the Ypres Salient, Passchendaele, Vimy, and the "Hundred Days" battles and considers lesser-known battlefields as well. Battle maps, contemporary maps, photographs, war art, and tourist information enhance the reader experience. In addition to its new look, this second edition features new photographs, maps, and a more-detailed history section. A new "Walking the Battlefields" feature allows visitors to follow the path of Canadian troops as they fought at Ypres, the St. Eloi Craters, the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and Bourlon Wood through detailed maps and unit-level text. The tour sections and references have also been updated to reflect recent developments in writing about the Great War in Canada. The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies (LCMSDS) at Wilfrid Laurier University exists to foster research, education, and discussion of historical and contemporary conflict. This publication was generously funded by John and Pattie Cleghorn.

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.

Life in Space explores the many aspects and outcomes of NASA's research in life sciences, a little-understood endeavor that has often been overlooked in histories of the space agency. Maura Mackowski details NASA's work in this field from spectacular promises made during the Reagan era to the major new directions set by George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration in the early twenty-first century. At the first flight of NASA's space shuttle in 1981, hopes ran high for the shuttle program to achieve its potential of regularly transporting humans, cargo, and scientific experiments between Earth and the International Space Station. Mackowski describes different programs, projects, and policies initiated across NASA centers and headquarters in the following decades to advance research into human safety and habitation, plant and animal biology, and commercial biomaterials. Mackowski illuminates these ventures in fascinating detail by drawing on rare archival sources, oral histories, interviews, and site visits. While highlighting significant achievements and innovations such as space radiation research and the Neurolab Spacelab Mission, Mackowski reveals frustrations-lost opportunities, stagnation, and dead ends-stemming from frequent changes in presidential administrations and policies. For today's dreams of lunar outposts or long-term spaceflight to become reality, Mackowski argues, a robust program in space life sciences is essential, and the history in this book offers lessons to help prevent leaving more expectations unfulfilled.

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.