"Warriors and Peasants" depicts the lives of the Don Cossacks, the largest of all the Cossack communities, in late Imperial Russia. The dual identity of the Cossacks, that of the steppe and of the settled Slavic areas, is emphasized as the key to their unique culture. The book explores how that identity manifested and preserved itself by focusing on the Cossack tradition, their economy, their families and their communities. Far from being moribund and close to collapse, the book concludes that the Cossack tradition remained among the most vibrant in the empire.

During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Washington policymakers aspired to destabilize the Soviet and East European Communist Party regimes by implementing programs of psychological warfare and gradual cultural infiltration. In focusing on American propaganda and cultural infiltration of the Soviet empire in these years, Parting the Curtain emerges as a groundbreaking study of certain aspects of US Cold War diplomacy never before examined.

Chileans are often called the 'English of South America'. This book narrates the tremendous influence that British visitors and immigrants have had on the history of Chile, starting in 1554 with 'Bloody Mary' becoming Queen of Chile. This is an informed, comprehensive, and balanced account that includes original research, and will appeal to students of Latin American history, the general reader, and travelers to Chile. Edmundson tells several stories, including Charles Darwin's seventeen months in Chile, the British stamp on the history of Patagonia, the story of the 'Nitrate King', and British participation in the War of Independence.

The Populist Movement was the largest mass movement for political and economic change in the history of the American South until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The Populist Movement in this book is defined as the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party, as well as the Agricultural Wheel and Knights of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists threatened the political hegemony of the white racist southern Democratic Party during populism's high point in the mid-1890s; and the populists threw the New South into a state of turmoil.

Populism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures brings together nine of the best new works on the populist movement in the South that grapple with several larger themes--such as the nature of political insurgency, the relationship between African Americans and whites, electoral reform, new economic policies and producerism, and the relationship between rural and urban areas--in case studies that center on several states and at the local level. Each essay offers both new research and new interpretations into the causes, course, and consequences of the populist insurgency.

One essay analyzes how notions of debt informed the Populist insurgency in North Carolina, the one state where the Populists achieved statewide power, while another analyzes the Populists' failed attempts in Grant Parish, Louisiana, to align with African Americans and Republicans to topple the incumbent Democrats. Other topics covered include populist grassroots organizing with African Americans to stop disfranchisement in North Carolina; the Knights of Labor and the relationship with populism in Georgia; organizing urban populism in Dallas, Texas; Tom Watson's relationship with Midwest Populism; the centrality of African Americans in populism, a comparative analysis of Populism across the Deep South, and how the rhetoric and ideology of populism impacted socialism and the Garvey movement in the early twentieth century. Together these studies offer new insights into the nature of southern populism and the legacy of the Peoples' Party in the South.

This work provides an in-depth case-study of decision-making in the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. It focuses on the development of rail transport policy, upon which the entire economy as well as the country's defence were so crucially dependent. It analyses the role of institutional lobbies in shaping policy, and sheds new light on the Stakhanovite movement, and analyses for the first time the impact of the Great Purges on the railways. The work provides a critical examination of the adequacy of existing conceptualisations of the Stalinist state.

This book offers the first comprehensive overview in English of the history of sociology in what is today the Czech Republic. Divided into six chapters, it traces the institutional development of the discipline from the late 19th century until the present, with an emphasis on the periods most favorable for sociology's institutionalization: the interwar years, the 1960s and the post-1989 era. The narrative places the institutions, persons and ideas that have been central to the discipline into the broader social and political context. Marek Skovajsa and Jan Balon show that sociology in the Czech Republic has been wedded to the dominant political projects of each successive historical period: nation- and state-building until after WWII, the communist experiment in 1948-1989, liberal democratic reconstruction after 1989, and internationalization after 2000. This work will appeal to social scientists and to a general readership interested in Czech culture and society.

Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union for almost two decades when it was at the height of its powers. This book is a long overdue reappraisal of Brezhnev the man and the system over which he ruled. By incorporating much of the new material available in Russian, it challenges the received wisdom about the Brezhnev years, and provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of one of the 20th century's most neglected political leaders.

In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised in Ohio, she was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and was gaining success as a writer when she departed in 1873 for St. Augustine. During the next six years, she made her way across the South and reported what she saw, first in illustrated travel accounts and then in the poetry, stories, and serialized novels that brought unsettled social relations to the pages of "Harper's Monthly," the "Atlantic," "Scribner's Monthly," "Appletons' Journal," and the "Galaxy." In the midst of Reconstruction and in print for years to come, Woolson revealed the sharp edges of loss, the sharper summons of opportunity, and the entanglements of northern misperceptions a decade before the waves of well-heeled tourists arrived during the 1880s.

This volume's sixteen essays are intent on illuminating, through her example, the neglected world of Reconstruction's backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable. Drawing upon the postcolonial and transnational perspectives of New Southern Studies, as well as the cultural history, intellectual genealogy, and feminist priorities that lend urgency to the portraits of the global South, this collection investigates the mysterious, ravaged territory of a defeated nation as curious northern readers first saw it.

The Spanish word cimarron, meaning "wild" or "untamed," refers to a region in the southern Rocky Mountains where control of timber, gold, coal, and grazing lands long bred violent struggle. After the U.S. occupation following the 1846-1848 war with Mexico, this tract of nearly two million acres came to be known as the Maxwell Land Grant. WhenCimarron Meant Wild presents a new history of the collision that occurred over the region's resources between 1870 and 1900. Author David L. Caffey describes the epic late-nineteenth-century range war in an account deeply informed by his historical perspective on social, political, and cultural issues that beset the American West to this day. Cimarron country churned with the tensions of the Old West-land disputes, lawlessness, violence, and class war among miners, a foreign corporation, local elites, Texas cattlemen, and the haughty "Santa Fe Ring" of lawyerly speculators. And present, still, were the indigenous Jicarilla Apache and Mouache Ute people, dispossessed of their homeland by successive Spanish, Mexican, and American regimes. A Mexican grant of uncertain size and bounds, awarded to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda in 1841 and later acquired by Lucien Maxwell, marked the beginning of a fight for control of the land and set off overlapping conflicts known as the Colfax County War, the Maxwell Land Grant War, and the Stonewall War. Caffey draws on new research to paint a complex picture of these events, and of those that followed the sale of the claim to investors in 1870. These clashes played out over the following thirty years, involving the new English owners, miners and prospectors, livestock grazers and farmers, and Native Americans. Just how wild was the Cimarron country in the late 1800s? And what were the consequences for the region and for those caught up in the conflict? The answers, pursued through this remarkable work, enhance our understanding of cultural and economic struggle in the American West.

The story of humanity is the story of textiles-as old as civilization itself. Textiles created empires and powered invention. They established trade routes and drew nations' borders. Since the first thread was spun, fabric has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel traces this surprising history, exposing the hidden ways textiles have made our world. The origins of chemistry lie in the coloring and finishing of cloth. The beginning of binary code-and perhaps all of mathematics-is found in weaving. Selective breeding to produce fibers heralded the birth of agriculture. The belt drive came from silk production. So did microbiology. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, the David and the Taj Mahal. From the Minoans who exported woolen cloth colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to the Romans who wore wildly expensive Chinese silk, the trade and production of textiles paved the economic and cultural crossroads of the ancient world. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyes drew sailors across strange seas, creating an ever-more connected global economy. Synthesizing groundbreaking research from economics, archaeology, and anthropology, Postrel weaves a rich tapestry of human cultural development.

The Holy Mountain of Athos is a self governing monastic republic on a peninsula in Northern Greece. Standing on the shores of the Aegean Sea is one of the twenty ruling monasteries that comprise the republic, that of St Panteleimon, known in Greek as the Rossikon. It's building, fully restored in recent years, can accommodate up to 5,000 men, reflecting the scale of the settlement at its apogee in the nineteenth century and prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 it has experienced a strong revival and is now one of the most numerous of the twenty. But the vast buildings that can be seen today are really only a reflection of the history of the past two centuries. Much less well known is the fact that the history of a Russian presence on Athos goes back more than one thousand years. This is the first comprehensive account of this in the English language. The author has been able to draw from previously inaccessible archival materials in gathering the wealth of information he shares in this work. The history of the community is not described in geographical isolation but shown as interacting with the much wider worlds of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires and the modern nation state of Greece, together with that of the Russian homeland whose political character is constantly evolving. There are shown to be three distinct phases in this history: From the tenth to the twelfth centuries when Russian Athonites inhabited the ancient Russian Lavra of the Mother of God, also known as Xylourgou. Then the six hundred years from the mid-twelth to the mid-eighteenth century when the ancient Monastery of St Panteleimon was the Russian house on Athos, more commonly referred to as Nagorny or Stary Rusik. Finally the most recent 250 years, that are naturally covered in greater depth thanks to the wider availability of sources. Amongst the themes explored in the book are ethnic relations, the Pan-Orthodox ideal, the role of money and political pressure, sanctity and heroism in adversity, and the importance of historical memory and precedent. The author seeks to arbitrate fairly between often strongly opposing ethnic viewpoints. It examines in detail the fluctuating fortunes of the monastic community of St Panteleimon during the past 250 years when its ethnic identity was frequently questioned. It is a history that has been blighted by Greek-Russian quarrels, mass deportation of dissenting brethren, troubles in the Caucasus, and even tangential implication in the present-day dispute between the Ecumenical and Moscow Patriarchates over Ukraine. This text will be invaluable to both academic historians and the general educated reader who does not possess specialist knowledge. It is complimented by a timeline, glossary, comprehensive bibliography, index, full colour illustrations and photographs.

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.

Russia's First Republican is designed to fill a gap in the historiography of the Decembrist movement. The research done in archives and libraries in Russia, the US, and the UK has led to the production of a comprehensive study of Pestel, the political activist and ideologue. It comprises a reconstruction of his formative years, an analysis of his role in the Decembrist secret societies from 1816 to 1825, and an assessment of his ideological contribution to the early nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement. Particular attention is paid to his highly original project for a Russian republic, Russian Justice.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 has been widely seen as a historical turning point. This book goes beyond the military and world political grand narratives to examine the war's social, cultural, literary, and intellectual impact. Containing contributions by established scholars in the fields of military history and the history and literature of both Russia and Japan, it offers for the first time in English a comparative perspective on symbolic meaning of the conflict.

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.

Why has Russian democracy apparently survived and even strengthened under a presidential system, when so many other presidential regimes have decayed into authoritarian rule? And what are the origins of presidential power in modern Russia? Thomas M. Nichols argues that the answer lies in the relationship between political institutions and trust: where society, and consequently politics, is fractious and divided, structural safeguards inherent in presidentialism actually serve to strengthen democratic behavior. The Russian presidency is not the cause of social turmoil in Russia, but rather a successful response to it. This book’s emphasis on the social origins of Russian politics explains not only the unexpected survival of Russian democracy, but encourages a reconsideration of the relationship between institutions, social conditions, and democracy.

To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding Japan's relationships with its minorities, state and economic development, and the uses of science and medicine. The book begins by tracing the country's early history through archaeological remains, before proceeding to explore life in the imperial court, the rise of the samurai, civil conflict, encounters with Europe, and the advent of modernity and empire. Integrating the pageantry of a unique nation's history with today's environmental concerns, Walker's vibrant and accessible new narrative then follows Japan's ascension from the ashes of World War II into the thriving nation of today. It is a history for our times, posing important questions regarding how we should situate a nation's history in an age of environmental and climatological uncertainties.

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.

In recent years, Hollywood cinema has forwarded a growing number of images of the Cold War and entertained a return to memories of conflicts between the USSR and the US, Russians and Americans, and communism and capitalism. Cold War II: Hollywood's Renewed Obsession with Russia explores the reasons for this sudden renewed interest in the Cold War. Essayists examine such films as Guy Ritchie's The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen's Hail, Caesar!, David Leitch's Atomic Blonde, Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, and Francis Lawrence's Red Sparrow, among others, as well as such television shows as Comrade Detective and The Americans. Contributors to this collection interrogate the revival of the Cold War movie genre from multiple angles and examine the issues of patriotism, national identity, otherness, gender, and corruption. They consider cinematic aesthetics and the ethics of these representations. They reveal how Cold War imagery shapes audiences' understanding of the period in general and of the relationship between the US and Russia in particular. The authors complicate traditional definitions of the Cold War film and invite readers to discover a new phase in the Cold War movie genre: Cold War II.

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.