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Books > History > History of other lands
Bringing together some of the last Holocaust survivor stories in
living memory, After the Holocaust shares Jewish scholarship,
activism, poetry, and personal narratives which tackle the changing
face of human rights education in the 21st century. The collected
voices draw on decades of research on Holocaust history to discuss
education, broader human rights abuses, genocide, internment, and
oppression. Advancing the dialogue between civic advocacy, public
remembrance, and research, contributors discuss how the Holocaust
is taught and remembered. By including additional perspectives on
the context of Canadian antisemitism, the legacy of human rights
abuses of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the internment of
Japanese Canadians in World War II, After the Holocaust examines
the ways the Holocaust changed thinking around human rights
legislation and memorialization on a global scale. "The first- and
second-generation survivor accounts are treasures-invaluable
reflections that anchor this collection." - David MacDonald ,
author of The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential
Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation
In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and
writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from
2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the
Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the
Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless
ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and
rape, inflicted upon the author and his fellow inmates over the
course of nearly three years of illegal incarceration spent largely
in the prison called Izoliatsiia (Isolation). Aseyev also reflects
on how a human can survive such atrocities and reenter the world to
share his story. Since February 2022, numerous cases of illegal
detainment and extreme mistreatment have been reported in the
Ukrainian towns and villages occupied by Russian forces during the
full-scale invasion. These and other war crimes committed by
Russian troops speak to the horrors wreaked upon Ukrainians forced
to live in Russian-occupied zones. It is important to remember,
however, that the torture and killing of Ukrainians by Russian
security and military forces began long before 2022. Rendered
deftly into English, Aseyev's compelling account offers a critical
insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied
territories of Ukraine.
In "Five Cities that Ruled the World," theologian Douglas Wilson
fuses together, in compelling detail, the critical moments birthed
in history's most influential cities --Jerusalem, Athens, Rome,
London, and New York.
Wilson issues a challenge to our collective understanding of
history with the juxtapositions of freedom and its intrinsic
failures; liberty and its deep-seated liabilities. Each revelation
beckoning us deeper into a city's story, its political systems, and
how it flourished and floundered.
You'll discover the significance of:
- Jerusalem's complex history and its deep-rooted character as
the city of freedom, where people found their spiritual
liberty.
- Athens' intellectual influence as the city of reason and
birthplace of democracy.
- Rome's evolution as the city of law and justice and the
freedoms and limitations that come with liberty.
- London's place in the world's history as the city of literature
where man's literary imagination found its wings.
- New York's rise to global fame as the city of commerce and how
it triggered unmatched wealth, industry, and trade throughout the
world.
"Five Cities that Ruled the World" chronicles the destruction,
redemption, personalities, and power structures that altered the
world's political, spiritual, and moral center time and again. It's
an inspiring, enlightening global perspective that encourages
readers to honor our shared history, contribute to the present, and
look to the future with unmistakable hope.
One man's immigration to the Canadian Prairies in the early 1930s
reveals the character of Canada today as sharply as it did long
ago. In 1930, a young Jewish man, Yehuda Eisenstein, arrived in
Canada from Poland to escape persecution and in the hopes of
starting a new life for himself and his young family. Like
countless other young European men who came to Canada from
"non-preferred" countries, Yehuda was only granted entry because he
claimed to be single, starting his Canadian life with a lie. He
trusted that his wife and children would be able to follow after he
had gained legal entry and found work. For years, Yehuda was given
two choices: remain in Canada alone, or return home to Poland to be
with his family. Who Gets In is author Norman Ravvin's pursuit of
his grandfather's first years in Canada. It is a deeply personal
family memoir born from literary and archival recovery. It is also
a shocking critique of Canadian immigration policies that directly
challenges Canada's reputation as a tolerant, multicultural
country, a criticism that extends to our present moment, as war
once again continues to displace millions from their homes.
In August 1972, military leader and despot Idi Amin expelled Asian
Ugandans from the country, professing to return control of the
economy to "Ugandan citizens." Within ninety days, 50,000 Ugandans
of South Asian descent were forced to leave and seek asylum
elsewhere; nearly 8,000 resettled in Canada. This major migration
event marked the first time Canada accepted a large group of
predominantly Muslim, non-European, non-white refugees.Shezan
Muhammedi's Gifts from Amin documents how these women, children,
and men-including doctors, engineers, business leaders, and members
of Muhammedi's own family-responded to the threat in Uganda and
rebuilt their lives in Canada. Building on extensive archival
research and oral histories, Muhammedi provides a nuanced case
study on the relationship between public policy, refugee
resettlement, and assimilation tactics in the twentieth century. He
demonstrates how displaced peoples adeptly maintain multiple
regional, ethnic, and religious identities while negotiating new
citizenship. Not passive recipients of international aid, Ugandan
Asian refugees navigated various bureaucratic processes to secure
safe passage to Canada, applied for family reunification, and made
concerted efforts to integrate into-and give back to-Canadian
society, all the while reshaping Canada's refugee policies in ways
still evident today. As the numbers of forcibly displaced people
around the world continue to rise, Muhammedi's analysis of
policymaking and refugee experience is eminently relevant. The
first major oral history project dedicated to the stories of
Ugandan Asian refugees in Canada, Gifts from Amin explores the
historical context of their expulsion from Uganda, the multiple
motivations behind Canada's decision to admit them, and their
resilience over the past fifty years.
The exploration and colonisation of the Pacific is a remarkable
episode of human prehistory. Early sea-going explorers had no prior
knowledge of Pacific geography, no documents to record their route,
no metal, no instruments for measuring time and none for
exploration. Forty years of modern archaeology, experimental
voyages in rafts, and computer simulations of voyages have produced
an enormous range of literature on this controversial and
mysterious subject. This book represents a major advance in
knowledge of the settlement of the Pacific by suggesting that
exploration was rapid and purposeful, undertaken systematically,
and that navigation methods progressively improved. Using an
innovative model to establish a detailed theory of navigation,
Geoffrey Irwin claims that rather than sailing randomly downwind in
search of the unknown, Pacific Islanders expanded settlement by the
cautious strategy of exploring upwind, so as to ease their safe
return. The author has tested this hypothesis against the
chronological data from archaeological investigation, with a
computer simulation of demographic and exploration patterns and by
sailing throughout the region himself.
The initial confrontation between Union general Ulysses S. Grant
and Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Virginia during the
Overland Campaign has not until recently received the same degree
of scrutiny as other Civil War battles. The first round of combat
between the two renowned generals spanned about six weeks in May
and early June 1864. The major skirmishes Wilderness, Spotsylvania,
and Cold Harbor rivaled any other key engagement in the war. While
the strength and casualties in Grant s army remain uncontested,
historians know much less about Lee s army. Nonetheless, the
prevailing narrative depicts Confederates as outstripped nearly two
to one, and portrays Grant suffering losses at a rate nearly double
that of Lee. As a result, most Civil War scholars contend that the
campaign proved a clear numerical victory for Lee but a tactical
triumph for Grant. Questions about the power of Lee s army stem
mainly from poor record keeping by the Confederates as well as an
inordinate number of missing or lost battle reports. The complexity
of the Overland Campaign, which consisted of several smaller
engagements in addition to the three main clashes, led to
considerable historic uncertainty regarding Lee s army. Significant
doubts persist about the army s capability at the commencement of
the drive, the amount of reinforcements received, and the total of
casualties sustained during the entire campaign and at each of the
major battles. In Lee s Army during the Overland Campaign, Alfred
C. Young III addresses this deficiency by providing for the first
time accurate information regarding the Confederate side throughout
the conflict. The results challenge prevailing assumptions, showing
clearly that Lee s army stood far larger in strength and size and
suffered considerably higher casualties than previously believed.
Many are aware that gerrymandering exists and suspect it plays a
role in our elections, but its history goes far deeper, and its
impacts are far greater, than most realize. In his latest book,
Brent Tarter focuses on Virginia's long history of gerrymandering
to uncover its immense influence on the state's politics and to
provide perspective on how the practice impacts politics
nationally.Offering the first in-depth historical study of
gerrymanders in Virginia, Tarter exposes practices going back to
nineteenth century and colonial times and explains how they
protected land owners' and slave owners' interests. The
consequences of redistricting and reapportionment in modern
Virginia-in effect giving a partisan minority the upper hand in all
public policy decisions-become much clearer in light of this
history. Where the discussion of gerrymandering has typically
emphasized political parties' control of Congress, Tarter focuses
on the state legislatures that determine congressional district
lines and, in most states, even those of their own districts. On
the eve of the 2021 session of the General Assembly, which will
redraw district lines for Virginia's state Senate and House of
Delegates, as well as for the U.S. House of Representatives,
Tarter's book provides an eye-opening investigation of
gerrymandering and its pervasive effect on our local, state, and
national politics and government.
How, asks John Terrell in this richly illustrated and original
book, can we best account for the remarkable diversity of the
Pacific Islanders in biology, language, and custom? Traditionally
scholars have recognized a simple racial division between
Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Australians, and South-east
Asians: peoples allegedly differing in physical appearance,
temperament, achievements, and perhaps even intelligence. Terrell
shows that such simple divisions do not fit the known facts and
provide little more than a crude, static picture of human
diversity.
What do Americans want from immigration policy and why? In the rise
of a polarized and acrimonious immigration debate, leading accounts
see racial anxieties and disputes over the meaning of American
nationhood coming to a head. The resurgence of parochial identities
has breathed new life into old worries about the vulnerability of
the American Creed. This book tells a different story, one in which
creedal values remain hard at work in shaping ordinary Americans'
judgements about immigration. Levy and Wright show that perceptions
of civic fairness - based on multiple, often competing values
deeply rooted in the country's political culture - are the dominant
guideposts by which most Americans navigate immigration
controversies most of the time and explain why so many Americans
simultaneously hold a mix of pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant
positions. The authors test the relevance and force of the theory
over time and across issue domains.
'It is a story full of drama, with the Nile, the pyramids and the
Valley of the Kings as backdrop. That A World Beneath the Sands is
also a subtle and stimulating study of the paradoxes of
19th-century colonialism is a bonus indeed.' - Tom Holland,
Guardian What could be more exciting, more exotic or more intrepid
than digging in the sands of Egypt in the hope of discovering
golden treasures from the age of the pharaohs? Our fascination with
ancient Egypt goes back to the ancient Greeks. But the heyday of
Egyptology was undoubtedly the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. This golden age of scholarship and adventure is neatly
book-ended by two epoch-making events: Champollion's decipherment
of hieroglyphics in 1822 and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by
Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later. In A World
Beneath the Sands, the acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson tells
the riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with
Egypt's ancient civilisation drove them to uncover its secrets.
Champollion, Carter and Carnarvon are here, but so too are their
lesser-known contemporaries, such as the Prussian scholar Karl
Richard Lepsius, the Frenchman Auguste Mariette and the British
aristocrat Lucie Duff-Gordon. Their work - and those of others like
them - helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile
Valley and its people, and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too.
Travellers and treasure-hunters, ethnographers and epigraphers,
antiquarians and archaeologists: whatever their motives, whatever
their methods, all understood that in pursuing Egyptology they were
part of a greater endeavour - to reveal a lost world, buried for
centuries beneath the sands.
In 1898 after the murder of a white woman, two young Seminoles were
chained and burned alive. Hiding behind a wall of silence and
fearing reprisal for identifying their executioners, virtually the
entire white community became involved with the ghastly execution.
In this absorbing narrative Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., captures
the horror and details the events that incited this alarming act of
mob violence and community complicity. Seminole Burning not only
gives an account of a dramatic, violent event in Indian-white
relations but also provides insights into the social, economic, and
legal history of the times. Although occurring during the heyday of
lynching in America, the execution of the young Seminoles proved to
be not just another sad episode in the history of injustice.
Apparently a vendetta organized by the extended family of the dead
woman's husband, it was orchestrated by landless whites, who for a
week after her murder, had harassed and terrorized more than twenty
Seminole men and boys in selecting victims. For having taken them
out of Indian Territory and into Oklahoma for execution, the mob
leaders became the target of federal authorities. In the first
successful prosecution of lynchers in the Southwest, a special
prosecutor revealed underlying motives for the crime and convicted
six. Seminole Burning is not just the story of a lynching and an
account of how landless Americans invaded Indian Territory. By
placing this tragic case in context and against the large backdrop
of history, Littlefield connects it to federal expansion of court
jurisdiction, to federal attempts to dissolve land titles of the
Five Civilized Tribes, and indeed to the establishing of the state
of Oklahoma.
Charles Wilson did it all. He arrived in the West in 1905, the year
of Saskatchewan's birth, and experienced all the hardship, success,
and suffering that the province enjoyed and endured on its path to
becoming one of the most favoured places in Canada today.
"In the Temple of the Rain God" explores how governments and
individuals struggled to save western agriculture from the crushing
mountain of farm debt and--through Charles Wilson's eyes--tells the
dramatic story of the first fifty years of Saskatchewan history.
Offering a unique window into the Old Colony Mennonite community in
Saskatchewan, this biography of Herman D.W. Friesen reveals the
life of a man who attempted to modernize his community, often in
opposition to traditional religious beliefs. The story begins on
the Hague-Osler Mennonite reserve in the 1910s and 20s. At this
time the government was pressuring Mennonite communities to send
their children to province-run schools. This set off a series of
migrations, in which Mennonites left for Mexico, Central America,
and other parts of Canada. During the watershed decade of the
1960s, Friesen was elected as a minister, and later as the
aeltester (Bishop). Despite growing up in an environment filled
with intense governmental conflict and considerable suspicion
towards "the English outsiders," he did not try to organize another
migration out of Saskatchewan. Instead, taking a unique approach to
leadership, Friesen tried to navigate a gradual process of
accommodation to the changes taking place in the province. Included
in the book are Friesen's sermons, translated from German,
providing a unique glimpse into the Old Colony Mennonite theology
that aided him in guiding the church in a strategy of gradual
cultural accommodation.
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.
National history is a vital part of national self-definition. Most
books on the history of the world try to impose a uniform
narrative, written usually from a single writer's point of view.
Histories of Nations is different: it presents 28 essays written by
a leading historian as a `self-portrait' of his or her native
country, defining the characteristics that embody its sense of
nationhood. The countries have been selected to represent every
continent and every type of state, large and small, and together
they make up two-thirds of the world's population. They range from
mature democracies to religious autocracies and one-party states,
from countries with a venerable history to those who only came into
being in the 20th century. In order to get to grips with the
national and cultural differences that both enliven and endanger
our world, we need above all to understand different national
viewpoints - to read the always engaging and often passionate
accounts given in this remarkable and unusual book. Original and
thoughtprovoking, this is a crucial primer for the modern age.
Historians have long been engaged in telling the story of the
struggle for the vote. In the wake of recent contested elections,
the suppression of the vote has returned to the headlines, as
awareness of the deep structural barriers to the ballot,
particularly for poor, black, and Latino voters, has called
attention to the historical roots of issues related to voting
access. Perhaps most notably, former state legislator Stacey
Abrams's campaign for Georgia's gubernatorial race drew national
attention after she narrowly lost to then-secretary of state Brian
Kemp, who had removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the
official rolls. After her loss, Abrams created Fair Fight, a
multimillion-dollar initiative to combat voter suppression in
twenty states. At an annual conference of the Organization of
American Historians, leading scholars Carol Anderson, Kevin M.
Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson, and Heather Anne Thompson had a
conversation with Abrams about the long history of voter
suppression at the Library Company of Philadelphia. This book is a
transcript of that extraordinary conversation, edited by Jim Downs.
Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections offers an enlightening,
history-informed conversation about voter disenfranchisement in the
United States. By gathering scholars and activists whose work has
provided sharp analyses of this issue, we see how historians in
general explore contentious topics and provide historical context
for students and the broader public. The book also includes a "top
ten" selection of essays and articles by such writers as journalist
Ari Berman, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight, and
civil rights icon John Lewis.
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