Red Arctic tells the history of Stalinist Russia's massive campaign to explore and develop its Northern territories during the 1930s. McCannon tells the dramatic stories of the polar expeditions - conducted by foot, ship, and plane - which were the pride of Stalinist Russia, to expose the reality behind them: chaotic blunders, bureaucratic competition, and the eventual rise of the GULAG as the dominant force in the North. Dramatic stories of the first polar explorations, the record-breaking flights and rescues by both foot and ice-breaker. First examination of the Stalinist creation of the myth of the arctic in the face of the rise of the GULAG.

What happens to the citizen when states and nations come into being? How do the different ways in which states and nations exist define relations between individuals, groups, and the government? Are all citizens equal in their rights and duties in the newly established polity? Addressing these key questions in the contested and ethnically heterogeneous post-Yugoslav states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro, this book reinterprets the place of citizenship in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the creation of new states in the Western Balkans. Carefully analysing the interplay between competing ethnic identities and state-building projects, the author proposes a new analytical framework for studying continuities and discontinuities of citizenship in post-partition, post-conflict states. The book maintains that citizenship regimes in challenged states are shaped not only by the immediate political contexts that generated them, but also by their historical trajectories, societal environments in which they exist, as well as the transformative powers of international and European factors.

A Brief Moment in the Sun is the first scholarly biography of Francis Lewis Cardozo, one of the most talented and influential African Americans to hold elected office in the South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Born to a formerly enslaved African American mother and white Jewish father in antebellum South Carolina, Cardozo led a life of extraordinary achievement as a pioneering educator, politician, and government official. However, today he is largely unknown in South Carolina and among students of nineteenth-century American history. Immediately after the Civil War, Cardozo succeeded in creating and leading a successful school for formerly enslaved children in the face of widespread racial hostility. Between 1868 and 1877, voters elected him secretary of state and state treasurer. In the Republican administrations that controlled the state during Reconstruction, Cardozo was a famously honest officeholder when many of his colleagues were notoriously corrupt. He played a major part in securing a viable educational system for Black and white children and land reform for thousands of landless families. Cardozo proved that Black men could govern at least as well as white. As a result, he became the target of white supremacist Democratic politicians after they reclaimed power through a campaign of violence and intimidation. They prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned Cardozo on a fabricated fraud charge. Pardoned in 1879, Cardozo moved to Washington DC, where he led an even more successful school for African American children. Neil Kinghan's Brief Moment in the Sun is the first complete historical analysis of Francis Cardozo and his contribution to Reconstruction and African American history. It draws on original research on Cardozo's early life and education in Scotland and England and pulls together for the first time the extant sources on his experiences in South Carolina and Washington, DC. Kinghan reveals all that Cardozo achieved as a Black educator and political leader and explores what else he might have realized if white racism and violence had not ended his efforts in South Carolina. Above all, Kinghan shows that Francis Cardozo deserves a place of honor and distinction in the history of nineteenth-century America.

On April 5, 2010, an explosion ripped through Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine, killing twenty-nine coal miners. This tragedy was the deadliest mine disaster in the United States in forty years-a disaster that never should have happened. These deaths were rooted in the cynical corporate culture of Massey and its notorious former CEO Don Blankenship, and were part of an endless cycle of poverty, exploitation, and environmental abuse that has dominated the Appalachian coal fields since coal was first discovered there. And the cycle continues unabated as coal companies bury the most insidious dangers deep underground, all in search of higher profits, and hide the true costs from regulators, unions, and investors alike. But the disaster at Upper Big Branch goes beyond the coal fields of West Virginia. It casts a global shadow, calling into bitter question why coal miners in the United States are sacrificed to erect cities on the other side of the world, why the coal wars have been allowed to rage, polarizing the country, and how the world's voracious appetite for energy is satisfied at such horrendous cost. With Thunder On The Mountain, Peter A. Galuszka pieces together the true story of greed and negligence behind the tragedy at the Upper Big Branch mine. In doing so he has created a devastating portrait of an entire industry that exposes the coal-black motivations that led to the death of twenty-nine miners and fuel the ongoing war for the world's energy future. This new paper edition contains a foreword by Denise Giardina that provides an update on Massey Energy and Donald Blankenship, chairman and CEO of Massey Energy Company during the UBB disaster, and recounts her own experiences with Massey Energy and the United Mine Workers Association in the 1980s. This edition also includes a notes section and a bibliography.

In a time and place teeming with miners desperate to strike it rich in the gold rush, the slow-moving stagecoach filled with other men's fortunes was often a temptation too great to resist. The treasure-laden express box quickly became a favorite target among road agents, making stagecoach robbery an enduring part of the mythology of the Old West.William Brazleton was bold enough to elude authorities - for a time, anyway - by reversing the direction of his steed's horseshoes. Arizona's "petticoat bandit" Pearl Hart liked to rob her stagecoaches with a polite and ladylike .38 caliber revolver. And the last stagecoach robber on the frontier was practically caught red-handed - his bloody palm print being the first used as evidence in a U.S. criminal prosecution.Great Stagecoach Robberies of the Old West tells the stories of hauls too large, murders too cold-blooded, and bandits too eccentric to fade into obscurity.

Donald A. Ritchie, a congressional historian for forty years , takes readers on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of Capitol Hill, pointing out the key players, explaining their behavior, and translating parliamentary language into plain English. He also explores the essential necessity of compromise to accomplish anything significant in the legislative arena. However, recent events show that political polarization has hardened and produced gridlock, as Ritchie explains in this new edition. The 2020 election also produced a more diverse membership in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion, and ideology, with primary elections resulting in the defeat of moderate candidates by opponents ranging from socialists on the left to conspiracy theorists on the right, making bipartisan compromise harder to achieve. Among the most significant events since the last edition, the Senate ignored President Obama's last nomination to the Supreme Court and then adopted a "nuclear option" to streamline future Supreme Court confirmations. The House also twice impeached President Trump, processes that starkly expose the differences between the majority-rule requirements of the House and the super-majority requirements of the Senate. This new edition explains how the parties have changed in light of the unprecedented politics of the past four years, culminating in the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and how this development has affected both the House and the Senate.

In this compelling book, Rien Fertel tells the story of humanity's complicated and often brutal relationship with the brown pelican over the past century. This beloved bird with the mythically bottomless belly-to say nothing of its prodigious pouch-has been deemed a living fossil and the most dinosaur-like of creatures. The pelican adorns the Louisiana state flag, serves as a religious icon of sacrifice, and stars in the famous parting shot of Jurassic Park, but, most significantly, spotlights our tenuous connection with the environment in which it flies, feeds, and roosts-the coastal United States. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated the first national wildlife refuge at Pelican Island, Florida, in order to rescue the brown pelican, among other species, from the plume trade. Despite such protections, the ubiquity of synthetic "agents of death," most notably DDT, in the mid-twentieth century sent the brown pelican to the list of endangered species. By the mid-1960s, not one viable pelican nest remained in all of Louisiana. Authorities declared the state bird locally extinct. Conservation efforts-including an outlandish but well-planned birdnapping-saved the brown pelican, generating one of the great success stories in animal preservation. However, the brown pelican is once again under threat, particularly along Louisiana's coast, due to land loss and rising seas. For centuries, artists and writers have portrayed the pelican as a bird that pierces its breast to feed its young, symbolizing saintly piety. Today, the brown pelican gives itself in other ways, sacrificed both by and for the environment as a bellwether bird-an indicator species portending potential disasters that await. Brown Pelican combines history and first-person narrative to complicate, deconstruct, and reassemble our vision of the bird, the natural world, and ourselves.

This is the fascinating biography of a bright young working man, Tom Hickey, who came to the United States from Ireland in 1892, became a machinist, and soon joined the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party. His party boss recognized the potential in this Irishman and even made him an "enforcer" against those who questioned the boss's authority. The enforcer, though, eventually found himself forced out and moved west to start a new life. Ultimately, Hickey landed in Texas and saw an opportunity to use syndicalism as an organizing tool to build a state socialist party. He did just that. Within a few years, Hickey transformed the faction-ridden Socialist Party of America in Texas into a force strong enough to threaten the Republican Party at the ballot box. He gained a large following thanks to a unique mixture of evangelical rhetoric and militant industrial unionism. As biographer Peter H. Buckingham points out, Hickey failed to deliver his people into the Promised Land. Violence, poll taxes, voter suppression, and other forces made voting for socialist candidates problematic, and the Democratic Party soon co-opted the more appealing elements of socialism into watered-down, reformist planks for the Texan voter. By the time Hickey died of throat cancer in the mid-1920s, his moment had passed. "Red Tom" Hickey is an important contribution to Texas and American history, capturing a moment in time that Buckingham argues was the second sustained crisis in American history: a democratic society wrestling with the effects of industrial capitalism.

Send the Alabamians recounts the story of the 167th Infantry Regiment of the WWI Rainbow Division from their recruitment to their valiant service on the bloody fields of eastern France in the climactic final months of World War I. To mark the centenary of World War I, Send the Alabamians tells the remarkable story of a division of Alabama recruits whose service Douglas MacArthur observed had not "been surpassed in military history." The book borrows its title from a quip by American General Edward H. Plummer who commanded the young men during the inauspicious early days of their service. Impressed with their ferocity and esprit de corps but exasperated by their rambunctiousness, Plummer reportedly exclaimed: In time of war, send me all the Alabamians you can get, but in time of peace, for Lord's sake, send them to somebody else! The ferocity of the Alabamians, so apt to get them in trouble at home, proved invaluable in the field. At the climactic Battle of Croix Rouge, the hot-blooded 167th exhibited unflinching valor and, in the face of machine guns, artillery shells, and poison gas, sustained casualty rates over 50 percent to dislodge and repel the deeply entrenched and heavily armed enemy. Relying on extensive primary sources such as journals, letters, and military reports, Frazer draws a vivid picture of the individual soldiers who served in this division, so often overlooked but critical to the war's success. After Gettysburg, the Battle of Croix Rouge is the most significant military engagement to involve Alabama soldiers in the state's history. Families and genealogists will value the full roster of the 167th that accompanies the text. Richly researched yet grippingly readable, Nimrod T. Frazer's Send the Alabamians will delight those interested in WWI, the World Wars, Alabama history, or southern military history in general. Historians of the war, regimental historians, military history aficionados, and those interested in previously unexplored facets of Alabama history will prize this unique volume as well.

The three counties of England's northern borderlands have long had a reputation as an exceptional and peripheral region within the medieval kingdom, preoccupied with local turbulence as a result of the proximity of a hostile frontier with Scotland. Yet, in the fifteenth century, open war was an infrequent occurrence in a region which is much better understood by historians of fourteenth-century Anglo-Scottish conflict, or of Tudor responses to the so-called 'border reivers'. This first book-length study of England's far north in the fifteenth century addresses conflict, kinship, lordship, law, justice, and governance in this dynamic region. It traces the norms and behaviours by which local society sought to manage conflict, arguing that common law and march law were only parts of a mixed framework which included aspects of 'feud' as it is understood in a wider European context. Addressing the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland together, Jackson W. Armstrong transcends an east-west division in the region's historiography and challenges the prevailing understanding of conflict in late medieval England, setting the region within a wider comparative framework.

A comprehensive study of the island that was once Britain's foremost colonial possession in the Western Hemisphere.

Most experts consider economic development to be the dominant factor influencing urban politics. They point to the importance of the finance and real estate industries, the need to improve the tax base, and the push to create jobs. Bruce F. Berg maintains that there are three forces which are equally important in explaining New York City politics: economic development; the city's relationships with the state and federal governments, which influence taxation, revenue and public policy responsibilities; and New York City's racial and ethnic diversity, resulting in demands for more equitable representation and greater equity in the delivery of public goods and services. New York City Politics focuses on the impact of these three forces on the governance of New York City's political system including the need to promote democratic accountability, service delivery equity, as well as the maintenance of civil harmony. This second edition updates the discussion with examples from the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations as well as current public policy issues including infrastructure, housing and homelessness, land use regulations, and education.

From 2003 to 2009 sensational judicial bribery scandals rocked Mississippi's legal system. Famed trial lawyers Paul Minor and Richard (Dickie) Scruggs and renowned judge and former prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter proved to be the nexus of these scandals. Seven attorneys and a former state auditor were alleged to have attempted to bribe or to have actually bribed five state judges to rule in favor of Minor and Scruggs in several lawsuits. This is the story of how federal authorities, following up on information provided by a bank examiner and a judge who could not be bribed, toppled Minor, Scruggs, and their enablers in what was exposed as the most significant legal scandal of twenty-first-century Mississippi.

James R. Crockett details the convoluted schemes that eventually put three of the judges, six of the attorneys, and the former auditor in federal prison. All of the men involved were successful professionals and three of them, Minor, Scruggs, and fellow attorney Joey Langston, were exceptionally wealthy. The stories involve power, greed, but most of all hubris. The culprits rationalized abominable choices and illicit actions to influence judicial decisions. The crimes came to light in those six years, but some crimes were committed before that. These men put themselves above the law and produced the perfect storm of bribery that ended in disgrace.

The tales Crockett relates about these scandals and the actions of Paul Minor and Richard Scruggs are almost unbelievable. Individuals willingly became their minions in power plays designed to distort the very rule of law that most of them had sworn to uphold.

The approximately 150,000 Inuit are indigenous to four nations Denmark (Greenland), Canada, the United States (Alaska), and Russia and thus have had very different colonial experiences and participate as citizens of those nations in different ways. Far from being victims of colonialism, Inuit are actively involved in shaping their social environments. Nonetheless, modern social and political realities present Inuit with many of the same issues faced by distinct peoples around the world. This volume describes how Inuit as a single people, citizens of separate nations, and residents of individual communities deal with education, language rights, self-government and self determination, the militarization of their lands and their lives, climate change and pollution, and globalization. This work presents an overview of the Inuit peoples of the Circumpolar North. Unlike other works that focus on traditional Inuit cultures, this work documents the social, political, and economic history of Inuit as part of a globalized world. The work contains information on traditional Inuit cultures, but with special emphasis placed on the recent history of Inuit communities. More than 450 dictionary entries cover issues of society, economy, and politics; influential educators, writers, environmentalists, and politicians; and the many voluntary associations and governmental agencies that have played a role in Inuit history. The introductory essay, chronology, and well-developed bibliography make this an ideal reference source for the researcher or student.

By focusing on how the idea of heroism on the battlefield helped construct, perpetuate, and challenge racial and gender hierarchies in the United States between World War I and the present, Warring over Valor provides fresh perspectives on the history of American military heroism. The book offers two major insights into the history of military heroism. First, it reveals a precarious ambiguity in the efforts of minorities such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, and gay men to be recognized as heroic soldiers. Paradoxically, America's heroism discourse allowed them to press their case for full membership in the nation, but doing so simultaneously validated the dichotomous interpretations of race and gender they repudiated. The ambiguous role of marginalized groups in war-related hero-making processes also testifies to this volume's second general insight: the durability and tenacity of the masculine warrior hero in U.S. society and culture. Warring over Valor bridges a gap in the historiography of heroism and military affairs.

'Russia's Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich's "Sakhalin"' is the first English language translation of the Russian journalist Vlas Doroshevich's 1903 account of his visit to tsarist Russia's largest penal colony, Sakhalin, in the north Pacific.

From the establishment of Roanoke to a miracle of modern medicine, It Happened in North Carolina takes you on a behind-the-scenes tour of thirty compelling episodes from the vibrant history of the Tar Heel State. Guess the identity of the wealthy and mysterious stranger of New Orleans. Go back to June 27, 1857, and climb the highest peak in the East along with Elisha Mitchell, who died there. Discover how the last shot of the Civil War was fired in 1941. Get the inside story on the North Carolina gold rush, the Wright brothers' first real flight, a showdown at Torpedo Junction, and the case of the telltale laundry ticket.

A fascinating collection of thirty compelling stories about events that shaped Gotham, "It Happened
in New York City" describes everything from the installation of the Statue of Liberty to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, from the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 to the construction of the new Yankee stadium, slated to open in 2009.

Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southwardd towards the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart," the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent. Since the start of the twentieth century, Argentina, Britain, and Chile have made overlapping sovereignty claims, while the United States and Russia have reserved rights to the entire continent. The environment has been at the heart of these disputes over sovereignty, placing the Antarctic Peninsula at a fascinating intersection between diplomatic history and environmental history. In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which imperial powers have used the environment to support their political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region. British officials argued that the production of useful scientific knowledge about the Antarctic helped to justify British ownership. Argentina and Chile made the case that the Antarctic Peninsula belonged to them as a result of geographical proximity, geological continuity, and a general sense of connection. Despite various challenges and claims, however, there has never been a genuine decolonization of the Antarctic Peninsula region. Instead, imperial assertions that respective entities were conducting science "for the good of humanity" were reformulated through the terms of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, and Antarctica's "frozen empires" remain in place to this day. In arguing for imperial continuity in the region, Howkins counters the official historical narrative of Antarctica, which rests on a dichotomy between "bad" sovereignty claims and "good" scientific research. Frozen Empires instead suggests that science, politics, and the environment have been inextricably connected throughout the history of the Antarctic Peninsula region-and remain so-and shows how political prestige in the guise of conducting "science for the good of humanity" continues to influence international climate negotiations.

Intimation of Revolution studies the rise of Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in the 1950s and 60s by showcasing the interactions between global politics and local social and economic developments. It argues that the revolution of 1969 and the national liberation struggle of 1971 were informed by the 'global sixties' that transformed the political landscape of Pakistan and facilitated the birth of Bangladesh. Departing from the typical understanding of the Bangladesh as a product of Indo-Pakistani diplomatic and military rivalry, it narrates how Bengali nationalists resisted the processes of internal colonization by the Pakistani military bureaucratic regime to fashion their own nation. It details how this process of resistance and nation-formation drew on contemporaneous decolonization movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America while also being shaped by the Cold War rivalries between the USA, USSR, and China.

Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives the general reader a sense of the view to be seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, the poems give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, that is internationally renowned for its distinction, demonstrating how Wales boast one of the oldest and yet continuing vibrant poetic traditions, the former in the Welsh language and the latter in English and bilingually.

This book is a detailed study of salient examples of Mexican travel writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While scholars have often explored the close relationship between European or North American travel writing and the discourse of imperialism, little has been written on how postcolonial subjects might relate to the genre. This study first traces the development of a travel-writing tradition based closely on European imperialist models in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. It then goes on to analyse how the narrative techniques of postmodernism and the political agenda of postcolonialism might combine to help challenge the genre's imperialist tendencies in late twentieth-century works of travel writing, focusing in particular on works by writers Juan Villoro, Hector Perea and Fernando Solana Olivares.

A Concise History of Bosnia integrates the political, economic and cultural history of this fascinating, beautiful, but much misunderstood country. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary literature, this objective and engaging history covers developments in the region up to the present day and offers an accessible interpretation of an often contested and controversial history. Importantly, Cathie Carmichael looks at Bosnia over the long term, moving away from a narrow focus on the 1990s to offer a historical rather than a nationalist perspective on events. Integrated within the narrative account, there is a particular focus on the themes of culture and religion, and the effect of geography and regional changes in the landscape on Bosnian history. Engaging and authoritative, the book succinctly explores how Bosnia has changed over many centuries, and focuses on the dynamic and creative aspects of Bosnia's past as well as the darker elements.