Sexual Revolutions explores the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century in several European countries and the USA by engaging with themes from sexual freedom and abortion to pornography and sexual variation. This work discusses the involvement of youth, feminism, left, liberalism, arts, science and religion in the process of sexual change.

Based on extensive research in formerly secret archives, this volume examines the progress of Soviet industrialisation against the background of the rising threat of aggression from Germany, Japan and Italy, and the consolidation of Stalin's power.

This interdisciplinary examination of present-day identities and histories of the former Yugoslavia explores relationships with the social, political, cultural and historical 'facts and fictions' that have marked the different parts of the region. It shows that while nationalism remains important other social dynamics also exert a strong influence.

This volume makes available transcripts and commentary from the secret correspondence between former Chechen foreign minister Ilyas Akhmatov and Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov. This correspondence provides revelatory insights into both men's attempts to secure Western support for a peaceful transition to an independent Chechnya.

The Greater War is an international history of the First World War. Comprising of thirteen chapters this collection of essays covers new aspects of the French, German, Italian and American efforts in the First World War, as well as aspects of Britain's colonial campaigns.

Language and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia critically examines the uses of language in post-Soviet media and political texts between 1998 and 2007. It will be of interest to academics and researchers in the fields of media studies, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and scholars in Russian Studies.

This interdisciplinary collection explores what mobility meant, and still means, in the specific contexts of Soviet and East European socialist and post-socialist societies. Together the chapters consider diverse practices of mobility and their different contexts of power, resistance and inequality.

In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture. Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siecle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater.

The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games is explained as the result of a complex series of events and policies that culminated in a strategic decision to not participate in Los Angeles. Using IR framework, D'Agati developes and argues for the concept of surrogate wars as an alternative means for conflict between states.

This book examines the emotional aspects of revolutionary experience during a critical turning point in both Russian and Jewish history - the 1905 revolution. Shtakser argues that radicalization involved an emotional transformation, which enabled many young revolutionaries to develop an activist attitude towards reality.

With the growing interest in the history of peoples of African descent in the Americas, narratives addressing regions outside of the United States are becoming increasingly popular. The Conceptualization of Race in Colonial Puerto Rico, 1800-1850 illuminates the role people of African descent played in the building of a Spanish Caribbean society during the social upheaval of the early nineteenth century. This examination of cultural tensions created by changing regional and national definitions and the fluidity of identity within these structures will appeal to those interested in colonial race issues, Africans in the Americas, and gender and race stratification. Kathryn R. Dungy uses gender, color, and class differences as lenses to understand a colonial society that was regulated by social relationships within Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the Americas. By examining slave and free status, color, gender, work, and immigration, she endeavors to stimulate current debate on issues of gender, color, nation, and empire, utilizing a unique population and culture in the Black Atlantic.

Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight.

This book investigates Russia's transformation into a European Power by way of the activities of the tsarist translator and official Andrei Vinius, who became an important advisor to Peter the Great. Vinius emerges as an influential conduit of Western culture and technology, who played a key role in transforming Muscovy into Russia.

One of the central challenges facing Macedonia, along with other Yugoslav successor states, is to develop civic values and to combat such uncivic values as ethnic intolerance, religious bigotry, and homophobia. This volume brings together specialists in Macedonian affairs to offer insights into the experiences and values of the Macedonians.

After more than three years of grim fighting, General Ulysses Grant had a plan to end the Civil War-laying siege to Petersburg, Virginia, thus cutting off supplies to the Confederate capital at Richmond. He established his headquarters at City Point on the James River, requiring thousands of troops, tons of supplies, as well as extensive medical facilities and staff. Nurses flooded the area, yet many did not work in medical capacities-they served as organizers, advocates and intelligence gatherers. Nursing emerged as a noble profession with multiple specialties. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this history covers the resilient women who opened the way for others into postwar medical, professional and political arenas.

If we do in fact ""remember the Alamo,"" it is largely thanks to one person who witnessed the final assault and survived: the commanding officer's slave, a young man known simply as Joe. What Joe saw as the Alamo fell, recounted days later to the Texas Cabinet, has come down to us in records and newspaper reports. But who Joe was, where he came from, and what happened to him have all remained mysterious until now. In a remarkable feat of historical detective work, authors Ron J. Jackson, Jr., and Lee Spencer White have fully restored this pivotal yet elusive figure to his place in the American story. The twenty-year-old Joe stood with his master, Lieutenant Colonel Travis, against the Mexican army in the early hours of March 6, 1836. After Travis fell, Joe watched the battle's last moments from a hiding place. He was later taken first to Bexar and questioned by Santa Anna about the Texan army, and then to the revolutionary capitol, where he gave his testimony with evident candor. With these few facts in hand, Jackson and White searched through plantation ledgers, journals, memoirs, slave narratives, ship logs, newspapers, letters, and court documents. Their decades-long effort has revealed the outline of Joe's biography, alongside some startling facts: most notably, that Joe was the younger brother of the famous escaped slave and abolitionist narrator William Wells Brown, as well as the grandson of legendary trailblazer Daniel Boone. This book traces Joe's story from his birth in Kentucky through his life in slavery - which, in a grotesque irony, resumed after he took part in the Texans' battle for independence - to his eventual escape and disappearance into the shadows of history. Joe, the Slave Who Became an Alamo Legend recovers a true American character from obscurity and expands our view of events central to the emergence of Texas.

This is the first study of popular opinions in Soviet society in the 1920s. These voices which made the Russian revolution characterize reactions to mobilization politics: patriotic militarizing campaigns, the tenth anniversary of the revolution and state attempts to unite the nation around a new Soviet identity.

This book focuses on the city of St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian empire from the early eighteenth century until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. It uses the Russian court as a prism through which to view the various cultural changes that were introduced in the city during the eighteenth century.

A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor. 'Breathtakingly good . . . Exiles is completely sui generis.' EDMUND DE WAAL 'Atkins spins a marvellous tapestry of colourful tales, beautifully weaving history and travel accounts.' ANDREA WULF, author of The Invention of Nature 'A volume for our times.' SARA WHEELER, THE SPECTATOR 'A fascinating study of exile and its effects.' OBSERVER This is the story of three unheralded nineteenth-century dissidents, whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow strongly today: Louise Michel, a leader of the radical socialist government known as the Paris Commune; Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, an enemy of British colonialism in Zululand; and Lev Shternberg, a militant campaigner against Russian tsarism. In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment - Michel's New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu's St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg's Sakhalin off the Siberian coast - in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home. Occupying the fertile zone where history, biography and travel writing meet, Exiles is a masterpiece of imaginative empathy. '[Atkins] is humane, humble, and empathetic . . . beautiful and moving.' ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa 'An incredible, brilliant act of retrieval.' PHILIP HOARE, author of Albert & the Whale 'A finely crafted and lyrical meditation.' TLS 'Gracefully written . . . Brilliant.' THE ECONOMIST 'Rarely has a book been more timely.' HISTORY TODAY *** Read The Moor and The Immeasureable World for more award-winning writing from William Atkins

Which state has the most national monuments? Where in America can you find one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World? Where is the largest contiguous forest of ponderosa pine? In Awesome Arizona, Roger Naylor, "the Dean of Arizona Travel Writers," has amassed 200 amazing facts and fascinating commentary about his beloved state. This is the fast-paced, funny encyclopedia that lovers of Arizona have been craving. Awesome Arizona captures the essence of the sixth-largest state, from its rowdy past to its epic landscape bulging with mountains, slashed by canyons, and blown apart by volcanoes. Learn about trees that once shaded dinosaurs, the West's most legendary gunfight, the world's largest antique, the best-preserved meteor crater on earth, where the post office still delivers mail by mule, the longest poker game in history, how Arizona saved the unicorn, and so much more.

Sir Edmund Hillary described Douglas Mawson's epic and punishing journey across 600 miles of unknown Antarctic wasteland as 'the greatest story of lone survival in polar exploration'.This Accursed Land tells that story; how Mawson declined to join Captain Robert Scott's ill-fated British expedition and instead lead a three-man husky team to explore the far eastern coastline of the Antarctic continent. But the loss of one member and most of the supplies soon turned the hazardous trek into a nightmare. Mawson was trapped 320 miles from base with barely nine days' food and nothing for the dogs. Eating poisoned meat, watching his body fall apart, crawling over chasms and crevices of deadly ice, his ultimate and lone struggle for survival, starving, poisoned, exhausted and indescribably cold, is an unforgettable story of human endurance. Grippingly told by Lennard Bickel, this is the most extraordinary journey from the brutal golden age of Antarctic exploration. Perfect for fans of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Michael Palin's Erebus.

The story of how the map of New Zealand emerged is a fascinating one. The first full map of the continent was published in London in 1773, which might seem the natural starting point, but over the preceding 150 years, fragments of charts and intelligence about New Zealand ricocheted around various parts of the world.  In A Draught of the South Land, Paul Moon provides the first comprehensive account of this piecemeal process. Moon's investigation covers several continents over more than a century, and reveals the personalities, blunders, strategic miscalculations, scientific brilliance, and imperial power-plays that were involved. Above all, he examines the roles played by explorers and traders, Maori and European rulers, scientific societies and military groups, as well as specialist cartographers and publishers. At a time when maps as colonial tools, enablers of trade and objects of curiosity are being studied anew, his careful analysis and engaging narrative will be of interest to scholars everywhere.  

Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the borders hitherto separating Greek culture and society from its contiguous Balkan polities came down, and Greeks had to reorient themselves toward their immediate neighbors and redefine their place within Europe and the new, more fluid global order. Projecting the political foresight and mustering the modernization policies to succeed in such an undertaking turned out to be no small feat, especially as the regional conflicts that had lain dormant during the Cold War were revived. Synthesizing the cultural, political, and historical into a sophisticated, interdisciplinary analysis, this innovative study untangles the prolonged 'historical moment' in which Greece and Europe were effectively held hostage to events in the Balkans - just at the time when both hoped to serve as the region's welcoming hosts.