This is a volume of essays exploring important themes in the economic and social history of Russia and the Soviet Union during the critical period between 1860 and 1930. It covers developments in agriculture, industry, trade, economic theory, defence policy and the social impact of revolution. The essays are written by well-established specialists in Russian and Soviet economic and social history and are intended as a tribute to the work of the highly-esteemed economic historian Olga Crisp.

In February 2019, Harmony Siganporia walked from Dandi to Ahmedabad, retracing the route of Gandhi's Salt March in reverse. She walked this route of just under 400 kilometres over 25 days, much as Gandhi and the original band of Marchers did in 1930. The 'Dandi Path' is the setting against which she explores the story of modern Gujarat, tracing the contours of the state's seismic shift towards espousing the narrative of vikas, abandoning in the process the possibility of a quest for swaraj. Gujarat has been described as the laboratory of Hindutva, and this book is an effort to explore this theme, even as it attempts to unearth whether there remain any competing epistemes to it; memories of the region's prior avatar as the setting against which Gandhi put into practice his experiments with truth, non-violent civil disobedience, and satyagraha. This project investigates what-if anything-remains of the Salt March in Gujarat's cultural memory, while also attempting to fill out the contours of the 'single story' of vikas with which the State has become so closely associated.

Up to now the culture of the Stalin period has been studied mainly from a political or ideological point of view. In this book renowned specialists from many countries approach the problem rather 'from inside'. The authors deal with numerous aspects of Stalinist culture such as art, literature, architecture, film and popular culture. Yet the volume is more than a mere collection of studies on special issues. It is an inquiry into the very nature of a certain type of culture, its symbols, rites and myths. The book will be useful not only for students of Soviet culture but also for a wider audience.

Focusing on the development of the Communist Party in Moscow between 1925 and 1932 and its ultimate assumption of absolute power. This volume examines in detail the political changes in Moscow, including the crisis over collectivization, and the organization strategy of the Party in Moscow.

The period between the Revolution of 1917 and Stalin's coming to power in the early 1930s was one of the most exciting for all branches of the arts in Russia. This study tries to show how the diversity of the Soviet arts of the 1920s continued the major trends of the pre-Revolutionary years.

This selection of documents - for the most part never before translated into English - traces the process of modernization which took place in Russia between 1856 and 1881. Political, social and economic developments are dealt with in thematic sections and the documents also show the growth of the revolutionary movement and conservative attempts to quell it. The great flowering of Russian literature and art during the quarter-century is also reflected. The documents are accompanied by individual commentaries and an extensive guide to further reading, whilst the volume is prefaced by a substantial introductory essay setting the documents in context.

In 1912, six months after Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men came to grief in Antarctica, a thirty-two-year-old Russian navigator named Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that would prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea-a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent commander, the absence of crucial nautical charts, insufficient fuel, and inadequate provisions that left the crew weak and debilitated by scurvy.

For nearly a year and a half, the twenty-five men and one woman aboard the Saint Anna endured terrible hardships and danger as the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Convinced that the Saint Anna would never free herself from the ice, Albanov and thirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, hauling makeshift sledges and kayaks behind them across the frozen sea, hoping to reach the distant coast of Franz Josef Land. With only a shockingly inaccurate map to guide him, Albanov led his men on a 235-mile journey of continuous peril, enduring blizzards, disintegrating ice floes, attacks by polar bears and walrus, starvation, sickness, snowblindness, and mutiny. That any of the team survived is a wonder. That Albanov kept a diary of his ninety-day ordeal-a story that Jon Krakauer calls an "astounding, utterly compelling book," and David Roberts calls "as lean and taut as a good thriller"-is nearly miraculous.

First published in Russia in 1917, Albanov's narrative is here translated into English for the first time. Haunting, suspenseful, and told with gripping detail, In the Land of White Death can now rightfully take its place among the classic writings of Nansen, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, and Shackleton.

A close reading of postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film recasts the Soviet Jew as a novel cultural figure: not just a minority but an ambivalent character navigating between the Jewish past and Bolshevik modernity. The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the Jewish community of the former tsarist empire. The Pale of Settlement on the empire's western borderlands, where Jews had been required to live, was abolished several months before the Bolsheviks came to power. Many Jews quickly exited the shtetls, seeking prospects elsewhere. Some left for bigger cities, others for Europe, America, or Palestine. Thousands tried their luck in the newly established Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, where urban merchants would become tillers of the soil. For these Jews, Soviet modernity meant freedom, the possibility of the new, and the pressure to discard old ways of life. This ambivalence was embodied in the Soviet Jew-not just a descriptive demographic term but a novel cultural figure. In insightful readings of Yiddish and Russian literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds characters traversing space and history and carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost Jewish world. There is the Siberian settler of Viktor Fink's Jews in the Taiga, the folkloric trickster of Isaac Babel, and the fragmented, bickering family of Moyshe Kulbak's The Zemlenyaners, whose insular lives are disrupted by the march of technological, political, and social change. There is the collector of ethnographic tidbits, the pogrom survivor, the emigre who repatriates to the USSR. Senderovich urges us to see the Soviet Jew anew, as not only a minority but also a particular kind of liminal being. How the Soviet Jew Was Made emerges as a profound meditation on culture and identity in a shifting landscape.

From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina's Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. In addition to tracing the historical legacy of southern bohemians, the collection traverses such contemporary issues as contested memory, the commodification of the bohemian South, and how southern bohemians play with traditions in new ways that compliment, contradict, and commingle with the region's past traditional practices and ideas. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation. Contributors include Scott Barretta, Shawn Chandler Bingham, Jaime Cantrell, Jon Horne Carter, Alex Sayf Cummings, Lindsey A. Freeman, Grace E. Hale, Joanna Levin, Joshua Long, Daniel S. Margolies, Chris Offutt, Zandria F. Robinson, Allen Shelton, Daniel Cross Turner, Zackary Vernon, and Edward Whitley.

A social history of New Mexico's ""Atomic City""Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, is the community that revolutionized modern weaponry and science. An ""instant city,"" created in 1943, Los Alamos quickly grew to accommodate six thousand people - scientists and experts who came to work in the top-secret laboratories, others drawn by jobs in support industries, and the families. How these people, as a community, faced both the fevered rush to create an atomic bomb and the intensity of the subsequent cold-war era is the focus of Jon Hunner's fascinating narrative history. Much has been written about scientific developments at Los Alamos, but until this book little has been said about the community that fostered them. Using government records and the personal accounts of early residents, Inventing Los Alamos, traces the evolution of the town during its first fifteen years as home to a national laboratory and documents the town's creation, the lives of the families who lived there, and the impact of this small community on the Atomic Age.

A steel town daughter’s search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Alabama   “As Birmingham goes, so goes the nation,� Fred Shuttlesworth observed when he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city for the transformative protests of 1963. From the height of the Civil Rights Movement through its long aftermath, images of police dogs, fire hoses and four girls murdered when Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church have served as an uncomfortable racial mirror for the nation. Like many white people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement’s wake, Julie Buckner Armstrong knew little about this history. Only after moving away and discovering writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker did she realize how her hometown and family were part of a larger, ongoing story of struggle and injustice. When Armstrong returned to Birmingham decades later to care for her aging mother, Shuttlesworth’s admonition rang in her mind. By then an accomplished scholar and civil rights educator, Armstrong found herself pondering the lessons Birmingham holds for a twenty-first century America. Those lessons extended far beyond what a 2014 Teaching Tolerance report describes as the common distillation of the Civil Rights Movement into “two names and four words: Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, and ‘I have a dream.’� Seeking to better understand a more complex local history, its connection to broader stories of oppression and resistance, and her own place in relation to it, Armstrong embarked on a journey to unravel the standard Birmingham narrative to see what she would find. Beginning at the center, with her family’s 1947 arrival to a housing project near the color line, within earshot of what would become known as Dynamite Hill, Armstrong works her way over time and across the map. Weaving in stories of her white working-class family, classmates, and others not traditionally associated with Birmingham’s civil rights history, including members of the city’s LGBTQ community, she forges connections between the familiar and lesser-known. The result is a nuanced portrait of Birmingham--as seen in public housing, at old plantations, in segregated neighborhoods, across contested boundary lines, over mountains, along increasingly polluted waterways, beneath airport runways, on highways cutting through town, and under the gaze of the iconic statue of Vulcan. In her search for truth and beauty in Birmingham, Armstrong draws on the powers of place and storytelling to dig into the cracks, complicating easy narratives of civil rights progress. Among the discoveries she finds in America’s racial mirror is a nation that has failed to recognize itself in the horrific images from Birmingham’s past and to acknowledge the continuing inequalities that make up the Civil Right’s Movement’s unfinished business. Learning from Birmingham reminds us that stories of civil rights, structural oppression, privilege, abuse, race and gender bias, and inequity are difficult and complicated, but their telling, especially from multiple stakeholder perspectives, is absolutely necessary.

Falklands Facts and Fallacies is a pioneer work and an essential contribution to an understanding of the history and legal status of the Falkland Islands. It presents abundant evidence from documents (some never printed before) in archives in Buenos Aires, La Plata, Montevideo, London, Cambridge, Stanley, Paris, Munich and Washington DC, and provides the facts to correct the fallacies and distortions in accounts by earlier authors. It reveals persuasive evidence that the Falklands were discovered by a Portuguese expedition at the latest around 1518-19, and not by Vespucci or Magellan. It demonstrates conclusively that the Anglo-Spanish agreement of 1771 did not contain a reservation of Spanish rights, that Britain did not make a secret promise to abandon the islands, and that the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790 did not restrict Britain's rights in the Falklands, but greatly extended them at the expense of Spain. For the first time ever, extracts from the despairing letters from the Falklands written in German in 1824 to Louis Vernet by his brother Emilio are printed here in translation, revealing the total chaos of the abortive 1824 Argentine expedition to the islands. This book reveals how tiny the Argentine settlement in the islands was in 1826-33. In April 1829 there were only 52 people, and there was a constant turnover of population; many people stayed only a few months, and the population reached its maximum of 128 only for a few weeks in mid-1831 before declining to 37 people at the beginning of 1833. This work also refutes the falsehood that Britain expelled an Argentine population from the Falklands in 1833. That myth has been Argentina's principal propaganda weapon since the 1960s in its attempts to undermine Falkland Islanders' right to self-determination. In fact Britain encouraged the residents to stay, and only a handful left the islands. A crucial document printed here is the 1850 Convention of Peace between Argentina and Britain. At Argentina's insistence, this was a comprehensive peace treaty which restored "perfect friendship" between the two countries. Critical exchanges between the Argentine and British negotiators are printed here for the first time, which show that Argentina dropped its claim to the Falklands and accepted that the islands are British. That, and the many later acts by Argentina described here, definitively ended any Argentine title to the islands. The legal status of the Falklands is analysed here by extensive reference to legal works, to United Nations resolutions on decolonisation, and to rulings by the International Court of Justice, which together demonstrate conclusively that the islands are British territory in international law and that the Falkland Islanders, who have now (2022) lived in their country for over 180 years and for nine generations, are a unique people who are holders of territorial sovereignty with the full right of external self-determination. This book completely refutes the argumentation presented by Professor Marcelo Kohen and Facundo Rodriguez in their work Las Malvinas entre el Derecho y la Historia, Buenos Aires2015 (and its English version: The Malvinas/Falklands Between History and Law), which repeats many of the untruths and distortions that have been presented for over half a century by Argentine authors - and by Argentine governments at the United Nations. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated; in cases of difference it supersedes the first edition published in March 2020.

The Language of Russian Peasants in the Twentieth Century: A Linguistic Analysis and Oral History analyzes the social dialect of Russian peasants in the twentieth century through letters and stories that trace their tragic history. In 1900, there were 100,000,000 peasants in Russia, but by mid-century their language was no longer passed from parents to children, resulting in no speakers of the dialect left today. In this study, Alexander D. Nakhimovsky argues that for all the variability of local dialects there was an underlying unity in them, which derived from their old shared traditions and oral nature. Their unity is best manifested in word formation, syntax, phraseology, and discourse. Different social groups followed somewhat different paths through the maze of Soviet history, and peasants' path was one of the most painful. The chronological organization of the book and the analysis of powerful, concise, and simple but expressive language of peasant letters and stories culminate into an oral history of their tragic Soviet experience.