Without much fanfare Ahmed Kathrada worked alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other giants in the struggle to end racial discrimination in South Africa. He faced house arrest and many court trials related to his activism until, finally, a trial for sabotage saw him sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Mandela and six others.

Conversations with a Gentle Soul has its origins in a series of discussions between Kathrada and Sahm Venter about his opinions, encounters and experiences. Throughout his life, Kathrada has refused to hang on to negative emotions such as hatred and bitterness. Instead, he radiates contentment and the openness of a man at peace with himself. His wisdom is packaged within layers of optimism, mischievousness and humour, and he provides insights that are of value to all South Africans.

Africa's leading producer of electricity, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd, is also a vertically integrated monopoly, owned by the South African state. This national champion was shaken in 2008, when it was obliged to introduce 'load shedding', or rolling blackouts, and again in late 2014. Trying to understand how and why one of the iconic pillars of South African state capitalism is now in distress, the authors of this book argue that the so-called electricity crisis is in fact a public monopoly crisis.

Moving beyond technical aspects, they explore the relationship between state power and Eskom before, during and after apartheid. From this perspective, they suggest that the current technical and financial troubles of this public utility are illustrative of the weakening of its technopolitical regime, of how national institutions have governed Eskom's technological development, and of the pursuit of political goals in the production of electrical power. Without a clear industrial strategy during the 2000s, Eskom became a powerful tool of Broad-Black Economic Empowerment as well as a neopatrimonial system which generates profits captured by the ruling party. As a result, crisis in Eskom shakes the whole political edifice. Inefficient and its finances increasingly under scrutiny, this state-owned enterprise's existence as a monopolistic public utility is regularly a subject of debate.

The authors discuss the ambivalent role of Eskom in the national energy transition policy and whether solutions point in the direction of de-integrating this public monopoly and allowing its current technopolitical regime to enter a planned or natural decline.

Africa is forever on our TV screens, but the bad-news stories massively outweigh the good. Ever since the process of decolonisation began in the mid-1950s, and arguably before, the continent has appeared to be stuck in a process of irreversible decline.

How did we get here? What, if anything, is to be done?

Fully revised and updated and weaving together the key stories and characters of the last sixty years into a stunningly compelling and coherent narrative, Martin Meredith has produced the definitive history of how European ideas of how to organise 10 000 different ethnic groups has led to what British prime minister Tony Blair described as the ‘scar on the conscience of the world’.

Authoritative, provocative, and consistently fascinating, this is the seminal book on one of the most important issues facing the West today

What does history look like without 'civilisations'? Josephine Quinn calls for a major reassessment of the West and the concepts that define it.

The West, history tells us, was built on the ideas and values of Ancient Greece and Rome, which disappeared from Europe during the Dark Ages and were then rediscovered by the Renaissance. In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the true story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of ‘civilisations’.

Quinn reveals a new narrative: one that traces the relationships that built what is now called the West from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart. She makes the case that it is contact and connections, rather than distinct and isolated civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history – people do.

This detailed Handbook to the Iron Age covers the last 2,000 years in Southern Africa.

The first part of the book outlines essential topics such as settlement organization, stonewalled patterns, ritual residues, long-distance trade, and ancient mining. Part two presents a comprehensive culture-history sequence through ceramic analyses, showing distributions, stylistic types, and characteristic pieces. The final section reviews and updates the main debates about black prehistory, including migration vs. diffusion, the role of cattle, the origins of Mapungubwe, the rise and fall of Great Zimbabwe, as well as the archaeology of the Venda, the Sotho-Tswana, and the Nguni speakers.

Handbook to the Iron Age is an abundantly illustrated study that is accessible to a wide range of people interested in African prehistory.

McKittrick’s history of the 1918 Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. The plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.

Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race.

While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed suffi cient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.

A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths is one of the ancient livery company of the City of London. With origins dating back to 1299, the company regulated many aspects of smithing within the City and its immediate environs, including who was allowed to practise the trade, their hours of work and the quality of their goods and workmanship. Other towns and cities had medieval guilds and companies with similar aims, but the economic might of the City of London - which encompassed a great deal of manufacturing as well as trade - was such that the City livery companies were always by far the most numerous and usually the most important in the country. Unlike the twelve Great City Livery Companies, such as the Mercers, Fishmongers or Clothworkers, the Blacksmiths' Company never accumulated large financial assets, but it did have its own ancient livery hall and modest property holdings. And unlike other companies, such as the Tallow Chandlers or the Loriners, whose trades have all but disappeared, the Blacksmiths do still retain a relevance in today's world. Ranked 40th in the order of precedence, it was a solid, middle-ranking livery company of some consequence. Eventually the very growth and dynamism of London led to a relative decline in the company's economic importance. It became impossible and probably undesirable to regulate trade in the old manner - no new livery companies were established between the early eighteenth century and 1926 - and the functions and role of livery companies changed from trade regulation to that of social, cultural, networking and charitable organisations. The Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths echoed these changes, yet, unlike many, it has retained strong links with the trade that created it. To this day, the company supports the blacksmithing community across the country, awarding prizes for high-quality work and sponsoring young practitioners. Professor David Hey has had unique access to the company's records as well as the extensive knowledge of present-day liverymen to distil a fascinating 700-year story of continuity and change. Illustrated with almost 60 colour photographs and maps, this book acts as an important record of the Blacksmiths' Company, as well as being an interesting case study of one of the great survivors of London's medieval past, the City livery company.

This riveting study shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s.

It is impossible to understand South Africa’s energy crisis without knowing this history. Faeeza Ballim’s deeply researched book challenges many prevailing assumptions and beliefs made regarding the crisis.

The book highlights the importance of technology to our understanding of South African history and challenges the idea that the technological state corporations were proxies for the apartheid government. While a part of the broader national modernization project under apartheid, these corporations also set the stage for worker solidarity and trade union organization in the Waterberg and elsewhere in the country.

Faeeza Ballim argues that the state corporations, their technology, and their engineers enjoyed ambivalent relationships with the governments of their time. And in the democratic era, while Eskom has been caught up in the scourge of government corruption, it has retained a degree of organizational autonomy and offered a degree of resistance to those who were attempting further corrupt practices.

The book takes an in-depth look at the East Coast Main Line-King's Cross to Edinburgh-between 1939 and 1959. This is carried out in a series of chapters. In the first one a picture is painted of the state of the network in the late 1930s. It is followed by an account of the historical context of the changes on the ECML over the subject years. This includes wartime 1939-1945 and the fortunes of British Railways in the post-war period until the end of the 1950s; then follows an account of passenger services on the ECML in the summer of 1939 and in the war and changes thereafter. Towards the end of the book there are smaller chapters of specific interest. Amongst these are military and other government installations served by the ECML during WWII; specific wartime locomotive workings; the impact of war on the ECML at various locations along the line; accidents on the ECML September-December 1959 and snow and floods on the ECML in the 1940s and 1950s. The period covered is a crucial one in the history of the line and it is presented in an erudite yet readable manner.

The image of western ranchers making a stand for their "rights"-against developers, the government, "illegal" immigrants-may be commonplace today, but the political power of the cowboy was a long time in the making. In a book steeped in the culture, traditions, and history of western range ranching, Michelle K. Berry takes readers into the Cold War world of cattle ranchers in the American West to show how that power, with its implications for the lands and resources of the mountain states, was built, shaped, and shored up between 1945 and 1965. After long days working the ranch, battling human and nonhuman threats, and wrestling with nature, ranchers got down to business of another sort, which Berry calls "cow talk." Discussing the best new machinery; sharing stories of drought, blizzards, and bugs; talking money and management and strategy: these ranchers were building a community specific to their time, place, and work and creating a language that embodied their culture. Cow Talk explores how this language and its iconography evolved and how it came to provide both a context and a vehicle for political power. Using ranchers' personal papers, publications, and cattle growers association records, the book provides an inside view of how range cattle ranchers in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana created a culture and a shared identity that would frame and inform their relationship with their environment and with society at large in an increasingly challenging, modernizing world. A multifaceted analysis of postwar ranch life, labor, and culture, this innovative work offers unprecedented insight into the cohesive political and cultural power of western ranchers in our day.

Continually Working tells the stories of Black working women who resisted employment inequality in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the 1940s to the 1970s. The book explores the job-related activism of Black Midwestern working women and uncovers the political and intellectual strategies they used to critique and resist employment discrimination, dismantle unjust structures, and transform their lives and the lives of those in their community. Moten emphasizes the ways in which Black women transformed the urban landscape by simultaneously occupying spaces from which they had been historically excluded and creating their own spaces. Black women refused to be marginalized within the historically white and middle-class Milwaukee Young Women's Christian Association (MYWCA), an association whose mission centered on supporting women in urban areas. Black women forged interracial relationships within this organization and made it, not without much conflict and struggle, one of the most socially progressive organizations in the city. When Black women could not integrate historically white institutions, they created their own. They established financial and educational institutions, such as Pressley School of Beauty Culture, which beautician Mattie Pressley Dewese opened in 1946 as a result of segregation in the beauty training industry. This school served economic, educational and community development purposes as well as created economic opportunities for Black women. Historically and contemporarily, Milwaukee has been and is still known as one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Black women have always contested urban segregation, by making space for themselves and others on the margins. In so doing, they have transformed both the urban landscape and urban history.

In the nineteenth century, most American farms had a small orchard or at least a few fruit-bearing trees. People grew their own apple trees or purchased apples grown within a few hundred miles of their homes. Nowadays, in contrast, Americans buy mass-produced fruit in supermarkets, and roughly 70 percent of apples come from Washington State. So how did Washington become the leading producer of America's most popular fruit? In this enlightening book, Amanda L. Van Lanen offers a comprehensive response to this question by tracing the origins, evolution, and environmental consequences of the state's apple industry. Washington's success in producing apples was not a happy accident of nature, according to Van Lanen. Apples are not native to Washington, any more than potatoes are to Idaho or peaches to Georgia. In fact, Washington apple farmers were late to the game, lagging their eastern competitors. The author outlines the numerous challenges early Washington entrepreneurs faced in such areas as irrigation, transportation, and labor. Eventually, with crucial help from railroads, Washington farmers transformed themselves into "growers" by embracing new technologies and marketing strategies. By the 1920s, the state's growers managed not only to innovate the industry but to dominate it. Industrial agriculture has its fair share of problems involving the environment, consumers, and growers themselves. In the quest to create the perfect apple, early growers did not question the long-term environmental effects of chemical sprays. Since the late twentieth century, consumers have increasingly questioned the environmental safety of industrial apple production. Today, as this book reveals, the apple industry continues to evolve in response to shifting consumer demands and accelerating climate change. Yet, through it all, the Washington apple maintains its iconic status as Washington's most valuable agricultural crop.

Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis. Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress, and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances, the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the 1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed children, families, communities, and the development of the nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis for the shape and function of agriculture.

In this surprising new look at how clothing, style, and commerce came together to change American culture, Jennifer Le Zotte examines how secondhand goods sold at thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales came to be both profitable and culturally influential. Initially, selling used goods in the United States was seen as a questionable enterprise focused largely on the poor. But as the twentieth century progressed, multimillion-dollar businesses like Goodwill Industries developed, catering not only to the needy but increasingly to well-off customers looking to make a statement. Le Zotte traces the origins and meanings of ""secondhand style"" and explores how buying pre-owned goods went from a signifier of poverty to a declaration of rebellion. Considering buyers and sellers from across the political and economic spectrum, Le Zotte shows how conservative and progressive social activists--from religious and business leaders to anti-Vietnam protesters and drag queens--shrewdly used the exchange of secondhand goods for economic and political ends. At the same time, artists and performers, from Marcel Duchamp and Fanny Brice to Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, all helped make secondhand style a visual marker for youth in revolt.

Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews's Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.

John Fletcher Hanson was a rare combination of industrialist, journalist, and orator who spent most of his life in Macon, Georgia, rising from the ashes of the Civil War to become the leading voice of the New South. Many have assigned that role to Henry Grady, but while Grady was talking about a New South, Hanson was building one, by creating jobs, promoting Southern industrialization, and advancing educational opportunities. Hanson, commonly referred to as "the Major" throughout his lifetime, founded Bibb Manufacturing and grew it into a textile empire, which stands beside his most enduring legacy, the Georgia Institute of Technology. Later, as president of the Central of Georgia railway and the Ocean Steamship Company, he strengthened the backbone of the state's transportation network. During the 1880s Hanson owned the Macon Telegraph and used it to challenge conventional Southern ideology about economics, race, and the solid Democratic stronghold on the South. While also fighting for a pro-business platform, he became a republican and worked with some of the most influential men of the Gilded Age. Georgia's post-Civil War history cannot be fully understood without examining the life of J. F. Hanson, its most important New South advocate and industrialist. In bringing this remarkable man and his accomplishments to light for the first time, Cracking the Solid South paints an absorbing picture of the economic, political, and social struggles that confronted Georgia after the Civil War and of the many ways one man shaped the course of the state's history.

Surveys developments from the establishment of the Apartheid state to 1982 when it was being challenged in the mines, factories and townships. After the Soweto Revolt, the government slowly began to compromise and by 1982 the conditions were present for the formation of a new union for black mineworkers. Key Features include studies of: Recruitment, harsh working conditions and work-related deaths and injuries, including a detailed account of the Coalbrook Colliery disaster in 1960 when 437 were killed. A wave of dissent by black students and industrial workers arose in the 1970s. The Guardian newspaper conducted a successful wages campaign for black workers. Black mineworkers joined the protesters in 1973-1976 when more than 200 of them were killed. These protests were followed by the Soweto uprising, by township violence and by a state response that was both oppressive and conciliatory

This open access book examines a particular factor in the enduring international success of German companies. Beyond industrial specialization, peaceful labor relations, local financial markets and the "miracle of the Mittelstand", it focuses on a characteristic aspect of governance within the German economy: The Chambers of commerce and industry. Important characteristics of the Chamber system are emphasized - including obligatory membership for firms as well as participatory rules of their self-administration. In turn, the book examines the institution's self-governance, its services, and its mission regarding the general representation of interests. Moreover, the book also identifies the advancement of the dual system of professional education as a central element of the Chamber system. Following an introduction about how the Chamber system works, interviews, case studies and historical explanations help to exemplify the true spirit inherent to this form of representation. In particular, they reveal the essence of how the Chambers contribute to the global success of German companies and foster their corporate responsibility in a practical way. Given its scope, the book will be of particular interest to professionals, policymakers and researchers concerned with how institutional organization can support commerce and industry for the public good. The book was developed in collaboration with Laura Sasse and the Practical Wisdom Society.

Post-industrial landscape scars are traces of 20th century utopian visions of society; they relate to fear and resistance expressed by popular movements and to relations between industrial workers and those in power. The metaphor of the scar pinpoints the inherent ambiguity of memory work by signifying both positive and negative experiences, as well as the contemporary challenges of living with these physical and mental marks. In this book, Anna Storm explores post-industrial landscape scars caused by nuclear power production, mining, and iron and steel industry in Malmberget, Kiruna, Barseback and Avesta in Sweden; Ignalina and Visaginas/Snie?kus in Lithuania/former Soviet Union; and Duisburg in the Ruhr district of Germany. The scars are shaped by time and geographical scale; they carry the vestiges of life and work, of community spirit and hope, of betrayed dreams and repressive hierarchical structures. What is critical, Storm concludes, is the search for a legitimate politics of memory. The meanings of the scars must be acknowledged. Past and present experiences must be shared in order shape new understandings of old places.

Exploring some of the world's eeriest places, Abandoned Islands features American civil war forts, Europe's last leper colony and South Atlantic whaling stations, along with once grand mansions and colonial settlements and churches, and much more. Arranged geographically, the book takes us from New York's East River to islands off Alaska, from a French Napoleonic-era fort off the coast of Normandy to deserted villages on remote Scottish isles, from Venetian sanatoria to Croatian penal colonies, Japanese mining colonies to Sudanese deserted ports and abandoned atolls in the Indian Ocean. Leafing through these pages, the reasons for abandonment are revealed: climate change sealing off fresh water or river channels, shifting economic forces making life too hard, religious conflict, or wars disrupting daily life - or the absence of war rendering a military settlement unnecessary. With more than 180 outstanding colour photographs and fascinating captions, Abandoned Islands is a brilliant pictorial exploration of lost worlds.