This book takes a considered look at the Mitterrand presidency as a whole, its place in French history, and the trends for the twenty-first century emerging under Chirac. The fourteen years during which Mitterrand was at the helm ushered in fundamental change in many different domains, as France faced up to new givens in an increasingly uncertain world. This study evaluates the impact and legacy of the Mitterrand years in the following key areas: the Republic; socialism; Europe and foreign affairs; business and the economy; society; and culture.

Scholarship on the history of West Germany's educational system has traditionally portrayed the postwar period of Allied occupation as a failure and the following decades as a time of pedagogical stagnation. Two decades after World War II, however, the Federal Republic had become a stable democracy, a member of NATO, and a close ally of the West. Had the schools really failed to contribute to this remarkable transformation of German society and political culture? This study persuasively argues that long before the protest movements of the late 1960s, the West German educational system was undergoing meaningful reform from within. Although politicians and intellectual elites paid little attention to education after 1945, administrators, teachers, and pupils initiated significant changes in schools at the local level. The work of these actors resulted in an array of democratic reforms that signaled a departure from the authoritarian and nationalistic legacies of the past. The establishment of exchange programs between the United States and West Germany, the formation of student government organizations and student newspapers, the publication of revised history and civics textbooks, the expansion of teacher training programs, and the creation of a Social Studies curriculum all contributed to the advent of a new German educational system following World War II. The subtle, incremental reforms inaugurated during the first two postwar decades prepared a new generation of young Germans for their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic state.

Transnational solidarity movements often play an important role in reshaping structures of global power. However, there remains a significant gap in the historical literature on collaboration between parties located in the Global South. Facing increasing repression, the Latin American left in the 1960s and 1970s found connection in transnational exchange, organizing with distant activists in Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. By exploring the particularities of South-South solidarity, this volume begins new conversations about what makes these movements unique, how they shaped political identities, and their lasting influence. Jessica Stites Mor looks at four in-depth case studies: the use of legal reform to accomplish the goals of solidarity embedded in Mexico's revolutionary constitution, visual and print media circulated by Cuba and its influence on the agenda of the Afro-Asian block at the United Nations, organizing on behalf of Palestinian nationalism in reshaping Argentina's socialist left, and the role of Latin American Catholic activists in challenging the South African apartheid state. These examples serve as a much-needed road map to navigate our current political climate and show us how solidarity movements might approach future struggles.

The Cold War and decolonization transformed the twentieth century world. This volume brings together an international line-up of experts to explore how these transformations took place and expand on some of the latest threads of analysis to help inform our understanding of the links between the two phenomena.The book begins by exploring ideas of modernity, development, and economics as Cold War and postcolonial projects and goes on to look at the era's intellectual history and investigate how emerging forms of identity fought for supremacy. Finally, the contributors question ideas of sovereignty and state control that move beyond traditional Cold War narratives."Decolonization and the Cold War" emphasizes new approaches by drawing on various methodologies, regions, themes, and interdisciplinary work, to shed new light on two topics that are increasingly important to historians of the twentieth century.

From long, first-hand experience as president of his own financial advertising agency, Alec Benn offers a unique, inside look at America's investment community, at a time of changes so profound that their impact and implications are still with us. Based not on public relations handouts (although he himself has written them) but on frank, revealing talks with people who actually participated in the events of those tumultuous seven years, on official oral histories (hitherto concealed), and on his own keen observations, Benn shows how those events and changes really occurred. He reveals that The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was in far greater peril of collapse in 1970 than anyone, except a few insiders, has ever known. He exposes how many of the most significant changes ever to affect investors really came about. And he provides new insights into the people who caused, influenced, or sometimes opposed the reforms we now take for granted, as well as into the impact of historical figures such as Richard Nixon and Ross Perot. Informative, entertaining, and impeccably researched and documented, Benn's book gives us new information to help evaluate the investment world of today, and to appreciate how dangerous it was at another time, a time that some say appears uncomfortably familiar.

Among the many topics Benn examines in depth is the creation of the Securities Investors Protection Corporation, the agency that insures against loss of the cash and securities left by investors in their brokers' hands. He shows how stock brokers' commissions came to be competitive and low, instead of fixed and high (a special benefit for today's day traders), and how members of The New York Stock Exchange became able to sell shares in their firms to the general public, opening a bountiful source of permanent capital. He goes on to cover the creation of the Central Certificate System, which led to a dramatic increase in trading volume later, and how the NYSE was reorganized, benefiting not only members but investors as well. Benn also explores how NYSE member firms became authorized to sell annuities and other insurance products, in itself a billion-dollar business. Finally, in an especially telling chapter, he discusses how and why discrimination on Wall Street based on class, religion, race, and gender declined (and by inference, why in some places it still lingers.)

Rockefellerocracy: Kennedy Assassinations, Watergate, and Monopoly of the "Philanthropic" Foundations is a portal to a universe of political and economic supremacy, revealing links to the crimes of the century. Kennedy had a dream for the nation, but Nelson Rockefeller, a ruthless megalomaniac, had his own selfish scheme to become president. After a ten-year-long course of wrongdoing to steal American democracy, his nomination to the vice presidency by President Gerald Ford was not the hand of fate. Congressman Ford had served as an integral part of the Warren Commission whitewash. The two men formed the first administration not elected by the people This release coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, that infamous weekend in November of 1963 that author Richard James DeSocio remembers well. He even witnessed Jack Ruby execute Lee Harvey Oswald in front of a live TV audience. Originally searching for answers to satisfy his own curiosity, that led to twenty-five years of painstaking research, the author has unraveled the dark mystery that baffled a nation for half a century. The verdict is radically different from the official version.

Hong Kong's expanding export-import trade and importance as a capital market have made it one of the major economic centers of Asia, second only to Tokyo. Consequently, the reversion of this previously capitalist city to the People's Republic of China ten years from now will have serious ramifications for the Western financial world. There is much speculation concerning the impact of communist control of the three principal factors which have contributed to Hong Kong's current standing: its political and social stability, economic reform, and the British legal system.

The story of Fidel Castro has few parallels in contemporary history. None of the outstanding Third World leaders of the twentieth-century played such a prominent and restless part on the international stage and none survived as head of state for as long. Over almost 50 years, he was one of the most controversial political figures in the world, and his legacy has yet to be fully evaluated. Some of his most cherished plans were realized and are a model for many Third World countries. Yet despite enormous sacrifices by Cubans, his grand vision remains unfulfilled and its continued pursuit is full of risks. The fully revised third edition of this respected political biography provides the first full retrospect of Castro's remarkable career right up to his illness and withdrawal from power in February 2008, incorporating analysis of: the renewed crackdown on dissidents in Cuba from the mid 1990s on the major geopolitical reconfiguration of Latin America in the late 1990s, and the new Cuban-Venezuelan relationship under Hugo Chavez the Helms Burton Act and the continuing US embargo The Cuban economy in the first decade of the new millennium It also revisits earlier events in Castro's career, for instance the various assassination plots against him , the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the light of documents released by Cuba and the US over the past decade and a half.

According to numerous scholars and pundits, JFK's victory in 1960 symbolized America's evolution from a politically Protestant nation to a pluralistic one. The anti-Catholic prejudice that many blamed for presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith's crushing defeat in 1928 at last seemed to have been overcome. However, if the presidential election of 1960 was indeed a turning point for American Catholics, how do we explain the failure of any Catholic--in over forty years--to repeat Kennedy's accomplishment? In this exhaustively researched study that fuses political, cultural, social, and intellectual history, Thomas Carty challenges the assumption that JFK's successful campaign for the presidency ended decades, if not centuries, of religious and political tensions between American Catholics and Protestants.

Facing Down the Soviet Union reveals for the first time the historic deliberations regarding the Chevaline upgrade to Britain's Polaris force, the decisions to procure the Trident C-4 and then D-5 system from the Americans in 1980 and 1982. It also details the decision to base Ground Launched Cruise Missiles in the UK in 1983.

The French North African Crisis analyzes the postwar breakdown in French imperial rule in North West Africa, concentrating primarily upon the Algerian war of independence. This book highlights the human tragedy involved and the divisive consequences within French metropolitan politics of intractable colonial conflict. It further examines how far the protracted crisis of colonial control in North Africa shaped French foreign and security policy and this impacted upon Anglo-French relations, the western alliance and the wider process of decolonization.

In his analysis of insurgency war, Donald Hamilton first attempts to provide insight into a strategic concept he believes is little understood today, and to explain its complicated relationship to American policy failures in Southeast Asia during the post-1945 era of containment. The study develops a working model of insurgency, explaining it as both a unique method and type of war-making. Significant findings include the inability of policymakers to perceive a potential insurgency in Vietnam as early as 1946, subsequent American involvement in not one, but three Asian insurgencies during the 1950s, and the ultimate failure of the U.S. military to meet the insurgency challenge in South Vietnam. This inability to eliminate the insurgency led not only to the complete breakdown of the South Vietnamese government, but was the primary reason why further U.S. military action after 1965 would prove ineffectual. This historical narrative also follows the involvement of several key players, including the personalities of Edward Lansdale, Sir Robert Thompson, Archimedes Patti, and Vo Nguyen Giap, who through their life experiences and writings, provide a keen profundity into why insurgencies occur, why they fail, and why they succeed.

Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

During the Cold War, Cyprus was of great strategic importance to the West. Britain, the US, and NATO all had valuable installations there, and any armed conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots could easily pull two nearby NATO members—Greece and Turkey—into war. When intercommunal fighting broke out in Cyprus in December 1963, the West was deeply embarrassed. This book examines the efforts of first Britain, and then the UN, to keep the peace.

Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, told by a former British Ambassador Twenty-five years ago, when the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan after a gruelling nine-year occupation, they left a legacy obscured by distortion and distrust. Fuelled by Cold War propaganda and the myths of the nineteenth-century Great Game, in many ways it remains so. The USSR entered the country in 1979 as part of efforts to quash growing anti-Soviet feeling in Kabul. What followed was a particularly brutal and bloody episode in world history - and one that is often credited as setting the stage for the Taliban's takeover in 1996. Basing his account on Russian sources and interviews, Rodric Braithwaite shows the conflict through the eyes of the Russians who fought it - politicians, officers, soldiers, advisers and journalists - moving seamlessly from the high politics of the Kremlin to lonely Russian conscripts in isolated mountain outposts. This is a powerful and sweeping history of the Soviets in Afghanistan, told with the unique insights of a former Ambassador to Moscow.

This is a study of global political history since 1941 with a particular emphasis on America's attitude to neutrality. This important revised and updated edition contains three entirely new chapters including an insightful new introduction and conclusion, drawing on newly released documentation, most importantly on Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War. Like the previous edition, this book looks at world affairs through the eyes of neutrality. It covers America's contribution to the decline of world-neutrality, the major economic and military events surrounding the Second World War, the founding of NATO and the problems of neutralism during the Vietnam War. This new edition, however, goes one step further to confirm, with fresh new evidence, the central thesis of the original volume.

Civil defence was an integral part of Britain's modern history. Throughout the cold war it was a central response of the British Government to the threat of war. This book will be the first history of the preparations to fight a nuclear war taken in Britain between the end of the Second World War and 1968.

After Germany's reunification in 1989-90, the country faced not only the history and consequences of the nation's division during the Cold War but also the continuing burdensome legacy of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. This book explains why concerns that the Nazi past would be marginalized by the more recent Communist past proved to be misplaced. It examines the delicate East-West dynamics and the notion that the West sought to impose "victor's justice" (or history) on the East. More specifically, it examines, for the first time, the history and significance of two parliamentary commissions of inquiry created in the 1990s to investigate the divided past after 1945 and its effects on the reunified country. Not unlike "truth commissions" elsewhere, these inquiries provided an important forum for renegotiating contemporary Germany's relationship with multiple German pasts, including the Nazi period and the Holocaust. The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War.

The subject of The Anti-Communist Manifestos is four influential books that informed the great political struggle known as the Cold War: Darkness at Noon (1940), by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian journalist and polymath intellectual; Out of the Night (1941), by Jan Valtin, a German sailor and labor agitator; I Chose Freedom (1946), by Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet engineer; and Witness (1952), by Whittaker Chambers, an American journalist. The authors were ex Communist Party members whose bitter disillusionment led them to turn on their former allegiance in literary fury.Koestler was a rapist, Valtin a thug. Kravchenko, though not a spy, was forced to live like one in America. Chambers was a prophet without honor in his own land. Three of the four had been underground espionage agents of the Comintern. All contemplated suicide, and two of them achieved it. John V. Fleming s humane and ironic narrative of these grim lives reveals that words were the true driving force behind the Cold War."

Fifty years after the formation of the Federal Republic and a decade after German unification, we stand on the cusp of a new century and a new millennium of German history. At the same time EMU marks a giant stride towards European integration and the end of the Deutschmark. In this book, leading international scholars reflect on the dramatic transformations of Germany's past and on Germany's future prospects. Post-war democratic and economic renewal is set in the context of continuing debates about German identity. There are assessments of all major leaders, parties and ideologies; of the still unfinished agenda of integrating East and West; of how the next generation of German leaders will interact with ageing governmental structures; of the Bundesbank and the successes and failures of economic policy, the trade unions and the media; and of Germany's emerging new role in Europe and the world.

It was in Europe that the Cold War reached a decisive turning point in the 1960s, leading to the era of detente. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), with its Final Act in Helsinki in August 1975, led to a rapprochement between East and West in the fields of security, economy and culture. This volume offers a pilot study in what the authors perceive as the key issues within this process: an understanding over the 'German problem' (balancing the recognition of the post-war territorial status quo against a formula for the eventuality of a peaceful change of frontiers) and the Western strategy of transformation through a multiplication of contacts between the two blocs. Both of these arguments emerged from the findings of an international research project on 'Detente and CSCE in Europe, 1966-1975', funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung and headed by the two editors.

Thousands of nuclear antiaircraft arms were designed, tested and deployed in the United States during Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. These Army "Nike-Hercules" missiles, Air Force "Genie" rockets, and "BOMARC" and "Falcon" missiles were meant to counter a raid by attacking Soviet bombers. U.S. policy makers believed that the American weapons could safely compensate for technological limitations which otherwise made it difficult to destroy high flying, fast moving airplanes. Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era traces this armament from conception through deployment. Bright recounts official actions, doctrinal decisions, and public policies. It also discusses the widespread acceptance of these weapons by the American public, a result of being touted in news releases, featured in films and television episodes, and disseminated throughout society as a whole.

The Algerian War 1954-62 was one of the most prolonged and violent examples of decolonization. Bringing to an end 132 years of French rule, the Algerian struggle caused the fall of six French prime ministers, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and expulsion of one million French settlers. This volume, bringing together leading experts in the field, focuses on one of the key actors in the drama - the French army. They show that the Algerian War was just as much about conflicts of ideas, beliefs and loyalties as it was about simple military operations. In this way, the collection goes beyond polemic and recrimination to explore the many and varied nuances of what was one of the historically most important of the grand style colonial wars.

How and why has the city of Florence, one of the great treasure houses of western civilization, been reduced to little more than a Renaissance Disneyland for tourists? Florence, once a center of national intellectual creativity, has become a city with two separate lives. Its historic center caters to and profits from tourists, while the periphery houses a population that endures overcrowding, decaying infrastructure, and an exorbitant cost of living. In "Politics in a Museum," James Miller investigates Florence's losing struggle with modern times.

He traces the city's story from its bloody liberation in 1944 through a reconstruction led by Communist and Catholic saints, the flood of 1966, the booms and busts of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the process, Miller provides an analysis of the defects of Italy's national political system, as well as a meticulous reconstruction of the men and events that have placed Florence alongside Venice in the unenviable status of museum city.