France has long been a deeply political country. At least since the French Revolution, the country and its people have felt themselves to be at the forefront of history - a great power with global ambitions. But the Second World War irrevocably changed France's place in the world. Despite Charles de Gaulle's attempts to restore France's 'grandeur' in the 1960s, since 1945 the French have been forced to reconcile themselves to their modest place at the heart of a changing Europe. What impact has this had on political life? How have the French reimagined the revolutionary, republican and reactionary ideologies that have been so crucial to the country's modern history? How has the arrival of hundreds of thousands of postcolonial migrants transformed politics? These are just some of the questions that are addressed in "France since the 1970s." Multi-authored by leading scholars from across the globe, it explores how the French have dealt with the pervasive sense of uncertainty that has become a defining feature of European politics since the late 1960s. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the modern political history of Europe.

How does literary production respond to processes of urbanization? What do literary and cultural representations tell us about urban practices?
Guided by these questions, "Urban Space and Late Twentieth-Century New York Literature" theorizes literary geography anew by examining writers' responses to the uneven development of New York City. Catalina Neculai offers a rich critique of literature written during the consolidation of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether it is about the culture industries, gentrification, housing movements, or the finance economy, here New York literature becomes akin to urban fieldwork that produces knowledge of space and engages with the politics of place. Interdisciplinary in conception and design, the book draws on fiction, non-fiction, grassroots narratives, archival material, radical Marxist geography, urban politics, and urban history.

Between 1945 and 1960, Great Britain constructed a substantial nuclear-armed bomber force. The creation of this force had ramifications that extended well beyond the confines of military policy. The process played a large part in defining relations with the United States, and the belief that these bombers could replace conventional forces convinced successive British governments that Great Britain could maintain a significant global military role. Originally published in 1995 and drawing on both archives and oral testimony, this book analyses British strategic discourse and its influence on British foreign policy in the early decades of the Cold War.

In this history of Russia from 1917 to the present, Alexander Chubarov teases out themes developed in his previous book on tsarist Russia (The Fragile Empire).

One of the key factors to Russia's distinctiveness is its halfway location in the center of the Eurasian landmass. This lends an inevitability to the traditional cultural schism between Westernizing reformers and Slavophiles. Neither approach, says Chubarov, will work on its own. Without ever minimizing the brutalities of the Soviet period -- the state terror, the collectivizations, the labor camps, the deportations of whole peoples -- Chubarov demonstrates much continuity between tsarist and Soviet Russia, with the latter often repeating the former's mistakes. Russia, says Chubarov, cannot turn its back on its Soviet experience. Far from being a blind alley or "aberrant phase, " the Soviet period was an organic part of Russia history and "was largely successful in turning Russia and most of the other Soviet republics into modern states."

This book reveals that 1969-74 was a crucial period for the special relationship. The Heath Government attempted to reverse Britains decline as a great power by forging an American-European special relationship out of the Anglo-American relationship. Simultaneously the Nixon Administration tried to recoup the global position of the United States.

This pioneering volume explores the contribution of migrants to European culture from the early modern era to today. It takes culture as an aesthetic and social activity of making, one practised by migrants on the move and also by those who represent their lives in an act of support. Adopting a multilingual approach, the book interprets the aesthetics and political practices developed by and with migrants in Spain, Italy and France. It juxtaposes early modern and modern work with contemporary, reconceiving migrants as crucial agents of change. Scholars and artists track people on the move within the continent and without, drawing a significant map for the cultural history of migration around Europe. An electronic version of this book is available under a creative commons licence: manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526166180/9781526166180.xml -- .

Updated to cover events between 1986 and 1992, including the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in December 1992, the book analyses the secessionist crisis in Punjab which led to Indira Gandhi's murder and examines larger themes of ethnic conflict and threats to Indian unity. The Punjab example sheds light on processes at work in the rest of India, as the introduction to the new edition of the book points out. It also considers the domestic implications for India of a world in which 'socialism' and 'non-alignment' have lost much of their meaning.

By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism. Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

A history of 1950s and 1960s British political culture, Redefining British Politics interrogates ideas, movements and identities bordering social and political change: consumer organisations; campaigns about TV, morality and culture; Young Conservatism; and how party politics used media like TV and was represented in popular culture.

The four years of the Bush presidency cover a momentous era in American and world history. In international affairs the events in Eastern Europe and the then Soviet Union in late 1989 gave the President a high profile. The advent of the 'New World Order' made the United States pre-eminent: the triumph of the West was assured, with the added bonus of the 'peace dividend' as arms control agreements and defense savings seemed imminent. The President's personal popularity flourished in this climate and reached a new peak with the triumph of the allied forces in the Gulf War. The Gulf conflict saw Bush at his most decisive: firm in his moral stance, skilled in his action to bring together allied support backed by the United Nations, and confident in his handling of public opinion.

This is the second of two volumes to bear witness to the Cuban experience. Together with its predecessor, "Cuba: Twenty-Five Years of Revolution," it offers a positive account. Yet, it is sensitive to the dilemmas and flawed strategies in Cuba's thirty-year process of transformation. It warns that no preconceived notion of state or of development will help grasp the multifaceted nature of this nation, which reflects aspects of both developed and underdeveloped nations. Seventeen chapters, five of which are from Cuban contributors, thoroughly investigate recent political, economic, and social changes as well as the successes and failures of long-term development policies. Heavy attention is paid to the rectification process launched by Castro in 1986.

This volume portrays a Cuba facing the 1990s with a burst of increased vigor in its efforts to secure continued far-reaching transformation. Seventeen chapters describe major changes in the economic realm caught up in the rectification campaign; a slow process of liberalization in the political sphere; and a Cuba that, in social terms, is far better off than any other Latin American country.

When information is a weapon, everyone is at war.

We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump. We've lost not only our sense of peace and democracy - but our sense of what those words even mean.

As Peter Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, 'behavioural change' salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and much more. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia - but the answers he finds there are surprising.

The unification of the two German states changed the geo-political, economic, social, and cultural borders of Germany and Europe. This volume in three parts researches how East German and West German authors and directors reacted to these radical changes. The basis of this research are fictional, autobiographical, journalistic, and cinematic texts. The authors and directors presented in this volume not only comment on the changes which they themselves experienced but also voice their changing attitudes to their own past within the divided Germany.

The second of a series, this study analyzes the historical relationships between the provision of military assistance and success in achieving Soviet aims during the Cold War. Mott looks at Soviet donor-recipient relationships across seventeen case studies to identify the generalities or regularities that relate the classical wartime relationship to achievement of donor Cold War aims. He refines the four critical features of the wartime donor-recipient relationship--convergence of donor and recipient aims, donor control, commitment of donor military forces, and coherence of donor policies and strategies--to reflect the unique political economic constraints of the Cold War. Findings challenge orthodox separation of politics, history, military science, and economics, and refute the common wisdom that economic aid is a more effective policy instrument than military assistance.

Mott contends that both successes and failures of Cold War Soviet military assistance were predictable, explicit consequences of donor policies and strategies and of convergence of donor and recipient aims. This book presents a pattern for both policy development and theoretical analysis in which military assistance is a viable, robust policy option and bilateral relationship with a clear set of requirements, features, processes, and predictable results. Its primary methodology is the search for uniformities across historical observations through low-level, ordinary, multivariate regressions. Each chapter focuses on Soviet military assistance in a region and refines the relevant features of the observed relationships into a tentative pattern for comparison with other regions.

The astonishing true story of how the CIA, MI6 and a Soviet defector saved the world in 1962, as told in the new film, The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. In August 1960, a Soviet colonel called Oleg Penkovsky tried to make contact with the West. His first attempt was to approach two young American students in Moscow. He handed them a bulky envelope and pleaded with them to deliver it to the American embassy. MI6 and the CIA came to believe Penkovsky was genuine and so the two agencies decided to run the operation jointly. It ran right through the Berlin crisis - in an astonishing near-miss, Penkovsky learned that the Wall was going to be built four days before it happened but was unable to contact his handlers - and the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which rocket manuals Penkovsky had handed over were crucial in determining what President Khrushchev was doing, and helped President John F. Kennedy and his team end the crisis and avert a nuclear war. Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, is widely seen as the most important spy of the Cold War, and the CIA-MI6 joint operation to run him has never been bettered. But had the KGB already 'turned' Penkovsky and were the Russians making sure he saw the information they wanted him to see? If so, it may even have been possible that the whole Cuban Missile Crisis might have been a Russian deception operation. Thrilling, evocative and hugely controversial, Dead Drop blows apart some of the myths about one of the Cold War's most well-known operations as the world stood on the brink of nuclear destruction.

This book is about the metamorphosis of national ideology in Ba'thist Iraq. By "ideology" the reference is to a very broad sense of the term, closer to a "collection of political proposals...somewhat intellectualistic" than to a comprehensive world view or an interpretation of history fully, systematically and rigorously thought out, presented and elaborated. Speeches by leading politicans, historiography and the writings of intellectuals in regard to Iraq's political community, are considered here as ideology, even if these ideas do not constitute a complete "politico-social programme".;This book is an attempt to follow and analyze the change in the Ba'th party's perception and representation of Iraq as a political community. By resurrecting and imbuing with great national significance elements previously rejected, ignored or downplayed in Ba'th ideology such as territory, race and local pre-Islamic and pre-Arab historical epochs, the Ba'th regime of Iraq has sought to re-shape the collective identification of its countrymen. In several cases, this reshaping took the form of re-enforcing and fully legitimizing an already existing identification that hitherto the party had looked

This collective work analyzes the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, providing a coherent picture of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in the period 2013-2020. Giving voice to different social groups, scholarly communities and agencies relevant to Ukraine's recent history, The War in Ukraine's Donbas goes beyond simplistic media interpretations that limit the analysis to Vladimir Putin and Russian aims to annex Ukraine. Instead, the authors identify the deeper roots linked to the autonomy and history of Donbas as a region. The contributions explore local society and traditions and the alienation from Ukraine caused by the events of Euromaidan, which saw the removal of the Donetsk-based president Viktor Yanukovych. Other chapters address the refugee crisis, the Minsk Accords in 2014 and the impact of the new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his efforts to bring the war to an end by negotiations among Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany. The book concludes with four proposals for a durable peace in Donbas: territorial power-sharing; the conversion of rebels into legitimate political parties; amnesty for all participants of the armed conflict; and a transitional period of several years until political institutions are fully re-established.

Despite-or because of-its huge popular culture status, Peanuts enabled cartoonist Charles Schulz to offer political commentary on the most controversial topics of postwar American culture through the voices of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang. In postwar America, there was no newspaper comic strip more recognizable than Charles Schulz's Peanuts. It was everywhere, not just in thousands of daily newspapers. For nearly fifty years, Peanuts was a mainstay of American popular culture in television, movies, and merchandising, from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to the White House to the breakfast table. Most people have come to associate Peanuts with the innocence of childhood, not the social and political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Some have even argued that Peanuts was so beloved because it was apolitical. The truth, as Blake Scott Ball shows, is that Peanuts was very political. Whether it was the battles over the Vietnam War, racial integration, feminism, or the future of a nuclear world, Peanuts was a daily conversation about very real hopes and fears and the political realities of the Cold War world. As thousands of fan letters, interviews, and behind-the-scenes documents reveal, Charles Schulz used his comic strip to project his ideas to a mass audience and comment on the rapidly changing politics of America. Charlie Brown's America covers all of these debates and much more in a historical journey through the tumultuous decades of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Peppermint Patty, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang.

Predictions about the world have the power to grip whole societies, and shape the actions of many groups whether working in politics, ecology or religion. At the end of epochs and eras humans tend to reflect on the shape of things to come. Most recently, fears about the 'millennium bug' had thousands rushing to stock up on candles and food in the weeks before New Year's Eve.
Concerns about the future have been expressed differently throughout history. This book explores the historical context surrounding various debates, decisions and beliefs about the future in recent centuries. Religious, political, literary and ecological visions of the future in America and Germany are addressed comparatively. In particular, scholars from the United States and Germany explore the meaning of eschatological and utopian thoughts pursued during the last three centuries and tackle subjects ranging from science fiction to religious radicalism, utopian social experiments, and visions of race relations. This book delves into the hopes and fears for the future that have shaped the past and will be of interest to comparative historians as well as to historians of Europe and the United States intrigued by the subject of utopias.

This book puts American policy in Southeast Asia and the traumatic events of the second Indochina War into the larger perspective of the Cold War. Levine's wide-ranging work treats everything from the local appeals of Communist parties in the region and the peculiarities of Vietnamese Communism to the development of the domino theory and its consequences, from helicopter warfare to the antiwar movement. Treating harshly some of the orthodoxies that have developed about Vietnam and scathing in its treatment of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, it will interest scholars, students, and veterans of the conflict.

Offers a broader timeline than any other Cold War text, charting the lead-up to the conflict from the Russian Revolution to World War II Ten new maps that illustrate the global reach of the long conflict An extended chronology to show recent related events An updated bibliography to reflect recent scholarship in the area

This book delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism.

The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949. Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.

This fascinating account, by a Czech-speaking American diplomat who lived in Czechoslovakia from 1967-1969, describes the collapse of a repressive Communist regime, the subsequent unprecedented explosion of popular freedom, the surprise Soviet occupation, and the spirited passive resistance of the population until the gradual strangulation of the Prague Spring. Drawing on his own journal, recent memoirs, and documentary materials in the National Archives, the author shows how American diplomats and senior U.S. officials analyzed and reacted to ongoing events. He explains how reform leader Alexander Dubcek became wedged between enthusiastic popular support and the objections of ultra-orthodox Soviet leaders. Skoug's economic and commercial responsibilities gave him considerable access to Czechoslovak officials even in the Novotny period, and he was an eyewitness to the invasion and many other crucial events of the period, including the great patriotic demonstration of March 1969 which the Soviet Union exploited to force Dubcek's resignation.

Despite overt Soviet pressure, neither Prague nor Washington anticipated intervention. The Johnson Administration, courting Moscow for help on Vietnam, displayed calculated indifference to the dispute and reacted tepidly to developments. Left alone, the Czechoslovak population met the invader with militant, if passive, resistance, but the Dubcek leadership capitulated to Soviet demands and acquiesced in an occupation that gradually betrayed all of the gains achieved. Subsequent reluctance by Washington to criticize Moscow helped the Soviet Union cut its diplomatic losses. On the other hand, the Czechoslavak crisis may have helped to persuade Gorbachev to allow Eastern Europe to resolve its own affairs in 1989.

The Mayor of Mogadishu tells the story of one family's epic journey through Somalia's turmoil, from the optimism of independence to its spectacular unravelling.Mohamud 'Tarzan' Nur was born a nomad, and became an orphan, then a street brawler in the cosmopolitan port city of Mogadishu - a place famous for its cafes and open-air cinemas. When Somalia collapsed into civil war, Tarzan and his young family joined the exodus from Mogadishu, eventually spending twenty years in North London. But in 2010 Tarzan returned to the unrecognisable ruins of a city largely controlled by the Islamist militants of Al-Shabaab. For some, the new Mayor was a galvanising symbol of defiance. But others branded him a thug, mired in the corruption and clan rivalries that continue to threaten Somalia's revival.The Mayor of Mogadishu is an uplifting story of survival, and a compelling examination of what it means to lose a country and then to reclaim it.