Ever since Fidel Castro assumed power in Cuba in 1959, Americans have obsessed about the nation ninety miles south of the Florida Keys. America's fixation on the tropical socialist republic has only grown over the years, fueled in part by successive waves of Cuban immigration and Castro's larger-than-life persona. Cubans are now a major ethnic group in Florida, and the exile community is so powerful that every American president has curried favor with it. But what do most Americans really know about Cuba itself? In this third edition of the widely hailed Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Julia Sweig updates her concise and remarkably accessible portrait of the small island nation. This edition contains a new foreword that discusses developments since Obama and Raul Castro announced the normalization of US-Cuba relations and restored formal diplomatic ties. A new final chapter discusses how normalization came to pass and covers Pope Francis' visit to Cuba, where he met with Fidel and Raul Castro. Expansive in coverage and authoritative in scope, the book looks back over Cuba's history since the Spanish American War before shifting to recent times. Focusing equally on Cuba's role in world affairs and its own social and political transformations, Sweig divides the book chronologically into the pre-Fidel era, the period between the 1959 revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War era, and - finally - the post-Fidel era. Informative, pithy, and lucidly written, it is the best compact reference on Cuba's internal politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting relationship with the global community. What Everyone Needs to Know is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

This is the best-selling biography of the IRA resistance fighter and hunger-striker, Bobby Sands. In this updated, new edition, Denis O'Hearn draws from a wealth of interviews with friends, comrades, fellow prisoners and prison wardens, to provide a faithful and shocking insight into life in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, an exploration of the motivations and thoughts of the Republican strikers and the story of one of the world's most radical, inspirational figures. Following his journey from its very beginnings - an ordinary boy from a working-class background in Belfast to a highly politicised, articulate revolutionary whose death in HM Prison Maze sent reverberations around the world, Bobby Sands: Nothing But An Unfinished Song captures the atmosphere of the time and the vibrancy of the man: a militant anti-imperialist who held on to his humanity despite living through a bitter, ugly struggle.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of today's most admired and controversial political figures. She burst into international headlines following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamist who threatened she would be next.

An international bestseller, Infidel shows the coming of age of this elegant, distinguished - and sometimes reviled - political superstar and champion of free speech. Raised in a strict Muslim family and extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female circumcision, brutal beatings, an adolescence as a devout believer, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four countries under dictatorships. She escaped from a forced marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands, where she fought for the rights of Muslim women and the reform of Islam, earning her the enmity of reactionary Islamists and craven politicians.

Under constant threat, she refuses to be silenced. Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright, curious, dutiful little girl evolves into a pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no other book could be more timely, or more significant.

After World War II, American statesman and scholar Lincoln Gordon emerged as one of the key players in the reconstruction of Europe. During his long career, Gordon worked as an aide to National Security Adviser Averill Harriman in President Truman's administration; for President John F. Kennedy as an author of the Alliance for Progress and as an adviser on Latin American policy; and for President Lyndon B. Johnson as assistant secretary of state. Gordon also served as the United States ambassador to Brazil under both Kennedy and Johnson. Outside the political sphere, he devoted his considerable talents to academia as a professor at Harvard University, as a scholar at the Brookings Institution, and as president at Johns Hopkins University. In this impressive biography, Bruce L. R. Smith examines Gordon's substantial contributions to U.S. mobilization during the Second World War, Europe's postwar economic recovery, the security framework for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and U.S. policy in Latin America. He also highlights the vital efforts of the advisers who helped Gordon plan NATO's force expansion and implement America's dominant foreign policy favoring free trade, free markets, and free political institutions. Smith, who worked with Gordon at the Brookings Institution, explores the statesman-scholar's virtues as well as his flaws, and his study is strengthened by insights drawn from his personal connection to his subject. In many ways, Gordon's life and career embodied Cold War America and the way in which the nation's institutions evolved to manage the twentieth century's vast changes. Smith adeptly shows how this "wise man" personified both America's postwar optimism and as its dawning realization of its own fallibility during the Vietnam era.

Revolutionary Justice narrates the power struggle between the Free Officers and their adversaries in the aftermath of Egypt's July Revolution of 1952 by studying trials held at the Revolution's Court and the People's Court. The establishment of these tribunals coincided with the most serious political crisis between the new regime and the opposition-primarily the Muslim Brothers and the Wafd party, but also senior officials in the previous government. By this point, the initial euphoria and the unbridled adoration for the Free Officers had worn off, and the focus of the public debate shifted to the legitimacy of the army's continued rule. Yoram Meital charts the crucial events of Egyptian Revolution both within and outside the courtroom. The tribunals' transcripts, which constitute the prime source of his study, offer a rare glimpse of the dialogue between parties that held conflicting views. While "show trials" against political dissidents are generally considered of little historical value, Revolutionary Justice lucidly shows that the rhetoric generated by Egypt's special courts played a crucial role in the denouement of political struggles, the creation of new historical trends, and the shaping of both the regime and the opposition's public image. The deliberations at the courtroom reinforced the prevailing emergency atmosphere, helping the junta advance its plans for a new dispensation. On the other hand, the responses of defendants and witnesses during the trial exposed weaknesses in the official hegemonic narrative. Paradoxically, oppositional views that the regime tirelessly endeavored to silence were tolerated and recorded in the courtroom.

The America of the near future will look nothing like the America of the recent past.America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use.Today's Millennials,well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings,are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they'd hoped. This graying of our population has helped polarize our politics, put stresses on our social safety net, and presented our elected leaders with a daunting challenge: How to keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future.Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed. By mid-century, the population of the United States will be majority non-white and our median age will edge above 40,both unprecedented milestones. But other rapidly-aging economic powers like China, Germany, and Japan will have populations that are much older. With our heavy immigration flows, the US is poised to remain relatively young. If we can get our spending priorities and generational equities in order, we can keep our economy second to none. But doing so means we have to rebalance the social compact that binds young and old. In tomorrow's world, yesterday's math will not add up.Drawing on Pew Research centre's extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, The Next America is a rich portrait of where we are as a nation and where we're headed,toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.

This book offers a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the history of passports, border surveillance, border crossing, and other elements of European border regimes in the 20th century. Border regime is interpreted widely, including inbound and outbound travels, permanent and temporary movements, distance and local border traffic, borderland fortifications, penalties for borderland offences, and also restrictions of free movement, even inside a given country. Based on archival sources from Hungary and the Czech Republic, extensive literature and more than two decades of research, the author distinguishes between two basic border regimes: the restrictive eastern and the permissive western systems, and a transitional zone between them. The historical development of these regimes is discussed in the framework of waves of globalisation and territorialisation. Border Regimes in Twentieth Century Europe offers the first-ever systematic comparison of European border regimes for students, scholars, and any readers who are interested in travel history, border studies, globalisation, area studies and 20th century Europe, including everyday history. By presenting their different historical experiences, the book contributes to a better understanding between old and new member states of the European Union, as well as between member and non-member states.

This book provides Aan analysis of the German Question's influence on the origins of the Cold War, arguing that the legal and diplomatic intercourse between the Allies regarding the treatment of the German Question brought forward the elements of intervention and coexistence which formed the basis for a relatively peaceful postwar international order.

South Africa's search for a way through repression, violence, and the various attempts at reform to a nonracial democracy has been a frustrating one for participants and observers alike. The political logjam was broken by President F. W. de Klerk's speech of February 2, 1990 and the response of the ANC. The release of Nelson Mandela, the unbanning of political organizations, and the beginning of the negotiation process were highlights in the period under review. By focusing on the period from 1987 to August 1990, Kalley brings forward her well-received South Africa Under Apartheid. At the same time she provides an opportunity for researchers outside South Africa to gauge viewpoints from the widest spectrum of political persuasions. The bibliography is organized in one alphabetical sequence by author or title. The preponderance of articles cited is in English, and where this is not the case, titles in other languages have been translated. All information on imprint collation and series is provided in English. The bibliography is supplemented by (a) an author index which includes corporate and individual authors, editors, sponsoring bodies, and institutes, and (b) a subject index which links keywords to specific entries. This bibliography will be invaluable to all researchers seeking materials on contemporary South African affairs.

Re-examining the long-held belief that the Sixties in Britain were dominated mainly by 'youth' and 'protest', the authors in the collection argue that innovation was everywhere shadowed by conservatism. A decade fascinated by itself and, especially, by the future, it also was tormented by self-doubt and accompanied by a fear of losing the past.

Iran is a country which, despite its extensive coverage in the media, is often regarded as 'mysterious', 'exotic' and 'other-worldly'. This attitude often stems from a focus on the rhetoric of controversial figures in Iranian politics, rather than looking at the everyday lives of Iranians themselves. In this book, Clarissa de Waal uses her training as an anthropologist to examine the experiences of individuals, concentrating on the Fars province in southwest Iran. This serves to highlight contemporary Iran outside of the capital, which so often dominates western understanding of the country. De Waal interviews a wide range of subjects, from public sector workers and entrepreneurs to Qashqa'i (both settled and nomadic), from students to the unemployed and from hairdressers to university professors. Through these interviews, she offers insight into the commonplace rituals of family interaction, the economics of food and fuel subsidies (and their withdrawal), the pervasiveness of unemployment and the varying approaches to Islam. She explores the extent to which the government of Iran and state-sanctioned religion impinges on citizens at home, work and in their social lives. Yet despite intrusive state interventionism, de Waal encounters inconsistencies between official government strictures and daily life. Satellite dishes, though illegal, are owned by most households, enabling them to watch foreign television from Mexican telenovellas to CNN. Uniquely, by being there during the 2009 elections, de Waal is also able to examine first-hand the various reactions both to the debate in the run-up to the elections and the huge protests in the wake of the election, recording the diverse responses to the candidates and their political platforms. By focusing on the everyday existence of a variety of Iranians from different backgrounds, de Waal offers insightful analysis concerning ordinary Iranians' lives and the impact the state has on them economically, socially and religiously.

The best, the fastest, the hippest and the most unorthodox account ever published of the US presidential electoral process in all its madness and corruption. In 1972 Hunter S. Thompson, the creator and king of Gonzo journalism, covered the US presidential campaign for Rolling Stone magazine alongside the establishment newsmen of Washington. The result is a classic piece of subversive reportage and a fantastic ride on the rollercoaster of Hunter's uniquely savage imagination. In his own words, written years before Watergate: 'It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.'

The Middle East has been the arena of three cataclysmic events since 1979 - the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. All of these have brought about major changes in the inter-regional politics and relations between Middle East countries and the outside world. This book seeks to analyze the impact of these events on Iranian-Arab relations. The authors examine Iran's relations with the Arab states of the Gulf in detail and sheds light on the changing patterns of Iranian-Egyptian and Lebanese relations.

The True Story Behind the Events on 9/11 that Inspired Broadway's Smash Hit Musical Come from Away, Featuring All New Material from the Author When 38 jetliners bound for the United States were forced to land at Gander International Airport in Canada by the closing of U.S. airspace on September 11, the population of this small town on Newfoundland Island swelled from 10,300 to nearly 17,000. The citizens of Gander met the stranded passengers with an overwhelming display of friendship and goodwill. As the passengers stepped from the airplanes, exhausted, hungry and distraught after being held on board for nearly 24 hours while security checked all of the baggage, they were greeted with a feast prepared by the townspeople. Local bus drivers who had been on strike came off the picket lines to transport the passengers to the various shelters set up in local schools and churches. Linens and toiletries were bought and donated. A middle school provided showers, as well as access to computers, email, and televisions, allowing the passengers to stay in touch with family and follow the news. Over the course of those four days, many of the passengers developed friendships with Gander residents that they expect to last a lifetime. As a show of thanks, scholarship funds for the children of Gander have been formed and donations have been made to provide new computers for the schools. This book recounts the inspiring story of the residents of Gander, Canada, whose acts of kindness have touched the lives of thousands of people and been an example of humanity and goodwill.

Life history and the Irish migrant experience offers a fresh perspective on the significance of England's largest post-war migrant group for current debates on identity and difference in contemporary Britain. The first book to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, it opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Based on richly contextualised case studies addressing experiences of emigration, urban life, work, religion, and the Troubles in England, chapters shed new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants and the circumstances that formed them. -- .

First Published in 1981. The objective of this study is to reconstruct the difficulty faced by American and British policy-makers in 'determining the capabilities and intentions' of their two main wartime allies regarding the Middle East. Specifically, it seeks to explore the role of great power relations in the Middle East in the breakdown of the wartime alliance and in the origins of the Cold War.

Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge delves into how the Cold War, as a global phenomenon, shaped local conditions and decisions for science in light of US-Europe relationships. The articles in this volume, edited by Jeroen van Dongen, show how the western network in which science was circulated and produced was strongly conditioned by the state and its international relations. The workings of secrecy, the consequences of US hegemony and decolonization, and the ambitions of post-war recovery attempts were all mediated through the interference of the state and through its relative position in the network. At the same time, hubristic expectations prefigured in the state's relation to science.

This book examines the gulf between the history and mythology that has grown up around different aspects of the Sixties, ranging from the counterculture to gay rights to the student and women's movements to the Johnson presidency. One of the volumes launching the Viewpoints of American Culture series, this collection of original essays features writing by scholars and public figures, including Tom Wicker, John D'Emilio, and Julian Bond, and includes their personal reflections on the decade.

_______________ 'A memoir to inspire' - Aminatta Forna 'I cannot recommend this book highly enough' - Nassim Assefi, author of Aria 'Fascinating insight on a topic much discussed but rarely understood from a human perspective. Recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the Middle East' - Image Magazine _______________ The story of three generations of Iranian women - Kamin, her mother and her grandmother - which portrays the history of twentieth century Iran Kamin Mohammadi was nine years old when her family fled Iran during the 1979 Revolution. Bewildered by the seismic changes in her homeland, she turned her back on the past and spent her teenage years trying to fit in with British attitudes to family, food and freedom. She was twenty-seven before she returned to Iran, drawn inexorably back by memories of her grandmother's house in Abadan, with its traditional inner courtyard, its noisy gatherings and its very walls steeped in history. The Cypress Tree is Kamin's account of her journey home, to rediscover her Iranian self and to discover for the first time the story of her family: a sprawling clan that sprang from humble roots to bloom during the affluent, Biba-clad 1960s, only to be shaken by the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War and the heartbreak of exile, and toughened by the struggle for democracy that continues today. This moving and passionate memoir is a love letter both to Kamin's extraordinary family and to Iran itself, an ancient country which has survived so much modern tumult but where joy and resilience will always triumph over despair. _______________ 'Here is a portrait of a country completely at odds with the media's portrayals ... It was a particular joy to read this memoir ... in the author's nostalgic depiction, one finds both a world that has passed away and one being born again' - Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go

In 1989 and 1990 the map of Europe was redrawn without a war, unlike other great ruptures of the international order such as 1815, 1870, 1918, and 1945. How did this happen? This major multinational study, based on archives from both sides of the 'Iron Curtain', highlights the contribution of international statecraft to the peaceful dissolution of Europe's bipolar order by examining pivotal summit meetings from 1970 to 1990. These are organized into three periods: 'Thawing', 'Living with', and 'Transcending' the Cold War. The volume offers fascinating insights into key statesmen such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. It explores the central issues of the superpowers and arms control, their triangular relationship with China, and the seemingly intractable German question. Particular attention is devoted to the cultural dimensions of summitry, as performative acts for the media and as encounters with 'the Other' across ideological divides. All these threads are drawn together in a sweeping analytical conclusion. Written in lively prose, Transcending the Cold War is essential reading for anyone interested not just in modern history but also current international affairs.

The previously untold true story of the CIA's clandestine use of American students as undercover operatives during the Cold War In 1967, CIA director Richard Helms had, as he would later recall, "one of my darkest days" when President Lyndon Johnson told him that the muckraking magazine Ramparts was about to expose one of the Agency's best-kept secrets: a covert project to enroll American students in the crusade against communism. Ramparts, however, had only a small part of the story of the CIA's two-decades-long effort to suborn the National Student Association. Patriotic Betrayal tells the rest of the tale, which reads like a John le Carre novel, filled with self-serving rationalizations, layers of duplicity, and bureaucratic double-talk. In this eye-opening book, Karen M. Paget, herself a former member of the NSA, mined hundreds of archival sources and declassified documents, and interviewed more than 150 people, to uncover precisely how the CIA turned the NSA into an intelligence asset during the Cold War, with students used-sometimes wittingly but usually unwittingly-as undercover agents inside America and abroad. A rich and suspenseful account of an under-examined episode in the Cold War, Patriotic Betrayal describes the relationship from its inception in 1947, when both the NSA and CIA were established, to 1967, when public exposure forced the CIA to discontinue the arrangement while successfully engineering a cover-up of the extent of its penetration into the NSA. For the first time, Paget tells the full story revealing that what began as a straightforward project to thwart perceived Soviet influence in America and abroad grew and diversified, and that intelligence-gathering and espionage-despite subsequent CIA denials-were integral to its nature. How did a domestic liberal student organization become, effectively, a covert arm of a secret government organization charged with advancing U.S. foreign policy aims? The answer throws a sharp light on the persistent argument, heard even today, about whether America's national-security interests can be secured by skullduggery and deception. Patriotic Betrayal is an indispensable history of the dark side of Cold War good intentions and fills a significant gap in an important era of postwar twentieth-century history.

Using the European Defence Community (EDC) as a case-study, this book examines the competing and often conflicting view of the British and American governments towards European integration in the early 1950s. The British, fearing an 'agonizing reappraisal' of the American defence commitment to Europe if the supranational EDC failed, went to great lengths to ensure the success of the scheme. When, despite these efforts, the EDC finally collapsed in August 1954, NATO was plunged into arguably the most severe crisis in its history. The crisis also possessed an Anglo-American dimension, with London and Washington badly divided on how it should be resolved. In the end, the British were instrumental in the creation of the Western European Union as a successor to the EDC. Their crisis management, however, had been rooted in fear of the 'agonizing reappraisal', a danger dismissed by many historians as exaggerated but which the British, in 1954, were perhaps right to take seriously.

The gender barrier that stood for nearly two centuries at the United States Military Academy was toppled in 1976. Based on more than one hundred interviews, thousands of pages of Academy documents, and a wide array of secondary sources, this is the first comprehensive history of what the admission of women at West Point meant for the Academy, for the Army, and for the United States. The story of how West Point prepared for the precedent-setting arrival of women has never before been thoroughly told. Given the current interest in the role of women in the armed forces, and the attention focused on The Citadel and VMI when they admitted women, this is a topical story that will appeal to a general audience.

Janda explains how and why female cadets were admitted to West Point and how they responded to the challenge of confronting 175 years of all-male Academy tradition. He argues that neither feminists nor Congress forced the Academy to change standards for women, and that Academy leaders were pioneers in exploring the implications of bringing women into formerly all-male military academies. "Stronger than Custom" also examines the sacrifices made by the first women cadets at the Academy, each of whom confronted an array of personal and professional hurdles on the road to graduation. When 62 of the original 119 women who entered the Academy in 1976 graduated four years later, they did so in triumph.