Bringing together scholarly essays and helpfully annotated primary documents, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution collects not only the best recent scholarship on the subject, but also showcases the primary texts written by African Americans about the Haitian Revolution. Rather than being about the revolution itself, this collection attempts to show how the events in Haiti served to galvanize African Americans to think about themselves and to act in accordance with their beliefs, and contributes to the study of African Americans in the wider Atlantic World.

Bringing together experts across Latin America, North America, and Spain, The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence innovatively revisits Latin American independence within a larger regional, temporal, and thematic framework to highlight its significance for the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The volume offers a synthetic yet comprehensive tool for understanding and assessing the most current studies in the field and their analytical contributions to the broader historiography. Organized thematically and across different regions of the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish and Luso America, the essays deepen well-known conclusions and reveal new interpretations. They offer analytical interventions that produce new questions on periodization, the meaning of anti-colonialism, liberalism, and republicanism, as well as the militarization of societies, public opinion, the role of sciences, labor regimes, and gender dynamics. A much-needed addition to the existing scholarship, this volume brings a transnational perspective to a critical period of history in Latin America.

This book, first published in 1967, examines the implications of a now-forgotten minor riot that occurred in 1833, a turbulent year with the working classes striving for recognition in a changing social order. A political meeting in London had been declared illegal, the police breaking up the crowd were met with resistance, and in the fracas a policeman was stabbed to death. A bad-tempered inquest followed, at which the jury returned a verdict of justified killing - for which a section of the public hailed them as heroes. This analysis sets the crime and verdict against the political protests of the time.

This book, first published in 1966, focuses on the stories of ordinary people who have stood up to tyrants around the world. A German opposes Hitler; a Rabbi in South Africa protests apartheid; an Algerian lawyer remains true to the law; a Polish writer fights the Nazis, and the Communists; an Irish playwright is caught up in the fight against the British; and a Hungarian Jewish poet recites poetry in concentration camps. Together they form an examination of political opposition, and a testimony.

This book, first published in 1980, is a comprehensive study of the radical theatre movement in Britain from 1968 to 1978. The essays are based on first-hand interviews, with each section being introduced with a summary of key events before detailing the artists under examination.

"Contesting the French Revolution" provides an insightful overview of one of history's most significant events, as well as examining the most significant historiographical debates about this period.Explores the causes, events, and consequences of the French Revolution
Offers a stimulating analysis of the most controversial debates: Were the events of 1789 a social revolution or a political accident? Did they mark the rise of industrial capitalism or the birth of modern democracy? Was Napoleon Bonaparte an heir to the ideals of 1789 or a betrayer of the Revolution?
Shows how historical interpretation of the French Revolution has been influenced by the changing political and social currents of the last 200 years - from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall - and how historical study has shifted from a political focus to social and cultural approaches in more recent years.

The American Civil Rights Movement: A documentary history collects in a single, brief volume, documents reflecting key aspects of the Civil Rights Movement: the voices of social activists (and opponents), the legal struggle in the courts, and governmental responses to civil rights issues - public statements, executive orders, legislation. The book is a deliberate attempt to address the shortcomings of capsule histories of the Movement, histories that neglect to describe the range of public and private institutions, organizations, and individuals that contributed to - and hindered - its accomplishments. The introductory essays, providing narrative or analytical background, combined with the range of documents presented, allows the book to serve as an excellent supplement to textbook treatments of modern U.S. history, African American history, and/or the Civil Rights Movement. The book includes over 100 documents - personal narratives, court decisions, news reports, letters, legislation - that provide the reader with insights into the philosophies, strategies, personalities of the Movement. -- .

Recent revisionist history has questioned the degree of social and economic change attributable to the French Revolution. Some historians have also claimed that the Revolution was primarily an urban affair with little relevance to the rural masses. This book tests these ideas by examining the Revolutionary, Napoleonic and Restoration attempts to transform the tenure of communal land in one region of southern France; the department of the Gard. By analysing the results of the legislative attempts to privatize common land, this study highlights how the Revolution's agrarian policy profoundly affected French rural society and the economy. Not only did some members of the rural community, mainly small-holding peasants, increase their land holdings, but certain sectors of agriculture were also transformed; these findings shed light on the growth in viticulture in the south of France before the monocultural revolution of the 1850s. The privatization of common land, alongside the abolition of feudalism and the transformation of judicial institutions, were key aspects of the Revolution in the countryside. This detailed study demonstrates that the legislative process was not a top-down procedure, but an interaction between a state and its citizens. It is an important contribution to the new social history of the French Revolution and will appeal to economic and social historians, as well as historical geographers.

On January 1, 1994 in the far southeast of Mexico, a guerrilla army of indigenous Mayan peasants calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in rebellion against 500 years of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, racism, and neoliberal capitalism. Zapatismo Beyond Borders examines how Zapatismo, the political philosophy of the Zapatistas, crossed the regional and national boundaries of the isolated indigenous communities of Chiapas to influence diverse communities of North American activists.

Providing readers with anthropological perspectives that draw on a year of fieldwork with activists, and also enriched by the author's own experience with contemporary social justice struggles, Alex Khasnabish examines the "transnational resonance" of the Zapatista movement. He shows how the spread of Zapatismo has unexpectedly produced new imaginations and practices of radical political action in diverse socio-political movements throughout North America. Zapatismo Beyond Borders is an engaging study of a radical political philosophy that has been both a model for grassroots organizations and a rallying call for members of the anti-globalization movement. Rigorous and engaged, this will be of interest to anyone interested in indigenous rights movements, political philosophy, and the recent history of political activism.

Afro-Cuban Identity in Post-Revolutionary Novel and Film examines the changing discourse on race as portrayed in Cuban novels and films produced after 1959. Andrea Easley Morris analyzes the artists' participation in and questioning of the revolutionary government's revision of national identity to include the unique experience and contributions of Cuban men and women of African descent. While the Cuban revolution brought sweeping changes that vastly improved the material condition of many Afro-Cubans, at the time overrepresented among Cuba's poor and marginalized, the government's official position was that racial inequities had been resolved as early as 1962. Although a more open dialogue on race was cut short, the work of several novelists and film directors from the late 1960s and 70s expresses the need to explore what was gained and lost by Afro-Cubans in the early years of the revolution, among them Manuel Granados, Miguel Barnet, Nivaria Tejera, Sara Gomez, Cesar Leante, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Sergio Giral, and Manuel Cofino. Their works participate in the process of redefining Cuban national identity that took place after the revolution and, more specifically, they explore the place of Afro-Cuban identity within a broader notion of revolutionary "Cubanness." This occurs through an emphasis on Afro-Cuban cultural practices that have constituted forms of resistance to colonial and neo-colonial oppression. This book examines the identity conflicts portrayed in these works and takes into account the artists' negotiation of their own status within the revolutionary context by looking at the narrative strategies used to address racial issues within the constraints placed on cultural production in Cuba after 1962.

It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why. More so than historians, it is philosophers that have played the leading role in the portrayal of this major event in French political history. The philosophical quarrels of the 1960s placed the French Revolution at the heart of their debates. The most well-documented among these is the conflict between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Levi-Strauss and subsequently, Michel Foucault. Do we need an ethics of the history of the French Revolution? Ranciere, Derrida, Balibar, Lefort, Robin, and Loraux can help answer this question, in an epistemological approach to history. These successive explorations allow us to move away from a myth of identity and to rediscover a real Revolution, capable of offering Enlightenment and political utility and interrogating what democracy and emancipation mean for us today.

Sixteen million people have died in civil wars in the past 50 years. In view of that, civil wars may be the single most destabilizing force in world politics today. The only greater killer is the suffering that pushes individuals into them. Civil wars create regional and global instability that threatens economic initiatives and political continuity. Preventing civil wars is a challenge that the policy community is ill-equipped to handle. Rwanda is an example a tragedy that the world did nothing to stop. Iraq and Afghanistan are tragedies the world did much to inflame. This book uses argument, evidence, and intuition born of experience to provide an account of civil wars and the steps we can take to reduce them.

This book explores rural political change in China from 1850 to 1949 to help us understand China's transformation from a weak, decaying agrarian empire to a unified, strong nation-state during this period. Based on local gazetteers, contemporary field studies, government archives, personal memoirs and other primary sources, it systematically compares two key macro-regions of rural China - the North China plain and the Yangzi delta - to demonstrate the ways in which the forces of political change, shaped by different local conditions, operated to transform the country. It shows that on the North China plain, the village community composed mainly of owner-cultivators was the focal point for political mobilization, whilst in the Yangzi delta absentee landlordism was exploited by the state for local control and tax extraction. However, these both set the stage, in different ways, for the communist mobilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Peasants and Revolution in Rural China is an important addition to the literature on the history of the Chinese Revolution, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the course of Chinese social and political development.

Sandwiched between the East and West, Russian intellectuals have for centuries been divided geographically, politically, and culturally into two distinct groups: the Slavophiles, who rejected Western-style democracy, preferring a more holistic and abstract vision, and the more rational and scientific-minded Westernizers. These two ideologies cut across the political spectrum of late nineteenth-century Russia and competed for dominance in the country's intellectual life. The tension created between these two opposing groups caused the feeling that violent upheaval was Russia's future. In turn, many began to think that Russia was possibly following the path of France and that a French-style revolution might be possible on Russian soil. In The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life, Dmitry Shlapentokh describes the role that the French democratic revolution played in Russia's intellectual development by the end of the nineteenth century.

The revolutionary upheaval in Russia at the beginning of twentieth century and the continuous expansion of the West convinced most Russian intellectuals that the French Revolution in its democratic reading was indeed the pathway of history. Yet the rise of totalitarian regimes and their expansion proved the validity of the sober vision of nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals. Some conservative Russian intellectuals believed that not only would Russia preserve its authoritarian regime but it would spread this regime all over the world. In this context, Shlapentokh argues the French Revolution with its democratic tradition was only a phenomenon of Western civilization and hence transitory.

The flirtation with Western ideology, with its democratic polity and market economy that followed in the wake of the collapse of the communist regime, culminated in an increasing push for corporate authoritarianism and nationalism. This work helps explain why Russia turned away from democratic to autocratic stylesi1/2economic pulls to capitalism notwithstanding. It has insight which helps to explain why Russia moved towards an authoritarian regime instead of democracy.

Dmitry Shlapentokh is associate professor of history at the University of Indiana, South Bend. Among his books are The French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, The Proto-Totalitarian State, Soviet Cinematography, 1918-1991 (with Vladimir Shlapentokh), and East Against West, The First Encounter: The Life of Themistocles.

Despite the fact that the Ku Klux Klan can be traced from the 1700s through the Civil War and is going strong in the present day, many people fail to realize the reach and influence of the group. Many scholars, for instance, perceive the KKK as a radical racist group composed primarily of ignorant, uneducated members, when it is actually much more. Some Klan groups are political, while others are simply social. Some 'meet and eat' just as any other mainstream civic or church group, but others are focused toward the use of well-planned violence. Not all Klan groups advocate an overthrow of the U.S. government, though some do.The author traces the historical development of the Klan, addressing its organization, membership, ideologies and philosophies. Avoiding the bias of previous works - written by either Klan apologists or detractors - the author chronicles the directions the group has taken during its long and diverse history. The study also details the secret oaths of allegiance, the Imperial Wizards, and the concept of Knighthood. The result is an accurate account of the Ku Klux Klan, a group that has continued to grow and evolve in response to changing times.

How can we save politics from the politician? How can we save ourselves? This book looks at the example of those who leave the city and break the social contract, rebellious exiles and freedom fighters escaping the wheel of necessity, and learns from them.

How can we save politics from the politician? How can we save ourselves? This book looks at the example of those who leave the city and break the social contract, rebellious exiles and freedom fighters escaping the wheel of necessity, and learns from them.

This book focuses upon significant aspects of Stalinism as a system in the USSR. It sheds new light on established questions and addresses issues that have never before been raised in the study of Stalinism. Stalinism constitutes one of the most striking and contentious phenomena of the twentieth century. It not only transformed the Soviet Union into a major military-industrial power, but through both the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War, and its effect on the political Left throughout much of the world, it also transformed much of that world. This collection of papers by an international cast of authors investigates a variety of major aspects of Stalinism. Significant new questions - like the role of private enterprise and violence in state-making - as well as some of the more established questions - like the number of Soviet citizens who died in the Second World War, whether agricultural collectivisation was genocidal, nationality policy, the politics of executive power, and the Leningrad affair - are addressed here in innovative and stimulating ways. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

This is the first modern scholarly study of the political culture of Scotland during the 1790s. Harris compares the emergence of 'the people' as a political force in Scotland with popular political movements in England and Ireland. He is the first to analyse Scottish responses to the French Revolution across the political spectrum; explaining Loyalist as well as Radical opinions and organisations. He also takes regional difference into account, moving scholarly attention beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow. This book adds significantly to the growing wealth of studies into the popular politics of the 1790s. It also sets the context for current scholarly debates about Robert Burns' engagement with the French Revolution.

This book centers on a foundational moment for Latin American racial constructs. While most contemporary scholarship has focused the explanation for racial tolerance-or its lack-in the colonial period, Marixa Lasso argues that the key to understanding the origins of modern race relations are to be found later, in the Age of Revolution. Lasso rejects the common assumption that subalterns were passive and alienated from Creole-led patriot movements, and instead demonstrates that during Colombia's revolution, free blacks and mulattos (pardos) actively joined and occasionally even led the cause to overthrow the Spanish colonial government. As part of their platform, patriots declared legal racial equality for all citizens, and promulgated an ideology of harmony and fraternity for Colombians of all colors. The fact that blacks were mentioned as equals in the discourse of the revolution and later served in republican government posts was a radical political departure. These factors were instrumental in constructing a powerful myth of racial equality-a myth that would fuel revolutionary activity throughout Latin America. Thus emerged a historical paradox central to Latin American nation-building: the coexistence of the principle of racial equality with actual racism at the very inception of the republic. Ironically, the discourse of equality meant that grievances of racial discrimination were construed as unpatriotic and divisive acts-in its most extreme form, blacks were accused of preparing a race war. Lasso's work brings much-needed attention to the important role of the anticolonial struggles in shaping the nature of contemporary race relations and racial identities in Latin America.

'Powerful . A humbling and important first-hand account of a brutal civil war in which as many as 500,000 people have died' Guardian

'A memoir of resistance and survival unique in the annals of modern war . If the shedding of blood can be beautiful in words, he makes it so' Wall Street Journal

Born to Palestinian refugees, Kassem Eid grew up in the small town of Moadamiya on the outskirts of the ancient city of Damascus, playing in streets perfumed with jasmine. But it didn't take long for Kassem to realise that he was treated differently at school because of his family's resistance to the brutal government regime. When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000, hopes that things might change for the better were swiftly crushed. When the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Syria were met with extreme violence, it was yet another blow - and as Kassem reached young adulthood, the country spiralled into civil war.

Then, on 21 August 2013, Kassem nearly died in a sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians. Later that day, he would pick up a gun for the first time, to join the Free Syrian Army as they fought government forces. For Kassem, this marked the moment that he and his country changed forever - even as the rest of the world turned its face away.

The flow and counter flow of revolution and counterrevolution have become the norm of the twentieth century. In this fascinating and well-rounded volume, the author illuminates the revolutionary process as it has developed from antiquity to the present day, from the vantage points of political science, history, and sociology.

Meisel's work is presented in the form of twelve absorbing episodes in the history of Western civilization. His remarkable for the detail with which he approaches a subject often difficult to define and even more difficult to explain. He suggests a new and highly useful perspective of history by viewing it as a process of revolution and counterrevolution and their transitional stages. As it is the nature of revolutions to fall short of their objectives and to enjoy only a brief heyday that becomes the stereotype accepted by posterity, the author emphasizes their antithetical closing phases--whose lessons posterity tends to forget.

Meisel's belief is that second-echelon figures teach us more about the natural process of revolution than the atypical "men of destiny," and he illustrates his account with many portrayals of comparative unknowns who lived through all the stages of revolution and counterrevolution. But revolutions can also be aborted or be preceded by counterrevolutions, as Meisel demonstrates by enlightening analyses of Mussolini's "coup d'tat," the origins of the Spanish Civil War, and General de Gaulle's defeat of a potential army insurrection in behalf of French Algeria.

In this profound and wide-ranging work, Meisel achieves an admirable balance between theory, action, and biography. The result is a unique survey of revolutionary history, in which a sophisticated thinker provides on almost every page a deepening understanding of the problems of revolution for the scholar and student of political processes, political theory, and comparative politics. The reader with a lively interest in the "modus operandi" of history will also find this book compelling reading.

"James H. Meisel" who died in 1991 was professor emeritus of political science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of "The Genesis of Georges Sorel, The Myth of the Ruling Class, The Fall of the Republic: Military Revolt in France," and edited "Makers of Modern Social Science: Pareto and Mosca."

Under the banner of a Holy War, masterminded in Berlin and unleashed from Constantinople, the Germans and the Turks set out in 1914 to foment violent revolutionary uprisings against the British in India and the Russians in Central Asia. It was a new and more sinister version of the old Great Game, with world domination as its ultimate aim. Here, told in epic detail and for the first time, is the true story behind John Buchan's classic wartime thriller Greenmantle, recounted through the adventures and misadventures of the secret agents and others who took part in it. It is an ominously topical tale today in view of the continuing turmoil in this volatile region where the Great Game has never really ceased.