Though scores of texts, films and stories have been told about the American Revolution from the perspectives of our Founding Fathers and their followers, comparatively little is known about those colonists who resisted the revolutionary movement, and tried desperately to preserve their nation s ties to the British Empire. Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America shows us that America s original colonies were not nearly as united behind the concept of forming free, independent states as our society s collective memory would have us believe. There were, in fact, numerous colonists, slaves, and Native Americans who counted themselves among the Loyalists: those who never wanted to sever ties with the English crown and who viewed revolution as an unnatural and unlawful mistake. Too often overlooked, these men and women made valid and valuable arguments against the formation of the United States both weighing the costs of revolution and the perilousness of existing without divine rule of a monarch arguments that even hundreds of years into America s existence are echoed and championed both within and beyond our borders. Colonists from commoners to clergymen had nuanced and complex reasons for wanting to remain under British control, and an awareness of these reasons and their origins paints a more historically accurate portrait of the American populous around the time of our country s founding. This volume not only showcases Dr. Chopra s comprehensive analysis of Loyalism and its arguments, but includes letters, legislation and even poems written by Loyalists during and after the Revolutionary War. Choosing Sides lays a detailed foundation of facts for its readers and provides them entry points to the debate surrounding the genesis of the United States. It is both a primary source and a touchstone for original interpretations and discussions."

This book offers an illuminating story of how social and political change can sometimes result from the vision, leadership, and commitment of a few dedicated individuals determined not to fail. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Movement chronicles the drive for a union of one of American society's most exploited groups. It is a story of courage and determination, set against the backdrop of the 1960s, a time of assassinations, war protests, civil rights battles, and reform efforts for poor and minority citizens. American farm workers were men and women on labor's last rung, living in desperate and inhumane conditions, poisoned by pesticides, and making a pittance for back-breaking work. The book shows how these migrant workers found a champion in Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union. With the help of quotes from documentary material only recently made available, it tells the story of the boycotts, marches, and strikes-including hunger strikes-used to force concessions for better conditions and pay. It also shows how the farm workers movement helped set the stage for growing Latino cultural awareness and political power. Interviews, speeches, congressional testimony, diary entries, and firsthand recollections from the early 1960s to the present Profiles of men and women who played important leadership roles in the farm workers movement

The Assembly of Notables which met between 22 February and 25 May 1787 was a major turning point in French, even world history: it was the first link in an unbroken chain which led to the French Revolution, which itself formed the template for the modern world.
The reform programme which finance minister Calonne, with the full backing of Louis XVI, presented to a hand-picked Assembly of Notables would have transformed France. She would have ended up with a Napoleonic system: equality without liberty. Since that is what she got in the end, after wading through oceans of blood, it might have been better if she had taken the shorter route. Liberty, however, in 1787 was valued more highly than equality and the Notables mercilessly exploited this preference to defeat Calonne and the king. By 1789, equality was back on the agenda and remained there through the vicissitudes of the coming years - but too late for Calonne (who was in exile) or for the king, who never recovered from the blow the Notables had dealt him.
In the light of modern scholarship and the latest archival information, John Hardman integrates the various facets of this seminal assembly, which are often considered in isolation (the king, the royal council, the Notables, the role of Necker, and that of public opinion) into a lucid analytical narrative, interspersed with the Notables' critique of Calonne's measures as they were successively presented to them.

The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution introduces scholars, students and generally interested readers to the formative event in American history. In thirty-three individual essays, by thirty-three authorities on the Revolution, the Handbook provides readers with in-depth analysis of the Revolution's many sides, ranging from the military and diplomatic to the social and political; from the economic and financial, to the cultural and legal. Its cast of characters ranges far, including ordinary farmers and artisans, men and women, free and enslaved African Americans, Indians, and British and American statesmen and military leaders. Its geographic scope is equally broad. The Handbook offers readers an American Revolution whose geo-political and military impact ranged from the West Indies to the Mississippi Valley; from the British Isles to New England and from Nova Scotia to Florida. The American Revolution of the Handbook is, simply put, an event that far transcended the boundaries of what was to become the United States. In addition to a breadth of subject matter, the Handbook offers a broad range of interpretive and methodological approaches. Its authors include social historians, historians of politics and institutions, cultural historians, historians of diplomacy, imperial historians, ethnohistorians, and historians of gender and sexuality. Instead of privileging a single or even several interpretive perspectives, the Handbook attempts to capture the full scope of current revolutionary-era scholarship. Nothing comparable has been published in decades.

"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.

This unique work analyzes the crisis in modern society, building on the ideas of the Frankfurt School thinkers. Emphasizing social evolution and learning processes, it argues that crisis is mediated by social class conflicts and collective learning, the results of which are embodied in constitutional and public law. First, the work outlines a new categorical framework of critical theory in which it is conceived as a theory of crisis. It shows that the Marxist focus on economy and on class struggle is too narrow to deal with the range of social conflicts within modern society, and posits that a crisis of legitimization is at the core of all crises. It then discusses the dialectic of revolutionary and evolutionary developmental processes of modern society and its legal system. This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society by a leading scholar in the field provides a new approach to critical theory that will appeal to anyone studying political sociology, political theory, and law.

Cross-dressing author, envoy, soldier and spy Charles d'Eon de Beaumont's unusual career fascinated his contemporaries and continues to attract historians, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, image makers, cultural theorists and those concerned with manifestations of the extraordinary. D'Eon's significance as a historical figure was already being debated more than 45 years before his death.

Not surprisingly, such sensational material has attracted the attention of enthusiasts, scholars and literateurs to 'the strange case of the chevalier d'Eon'. He has also attracted the attention of psychologists and sexologists, and for most of the last century his gender transformation has been viewed through a Freudian lens. His cross-dressing, it was usually assumed, must have a psychosexual explanation. Until the second half of the twentieth century the terms 'Eonist' and 'Eonism' were the standard English words for transvestites and transvestism respectively, but 'Eonism' was also, thanks to Havelock Ellis, widely regarded as a psychological condition or compulsion. However, in the mid-twentieth century, new ideas about gender-identity disorders led to d'Eon being redefined not as a transvestite, but a transsexual - a person who considers their sex to have been 'misassigned'.

The essays in this collection contribute to d'Eon's rehabilitation as a figure worthy of scholarly attention and display a variety of disciplinary approaches. Drawing on new research into d'Eon's life, this volume offers original and nuanced readings of how a gender identity could come to be negotiated over time.

With the summer of 2012 marking half a century of independence for Algeria, the Algerian War has been brought into discussions in France once more, where parallels between the past and present are revealed. This analysis takes an in-depth look at the war from 1954 to 1962 and the response from the French left. Drawing from documents and interviews, it offers a full account of not only the role of the revolutionary left in giving political and practical solidarity to the Algerian liberation struggle, but also that of the Trotskyists during that period. Including a section on how the war has been reflected in fiction, this volume is sure to interest academics across various fields.

The American Revolution gave birth to a new world republic and a philosophy based on freedom, liberty, and equality. The philosophical concepts articulated by the revolutionary leaders have become a model of positive change for people around the world. This concise reference guide includes an overview essay that traces the course of the Revolution and five essays on various aspects of the conflict. Also included are biographical sketches of 19 important historical figures and a selection of primary documents with introductions by the author. A timeline and annotated bibliography compliment the text, making this the perfect starting point for student and general-reader research, and a fresh survey of the events that brought about the birth of the American republic. The essays in this book focus on the events and conditions that led the American colonies to revolt, the war itself, life on the home front, revolutionary diplomacy, and a concluding, interpretive essay on the lasting impact of the American Revolution. The biographical sketches include a wide array of important actors on the stage, including Abigail Adams, John Adams, George III, George Washington, Mercy Otis Warren, among others. Primary documents include excerpts from Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Proclamation of Lord Dunmore offering Freedom to Slaves Belonging to the Rebels in Virginia" of 1775, The Articles of Federation, and the Treaty of Paris, among others. Every generation needs to reinterpret its history to reflect its own needs and ideals. This book offers a new look at this pivotal time in world history.

A spasm of extreme radicalism that rocked China to its foundations in the mid- to late 1960s, the Cultural Revolution has generated a vast literature. Much of it, however, is at a birds-eye level, and we have very few detailed accounts of how it worked on the ground. Long after the event, Tan Hecheng, now a retired Chinese writer and editor, was sent to Daoxian, Mao's home county, to report on the official investigation into the massacre that took place there during the Cultural Revolution. In The Killing Wind, Tan recounts how over the course of 66 days in 1967, over 9,000 Chinese "class enemies" were massacred in the Daoxian, in the Hunan Province. The killings were unprovoked and carried out with incredible, stomach-churning brutality, which is documented here in excruciating detail. But although this could easily be just a compendium of horrors, it's also a meditation on memory, moral culpability, and the failure of the Chinese government to come to terms with the crimes of the Maoist era. Tan interweaves the story of his research with the recollections of survivors and reflections on the long-term consequences of the Cultural Revolution. Akin to Jan Gross's Neighbors, about the Holocaust in a Polish town, The Killing Wind likewise paints a single episode in extraordinary detail in order to make a broader argument about the long term consequences flowing from one of the twentieth century's greatest human tragedies.

This history of the Ku Klux Klan traces the evolution of the organization from its 1865 founding to the present, drawing extensively on contemporaneous media reports. The Ku Klux Klan tells the story of America's oldest and largest homegrown terrorist organization. It is a revealing look at the philosophies and methods of a secret society that used religious symbols, secret codes, and the cloak of anonymity to bind its members together in the cause of violent racial warfare. The Ku Klux Klan encompasses the organization's entire history, from its post-Civil War founding by Nathan Bedford Forrest, to its high watermark in the early 20th century, with membership swelling to four million and its founders portrayed as heroes in the film, Birth of a Nation to its resurgence in the Civil Rights era, to more recent attempts by David Duke and others to put a benign face on the Klan in order to gain elective office.

In sixteenth-century England Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, enjoyed great domestic and international renown as a favourite of Elizabeth I. He was a soldier and a statesman of exceptionally powerful ambition. After his disastrous uprising in 1601 Essex fell from the heights of fame and favour, and ended his life as a traitor on the scaffold. This interdisciplinary account of the political culture of late Elizabethan England explores the ideological contexts of Essex's extraordinary career and fall from grace, and the intricate relationship between thought and action in Elizabethan England. By the late sixteenth century, fundamental political models and vocabularies that were employed to legitimise the Elizabethan polity were undermined by the strains of war, the ambivalence that many felt towards the church, continued uncertainty over the succession, and the perceived weaknesses of the rule of the aging Elizabeth. Essex's career and revolt threw all of these strains into relief. Alexandra Gajda examines the attitude of the earl and his followers to war, religion, the structures of the Elizabethan polity, and Essex's role within it. She also explores the classical and historical scholarship prized by Essex and his associates that gave shape and meaning to the earl's increasingly fractured relationship with the Queen and regime. She addresses contemporary responses to the earl, both positive and negative, and the earl's wider impact on political culture. Political and religious ideas in late sixteenth-century England had an important impact on political events in early modern England, and played a vital role in shaping the rise and fall of Essex's career.

The diaries of Dr Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi offer a unique insight to the peculiarities of colonialism that have shaped Palestinian history. Elected mayor of Jerusalem - his city of birth - in 1935, the physician played a leading role in the Palestinian Rebellion of the next year, with profound consequences for the future of Palestinian resistance and British colonial rule. One of many Palestinian leaders deported as a result of the uprising, it was in British-imposed exile in the Seychelles Islands that al-Khalidi began his diaries. Written with equal attention to lively personal encounters and ongoing political upheavals, entries in the diaries cover his sudden arrest and deportation by the colonial authorities, the fifteen months of exile on the tropical island, and his subsequent return to political activity in London then Beirut. The diaries provide a historical and personal lens into Palestinian political life in the late 1930s, a period critical to understanding the catastrophic 1948 exodus and dispossession of the Palestinian people. With an introduction by Rashid Khalidi the publication of these diaries offers a wealth of primary material and a perspective on the struggle against colonialism that will be of great value to anyone interested in the Palestinian predicament, past and present.

A century on, scholars can achieve a certain balance in views of what Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin's government meant for Russia and for the world. In Roberto Echeverran synthesizes all that we know about Lenin and his government by taking data from new and original sources. With auxiliary chapters on the evolution of land tenancy in Russia, the collectivization of land under Stalin, and the suppression of sexual minorities under Soviet rule, this book adds breadth and scope to our understanding of Lenin's government and legacy.

At the start of the 1960s, revolution challenged the established world order. In every corner of the underdeveloped world, discontent with the status quo fueled attempts to revoke colonialism and the strangleholds on power maintained by entrenched local oligarchies. This book examines the causes of revolution in the sixties and the various responses crafted to stop it, in particular, the Alliance for Progress, a program which represented the best products of American developmental and counterinsurgency theory. Equally important, however, is an examination of the independent policies implemented by Latin Americans themselves, often in direct opposition to those pursued by the U.S. For the United States the period represented a challenge to both its sovereignty and its leadership in the so-called "Free World." Perhaps more importantly, the disruptions blanketing the globe also pointed out the dramatic weaknesses of an American policy dominated by preparations for thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. For Latin America, revolution challenged national stability and, in the cases of the regimes it was directed against, their very survival.

This book is the first extensive research on the role of poetry during the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). How can poetry, especially peaceful medieval Sufi poems, be applied to exalt violence, to present death as martyrdom, and to process war traumas? Examining poetry by both Islamic revolutionary and established dissident poets, it demonstrates how poetry spurs people to action, even leading them to sacrifice their lives. The book's originality lies in fresh analyses of how themes such as martyrdom and violence, and mystical themes such as love and wine, are integrated in a vehemently political context, while showing how Shiite ritual such as the pilgrimage to Mecca clash with Saudi Wahhabi appreciations. A distinguishing quality of the book is its examination of how martyrdom was instilled in the minds of Iranians through poetry, employing Sufi themes, motifs and doctrines to justify death. Such inculcation proved effective in mobilising people to the front, ready to sacrifice their lives. As such, the book is a must for readers interested in Iranian culture and history, in Sufi poetry, in martyrdom and war poetry. Those involved with Middle Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies, Literary Studies, Political Philosophy and Religious Studies will benefit from this book. "From his own memories and expert research, the author gives us a ravishing account of 'a poetry stained with blood, violence and death'. His brilliantly layered analysis of modern Persian poetry shows how it integrates political and religious ideology and motivational propaganda with age-old mystical themes for the most traumatic of times for Iran." (Alan Williams, Research Professor of Iranian Studies, University of Manchester) "When Asghar Seyed Gohrab, a highly prolific academician, publishes a new book, you can be certain he has paid attention to an exciting and largely unexplored subject. Martyrdom, Mysticism and Dissent: The Poetry of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) is no exception in the sense that he combines a few different cultural, religious, mystic, and political aspects of Iranian life to present a vivid picture and thorough analysis of the development and effect of what became known as the revolutionary poetry of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This time, he has even enriched his narrative by inserting his voice into his analysis. It is a thoughtful book and a fantastic read." (Professor Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona)