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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political activism > Revolutions & coups
Prior to the 1980s Honduras was an obscure backwater, of little
public or policy concern in the United States. With the advent of
the Reagan administration, however, Hondurans found themselves at
the center of the US-Central American imbroglio, a launching pad
for the administration's contra war against the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua and for counterinsurgency operations
against guerrillas in El Salvador. Placing events in the context of
Honduran history, the authors provide penetrating insights into the
causes of revolution in Central America and the sources of
stability that enabled Honduras to escape the civil strife that
consumed its neighbors. At the same time, the work offers a
fascinating account of Honduran domestic politics and of the
personalities, motives, and maneuvers of policymakers on both sides
of the U.S.-Honduras relationship-too often a tale of intrigue,
violence, and corruption.
Mary S. Barton explores counterterrorism in the years between World
War I and World War II, starting with the attempted assassination
of French Prime Minister George Clemenceau in 1919, and taking the
story up to and beyond the double assassination of King Alexander I
of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou in
1934. In telling the story of counterterrorism over this period,
Barton gives particular emphasis to Britain's attempts to quell
revolutionary nationalist movements in India and throughout its
empire, and to the Great Powers' combined efforts to counter the
activities of the Communist International. Further to this, Barton
discusses the establishment of the tools and infrastructure of
modern intelligence, including the cooperation between the United
Kingdom and United States which would evolve into the Five Eyes
intelligence alliance. She gives weight to forgotten terrorism and
arms traffic conventions, and explores the facilitating role which
the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations played in this
context. The stories told in Counterterrorism Between the Wars play
out across the world, from the remains of the Austro-Hungarian,
German, and Russian empires, to the Northwest Frontier and the
Bengal Province of British India. A century after the Paris Peace
Conference of 1919, Counterterrorism Between the Wars is the first
comprehensive study to fit together the mass production of weapons
during the Great War with the diplomacy of the interwar era and the
rise of state-sponsored terrorism during the 1920s and 1930s.
On Easter Monday, 1916, Irish rebels poured into Dublin's streets
to proclaim an independent republic. Ireland's long struggle for
self-government had suddenly become a radical and bloody fight for
independence from Great Britain. Irish nationalists mounted a
week-long insurrection, occupying public buildings and creating
mayhem before the British army regained control. The Easter Rising
provided the spark for the Irish revolution, a turning point in the
violent history of Irish independence. In this highly original
history, acclaimed scholar R. F. Foster explores the human
dimension of this pivotal event. He focuses on the ordinary men and
women, Yeats's "vivid faces," who rose "from counter or desk among
grey / Eighteenth-century houses" and took to the streets. A
generation made, not born, they rejected the inherited ways of the
Church, their bourgeois families, and British rule. They found
inspiration in the ideals of socialism and feminism, in new
approaches to love, art, and belief. Drawing on fresh sources,
including personal letters and diaries, Foster summons his
characters to life. We meet Rosamond Jacob, who escaped provincial
Waterford for bustling Dublin. On a jaunt through the city she
might visit a modern art gallery, buy cigarettes, or read a radical
feminist newspaper. She could practice the Irish language, attend a
lecture on Freud, or flirt with a man who would later be executed
for his radical activity. These became the roots of a rich life of
activism in Irish and women's causes. Vivid Faces shows how
Rosamond and her peers were galvanized to action by a vertiginous
sense of transformation: as one confided to his diary, "I am
changing and things around me change." Politics had fused with the
intimacies of love and belief, making the Rising an event not only
of the streets but also of the hearts and minds of a generation.
The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution brings together a
sweeping range of expert and innovative contributions to offer
engaging and thought-provoking insights into the history and
historiography of this epochal event. Each chapter presents the
foremost summations of academic thinking on key topics, along with
stimulating and provocative interpretations and suggestions for
future research directions. Placing core dimensions of the history
of the French Revolution in their transnational and global
contexts, the contributors demonstrate that revolutionary times
demand close analysis of sometimes tiny groups of key political
actors - whether the king and his ministers or the besieged leaders
of the Jacobin republic - and attention to the deeply local
politics of both rural and urban populations. Identities of class,
gender and ethnicity are interrogated, but so too are conceptions
and practices linked to citizenship, community, order, security,
and freedom: each in their way just as central to revolutionary
experiences, and equally amenable to critical analysis and
reflection. This volume covers the structural and political
contexts that build up to give new views on the classic question of
the 'origins of revolution'; the different dimensions of personal
and social experience that illuminate the political moment of 1789
itself; the goals and dilemmas of the period of constitutional
monarchy; the processes of destabilisation and ongoing conflict
that ended that experiment; the key issues surrounding the
emergence and experience of 'terror'; and the short- and long-term
legacies, for both good and ill, of the revolutionary trauma - for
France, and for global politics.
Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the "Long
1960s," this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime
students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It
explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek
student activists, illustrating how these "children of the
dictatorship" managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition
for their "progressive" purposes and how their transnational
exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how
the students' social and political practices became a major source
of pressure on the Colonels' regime, finding its apogee in the
three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the
foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the
following decades.
'A wonderful, inspiring story told with scholarship, passion and
wit' - Miriam Margolyes 'A must-read' - Independent on Sunday With
an introduction by Dr Helen Pankhurst. An illuminating and riveting
exploration of the women's movement in Britain, and the
extraordinary women behind it. From the passing of the Marriage and
Divorce Act in 1857 to all women attaining the vote in 1928, the
struggle for suffrage in the United Kingdom was to be fought using
the weapons of intellect, searing rhetoric, and violence in the
streets. Ordinary women rose up to defy the roles prescribed by
their society to become heroes in the battle for equality. Using
anecdotes and accounts by both famous and hitherto lesser-known
suffragettes and suffragists, March, Women, March explores how the
voices of women came to be heard throughout the land in the pursuit
of equal voting rights for all women. Lucinda Hawksley brings the
main protagonists of the women's movement to life, sharing diary
extracts and letters that show the true voices of these women,
while their portrayals in literature and art - as well as the media
reports of the day - show just how much of an impact these
trailblazers made. 'An accessible and engaging guide to the
original women's movement' - Daily Telegraph
A concise and accessible history of decolonization in the twentieth
century The end of colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean
was one of the most important and dramatic developments of the
twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, dozens of new
states emerged as actors in global politics. Long-established
imperial regimes collapsed, some more or less peacefully, others
amid mass violence. This book takes an incisive look at
decolonization and its long-term consequences, revealing it to be a
coherent yet multidimensional process at the heart of modern
history. Jan Jansen and Jurgen Osterhammel trace the decline of
European, American, and Japanese colonial supremacy from World War
I to the 1990s. Providing a comparative perspective on the
decolonization process, they shed light on its key aspects while
taking into account the unique regional and imperial contexts in
which it unfolded. Jansen and Osterhammel show how the seeds of
decolonization were sown during the interwar period and argue that
the geopolitical restructuring of the world was intrinsically
connected to a sea change in the global normative order. They
examine the economic repercussions of decolonization and its impact
on international power structures, its consequences for envisioning
world order, and the long shadow it continues to cast over new
states and former colonial powers alike. Concise and authoritative,
Decolonization is the essential introduction to this momentous
chapter in history, the aftershocks of which are still being felt
today.
To most Westerners, the Iranian revolution was a shocking
spectacle, a distant mass upheaval suddenly breaking into the daily
news. It was, in fact, a revolution of the television era, as this
book demonstrates. This account of the role of culture and
communication in the Iranian revolution also considers revolution
as communication in the modern world. Co-authored by participants
in the revolutionary upheaval, this study reflects a wide
perspective. Drawing on ten years of research, the authors vividly
show how the processes and products of modernization actually
helped to undermine the very foundation of modernity in Iran. Their
work reveals how deeply embedded cultural modes of communication
coupled with crucial media technologies were able to mobilize a
population within a repressive political context. Tracing the use
of small media (audio and video cassettes) to disseminate the
revolution, the authors challenge much of the theory that has
dominated international communication studies and, in doing so,
question the credibility of the established media. Their book also
examines the dilemmas of cultural policymaking based on Islamic
principles in a media-saturated domestic and international
environment. Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi are
co-editors of "Questioning the Media".
The first comprehensive account to record and analyze all deaths
arising from the Irish revolution between 1916 and 1921 "A
monumental new book [and] an incredible piece of research. . . .
Formidable, authoritative and handsomely produced, The Dead of the
Irish Revolution is a fitting memorial."-Andrew Lynch, Irish
Independent "Will surely serve as the indispensable reference work
on this topic for the foreseeable future. . . . A truly remarkable
feat of close scholarship and calm exposition."-Gearoid O
Tuathaigh, Irish Times Weekend This account covers the turbulent
period from the 1916 Rising to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December
1921-a period which saw the achievement of independence for most of
nationalist Ireland and the establishment of Northern Ireland as a
self-governing province of the United Kingdom. Separatists fought
for independence against government forces and, in North East
Ulster, armed loyalists. Civilians suffered violence from all
combatants, sometimes as collateral damage, often as targets. Eunan
O'Halpin and Daithi O Corrain catalogue and analyze the deaths of
all men, women, and children who died during the revolutionary
years-505 in 1916; 2,344 between 1917 and 1921. This study provides
a unique and comprehensive picture of everyone who died: in what
manner, by whose hands, and why. Through their stories we obtain
original insight into the Irish revolution itself.
The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 is a new history of Russia's
revolutionary era as a story of experience-of people making sense
of history as it unfolded in their own lives and as they took part
in making history themselves. The major events, trends, and
explanations, reaching from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final
shots of the civil war in 1921, are viewed through the doubled
perspective of the professional historian looking backward and the
contemporary journalist reporting and interpreting history as it
happened. The volume then turns toward particular places and
people: city streets, peasant villages, the margins of empire
(Central Asia, Ukraine, the Jewish Pale), women and men, workers
and intellectuals, artists and activists, utopian visionaries, and
discontents of all kinds. We spend time with the famous (Vladimir
Lenin, Lev Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac
Babel) and with those whose names we don't even know. Key themes
include difference and inequality (social, economic, gendered,
ethnic), power and resistance, violence, and ideas about justice
and freedom. Written especially for students and general readers,
this history relies extensively on contemporary texts and voices in
order to bring the past and its meanings to life. This is a history
about dramatic and uncertain times and especially about the
interpretations, values, emotions, desires, and disappointments
that made history matter to those who lived it.
On 17 May 1980, on the eve of Peru's presidential election, five
masked men stormed a small town in the Andean heartland. They set
election ballots ablaze and vanished into the night but not before
planting a red hammer-and-sickle banner in the town square. The
lone man arrested the next morning later swore allegiance to a
group called Shining Path. The tale of how this ferocious group of
guerrilla insurgents launched a decade-long reign of terror, and
how brave police investigators and journalists brought it to
justice, may be the most compelling chapter in modern Latin
American history but the full story has never been told. Described
by a U.S. State Department cable as "cold-blooded and bestial",
Shining Path orchestrated bombings, assassinations and massacres
across the cities, countryside and jungles of Peru in a murderous
campaign to seize power and impose a Communist government. At its
helm was the professor-turned-revolutionary Abimael Guzman, who
launched his single-minded insurrection alongside two women: his
charismatic young wife, Augusta La Torre and the formidable Elena
Iparraguirre, who married Guzman soon after Augusta's mysterious
death. Their fanatical devotion to an outmoded and dogmatic
ideology, and the military's bloody response, led to the death of
nearly 70,000 Peruvians. Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna's narrative
history of Shining Path is both panoramic and intimate, set against
the socioeconomic upheavals of Peru's rocky transition from
military dictatorship to elected democracy. They take readers deep
into the heart of the rebellion and the lives and country it nearly
destroyed. We hear the voices of the mountain villagers who
organised a fierce rural resistance and meet the irrepressible
black activist Maria Elena Moyano and the Nobel Prize-winning
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who each fought to end the bloodshed.
Deftly written, The Shining Path is an exquisitely detailed account
of a little-remembered war that must never be forgotten.
There is little doubt that the '45 rebellion was the greatest
challenge to the eighteenth-century British state. The battle of
Culloden in which it culminated was certainly one of the most
dramatic of the century. This study, based on extensive archival
research, examines the political and military context of the
uprising and highlights the seriousness of the challenge posed by
the Jacobites. The result is an illuminating account of an episode
often obscured by the perspectives of Stuart romance.
The story of the fate of a single family during the Irish
Revolution, Four Killings is a remarkable book written by a
celebrated Irish broadcaster. It is a book about political murder,
and the powerful hunger for land and the savagery it can unleash.
Dungan's family was involved in four violent deaths between 1915
and 1922. One man, Jack Clinton, an immigrant small farmer from Co.
Meath, was murdered in the remote and lawless Arizona territory by
a powerful rancher's hired gun; three more died in Ireland, and
each death is compellingly reconstructed in this extraordinary
book. What unites them is the violence that engulfed Ireland during
the campaign against the British, but also the theme of deep anger
over the ownership of land. That often brutal struggle between
landless labourers and smallholders and more prosperous farmers is
a forgotten aspect of the war of independence. It was in many ways
a continuation of the unfinished 19th-century Land War. Mark
Clinton was murdered by a group of agrarian 'bandits' who resented
his family's possession of some disputed land; his killer was tried
and executed by the dead man's relatives and comrades in the Meath
IRA. And another man, a mentally challenged youth, was shot as an
informer by another relative of Dungan's and buried in secrecy and
silence. Myles Dungan's book, focused on one family, offers an
original take on this still controversial period: a prism through
which the moral and personal costs of violence, and the elemental
conflict over land, come alive in surprising ways. This is a highly
readable narrative history, combining original scholarship and a
strong grasp of the larger issues at stake.
This special issue is a key text in the current study of social
movements. It introduces new analytical concepts for understanding
visuals in social movements and examines case studies from across
the globe; such as analysis of the symbols used in the Egyptian
uprising, and contested images from anti-surveillance protests in
Europe.
A political portrait focused on Guevara's thought and political
record aimed at dispelling many of the myths about the
revolutionary. This re-examination of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's
thoughts on socialism, democracy and revolution is a must-read for
today's activists - or anyone longing to fight for a better world.
Fifty years after his death, Guevara remains a symbol to legions of
young rebels and revolutionaries. This unique book provides a way
to critically engage with Guevara's economic views, his ideas about
revolutionary agency and more.
'The unexpected comic masterpiece of the year' Daily Mail In 1967,
retired army major and self-made millionaire Paddy Roy Bates
inaugurated himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand on a World
War II Maunsell Sea Fort near Felixstowe - and began the peculiar
story of the world's most stubborn micronation. Having fought off
attacks from UK government officials and armed mercenaries for half
a century - and thwarted an attempted coup that saw the Prince
Regent taken hostage - the self-proclaimed independent nation still
stands. It has its own constitution, national flag and anthem,
currency, and passports - and offers the esteemed titles of 'Lord'
or 'Lady' to its loyal patrons. Incorporating original interviews
with surviving members of the principality's royal family, and many
rare, vintage photographs, Dylan Taylor-Lehman recounts the
outrageous attempt to build a sovereign kingdom by a family of
rogue, larger-than-life adventurers on an isolated platform in the
freezing waters of the North Sea.
Ali Shariati (1933-77) has been called by many the 'ideologue of
the Iranian Revolution'. An inspiration to many of the
revolutionary generation, Shariati's combination of Islamic
political thought and Left-leaning ideology continues to influence
both in Iran and across the wider Muslim world. In this book,
Siavash Saffari examines Shariati's long-standing legacy, and how
new readings of his works by contemporary 'neo-Shariatis' have
contributed to a deconstruction of the false binaries of
Islam/modernity, Islam/West, and East/West. Saffari argues that
through their critique of Eurocentric metanarratives on the one
hand, and the essentialist conceptions of Islam on the other,
Shariati and neo-Shariatis have carved out a new space in Islamic
thought beyond the traps of Orientalism and Occidentalism. This
unique perspective will hold great appeal to researchers of the
politics and intellectual thought of post-revolutionary Iran and
the greater Middle East.
This thorough narrative examines Emiliano Zapata's life, his role
in Mexico's revolutionary movement, and his true motivations and
beliefs. Emiliano Zapata is regarded as among the most important
figures of the Mexican Revolution. This book provides more than
just a biography of a great leader; it enables readers to
understand who Zapata was and the interests and ideologies he
supported, emphasizing his ideals and distinguishing him from those
who have used his name for their own purposes. Emiliano Zapata: A
Biography is organized chronologically, detailing Zapata's youth
and early adulthood in the years preceding the Mexican Revolution;
his role in getting his home state involved in the Revolution; and
his ascent to power in Morelos' revolutionary movement. The author
elucidates Zapata's continual struggle to bring meaningful change
to the lives of Mexico's poorest people, how his commitment to
revolutionary reform came to define his existence, and how his
ideals led to his own violent death as they had to the deaths of so
many of his adversaries. A fascinating read for high school
students as well as general readers, this biography tells an
unforgettable story of one of Mexico's heroic figures. A timeline
of important events in Zapata's life prefaces the narrative
Photographs depicting Zapata over the course of his turbulent
public career provide glimpses of a legend A complete bibliography
provides students with a guide for further research An appendix
contains a hard-to-find Mexican ballad about Zapata's funeral with
an original English prose translation
A spellbinding new biography of Stalin in his formative years This
is the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin from his birth to the
October Revolution of 1917, a panoramic and often chilling account
of how an impoverished, idealistic youth from the provinces of
tsarist Russia was transformed into a cunning and fearsome outlaw
who would one day become one of the twentieth century's most
ruthless dictators. In this monumental book, Ronald Grigor Suny
sheds light on the least understood years of Stalin's career,
bringing to life the turbulent world in which he lived and the
extraordinary historical events that shaped him. Suny draws on a
wealth of new archival evidence from Stalin's early years in the
Caucasus to chart the psychological metamorphosis of the young
Stalin, taking readers from his boyhood as a Georgian nationalist
and romantic poet, through his harsh years of schooling, to his
commitment to violent engagement in the underground movement to
topple the tsarist autocracy. Stalin emerges as an ambitious
climber within the Bolshevik ranks, a resourceful leader of a small
terrorist band, and a writer and thinker who was deeply engaged
with some of the most incendiary debates of his time. A landmark
achievement, Stalin paints an unforgettable portrait of a driven
young man who abandoned his religious faith to become a skilled
political operative and a single-minded and ruthless rebel.
'Fascinating... One of the most astute political commentators on
Putin and modern Russia' Financial Times 'An amazing achievement'
Peter Frankopan Can anyone truly understand Russia? Russia is a
country with no natural borders, no single ethos, no true central
identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it is everyone's
'other'. And yet it is one of the most powerful nations on earth, a
master game-player on the global stage with a rich history of war
and peace, poets and revolutionaries. In this essential
whistle-stop tour of the world's most complex nation, Mark Galeotti
takes us behind the myths to the heart of the Russian story: from
the formation of a nation to its early legends - including Ivan the
Terrible and Catherine the Great - to the rise and fall of the
Romanovs, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, Chernobyl and the
end of the Soviet Union - plus the rise of a politician named
Vladimir Putin, and the events leading to the Ukrainian war.
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