Three Scottish weavers, James Wilson, Andrew Hardie and John Baird, were hanged and beheaded for high treason in the summer of 1820. Nineteen more men were transported to the penal colony of Botany Bay. Their crime? To have taken up arms against a corrupt and nepotistic parliament, and the aristocratic government that refused to reform it. This 'Radical War' was the culmination of five years of unsuccessful mass petitioning of Westminster by working people in Scotland and England. The contempt and intransigence of the Tory government forced an escalation in tactics, and on Easter Monday of 1820, the call for a general strike was answered throughout the western counties of Scotland. Their demands were threefold: the vote for all men, annual parliaments and equal constituencies. Coupled with an armed rebellion, the strike was met by the full military might of the British state; hundreds were arrested and imprisoned without trial, while hundreds more fled the country. This Scottish general strike and insurrection is a little-known chapter of British history and yet remains an immensely important one in the long fight for democracy. In The Fight for Scottish Democracy, Murray Armstrong brings these events dramatically to life.

The French Revolution brought momentous political, social, and cultural change. Life in Revolutionary France asks how these changes affected everyday lives, in urban and rural areas, and on an international scale. An international cast of distinguished academics and emerging scholars present new research on how people experienced and survived the revolutionary decade, with a particular focus on individual and collective agency as discovered through the archival record, material culture, and the history of emotions. It combines innovative work with student-friendly essays to offer fresh perspectives on topics such as: * Political identities and activism * Gender, race, and sexuality * Transatlantic responses to war and revolution * Local and workplace surveillance and transparency * Prison communities and culture * Food, health, and radical medicine * Revolutionary childhoods With an easy-to-navigate, three-part structure, illustrations and primary source excerpts, Life in Revolutionary France is the essential text for approaching the experiences of those who lived through one of the most turbulent times in world history.

This book discusses global dynamics behind the synchronous outburst of protests in China and Germany in 1989 and the local acts of dissent on the squares comparatively. It breaks with the national timelines protests in 1989 have so far been identified with and offers insights into the spatial manifestation of the global moment of 1989. Concluding on the importance of the "SpaceTime" on the seized squares in 1989, it also discusses more recent protests forming on city squares. Offering a global perspective on a phenomenon that itself became global in the last decades, the book provides a view on globalization processes operating from below that puts the occupied space on city squares at the heart of interest.

While much of the work in this field focuses on individual psychology or radical ideology, Bosi, O Dochartaigh, Pisoiu and others take a fresh, innovative look at the importance of context in generating mobilisation and shaping patterns of violence. The cases dealt with range widely across space and time, from Asia, Africa and Europe to the Americas, and from the Irish rebellion of 1916 through the Marxist insurgency of Sendero Luminoso to the `Invisible Commando' of Cote d'Ivoire. They encompass a wide range of types of violence, from separatist guerrillas through Marxist insurgents and Islamist militants to nationalist insurrectionists and the distinctive forms of urban violence that have emerged at the boundary between crime and politics. Chapters offer new theoretical perspectives on the decisive importance of the spatial and temporal contexts, and supportive milieux, in which parties to conflict are embedded, and from which they draw strength.

Fidel Castro's triumphant march into Havana on January 8, 1959 signaled the end to Cuba's old order and the beginning of a new era. This one-stop guide to the Cuban revolution analyzes Castro's drive to oust Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The reader will gain an understanding of the revolt and its causes and consequences. Two additional chapters examine Castro's efforts to pursue an independent foreign policy and an analysis of the ever-changing characteristics of the Cuban-American community and its relationship to the homeland. A variety of selected documents supplement the main points of each chapter.

Ready-reference features include: a chronology of events in the history of Cuba and the Cuban revolution; lengthy biographical profiles of 23 major figures in the history of Cuba and the revolution that provide the reader with insights into the political thinking and contributions each made to the Cuban historical experience; and the text of 15 key primary documents on the topics, including statements by Fidel Castro, President John F. Kennedy, and President Bill Clinton. A glossary of frequently cited terms, an annotated bibliography, and photos make this work ideally suited for student research.

Until very recently Germany has frequently been characterized as the 'country without revolution', and the catastrophies of its recent history have been attributed to the lack of successful modernizing impulses. This series of essays by leading German scholars explores the effects of revolutions upon German history from 1789 to 1989 - the date of Germany's 'peaceful revolution' - and discusses the fundamental questions of reform and revolution, the effects of war, counter-revolution and defeat on the social process of modernization. The book not only examines the revolutions of 1789, 1848, 1918 and 1989, but equally focuses on the great reform periods, the 'revolutions from above'. It analyzes the significance of World War I for revolutionizing German society, the nature of the 'national-socialist revolution', and the effects of the 1945 defeat on new beginnings in a divided Germany. It offers, on the basis of up-to-date research, stimulating debates about fundamental problems of German history.
The authors count among the leading German scholars of their generation, including Peter Brandt, Rüdiger Hachtmann, Jürgen Kocka, Wolfgang Kruse, Hans Mommsen, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Heinrich-August Winkler.

This volume of Burke's writings and speeches is divided into two parts. The first covers the period between the time of his retirement from the House of Commons in 1794 and his death in 1797. His main preoccupation during this period was, of course, the French Revolution and the progress of the war against France. Surveying developments with dismay and apprehension, he produced a critique of the Revolution which expressed much of his mature thinking on political and social life, and issued a clarion call for a European crusade to save civilization. Part II contains Burke's writings and speeches relating to Ireland. From his entry into political life, he was intensely interested in Irish problems, religious, economic, and constitutional, and in Anglo-Irish relations. Fervently believing that Great Britain and Ireland should be partners within the Empire, in his last years he was deeply disturbed by the influence of the French Revolution on Irish politics.

This book provides a paradigm of the coup and provides a historical basis for that paradigm that is unsurpassed in its objectivity and research. The author of this book has spent over a decade living and working with military and political figures throughout Latin America. His book is both an educational and an exciting peek into the dark world of military subversion by an observer who has seen it first hand.

The coup d'etat has defied all attempts at rational analysis. This is hardly surprising, in that it is born in darkness and very frequently dies there, only coming to light in the last moments before either a bloody defeat or a stunning success. The participants on the military side are frequently reluctant to discuss their activities, even long after the fact, and their civilian victims can usually only guess at what happened to them. Previous studies have often been heavily tainted by the politics of the writer, categorizing the coup as a product of class struggle, the cold war, or outright foreign intervention by the superpowers.

The author of this book has spent over a decade living and working closely with military and political figures throughout Latin America and has used the fruits of literally hundreds of encounters (ranging from simple interviews to longtime friendships) to piece together an insightful picture of this nebulous but very real phenomenon. He has identified the motives of coup plotters and the means by which they go about building the coalition necessary to overthrow a government. Rather than use hypothetical cases to illustrate his points, he has drawn on history to demonstrate how coups succeed and why they fail. This book is both an educational and an exciting peek into the dark world of military subversion by an observer who has seen it first hand.

The constituent power of the people is one of the fundamental ideas of modern politics. It was first articulated during the early modern revolutions when the idea was deployed to legitimize the revolution and to develop constitutions. This study sketches the historical background and the articulation of the idea of constituent power of the people, using the threefold meaning of the idea initially suggested by Carl Schmitt: constituent power being power above the existing constitutional order, power within that order, and power beside the constitutional order. These conceptions are not only discussed in the historical context they were articulated in but also placed within the framework of contemporary political and constitutional thought. In doing so, this book explores the various emphasizes that different theorists place on the role of constituent power in democracies to provide a comprehensive understanding of how this cornerstone of political thought has evolved since it was first posited in the 18th Century.

Deeply influenced by Enlightenment writers from Naples and France, Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823) was forced into exile for his involvement in the failed Neapolitan revolution of 1799. Living in Milan, he wrote what became one of the nineteenth century's most important treatises on political revolution. In his Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, Cuoco synthesized the work of Machiavelli, Vico, and Enlightenment philosophers to offer an explanation for why and how revolutions succeed or fail. A major influence on political thought during the unification of Italy, the Historical Essay was also an inspiration to twentieth-century thinkers such as Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. This critical edition, featuring an authoritative translation, introduction, and annotations, finally makes Cuoco's work fully accessible to an English-speaking audience.

With the Iranian revolution as her focal point, Seliktar offers a systematic analysis of predictive failure in foreign policy at the paradigmatic, policy, and intelligence levels. Seliktar first examines how social science paradigms determine conceptualizations of political change, and then applies that analysis to understanding New Internationalism, the Carter administration's foreign policy philosophy at the time of the Shah's fall from power. Based in part on classified documents seized during the takeover of the American embassy, Failing the Crystal Ball Test is a valuable addition to Middle Eastern studies, international relations, and comparative politics collections. Seliktar engages in a general discussion of the problems entailed in correctly assessing the political legitimacy of foreign regimes, and describes the origins of New Internationalism as influenced by the New Left dependency theories. Examining President Carter's application of New Internationalism to Iran, Seliktar presents an account first of political influences on the predictive process during the early stages of revolution, and then of the administration's misreading of the likelihood of a fundamentalist regime in Teheran.

During the momentous events that shook Italy in 1860 as the nation was unified, there was a murderous riot in the Sicilian town of Bronte on the slopes of Mount Etna. Thereafter, Bronte became a symbol - of the limits of the liberal Risorgimento and of the persistence of foreign domination: descendants of Admiral Horatio Nelson had the largest landholding in the town and the British were said to have put pressure on Garibaldi to crush the uprising, which his lieutenant did with brutality. Lucy Riall has used the discovery of a new archive to transform brilliantly this episode into an ambitious exploration of much larger themes. Relaying an often brutal tale of poverty, injustice, and mismanagement, her powerful and engaging narrative also opens windows onto the true meaning of the British presence. Bronte's story becomes one that is also about Britain's policy towards Italy and Europe in the nineteenth century, and about colonial rule overseas in the age of Empire. It shows what happened when these two different aspects of British power bumped into each other in one Sicilian town.

This 7-volume set of previously out-of-print titles examines both the war for liberation in Vietnam and its political and economic aftermath. The economic reforms that began to transform Vietnam from a planned economy to a partially market one are focused on in particular, as are the early days of revolutionary conflict.

The Puritan Revolution escaped the control of its creators. The parliamentarians who went to war with Charles I in 1642 did not want or expect the fundamental changes that would follow seven years later: the trial and execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the creation of the only republic in English history. There were startling and unexpected developments, too, in religion and ideas: the spread of unorthodox doctrines; the attainment of a wide measure of liberty of conscience; new thinking about the moral and intellectual bases of politics and society. God's Instruments centres on the principal instrument of radical change, Oliver Cromwell, and on the unfamiliar landscape of the decade he dominated, from the abolition of the monarchy in 1649 to the return of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. Its theme is the relationship between the beliefs or convictions of politicians and their decisions and actions. Blair Worden explores the biblical dimension of Puritan politics; the ways that a belief in the workings of divine providence affected political conduct; Cromwell's commitment to liberty of conscience and his search for godly reformation through educational reform; the constitutional premises of his rule and those of his opponents in the struggle for supremacy between parliamentary and military rule; the relationship between conceptions of civil and religious liberty. The conflicts Worden reconstructs are placed in the perspective of long-term developments, of which historians have lost sight, in ideas about parliament and about freedom. The final chapters turn to the guiding convictions of two writers at the heart of politics, John Milton and the royalist Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon. Material from previously published essays, much of it expanded and extensively revised, comes together with freshly written chapters.

This book presents ten selections from the most important scholarship on the French Revolution over the past quarter century, introduced and contextualized for student readers.
Historians typically categorize the historiography of the French Revolution according to each author's approval or disapproval of the Revolution, political agenda (for example Marxist, liberal, conservative, or feminist), or methodology (for example social, political, or cultural history). This book demonstrates the inadequacy of these categories of analysis for a nuanced understanding of the Revolution and emphasizes the surprising connections between historians typically seen simply as opponents in a debate. In its thorough introduction, The French Revolution: The Essential Readings demonstrates the success of an eclectic, interdisciplinary approach to this central period in modern European history and the larger relevance of the historiography to the humanities more generally.

As the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years War approaches, Geoff Mortimer provides a timely re-assessment of its origins. These lie mainly neither in religious tensions in Germany nor in the conflicts between Spain, France and the Dutch, but in the revolt in Bohemia and the famous defenestration of Prague.

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 interest of Russian intellectuals in the French Revolution demonstrates that some Russian thinkers of the 19th century had begun to question the concept of Russia's uniqueness. Yet most of them came to believe that the French Revolution (which they tended to equate with the Western experience) was irrelevant not only to Russia but to the rest of the world as well. They saw, perhaps correctly, that the Western experience, with the French Revolution as its symbol, was foreign to Russian destiny. Most of the Russian intellectuals of that time had rightly foreseen Russia, and to some degree the rest of the world's future, as following an authoritarian/totalitarian model of development.

In Michael Romanov: Brother of the Last Tsar, translator Helen Azar and Romanov historian Nicholas B. A. Nicholson present for the first time in English the annotated 1916-1918 diaries and letters of Russia's Grand Duke Michael, from the murder of the Siberian mystic Grigorii Rasputin through the Revolution of 1917, which dethroned the Romanov dynasty after Michael briefly found himself named Emperor when his brother Nicholas II abdicated. Michael's diaries provide rare insight into the fall of the Empire, the rise and fall of the Provisional Government and brief Russian republic, and the terrifying days of the February and October Revolutions after which Michael found himself a prisoner who would meet his end in the Siberian city of Perm. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia (1878-1918) was born the youngest son of Tsar Alexander III, but with the death of his brother Grand Duke George in 1899, Michael was thrust into the spotlight and the role of "Heir-Tsesarevich" to Emperor Nicholas II, then the father of three girls. Even after the birth of an heir in 1904, Michael found himself pushed closer to the throne with each of the boy's bouts of hemophilia. By 1916 during World War I, Nicholas and Alexandra found themselves deeply unpopular not only in political circles but also with other members of the House of Romanov, who felt that the parlous times required drastic change. Michael found himself at the center of these events. Azar's translation is uniquely faithful to the original text and gives readers the feeling of the immediacy and haste in Michael's original observations of these tumultuous times. Nicholson's annotations provide biographical and historical background, while quoting dozens of other rare primary sources.

This book takes a comprehensive look at the PLO, examining its origins, legal status, goals, and strategies. Jamal R. Nassar investigates the PLO's role in regional and international politics and unveils the dynamics of the power relationships responsible for the organization's successes and failures. The book discerns patterns and trends in the PLO's activities and studies the conditions under which these patterns and trends develop. Nassar places the PLO in a global perspective, delving into the basis of the organization's legitimacy and its prospects for participation in the peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The book's organization and comprehensive coverage--beginning with a thorough historical background of the Palestinian experience--make it an excellent study for the student of Middle Eastern politics.

Nassar probes the rise of the PLO to its present position as a major actor in the Middle East--one that is no less significant than a number of sovereign states. He shows that the PLO is a complex power that cannot hope to achieve its objectives independently of other regional powers but can prevent these powers from resolving the Arab-Israeli dispute. The book outlines the many peace initiatives that have been foiled by the PLO and reveals how Israel's refusal to talk to the PLO will likely thwart the achievement of peace. Students and scholars of Middle East and Palestinian politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorism, political ideologies, revolutionary movements, transnational politics, and contemporary history will find Jamal Nassar's book on the PLO an invaluable resource.

This book sheds light on the growing phenomenon of cyberactivism in the Arab world, with a special focus on the Egyptian political blogosphere and its role in paving the way to democratization and socio-political change in Egypt, which culminated in Egypt's historical popular revolution on Jan. 25, 2011. In doing so, it examines the relevance and applicability of the concepts of citizen journalism and civic engagement to the discourses and deliberations in five of the most popular political blogs in Egypt, through exploring the potential connection between virtual activism, as represented in the postings on these blogs, and real activism in Egyptian political life, as represented in the calls for social, economic and political reform on the streets.