This new study of Napoleon emphasizes his ties to the French Revolution, his embodiment of its militancy, and his rescue of its legacies. Jordan's work illuminates all aspects of his fabulous career, his views of the Revolution and history, the artists who created and embellished his image, and much of his talk about himself and his achievements.

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.

A bold new study of politics and power in 17th-century France, this book argues that the French Crown centralized its power nationally by changing the way it delegated its royal patronage in the provinces. During this period, the royal government of Paris gradually extended its sphere of control by taking power away from the powerful and potentially disloyal provincial governors and nobility and instead putting it in the hands of provincial power brokers--regional notables who cooperated with the Paris ministers in exchange for their patronage. The new alliances between the Crown's ministers and loyal provincial elites functioned as political machines on behalf of the Crown, leading to smoother regional-national cooperation and foreshadowing the bureaucratic state that was to follow.

This book combines social and institutional histories of Russia, focusing on the secret police and their evolving relationship with the peasantry. Based on an analysis of Cheka/OGPU reports, it argues that the police did not initially respond to peasant resistance to Bolshevik demands simply with the gun--rather, they listened to peasant voices.

In 1968, a ragtag group of Palestinian guerrillas burst onto the world stage as part of a global offensive that combined controversial armed operations, diplomacy, and revolutionary politics. In the following years, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) forced the question of Palestine to the forefront of the world's attention and cement its status as the sole legitimate representative of a nation of people striving for statehood. While their spectacular acts of revolutionary violence - hijackings, guerrilla attacks, suicide operations - seized headlines and made the PLO the face of "international terrorism" in the 1970s, it would be the organization's diplomatic campaign that would propel it to prominence in the global arena. By the middle years of the decade, the PLO would stand beside Vietnamese, Cuban, Algerian, and South African guerrilla fighters at the vanguard of a new generation of revolutionaries in the Third World. More than just a subplot in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian struggle sat the juncture of a critical phase in the Cold War and the wave of revolutions that swept through the Third World in the 1960s. Using Arabic sources and recently declassified U.S. documents, The Global Offensive returns the PLO's story to its international context. As the PLO gained both prestige and infamy, leaders in both the United States and the Soviet Union hastened to come to terms with this new force in Middle Eastern affairs. Fearing the PLO's potential to revolutionize the Arab world and project armed violence across a global spectrum, American leaders faced the choice of establishing diplomatic relations with the organization or crafting a containment policy for a new generation of Arab revolutionaries. Their decisions-along with those of Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli leaders-would have dramatic implications into the twenty-first century and help to remake the art of revolution and the structure of global power in the late-Cold War world and beyond. However, despite its sweeping victories in the international system, the Palestinian liberation struggle would not gain statehood in the twentieth century.

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A Companion to the American Revolution" is a single guide to the themes, events, and concepts of this major turning point in early American history. Containing coverage before, during, and after the war, as well as the effect of the revolution on a global scale, this major reference to the period is ideal for any student, scholar, or general reader seeking a complete reference to the field.
Contains 90 articles in all, including guides to further reading and a detailed chronological table.
Explains all aspects of the revolution before, during, and after the war.
Discusses the status and experiences of women, Native Americans, and African Americans, and aspects of social and daily life during this period.
Describes the effects of the revolution abroad.
Provides complete coverage of military history, including the home front.
Concludes with a section on concepts to put the morality of early America in today's context.

In this study of the anti-colonial riots which erupted in Hong Kong in May 1967, the authors shed new light on their causes, their impact on future government policy and on Sino-British relations, and their legacy for Hong Kong society and governance, and the people of the territory.

In this work, Henry Vyverberg traces the evolution and consequences of a crucial idea in French Enlightenment thought--the idea of human nature. Human nature was commonly seen as a broadly universal, unchanging entity, though perhaps modifiable by geographical, social, and historical factors. Enlightenment empiricism suggested a degree of cultural diversity that has often been underestimated in studies of the age. Evidence here is drawn from Diderot's celebrated Encyclopedia and from a vast range of writing by such Enlightenment notables as Voltaire, Rousseau, and d'Holbach. Vyverberg explains not only the age's undoubted fascination with uniformity in human nature, but also its acknowledgment of significant limitations on that uniformity. He shows that although the Enlightenment's historical sense was often blinkered by its notions of a uniform human nature, there were also cracks in this concept that developed during the Enlightenment itself.

This book provides the first fully comprehensive bibliography of English-language literature on what was, arguably, the most important historical event of the 20th century. It brings together for the first time the multitude of monographs, articles, and dissertations on various aspects of the Russian Revolution that have been published from 1905 to mid-1994. While the bibliography conceives the Revolution as the period of transition from tsarist Russia to Soviet Russia, a process that occured between 1905 and 1921, it seeks not only to list works central to that process, but to list all works relevant to that period of Russian history.

The bibliography contains 24 thematic sections covering all subjects from politics and society, to education and the arts. Thus there are categories devoted not only to the tsarist establishment and the Red Army, but to science and technology during the revolutionary years. Most of the thematic sections have subsections which seek to divide the history of the Russian Revolution into its component parts in a manner that will be familiar to specialists and accessible to students. There are indexes of authors and subjects, as well as a detailed list of contents, all designed to facilitate quick and easy use of the bibliography.

The Contra War and the Iran-Contra affair that shook the Reagan presidency were center stage on the U.S. political scene for nearly a decade. According to most observers, the main Contra army, or the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN), was a mercenary force hired by the CIA to oppose the Sandinista socialist revolution.

The Real Contra War demonstrates that in reality the vast majority of the FDN's combatants were peasants who had the full support of a mass popular movement consisting of the tough, independent inhabitants of Nicaragua's central highlands. The movement was merely the most recent instance of this peasantry's one-thousand-year history of resistance to those they saw as would-be conquerors.

The real Contra War struck root in 1979, even before the Sandinistas took power and, during the next two years, grew swiftly as a reaction both to revolutionary expropriations of small farms and to the physical abuse of all who resisted. Only in 1982 did an offer of American arms persuade these highlanders to forge an alliance with former Guardia anti-Sandinista exiles--those the outside world called Contras.

Relying on original documents, interviews with veterans, and other primary sources, Brown contradicts conventional wisdom about the Contras, debunking most of what has been written about the movement's leaders, origins, aims, and foreign support.

On 7 March 2004, former SAS soldier and mercenary Simon Mann prepared to take off from Harare International Airport with a plane full of heavy weaponry and guns for hire. Their destination: Equatorial Guinea. Their intention: to remove one of the most brutal dictators in Africa in a privately organised coup d’etat. The plot had the tacit approval of Western intelligence agencies. It had the backing of a European government, and the endorsement of a former Prime Minister. Simon Mann had personally planned, overseen and won two wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. Everything should have gone right. Why, then, did it go so wrong?

When Simon Mann was released from five years’ incarceration in some of Africa’s toughest prisons, he made worldwide headlines. Since then, he has spoken to nobody about his experiences.

Now he is telling everything, including:

• The full involvement of Mark Thatcher in the coup d’etat.
• How a former Prime Minister personally endorsed the coup during face to face meetings with Simon Mann.
• The financial involvement of two controversial and internationally famous members of the House of Lords in the plot, backed up by banking records.
• How the British government approached Simon in the months preceding the Iraq war, to suggest ways in which a justified invasion of Iraq could be engineered.
• Simon will also tell of his pain when he had to tell his wife Amanda, who gave birth to their fourth child while he was incarcerated, that he believed he would never be freed.

This is an account of the occupiers extortio n, confiscation, and resulting hardships, as well as the act ions of those who resisted, is a timely reminder of the dram a being played out in Afghanistan today. '

Examines the 1980 Solidarity revolution in Poland, the government's subsequent establishment of martial law in response, in 1981, and the eventual transition to democracy in 1989. The 1980 general strike in Poland and the establishment of the independent Solidarity movement, which sought to create a state based on civic freedom, were symptoms of a crisis of the communist system. On December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski on behalf of the ruling Communist Party imposed martial law, effectively quashing Solidarity. Jaruzelski won the battle, but Solidarity continued its revolution in secret and Poland remained politically destabilized. Elections held in June 1989 ended with the defeat of the Communists and the establishment in September of a coalition government in which half of the parliamentary seats went to Solidarity, whose representative was also appointed prime minister. The revolution inaugurated in 1980 by the dockworkers of Gdansk had come to fruition. Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980-1989: Solidarity, Martial Law, and the End of Communism inEurope recounts and analyzes the events of this formative decade in Polish history, with particular emphasis on the martial law period. Drawing on extensive archival research, Andrzej Paczkowski examines the origin and form of the Solidarity revolution, the course of the Communist counterrevolution, and the final victory won by Solidarity along with its international repercussions. Andrzej Paczkowski is professor of political studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. Christina Manetti, PhD, is a translator and independent researcher of Polish history.

Nationalism is a key topic within Balkan Studies, and one of the driving forces behind the bloody and difficult history of the region. Using primary sources not previously utilized by western scholars, this book documents the 'Croatian Spring' - a national and liberal movement that began in the mid-sixties after the fall of the vice president and head of the Yugoslav secret police Aleksandar Rankovic. The author chronicles these developments of democratisation and de-centralisation of communist Yugoslavia, placing them in the wider context of the Cold War and Yugoslav relations with the Soviet Union and the UnitedStates. Tito managed to balance national stability and his relations with East and West, until he felt that the national-liberal movements challenged his authority, and thus threaten the very foundations of the Yugoslav state. From late 1971 onwards, the liberal political and cultural classes of Croatia and other republics were abruptly purged, impoverishing Yugoslav leadership for subsequent decades.Batovic also considers the role of the West, who felt a centralised and stable Yugoslavia was in their interests and quickly accommodated themselves to the repression of the reformist movement.

While Mexico's spiritual history after the 1910 Revolution is often essentialized as a church-state power struggle, this book reveals the complexity of interactions between revolution and religion. Looking at anticlericalism, indigenous cults and Catholic pilgrimage, these authors reveal that the Revolution was a period of genuine religious change, as well as social upheaval.

Using a variety of old and new archival sources to examine the emergence of the Soviet system (1917-1937), this combined approach offers chronologically coherent and original construction of some crucial stages and problems in Soviet history. The past two centuries have produced an extraordinary number of new states--more than 30 in 20th-century Europe alone. It is within this turbulent context that one must analyze the rise of the Soviet state, an entity that would prove fragile in the long run despite its all-powerful facade. An examination of the extreme features and peculiarities of the Soviet variant offers revealing insights into this exceptional historical process and contributes to a wider understanding of the European Forty Year War (1912-1953).

Graziosi devotes particular attention to Soviet solutions to the peasant and nationality problems, as well as to the pre-eminent role of ideology, the rise of personal despotism, and the unusual degree of penetration between state and economy. Using a variety of interpretations, he applies concepts from political, economic, and social history to the Soviet phenomenon without losing sight of its connections with more general European developments. The life of a Bolshevik leader is used to provide an overview of the whole period from six points of view: psychology, ideology, despotism, nationality, relations with the West, and economic building. Also, an analysis of industrialization based on the accounts of foreign workers who often met a tragic fate in the great purges contributes significantly to an assessment of the role that myth building played in the Stalinist repression of the Soviet working class.

"A Tale of Two Cities" has always been one of Dickens's most popular texts. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this new collection of essays examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

In this perceptive book, cultural and political theorist Jason M. Adams moves beyond increasingly inadequate accounts of speed and acceleration to reflect upon the temporality of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In doing so, he develops the concept of immediacy - the 'speed-limit' that, today more than ever, is reformatting thought, control, and resistance alike. In the process, Adams mobilizes the work of Paul Virilio, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt and Gilles Deleuze to rethink the ancient Greek concept of kairos for the contemporary moment.