Up until the end of World War II, academe in central Europe showed little interest in American culture. However, this rapidly changed as American culture became an increasingly inescapable part of everyday life in the postwar period. Drawing on a series of transatlantic encounters in the years following 1945, George Blaustein chronicles how issues like race, gender, and empire, as they relate to the United States, became areas of intense interest among members of the European academy. A major part of Blaustein's book revolves around the exchange of ideas that took place at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, founded in 1947. Through the period of occupation, the seminar hosted a who's-who of American and European intellectual life: figures like F. O. Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, and John Hope Franklin. In four concise chapters, Nightmare Envy and Other Stories explores how the ruin of postwar Europe led writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to understand America in new ways. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories will interest scholars in the fields of American Studies, postwar intellectual history, and cultural diplomacy.

"This is the most unusual history of Africa... it compares three religious systems: Christianity, Islam and indigenous African religions, in their influence on the history of the continent. Mavimbela seeks to demonstrate that all these religions are deeply rooted in the customs, practices and beliefs of the respective societies and that none are superior in their ability to explain the natural phenomena encountered by their adherents... this book is an extended expose of how a conquering power used either Christianity or Islam to establish subjugation over African people... The author hopes that by revisiting the painful detail of that history and it's implications, African people might still locate the bearings that might lead them back to their self-worth." - Prof Ben Turok

Established as the Pine Ridge Agency in southwestern South Dakota between Nebraska and the Black Hills in 1878, Pine Ridge became a reservation in 1889. The second-largest reservation in the country, comprised of almost 2 million acres, it is home to 38,000 residents, almost 18,000 of whom are enrolled members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. The history of the Pine Ridge Reservation is laden with both an awe-inspiring cultural heritage and the tragic effects of forced settlement on the reservation.

Forgiveness Redefined is Candice Mama’s honest and healing story. It tells how she found ways to deal with the death of her father, Glenack Masilo Mama, and to forgive the notorious apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock, the man responsible for his brutal murder. We follow Candice’s journey of discovering how her father died, how this affected her and how she battled the demons of depression before the age of sixteen. But most importantly, we follow her journey towards beating the odds and rising above her heartbreaks.

Candice Mama is today still under the age of 30, but has been named as one of Vogue Paris’ most inspiring women alongside glittering names such as Michelle Obama. She has taken backstage selfies with music crooner Seal and travels all over the world to talk about her journey. This bubbly, inspiring young author tells how she shed some of the worst layers of grief and became an inspiration for others. We learn about her perplexing, unconventional childhood, her search for identity, and the beautiful bond she formed, posthumously, with a father she never had the opportunity to get to know in person. She also tells, in her own words, about the life-changing encounter between her family and her father’s killer.

Candice tenderly opens up about the result of the trauma of her father’s death on her entire family, and meeting her mother for the first time at the age of four. She tells about the confusing, yet fascinating, dynamics that later unfolded as she discovered pieces of herself, rediscovered relationships with her own family and came to forgiveness and understanding.

This book serves as inspiration for other young – and older – people to look at their own stories through different lenses. Candice’s experiences are not unique, and she offers healing thoughts to others who suffered similar trauma by sharing the details of her own story. Forgiveness Redefined is a touching, personal story by a young woman who learned too early about pain, loss and rejection – but who also learned how to overcome those burdens and live joyfully.

At eight, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion's legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In his early twenties, he shared a Manhattan apartment with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor selling popcorn at Radio City Music Hall. A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese.

In the midst of it all, Griffin's twenty-two-year-old sister, Dominique, a rising star in Hollywood, was brutally strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, leading to one of the most infamous public trials of the 1980s. The outcome was a travesty of justice that marked the beginning of their father Dominick Dunne's career as a bestselling author of true crime narratives.

And yet, for all its boldface cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes, The Friday Afternoon Club is no mere celebrity memoir. It is, down to its bones, a family story that embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny and moving characters - its author most of all.

The Game Ranger, The Knife, The Lion And The Sheep offers spell-binding stories of some amazing, little known characters from South Africa, past and very past. Let us introduce you to some of the characters you’ll meet inside.

Starting with Krotoa, the Khoi maiden who is found working in the Van Riebeeck household as both servant and interpreter. In time she becomes the concubine of Danish surgeon Pieter Merhoff and later his wife. But did she jump (allured by the European glitz and good food) or was she pushed (abducted or sold to the Van Riebeeck’s by her uncle Atshumatso, otherwise Herry)? Was she raped or a willing sexual parter of Meerhoff? Women, like fresh meat and vegetables, were in short supply in those early colonial years in the Cape.

Then there is Mevrou Maria Mouton who preferred to socialise with the slaves than her husband on their farm in the Swartland, and with whom she conspired to murder him. What became of them is … best those gory details are glossed over for now.

And the giant Trekboer Coenraad de Buys, rebel, renegade, a man with a price on his head who married many women (none of them white) and fathered a small nation. The explorer Lichtenstein called him a modern-day Hercules. Then there are the men of learning and insight, such as Raymond Dart and Adrian Boshier, who opened up the world of myths and ancient artefacts so we now better understand the ancients and the world they created for us to inherit. Or James Kitching who broke open rocks in the Karoo to reveal creatures that inhabited this region long before even Africa was born.

And so, without further ado, we give you our selection of stories about remarkable characters from the veld. These stories will excite, entertain and enthral you! You will finish reading them wishing you had more!

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

With nicknames such as Mob Town and Syphilis City no one would deny that Baltimore has its dark side. Before shows such as The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets brought the city's crime rate to national attention, locals entertained themselves with rumors surrounding the mysterious death of writer Edgar Allan Poe and stories Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent time in a Baltimore area sanitarium in the 1930s. Tourists make the Inner Harbor one of the most traveled areas in the country, but if they would venture a few streets north to The Block on Baltimore Street they would see an area once famous for its burlesque shows. It is only the locals who would know to continue north on St. Paul to the Owl Bar, a former speakeasy that still proudly displays some of its Prohibition era paraphernalia.

Wicked Baltimore: The Seedy Side of Charm City, details the salacious history of Baltimore and its denizens from the city's earliest history up to through Pro

The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah are an indigenous people on Martha's Vineyard. From their legendary giant leader Moshup, Wampanoags can trace their ancestry back more than ten thousand years. The tribe weathered colonization by missionaries in the 1600s, then endured two centuries of domination, only to have their land taken in 1870. However, over the past 140 years, the Wampanoag Tribe, which still lives in its ancestral home of Aquinnah, has shown endurance and fortitude as it continues to practice traditional crafts and its tribal heritage. Thomas Dresser captures the spirit of the tribe, tracing its survival through to recognition by the federal government in 1987, nearly twenty-five years ago. Brief interviews with elders and current tribal members offer insight into the tribe's remarkable history.

The decades since the 1980s have witnessed an unprecedented surge in research about Latin American history. This much-needed volume brings together original essays by renowned scholars to provide the first comprehensive assessment of this burgeoning literature.
The seventeen original essays in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History survey the recent historiography of the colonial era, independence movements, and postcolonial periods and span Mexico, Spanish South America, and Brazil. They begin by questioning the limitations and meaning of Latin America as a conceptual organization of space within the Americas and how the region became excluded from broader studies of the Western hemisphere. Subsequent essays address indigenous peoples of the region, rural and urban history, slavery and race, African, European and Asian immigration, labor, gender and sexuality, religion, family and childhood, economics, politics, and disease and medicine. In so doing, they bring together traditional approaches to politics and power, while examining the quotidian concerns of workers, women and children, peasants, and racial and ethnic minorities.
This volume provides the most complete state of the field and is an indispensible resource for scholars and students of Latin America.

The Case for a Second Republic: South Africa’s Second Chance is a timely intervention that navigates South Africa’s transition as a republic over the past 30 years on the one hand, and the conundrum of the government of national unity on the other.

This book is not just politically thought-provoking, but erudite, educational and informative. It performs an urgent analytical sweep of 30 years of South Africa’s democracy, charting the long historical path that laid the foundations for the country’s geographical space from which its sovereignty derives. As an historian, Maloka takes the reader through an illuminating tour de force, spanning early South African history, the formation of the 1910 Union of South Africa and the democratic era.

In this book, Maloka differentiates the idea of a ‘Second Republic‘ from the so-called ‘Second Transition’ advanced by some ANC and Alliance partners around 2012. He also posits the idea of the ‘re-foundation of the state’. Maloka rejects the ongoing hysteria about South Africa becoming a ‘failed state’. Maloka calls for the crafting of a new governance paradigm based on three pillars: a self-reliant mind-set; a technocratic state (not political braskap); and substantive people’s power through street committees and direct election of public representatives.

Maloka strongly advocates for discussions around the possibility of the Second Republic, so as to find better mechanisms to address these issues that are a stubborn legacy of a long history of the country.

Systemic racism and sexism caused one of South Africa’s most important writers to disappear from public consciousness. Is it possible to justly restore her historical presence?

Regina Gelana Twala, a Black South African woman who died in 1968 in Swaziland (now Eswatini), was an extraordinarily prolific writer of books, columns, articles, and letters. Yet today Twala’s name is largely unknown. Her literary achievements are forgotten. Her books are unpublished. Her letters languish in the dusty study of a deceased South African academic. Her articles are buried in discontinued publications. Joel Cabrita argues that Twala’s posthumous obscurity has not developed accidentally as she exposes the ways prejudices around race and gender blocked Black African women like Twala from establishing themselves as successful writers.

Drawing upon Twala’s family papers, interviews, newspapers, and archival records from Pretoria, Uppsala, and Los Angeles, Cabrita argues that an entire cast of characters—censorious editors, territorial White academics, apartheid officials, and male African politicians whose politics were at odds with her own—conspired to erase Twala’s legacy. Through her unique documentary output, Twala marked herself as a radical voice on issues of gender, race, and class. The literary gatekeepers of the racist and sexist society of twentieth-century southern Africa clamped down by literally writing her out of the region’s history.

Written Out also scrutinizes the troubled racial politics of African history as a discipline that has been historically dominated by White academics, a situation that many people within the field are now examining critically. Inspired by this recent movement, Cabrita interrogates what it means for her —a White historian based in the Northern Hemisphere—to tell the story of a Black African woman. Far from a laudable “recovery” of an important lost figure, Cabrita acknowledges that her biography inevitably reproduces old dynamics of White scholarly privilege and dominance. Cabrita’s narration of Twala’s career resurrects it but also reminds us that Twala, tragically, is still not the author of her own life story.

At once disturbing and perversely comforting, the crime novel has historically been used to curtail social anxieties through the ‘open and shut case’ of its narrative form. But what happens to that form in a world where guilt and innocence cannot be so easily assigned?

Return to the Scene of the Crime takes on the trope of the investigator who returns to the postcolony on a quest for knowledge. In tandem with solving the case, they must also grapple with the complexities of their own origins. Kamil Naicker shows how five authors defy generic expectation in order to illustrate the complexity of personal identity, transitional justice and civil violence in the postcolonial world.

Bringing together novels set in South Africa, China, Guatemala, Sri Lanka and Somalia, this book makes a marked intervention in the field of literary studies, by both bringing to light the trend of the returnee figure and exploring the possibilities of world-making through the explosion of a familiar form.

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the gender rules encountered in Europe in the period between approximately 500 and 1500 C.E. The essays collected in this volume speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women's and gender history - that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on Western Europe in the Middle Ages but offers some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium, opening these fields for further research. The Handbook is structured into seven sections: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labour, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change throughout the medieval period. This Handbook contains material from some of the foremost scholars in this field, and will not only serve as the major reference text in the area of medieval and gender studies, but will also provide the agenda for future new research.

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 2019
'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming' GUARDIAN

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers.

What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888.

Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.

Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.

WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS FOR HISTORY 2019

The United Africa Company (UAC), formed in 1929 by the fusion of the Niger Company and the African and Eastern Corporation, was by far the largest single commercial organization in West and Equatorial Africa, and thus central to modern African economic history. This is the first detailed account to be published and one which fills a serious gap in the literature. It was not commissioned by the company (now reabsorbed into Unilever) but the author had full access to all confidential material in the UAC and Unilever archives and complete freedom in what he wrote. The book is not intended to be primarily a company history but uses the UAC as a focal point for detailed study of how the role of foreign merchant capital changed in response to economic and political developments in Black Africa during this critical half century.

Iranian history has long been a source of fascination for European and American observers. The country's ancient past preoccupied nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists as they attempted to construct a unified understanding of the ancient world. Iran's medieval history has likewise preoccupied scholars who have long recognized the Iranian plateau as a cultural crossroad of the world's great civilizations. In more recent times, Iran has continued to demand the attention of observers when, for example, the revolution of 1978-79 dramatically burst onto the world stage, or more recently, when the Iranian democracy movement has come to once again challenge the status quo of the clerical regime. Iran's dominance in the Middle East has brought it into conflict with the United States and so it is the subject of almost daily coverage from reporters. Sympathetic observers of Iran-students, scholars, policy makers, journalists, and the educated public-tend to be perplexed and confused by this tangled web of historical development. Iran, as it appears to most observers, is a foreboding, menacing, and far away land with a history that is simply too difficult to fathom.
The Handbook is a guide to Iran's complex history. The book emphasizes the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while also describing the important patterns of transformation that have characterized Iran's past. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific epoch of Iranian history and surveys the general political, social, cultural, and economic issues of that era. The ancient period begins with chapters considering the anthropological evidence of the prehistoric era, through to the early settled civilizations of the Iranian plateau, and continuing to the rise of the ancient Persian empires. The medieval section first considers the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century, and then moves on to discuss the growing Turkish influence filtering in from Central Asia beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The last third of the book covers Iran in the modern era by considering the rise of the Safavid state and its accompanying policy of centralization and the introduction of Shi'ism, followed by essays on the problems of reform and modernization in the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, and finally with a chapter on the revolution of 1978-79 and its aftermath.
The book is a collaborative exercise among scholars specializing in a variety of sub-fields, and across a number of disciplines, including history, art history, classics, literature, politics, and linguistics. Here, readers can find a reliable and accessible narrative that can serve as an introduction to the field of Iranian studies. While the number of monographs published within specialized subfields of Iranian history continues to proliferate, there have been, to date, no books that attempt to produce a comprehensive single-volume history of Iranian civilization.

This book is the never-before-told story of the dream to set up camp in a vast African wasteland and return it to its former glory as one of the world’s premier wildlands.

Outdoor writer Mike Arnold takes us on an impressionistic journey through Coutada 11, a once again magnificent natural area in Mozambique’s Zambeze Delta. Mike leads us from its poached-out days as a source of bush meat for starving villagers and civil war military troops to the arrival in the early ‘90s of hunting outfitter Mark Haldane and his partners, on their often perilous, sometimes hilarious, travails to take the defiled and uninhabitable place and make it whole again.

Through Mike’s encounters with Haldane and his crew of scientists, guides, and motor-cycle-riding poacher patrols; with local villagers who were an integral part from the beginning; and, of course, with the apex predators, birds, and game animals that 30 years ago no one could have imagined thriving in this locale, this book serves as proof that a small group of dedicated people can make all the difference, and dreams can come true.

In January 2003, the Berest family receive a mysterious, unsigned postcard. On one side was an image of the Opéra Garnier; on the other, the names of their relatives who were killed in Auschwitz: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques.

Years later, Anne sought to find the truth behind this postcard. She journeys 100 years into the past, tracing the lives of her ancestors from their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris, the war and its aftermath. What emerges is a thrilling and sweeping tale based on true events that shatters her certainties about her family, her country, and herself.

At once a gripping investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and an enthralling portrait of 20th-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, The Postcard tells the story of a family devastated by the Holocaust and yet somehow restored by love and the power of storytelling.

New edition of the late Stephen Ellis' meticulously researched book that penetrates the secrecy of the ANC in exile for the first time.

After the ANC was banned by the apartheid government in 1960, many of its leaders and members were forced to leave the country. During the next three decades, it had to operate in exile and underground. Yet the real history of this period remains shrouded in mystery.

Some events, such as the Rhodesian campaign of 1967–1968 and the Kabwe conference of 1985, are well known, but lesser known are the intense factional struggles within the organisation, recurring pro-democracy protests and the creation of a security apparatus that inspired widespread fear. Some networks within the exiled ANC became heavily involved in corruption, even colluding with elements of the apartheid security police and secret services.

External Mission aims to provide a full account of the ANC’s years in exile, penetrating the secrecy the organisation erected around itself and testing the myths that emerged from that period. It is based on an exceptionally wide range of sources, including the ANC’s own archives and foreign archives such as those in East Germany, where the movement’s security personnel were trained.

Incisive and revealing, External Mission is key to understanding South Africa today.

Killing Crazy Horse is the latest installment of the multimillion-selling Killing series is a gripping journey through the American West and the historic clashes between Native Americans and settlers. The bloody Battle of Tippecanoe was only the beginning. It's 1811 and President James Madison has ordered the destruction of Shawnee warrior chief Tecumseh's alliance of tribes in the Great Lakes region. But while General William Henry Harrison would win this fight, the armed conflict between Native Americans and the newly formed United States would rage on for decades. Bestselling authors Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard venture through the fraught history of our country's founding on already occupied lands, from General Andrew Jackson's brutal battles with the Creek Nation to President James Monroe's epic "sea to shining sea" policy, to President Martin Van Buren's cruel enforcement of a "treaty" that forced the Cherokee Nation out of their homelands along what would be called the Trail of Tears. O'Reilly and Dugard take readers behind the legends to reveal never-before-told historical moments in the fascinating creation story of America. This fast-paced, wild ride through the American frontier will shock readers and impart unexpected lessons that reverberate to this day.

This is a story of human survival over the last one million years in the Namib Desert – one of the most hostile environments on Earth.

The resilience and ingenuity of desert communities provides a vivid picture of our species’ response to climate change, and ancient strategies to counter ever-present risk. Dusty fragments of stone, pottery and bone tell a history of perpetual transition, of shifting and temporary states of balance.

Namib digs beneath the usual evidence of archaeology to uncover a world of arcane rituals, of travelling rain-makers, and of intricate social networks which maintained vital systems of negotiated access to scarce resources. It covers a million years of human history in the Namib Desert, including the Earlier, Middle and Later Stone Ages, colonial occupation and genocide, to the invasion of the desert by South African troops during World War I.

This is more than a work of scientific research; it is a love-song to the desert and its people.