In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. The decade featured perilous confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union over Berlin and Cuba, the massive buildup of nuclear stockpiles, the escalation of war in Vietnam, and bitter East-West rivalry throughout the developing world. Only in recent years have scholars begun to realize that there is another history of international affairs in the 1960s. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face today - inequality, terrorism, demographic instability, energy dependence, epidemic disease, massive increases in trade and monetary flows, to name just a few examples - asserted themselves powerfully during the decade. The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson confronted tectonic shifts in the international environment and perhaps even the beginning of the post-Cold War world. While the ideologically infused struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union was indisputably crucial, new forces and new actors altered international relations in profound and lasting ways. This book asks how the Johnson administration responded to this changing landscape. To what extent did U.S. leaders understand the changes that we can now see clearly with the benefit of hindsight? How did they prioritize these issues alongside the geostrategic concerns that dominated their daily agendas and the headlines of the day? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda of problems? This book reconsiders the 1960s and suggests a new research agenda predicated on the idea that the Cold War was not the only - or perhaps even the most important - feature of international life in the period after World War II.

The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which "Manifest Destiny" and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and culminating in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Pinheiro begins with social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and political sentiment into one universally understood argument about the future of the United States. When the overwhelmingly Protestant United States went to war with Catholic Mexico, this "Beecherite Synthesis" provided Americans with the most important means of defining their own identity, understanding Mexicans, and interpreting the larger meaning of the war. Anti-Catholic rhetoric constituted an integral piece of nearly every major argument for or against the war and was so universally accepted that recruiters, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, evangelical activists, abolitionists, and pacifists used it. It was also, Pinheiro shows, the primary tool used by American soldiers to interpret Mexico's culture. All this activity in turn reshaped the anti-Catholic movement. Preachers could now use caricatures of Mexicans to illustrate Roman Catholic depravity and nativists could point to Mexico as a warning about what America would be like if dominated by Catholics. Missionaries of Republicanism provides a critical new perspective on ''Manifest Destiny,'' American republicanism, anti-Catholicism, and Mexican-American relations in the nineteenth century.

Over the last decade, the theatre and opera of the French Revolution have been the subject of intense scholarly reassessment, both in terms of the relationship between theatrical works and politics or ideology in this period and on the question of longer-scale structures of continuity or rupture in aesthetics. Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 moves these discussions boldly forward, focusing on the Paris Opera (Academie Royale de Musique) in the cultural and political context of the early French Revolution. Both institutional history and cultural study, this is the first ever full-scale study of the Revolution and lyric theatre. The book concentrates on three aspects of how a royally-protected theatre negotiates the transition to national theatre: the external dimension, such as questions of ownership and governance and the institution's relationship with State institutions and popular assemblies; the internal management, finances, selection and preparation of works; and the cultural and aesthetic study of the works themselves and of their reception.
In Staging the French Revolution, author Mark Darlow offers an unprecedented view of the material context of opera production, combining in-depth archival research with a study of the works themselves. He argues that a mixture of popular and State interventions created a repressive system in which cultural institutions retained agency, compelling individuals to follow and contribute to a shifting culture. Theatre thereby emerged as a locus for competing discourses on patriotism, society, the role of the arts in the Republic, and the articulation of the Revolution's relation with the 'Old Regime', and is thus an essential key to the understanding of public opinion and publicity at this crucial historical moment. Combining recent approaches to institutions, sociability, and authors' rights with cultural studies of opera, Staging the French Revolution takes a historically grounded and methodologically innovative cross-disciplinary approach to opera and persuasively re-evaluates the long-standing, but rather sterile, concept of propaganda."

In Hollywood Left and Right, Steven J. Ross tells a story that has escaped public attention: the emergence of Hollywood as a vital center of political life and the important role that movie stars have played in shaping the course of American politics.
Ever since the film industry relocated to Hollywood early in the twentieth century, it has had an outsized influence on American politics. Through compelling larger-than-life figures in American cinema--Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward G. Robinson, George Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Charlton Heston, Warren Beatty, and Arnold Schwarzenegger--Hollywood Left and Right reveals how the film industry's engagement in politics has been longer, deeper, and more varied than most people would imagine. As shown in alternating chapters, the Left and the Right each gained ascendancy in Tinseltown at different times. From Chaplin, whose movies almost always displayed his leftist convictions, to Schwarzenegger's nearly seamless transition from action blockbusters to the California governor's mansion, Steven J. Ross traces the intersection of Hollywood and political activism from the early twentieth century to the present.
Hollywood Left and Right challenges the commonly held belief that Hollywood has always been a bastion of liberalism. The real story, as Ross shows in this passionate and entertaining work, is far more complicated. First, Hollywood has a longer history of conservatism than liberalism. Second, and most surprising, while the Hollywood Left was usually more vocal and visible, the Right had a greater impact on American political life, capturing a senate seat (Murphy), a governorship (Schwarzenegger), and the ultimate achievement, the Presidency (Reagan).

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

The Company-State rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. Taking seriously the politics and political thought of the early Company on their own terms, it explores the Company's political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to warmaking and colonial plantation. Tracing the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, this book reveals how Company leadership wrestled not simply with the bottom line but with typically early modern problems of governance, such as: the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationship between law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, commerce, religion, territory, and the sea. The Company-State thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, "commercial" and "imperial" eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a "trading world" of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, The Company-State offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of "globalization," this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century.

This edition of the writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), barrister, United Irishman, agent of the Catholic Committee and later an officer in the French revolutionary army, is intended to comprehend all his writings and largely to supersede the two-volume Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone. ..written by himself that was edited by his son William, and published at Washington in 1826. It consists mainly of Tone's correspondence, diaries, autobiography, pamphlets, public addresses, and miscellaneous memoranda (both personal and public); it is based on the original MSS if extant or the most reliable printed sources.
Tone's participation in Irish politics in the early 1790s and his presence on the periphery of the ruling circle in revolutionary France from February 1796 to September 1798 would be sufficient to make his writings a major historical source. The literary quality of his writings, diaries, and autobiography enhances their importance. The unique quality of Tone's writings is that they are the production of a gifted and convivial young Irishman who moved widely in intellectual and political circles.
This volume - France, the Rhine, Lough Swilly, and the Death of Tone - completes the edition, following the last part of Tone's life, until his death following the abortive Irish uprising of 1798. It includes addenda, corrigenda, an iconography, a bibliography, and a complete index to all three volumes.

In 1962, when the Cold War threatened to ignite in the Cuban Missile Crisis, when more nuclear test bombs were detonated than in any other year in history, Rachel Carson released her own bombshell, Silent Spring, to challenge society's use of pesticides. To counter the use of chemicals-and bombs-the naturalist articulated a holistic vision. She wrote about a "web of life" that connected humans to the world around them and argued that actions taken in one place had consequences elsewhere. Pesticides sprayed over croplands seep into ground water and move throughout the ecosystem, harming the environment. Thousands accepted her message, joined environmental groups, flocked to Earth Day celebrations, and lobbied for legislative regulation. Carson was not the only intellectual to offer holistic answers to society's problems. This book uncovers a holistic sensibility in post-World War II American culture that both tested the logic of the Cold War and fed some of the twentieth century's most powerful social movements, from civil rights to environmentalism to the counterculture. The study examines six important leaders and institutions that embraced and put into practice a holistic vision for a peaceful, healthful, and just world: nature writer Rachel Carson; structural engineer R. Buckminster Fuller; civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow; and the Esalen Institute and its founders, Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Each looked to whole systems instead of parts and focused on connections, interdependencies, and integration to create a better world. In the 1960s and 1970s, holistic conceptions and practices infused the March on Washington, Earth Day, the human potential movement, New Age spirituality, and alternative medicine. Though dreams of creating a more perfect world were tempered by economic inequalities, political corruption, and deep social divisions, this sensibility influenced American culture in important ways that continue into the twenty-first century.

'A breathtaking story' Daily Mail 'Extraordinary' The Telegraph on the Cook sisters Desperate circumstances can cause ordinary women to achieve extraordinary things. No one would have predicted such glamorous and daring lives for Ida and Louise Cook two decidedly ordinary women who lived quiet lives in the London suburbs. But throughout the 1930s, the remarkable sisters rescued dozens of Jews facing persecution and death. Ida's memoir of the adventures she and Louise shared remains as fresh, vital, and entertaining as the woman who wrote it. Even when Ida began to earn thousands as a successful romance novelist, the sisters directed every spare resource, as well as their considerable courage and ingenuity, towards saving as many as they could from Hitler's death camps.

There is a striking similarity between Marian devotional songs and secular love songs of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Two disparate genres-one sacred, the other secular; one Latin, the other vernacular-both praise an idealized, impossibly virtuous woman. Each does so through highly stylized derivations of traditional medieval song forms - Marian prayer derived from earlier Gregorian chant, and love songs and lyrics from medieval courtly song. Yet despite their obvious similarities, the two musical and poetic traditions have rarely been studied together. Author David Rothenberg takes on this task with remarkable success, producing a useful and broad introduction to Marian music and liturgy, and then coupling that with an incisive comparative analysis of this devotional form with the words and music of secular love songs of the period. The Flower of Paradise examines the interplay of Marian devotional and secular poetics within polyphonic music from c. 1200 to c. 1500. Through case studies of works that demonstrate a specific symbolic resonance between Marian devotional and secular song, the book illustrates the distinctive ethos of this period in European culture. Rothenberg makes use of an impressive command of liturgical and religious studies, literature and poetry, and art history to craft a study with wide application across disciplinary boundaries. With its broad scope and unique, incisive analysis, this book is suited for scholars, students, and general readers alike. Undergraduate and graduate students of musicology, Medieval and Renaissance studies, comparative literature, art history, Western reglious history, and music history-especially that of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and sacred music-will find this book a useful and informative resource on the period. The Flower of Paradise is also of interest to those with a particular dedication to any of its diverse subject areas. For individuals involved in religious organizations or those who frequent Medieval or Renaissance cultural sites and museums, this book will deepen their knowledge and open up new ways of thinking about the history and development of secular and sacred music and the Marian tradition.

Its unique ability to sway the masses has led many observers to consider cinema the artform with the greatest political force. The images it produces can bolster leaders or contribute to their undoing. Soviet filmmakers often had to face great obstacles as they struggled to make art in an authoritarian society that put them not only under ideological pressure but also imposed rigid economic constraints on the industry. But while the Brezhnev era of Soviet filmmaking is often depicted as a period of great repression, Soviet Art House reveals that the films made at the prestigious Lenfilm studio in this period were far more imaginative than is usually suspected. In this pioneering study of a Soviet film studio, author Catriona Kelly delves into previously unpublished archival documents and interviews, memoirs, and the films themselves to illuminate the ideological, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of filmmaking in the Brezhnev era. She argues that especially the young filmmakers who joined the studio after its restructuring in 1961 revitalized its output and helped establish Leningrad as a leading center of oppositional art. This unique insight into Soviet film production shows not only the inner workings of Soviet institutions before the system collapsed but also traces how filmmakers tirelessly dodged and negotiated contradictory demands to create sophisticated and highly original movies.

This book explores the mental and literary awakening that many working-class women in the United States experienced when they left the home and began to work in factories early in the nineteenth century. Cook also examines many of the literary productions from this group of women ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of women factory workers, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. Working women's avid interests in books and writing evolved in the context of an American romanticism that encouraged ideals of self-reliance that were not formulated with factory girls in mind. Their efforts to pursue a life of the mind while engaged in arduous bodily labour also coincided with the emergence of middle-class women writers from private and domestic lives into the literary marketplace. However, while middle-class women risked forfeiting their status as ladies by trying to earn money by becoming writers, factory women were accused of selling out their class credentials by trying to be literary. Cook traces the romantic literariness of several generations of working-class women in their own writing and the broader literary responses of those who shared some, though by no means all, of their interests. The most significant literary interaction, however, is with middle-class women writers. Some of these, like Margaret Fuller, envisioned ideals of female self-development that inspired, without always including, working women. Others, like novelists Davis, Phelps, Alcott, and Scudder, created compassionate fictions of their economic and social inequities but balked at promoting their artistic and intellectual equality.

The Second World War affected the lives and shaped the experience of millions of individuals in Germany--soldiers at the front, women, children and the elderly sheltering in cellars, slave laborers toiling in factories, and concentration-camp prisoners and POWs clearing rubble in the Reich's devastated cities.
Taking a "history from below" approach, the volume examines how the minds and behaviour of individuals were moulded by the Party as the Reich took the road to Total War. The ever-increasing numbers of German workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht were replaced with forced foreign workers and slave labourers and concentration camp prisoners. The interaction in everyday life between German civilian society and these coerced groups is explored, as is that society's relationship to the Holocaust.
From early 1943, the war on the home front was increasingly dominated by attack from the air. The role of the Party, administration, police, and courts in providing for the vast numbers of those rendered homeless, in bolstering civilian morale with "miracle revenge weapons" propaganda, and in maintaining order in a society in disintegration is reviewed in detail.
For society in uniform, the war in the east was one of ideology and annihilation, with intensified indoctrination of the troops after Stalingrad. The social profile of this army is analysed through study of a typical infantry division. The volume concludes with an account of the various forms of resistance to Hitler's regime, in society and the military, culminating in the failed attempt on his life in July 1944.

Here is a fascinating compact history of Chinese political, economic, and cultural life, ranging from the origins of civilization in China to the beginning of the 21st century. Historian Paul Ropp combines vivid story-telling with astute analysis to shed light on some of the larger questions of Chinese history. What is distinctive about China in comparison with other civilizations? What have been the major changes and continuities in Chinese life over the past four millennia? Offering a global perspective, the book shows how China's nomadic neighbors to the north and west influenced much of the political, military, and even cultural history of China. Ropp also examines Sino-Indian relations, highlighting the impact of the thriving trade between India and China as well as the profound effect of Indian Buddhism on Chinese life. Finally, the author discusses the humiliation of China at the hands of Western powers and Japan, explaining how these recent events have shaped China's quest for wealth, power and respect today, and have colored China's perception of its own place in world history.

In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into confessional touchstones.
Looking at archival materials containing direct references to feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper devotional feeling.
This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in their faith.

Perhaps no other single Roman speech exemplifies the connection between oratory, politics and imperialism better than Cicero's De Provinciis Consularibus, pronounced to the senate in 56 BC. Cicero puts his talents at the service of the powerful "triumviri" (Caesar, Crassus and Pompey), whose aims he advances by appealing to the senators' imperialistic and chauvinistic ideology. This oration, then, yields precious insights into several areas of late republican life: international relations between Rome and the provinces (Gaul, Macedonia and Judaea); the senators' view on governors, publicani (tax-farmers) and foreigners; the dirty mechanics of high politics in the 50s, driven by lust for domination and money; and Cicero's own role in that political choreography. This speech also exemplifies the exceptional range of Cicero's oratory: the invective against Piso and Gabinius calls for biting irony, the praise of Caesar displays high rhetoric, the rejection of other senators' recommendations is a tour de force of logical and sophisticated argument, and Cicero's justification for his own conduct is embedded in the self-fashioning narrative which is typical of his post reditum speeches. This new commentary includes an updated introduction, which provides the readers with a historical, rhetorical and stylistic background to appreciate the complexities of Cicero's oration, as well as indexes and maps.

We love freedom. We hate racism. But what do we do when these values collide? In this wide-ranging book, Erik Bleich explores policies that the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other liberal democracies have implemented when forced to choose between preserving freedom and combating racism. Bleich's comparative historical approach reveals that while most countries have increased restrictions on racist speech, groups and actions since the end of World War II, this trend has resembled a slow creep more than a slippery slope. Each country has struggled to achieve a balance between protecting freedom and reducing racism, and the outcomes have been starkly different across time and place. Building on these observations, Bleich argues that we should pay close attention to the specific context and to the likely effects of any policy we implement, and that any response should be proportionate to the level of harm the racism inflicts. Ultimately, the best way for societies to preserve freedom while fighting racism is through processes of public deliberation that involve citizens in decisions that impact the core values of liberal democracies.

For most of the postwar period, the destruction of European Jewry was not a salient part of American Jewish life, and was generally seen as irrelevant to non-Jewish Americans. Survivors and their families tended to keep to themselves, forming their own organizations, or they did their best to block out the past. Today, in contrast, the Holocaust is the subject of documentaries and Hollywood films, and is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. Reluctant Witnesses mixes memoir, history, and social analysis to tell the story of the rise of Holocaust consciousness in the United States from the perspective of survivors and their descendants. The public reckoning with the Holocaust, the book argues, was due to more than the passage of time. It took the coming of age of the "second generation" - who reached adulthood during the rise of feminism, the ethnic revival, and therapeutic culture - for survivors' families to reclaim their hidden histories. Inspired by the changed status of the victim in American society, the second generation coaxed their parents to share their losses with them, transforming private pains into public stories. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find its voice. It tells this story in relation to the changing status of trauma and victimhood in American culture more generally. At a time when a sense of Holocaust fatigue seems to be setting in, and when the remaining survivors are at the end of their lives, it offers a reminder that the ability to speak openly about traumatic experiences had to be struggled for. By confronting traumatic memories and catastrophic histories, the book argues, we can make our world mean something beyond ourselves.

After the battle of Antietam in 1862, Harriet Eaton traveled to Virginia from her home in Portland, Maine, to care for soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. Portland's Free Street Baptist Church, with liberal ties to abolition, established the Maine Camp Hospital Association and made the widowed Eaton its relief agent in the field. One of many Christians who believed that patriotic activism could redeem the nation, Eaton quickly learned that war was no respecter of religious principles. Doing the work of nurse and provisioner, Eaton tended wounded men and those with smallpox and diphtheria during two tours of duty. She preferred the first tour, which ended after the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, to the second, more sedentary, assignment at City Point, Virginia, in 1864. There the impositions of federal bureaucracy standardized patient care at the expense of more direct communication with soldiers. Eaton deplored the arrogance of U.S. Sanitary Commissioners whom she believed saw state benevolent groups as competitors for supplies. Eaton struggled with the disruptions of transience, scarcely sleeping in the same place twice, but found the politics of daily toil even more challenging. Conflict between Eaton and co-worker Isabella Fogg erupted almost immediately over issues of propriety; the souring working conditions leading to Fogg's ouster from Maine state relief efforts by late 1863. Though Eaton praised some of the surgeons with whom she worked, she labeled others charlatans whose neglect had deadly implications for the rank and file. If she saw villainy, she also saw opportunities to convert soldiers and developed an intense spiritual connection with a private, which appears to have led to a postwar liaison. Published here for the first time, the uncensored nursing diary is a rarity among medical accounts of the war, showing Eaton to be an astute observer of human nature and not as straight-laced as we might have thought. This hardcover edition includes an extensive introduction from the editor, transcriptions of relevant letters and newspaper articles, and a thoroughly researched biographical dictionary of the people mentioned in the diary.

American living standards improved considerably between 1900 and 2000. While most observers focus on gains in per-capita income as a measure of economic well-being, economists have used other measures of well-being: height, weight, and longevity. The increased amount of leisure time per week and across people's lifetimes, however, has been an unsung aspect of the improved standard of living in America. In Century of the Leisured Masses, David George Surdam explores the growing presence of leisure activities in Americans' lives and how this development came out throughout the twentieth century. Most Americans have gone from working fifty-five or more hours per week to working fewer than forty, although many Americans at the top rungs of the economic ladder continue to work long hours. Not only do more Americans have more time to devote to other activities, they are able to enjoy higher-quality leisure. New forms of leisure have given Americans more choices, better quality, and greater convenience. For instance, in addition to producing music themselves, they can now listen to the most talented musicians when and where they want. Television began as black and white on small screens; within fifty years, Americans had a cast of dozens of channels to choose from. They could also purchase favorite shows and movies to watch at their convenience. Even Americans with low incomes enjoyed television and other new forms of leisure. This growth of leisure resulted from a combination of growing productivity, better health, and technology. American workers became more productive and chose to spend their improved productivity and higher wages by consuming more, taking more time off, and enjoying better working conditions. By century's end, relatively few Americans were engaged in arduous, dangerous, and stultifying occupations. The reign of tyranny on the shop floor, in retail shops, and in offices was mitigated; many Americans could even enjoy leisure activities during work hours. Failure to consider the gains in leisure time and leisure consumption understates the gains in American living standards. With Century of the Leisured Masses, Surdam has comprehensively documented and examined the developments in this important marker of well-being throughout the past century.

Specters of Revolution chronicles the subaltern political history of peasant guerrilla movements that emerged in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero during the late 1960s. The National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR) and the Party of the Poor (PDLP), led by schoolteachers Genaro Vazquez and Lucio Cabanas, respectively, organized popularly-backed revolutionary armed struggles that sought the overthrow of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Both guerrilla organizations materialized from a decades-long history of massacres and everyday forms of terror committed by local-regional political bosses and the Mexican federal government against citizen social movements that demanded the redemption of constitutional rights. The book reveals that these revolutionary movements developed after years of exhausting legal, constitutional pathways of redress (focused on issues of economic justice and electoral rights) and surviving several state-directed massacres throughout the 1960s. As such, the peasant guerrillas represented only the final phase of a social process with roots in the unfulfilled promises of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the dual capitalist modernization-political authoritarian program adopted by the PRI after 1940. The history of the ACNR and PDLP guerrillas, and the brutal counterinsurgency waged against them by the PRI regime, challenges Mexico's place within the historiography of post-1945 Latin America. At the local and regional levels parts of Mexico like Guerrero experienced instances of authoritarian rule, popular political radicalization, and brutal counterinsurgency that fully inserts the nation into a Cold War Latin American history of state terror and "dirty wars." This study simultaneously exposes the violent underbelly that underscored the PRI's ruling tenure after 1940 and explodes the myth that Mexico constituted an island of relative peace and stability surrounded by a sea of military dictatorships during the Cold War.

Who were the Victorians? Were they self-confident imperialists secure in the virtues of the home, and ruled by the values of authority, duty, religion and respectability? Or were they self-doubting and hypocritical prudes whose family life was authoritarian and loveless? Ever since Lytton Strachey mocked Florence Nightingale and General Gordon in Eminent Victorians, the reputation of the Victorians, and of what they stood for, has been the subject of vigorous debate.
John Gardiner provides a fascinating guide to the changing reputation of the Victorians during the 20th century. Different social, political, and aesthetic values, two world wars, youth culture, nostalgia, new historical trends and the heritage industry have all affected the way we see the age and its men and women. The second half of the book shows how radically biographical accounts have changed over the last 100 years, exemplified by four archetypical Victorians: Charles Dickens, W.E. Gladstone, Oscar Wilde, and Queen Victoria herself.