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In Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Suleiman conducts a profound exploration of where individual memories converge with public remembrance of traumatic events. In this book she argues that memories of World War II transcend national boundaries, due not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory.
Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South
Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations in the antebellum South, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers--in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. This is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.
Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia
In stark contrast to the popular "clash of civilizations" theory that sees Islam inevitably in conflict with the West, Robert D. Crews reveals the remarkable ways in which Russia constructed an empire with broad Muslim support. For Prophet and Tsar unearths the fascinating relationship between an empire and its subjects. As America and Western Europe debate how best to secure the allegiances of their Muslim populations, Crews offers a unique and critical historical vantage point.
Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust
The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together the diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Jeffrey Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers along with a fresh interpretation of the paranoia underlying the ideology of the Third Reich.
Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America
In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building. This is an authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.
Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany
Studying the Jew investigates those German scholars who forged an interdisciplinary field to create a comprehensive portrait of the Jew, fabricating an empirical basis for Nazi antisemitic policies. In a chilling story of academics who perverted their talents and distorted their research in support of persecution and genocide, Studying the Jew explores the intersection of ideology and scholarship, the state and the university, the intellectual and his motivations, to provide a new appreciation of the use and abuse of learning and the horrors perpetrated in the name of reason.
This book tells the story of how the transition to democracy in South Africa enfranchised blacks politically but without raising most of them from poverty. Although democratic South Africa is officially "non-racial," the book shows that racial solidarities continue to play a role in the country's political economy.
McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam
By examining the role of McGeorge Bundy and the National Security Council, Andrew Preston demonstrates that policymakers escalated the conflict in Vietnam in the face of internal opposition, external pressures, and a continually failing strategy. The War Council is an illuminating and compelling story with two inseparable themes: the acquisition and consolidation of power; and how that power is exercised.
The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425
Lust for Liberty challenges long-standing views of popular medieval revolts. Comparing rebellions in northern and southern Europe over two centuries, Samuel Cohn analyzes their causes and forms, their leadership, the role of women, and the suppression or success of these revolts. The book offers a new interpretation of the Black Death and the increase of and change in popular revolt from the mid-1350s to the early fifteenth century.
Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia
In this book, Sherman Cochran reconsiders the nature and role of consumer culture in the spread of cultural globalization. Cochran brings to light enduring features of the Chinese experience with consumer culture. The history of Chinese medicine men in pre-socialist China, he suggests, has relevance for the twenty-first century because they achieved goals that their successors in contemporary China are currently seeking to attain.
China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History
In Lost Modernities, Alexander Woodside offers an overview of the bureaucratic politics of preindustrial China, Vietnam, and Korea. He focuses on the political and administrative theory of the three mandarinates and their long experimentation with governments recruited in part through meritocratic civil service examinations. This book removes modernity from a standard Eurocentric understanding and offers a unique new perspective on the transnational nature of Asian history.
The Limits of Developmental Autocracy
In a book sure to provoke debate, Minxin Pei examines the sustainability of the Chinese Communist Party's reform strategy--pursuing pro-market economic policies under one-party rule. Combining powerful insights with empirical research, China's Trapped Transition offers a provocative assessment of China's future as a great power.
The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier
C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China's Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Islam and the West
The events of September 11, 2001, forever changed the world as we knew it. In their wake, the quest for international order has prompted a reshuffling of global aims and priorities. In a fresh approach, Kepel focuses on the Middle East as a nexus of international disorder and decodes the complex language of war, propaganda, and terrorism that holds the region in its thrall.
A History of American Childhood
Today, adults impose ever-increasing demands on the young for self-discipline, cognitive development, and academic achievement, even as the influence of the mass media and consumer culture has grown. With a nod to the past, Mintz revisits an alternative to the goal-driven realities of contemporary childhood. An odyssey of psychological self-discovery and growth, this book suggests a vision of childhood that embraces risk and freedom--like the daring adventure on Huck's raft.
A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC
20,000 B.C., the peak of the last ice age--the atmosphere is heavy with dust, glaciers span vast regions, and people face the threat of extinction. But these people live on the brink of seismic change--10,000 years of climate shifts culminating in abrupt global warming that will usher in a fundamentally changed human world. This is the story of this momentous period--one in which a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could presage anything from the spread of lush woodland to the coming of apocalyptic floods--and one in which we find the origins of civilization itself.
African Americans in the Age of Revolution
As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of the country's population was African American. The experiences of these men and women have been largely ignored in the accounts of the colonies' glorious quest for freedom. In this compact volume, Gary B. Nash reorients our understanding of early America, and reveals the perilous choices of the founding fathers that shaped the nation's future.
The Russians in the Soviet Union
In this illuminating book, Geoffrey Hosking explores what the Soviet experience meant for Russians. Hosking analyzes how the Soviet state molded Russian identity, beginning with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. At the heart of this penetrating work is the fundamental question of what happens to a people who place their nationhood at the service of empire.
Mycenae, the fabled city of Homer's King Agamemnon, leapt into the headlines in the late nineteenth century when Heinrich Schliemann announced that he had opened the Tomb of Agamemnon and found the body of the hero smothered in gold treasure. In this book, historian of science Cathy Gere tells the story of these extraordinary ruins.
India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's development in the eighteenth century and beyond. In this powerfully written critique, Nicholas Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself.
The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
A Hundred Horizons takes us to the shores of the Indian Ocean, in a brilliant reinterpretation of how culture developed and history was made at the height of the British raj. Sugata Bose explores the intricate social and economic webs of these shores from 1850 to 1950, finding evidence of the interdependence of the peoples of the lands beyond the horizon, from the Middle East to East Africa to Southeast Asia.
American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors
This elegantly written book examines the structure and impact of empires and asks whether the United States shares their traits and behavior. Charles S. Maier outlines the essentials of empire throughout history, then explores the exercise of U.S. power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With learning, dispassion, and clarity, Among Empires offers bold comparisons and an original account of American power.
The Homemade Art of Grandma Moses
In this book, Karal Ann Marling looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter--and her astonishing fame. Between the cultural ephemera, folklore, song, and history embedded in Moses' paintings and the potent advertising shorthand for Americana that her images rapidly became, this book reveals the widespread longing for the memories, comforts, and small victories of a mythic, intimate American past tapped by the phenomenon of Grandma Moses.
History, Myth, Reality
This book is a profound reexamination of the role of the German army, the Wehrmacht, in World War II. Until very recently, the standard story avowed that the ordinary German soldier in World War II was a good soldier, distinct from Hitler's rapacious SS troops, and not an accomplice to the massacres of civilians. Wolfram Wette, a preeminent German military historian, explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity.
Writing a Diary Under Stalin
Revolution on My Mind is a stunning revelation of the inner world of Stalin's Russia, showing us the minds and hearts of Soviet citizens who recorded their lives in diaries during an extraordinary period of revolutionary fervor and state terror. Jochen Hellbeck brings us face to face with gripping and unforgettably poignant life stories. This book brilliantly explores the forging of the revolutionary self in a study that speaks to the evolution of the individual in mass movements of our own time.
Social, Political, and Religious
In Ireland, Gustave de Beaumont chronicles the history of the Irish and offers up a national portrait on the eve of the Great Famine. This rediscovered masterpiece includes an introduction on Beaumont and his world. This volume also presents Beaumont's impassioned preface in which he portrays the appalling effects of the Great Famine. A classic of nineteenth-century political and social commentary, Beaumont's singular portrait offers the compelling immediacy of an eyewitness to history.
A Debate
In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, James Ceaser traces the way certain "foundational" ideas--including nature, history, and religion--have been understood and used over the course of American history. Ceaser treats these ideas as elements of political discourse that provide the ground for other political ideas, such as liberty or equality. Three critical commentators challenge Ceaser's arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.
Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920
Between 1875 and 1920, Chicago's homicide rate more than quadrupled. Based on an analysis of nearly six thousand homicide cases, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped Chicago city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence. From rage killers to the "Baby Bandit Quartet," Jeffrey Adler offers a dramatic portrait of Chicago during a period in which the characteristic elements of modern homicide in America emerged.
Europe to the Pacific
An unforgettable voyage filled with delightful characters, dramatic encounters, and rich cultural details, The Travelers' World heralds a moment of intellectual preparation for the modern global era. Harry Liebersohn examines the transformation of global knowledge during the great age of scientific exploration. We now travel effortlessly to distant places, but the questions about perception, truth, and knowledge that these intercontinental mediators faced still resonate.
Wendels, Haniels, Falcks, and the Continental European Model
In Family Capitalism, Harold James tells how "iron masters" of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by new generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. Finally, the author shows how the trajectories of the firms were influenced by political, military, economic, and social events and how these firms illuminate a European model of "relationship capitalism."
The Flowering of Muslim Theology discusses the emergence of theology in the classical period and offers acute and illuminating comparisons with the Christian (and Jewish) traditions. In this lucid and authoritative introduction to classical Islam, Josef van Ess opens a window on the intellectual world that gave rise to Muslim theology. This work gives a wider audience rare insight into Islam's past.
The Democratization of Writing in Britain
Hilliard, Christopher
In twentieth-century Britain the literary landscape underwent a fundamental change. Aspiring authors--traditionally drawn from privileged social backgrounds--now included factory workers writing amid chaotic home lives and married women joining writers' clubs in search of creative outlets. In this brilliantly conceived book, Christopher Hilliard reveals the extraordinary history of "ordinary" voices. In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people--would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history--Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.
In this beautifully illustrated book, we experience the synthesis of Cleopatra's and Rome's defining moments through surviving works of art and other remnants of what was once an opulent material culture. This culture best chronicles Cleopatra's legend and suggests her subtle but indelible mark on the art of imperial Rome at the critical moment of its inception.
A Clash of Race and Memory
Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. The Southern Past argues that these battles are ultimately about who has the power to determine what we remember of the past, and whether that remembrance will honor all Southerners or only select groups.
Richard Burton and the Victorian World
Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Richard Burton contributed so forcefully to his generation that he provides us with a singularly panoramic perspective on the world of the Victorians. Engagingly written and vigorously argued, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of a remarkable man and a crucial era.
America's Vision for Human Rights
In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter redefined human rights and America's vision for the world.
Scenes from the Battlefields of History
Spiller combines a mastery of the primary sources with a vibrant historical imagination to locate a dozen turning points in the world's history of warfare that altered our understanding of war and its pursuit. We are conducted through profound moments by the voices of those who witnessed them and are given a graphic understanding of war, the devastating choices, the means by which battles are won and lost.
Law and Power on the Frontier
Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth,nearly all the land in the United States was transferred from AmericanIndians to whites. How did Indians actually lose their land? Stuart Banner argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers. Instead, time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles.
Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy
Based on seven years of archival research, this book describes previously unknown aspects of the electoral college crisis of 1800, presenting a revised understanding of the early days of two great institutions that continue to have a major impact on American history: the plebiscitarian presidency and a Supreme Court that struggles to put the presidency's claims of a popular mandate into constitutional perspective.
Rome is not one city but many, each with its own history unfolding from a different center. Beginning with the very shaping of the ground on which Rome first rose, this book conjures all these cities, past and present, conducting the reader through time and space to the complex and shifting realities--architectural, historical, political, and social--that constitute Rome.
Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery
As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval.
The history of the Colosseum--chockfull of romantic but erroneous myths--is, in reality, much stranger than the legend. In this engaging book, we learn the details of how the arena was built and at what cost; we are introduced to the emperors who sometimes fought in gladiatorial games staged at the Colosseum; and we take measure of the audience who reveled in, or opposed, these games. The authors also trace the strange afterlife of the monument--as fortress, shrine of martyrs, church, and glue factory.
No account is more critical to our understanding of Joan of Arc than the contemporary record of her trial in 1431. The trial record, which sometimes preserves Joan's very words, unveils her life, character, visions, and motives in fascinating detail. This new translation, the first in fifty years, is based on the full record of the trial proceedings in Latin.
From the earliest times, successive waves of foreign invaders have left their mark on Italy. Beginning with Germanic invasions that undermined the Roman Empire and culminating with the establishment of the modern nation, Girolamo Arnaldi explores the dynamic exchange between outsider and "native," liberally illustrated with interpretations of the foreigners drawn from a range of sources.
A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day
Bonfire Night, observed every year to memorialize the narrowly foiled Gunpowder Plot, is one of England's most festive occasions. Why has the memory of this act of treason and terrorism persisted for 400 years? James Sharpe teases apart the tangled web of religion and politics that gave rise to the plot and wittily shows how celebration of that fateful night has changed over the centuries.
Personality and Politics in Modern America
A political leader's decisions can determine the fate of a nation, but what determines how and why that leader makes certain choices? William Chafe examines eight of the most significant political leaders of the modern era in order to explore the relationship between their personal patterns of behavior and their political decision-making process.
White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America
In the 1970s, white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights movement.
The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883-1917
Georgian social democracy was the most successful social democratic movement in the Russian Empire. Despite its small size, it produced many of the leading revolutionary figures of 1917. In the first of two volumes, Stephen Jones writes the history of this national movement, which represented one of the earliest examples of European social democracy at the turn of the twentieth century.
Technological Imperatives and America's Civilizing Mission
Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to "civilize" non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America's foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf.
French Strategy and Operations in the Great War
As the driving force behind the Allied effort in World War I, France willingly shouldered the heaviest burden. In this masterful book, Robert Doughty explains how and why France assumed this role and offers new insights into French strategy and operational methods.
Yiddish Socialists in New York
The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.
Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor
Rossman, Jeffrey J.
Challenging the claim that workers supported Stalin's revolution "from above" as well as the assumption that working-class opposition to a workers' state was impossible, Jeffrey Rossman shows how a crucial segment of the Soviet population opposed the authoritiesduring the critical industrializing period of the First Five-Year Plan.
Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin
In retelling success stories from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, Laird goes beyond personality, upbringing, and social skills to reveal the critical common key--access to circles that control and distribute opportunity and information. She contrasts how Americans have prospered--or not--with how we have talked about prospering.
The Opening of the American Workplace
In this groundbreaking work, Nancy MacLean shows how African-American and later Mexican-American civil rights activists and feminists concluded that freedom alone would not suffice: access to jobs at all levels is a requisite of full citizenship. Tracing the struggle to open the American workplace to all, MacLean chronicles the cultural and political advances that have irrevocably changed our nation over the past fifty years.
Black Performers in Turn of the Century America
Drawing extensively on black newspapers and commentary of the period, Karen Sotiropoulos shows how black performers and composers participated in a politically charged debate about the role of the expressive arts in the struggle for equality. Despite the racial violence, disenfranchisement, and the segregation of virtually all public space, they used America's new businesses of popular entertainment as vehicles for their own creativity and as spheres for political engagement.
Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates
In this groundbreaking study, Portnoy links antebellum Indian removal debates with crucial, simultaneous debates about African Americans--abolition of slavery and African colonization--revealing ways European American women negotiated prohibitions to make their voices heard. Situating the debates within contemporary, competing ideas about race, religion, and nation, Portnoy examines the means by which women argued for a "right to speak" on national policy.
Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian Empire ranked third among the world's oil-producing states, and accounted for five percent of global oil production. By 1918, the Central Powers did not have enough oil to maintain a modern military. How and why did the promise of oil fail Galicia (the province producing the oil) and the Empire?
The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy
This illuminating study examines the dramatic transformation of Bohemian noble identity from the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth century to the descent of the Iron Curtain after World War II. This book offers valuable insights on the nationalization of a conservative political elite, as well as on the national and social revolutions that recast Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
1 May - 26 October 1782
John Adams was a shrewd observer of the political and diplomatic world in which he functioned and his comments on events and personalities remain the most candid and revealing of any American in Europe. In 1782, Adams focused his energies on raising a loan from Dutch bankers and negotiating a Dutch-American commercial treaty. This volume chronicles Adams's efforts to achieve these objectives, but it also provides an unparalleled view of eighteenth-century American diplomacy on the eve of a peace settlement ending the eight-year war of the American Revolution.
In this magisterial study, Michael Smith explains how France left behind small-scale merchant capitalism for the large corporate enterprises that would eventually dominate its domestic economy and project French influence throughout the world. Arguing against the long-standing view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, Smith presents a story of considerable achievement.
Biological Weapons since 1945
The threat of biological weapons has never attracted as much public attention as in the past five years. Yet there has been little historical analysis of such weapons over the past half-century. Deadly Cultures sets out to fill this gap by analyzing the historical developments since 1945.
China, Healing, and the West to 1848
When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people might point to the "rediscovery" of Chinese acupuncture in the 1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts, Linda Barnes leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese understandings of illness and healing.
The Struggle for Political Rights in China
A leading scholar of China's modern political development examines the changing relationship between the Chinese people and the state. Correcting the conventional view of China as having instituted extraordinary economic changes but having experienced few political reforms in the post-Mao period, Merle Goldman details efforts by individuals and groups to assert their political rights.
September 11, 2001, Gaddis argues, was not the first time a surprise attack shattered American assumptions about national security and reshaped American grand strategy. We've been there before, and have responded each time by dramatically expanding our security responsibilities. How successful our current strategies will be in the face of twenty-first-century challenges is the question that now confronts us.
new in paperback
A Military History
In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America's most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations.
new in paperback
A New History,
Second Enlarged Edition
John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date and provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.
new in paperback
Imagination and Belief
This book traces the history of the legends surrounding the Grail, beginning with Chrétien de Troyes's great romances of the twelfth century and the medieval Church's religious version of the secular ideal. He pursues the myths through Victorian obsessions and enthusiasms to the popular bestsellers of the late twentieth century that have embraced its mysteries.
new in paperback
The Roman emperor Nero is remembered by history as the vain and immoral monster who fiddled while Rome burned. Edward Champlin reinterprets Nero's enormities on their own terms, as the self-conscious performances of an imperial actor with a formidable grasp of Roman history and mythology and a canny sense of his audience.
new in paperback
The Story of the Haitian Revolution
The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue. Laurent Dubois weaves the stories of slaves, free people of African descent, wealthy whites, and French administrators into an unforgettable tale of insurrection, war, heroism, and victory. He establishes the Haitian Revolution as a foundational moment in the history of democracy and human rights.
new in paperback
Jazz and the Making of the Sixties
In the long decade between the mid-fifties and the late sixties, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz--and American--history.
new in paperback
Claudia Koonz's latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk. By showing how Germans learned to countenance the everyday persecution of fellow citizens labeled as alien, Koonz makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust.
new in paperback
From the Rhythm of Time to the Making of Matter
The principle of the pendulum's swing marks a simple yet fundamental system in nature, one that ties the rhythm of time to the very existence of matter in the universe. Newton sets the stage for Galileo's discovery with a look at biorhythms in living organisms and at early calendars and clocks--contrivances of nature and culture that, however adequate in their time, did not meet the precise requirements of seventeenth-century science and navigation.
new in paperback
Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace
In 2002, nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan mobilized for war over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir, sparking panic around the world. Drawing on extensive firsthand experience in the contested region, Sumantra Bose reveals how the conflict became a grave threat to South Asia and the world and suggests feasible steps toward peace.
new in paperback
" How can such a gentle people as we are be so murderous?" a prominent Indonesian asks. That question--and the mysteries of the archipelago's vast contradictions--haunt Theodore Friend's remarkable work, a narrative of Indonesia during the last half century, from the postwar revolution against Dutch imperialism to the unrest of today.
new in paperback
The Transformation of Selling in America
In this entertaining and informative book, Walter Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert. From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives.
new in paperback
Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century.
new in paperback
Human Rights Wars and America's Response
As the chief human rights official of the Clinton Administration, John Shattuck faced far-flung challenges. This is the story of what was learned as he and other human rights hawks worked to change the Clinton Administration's human rights policy from disengagement to saving lives and bringing war criminals to justice.
new in paperback
The American Way of Adoption
Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. Taking this history into the early twenty-first century, Melosh offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption.
new in paperback
From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland
Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography, and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, A Biography of No Place reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history.
new in paperback
The shah of Iran would remain on the throne for the foreseeable future: This was the firm conclusion of a 1978 CIA analysis. One hundred days later the shah was overthrown by a popular revolution. This book offers rare insight into the nature and evolution of the Iranian revolution and into the ultimate unpredictability of protest movements in general.
new in paperback
How It Flourished and What It Cost
American agriculture in the twentieth century has given the world one of its great success stories, a paradigm of productivity and plenty. Yet the story has its dark side, from the plight of the Okies in the 1930s to the farm crisis of the 1980s to today's concerns about low crop prices and the impact of biotechnology. Looking at U.S. farming over the past century, Bruce Gardner searches out explanations for both the remarkable progress and the persistent social problems that have marked the history of American agriculture.
new in paperback
The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City
The story of the civil rights movement typically begins with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and culminates with the 1965 voting rights struggle in Selma. But as Martha Biondi shows, a grassroots struggle for racial equality in the urban North began a full ten years before the rise of the movement in the South. To Stand and Fight demonstrates how black New Yorkers launched the modern civil rights struggle and left a rich legacy.
new in paperback
Peter the Great
Many books chronicle the remarkable life of Russian tsar Peter the Great, but none analyze how his famous reforms actually took root and spread in Russia. By century's end, Russia was poised to play a critical role in the Napoleonic wars and boasted an elite culture about to burst into its golden age. In The Revolution of Peter the Great, James Cracraft offers a brilliant new interpretation of this pivotal era.
new in paperback
The Invention of China in Modern World Making
This book brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the invention of "China," "the East," "the West," and the modern notion of "the world" in recent history.
new in paperback
Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations
Alan McPherson sheds much-needed light on the controversial and pressing problem of anti-U.S. sentiment in the world. Examining the roots of anti-Americanism in Latin America, McPherson focuses on three major crises: the Cuban Revolution, the 1964 Panama riots, and U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. Deftly combining cultural and political analysis, he demonstrates the shifting and complex nature of anti-Americanism in each country and the love-hate ambivalence of most Latin Americans toward the United States.
new in paperback
Experiment with a People
For the second time in less than a century, the Russians have been engaged in a fundamental reshaping of their society, and the results will prove of vital importance to the global community. Robert Service provides a valuable and engaging guide to their recent remarkable journey.
new in paperback
In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the Hitler Youth, founded in 1933 soon after the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany.Drawing on original reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Kater traces the history of the Hitler Youth, examining the means, degree, and impact of conversion, and the subsequent fate of young recruits.
new in paperback
Challenging the boundaries of slavery ultimately brought on the Civil War and the unexpected, immediate emancipation of slaves long before it could have been achieved in any other way. This imaginative and fascinating book puts slavery into a brilliant new light and underscores anew the desperate human tragedy lying at the very heart of the American story.
new in paperback
The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945
In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.
new in paperback
America's Most Embattled Emblem
Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history. He reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War and shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement.
new in paperback
How World War II Changed a Generation
Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million Jews entered the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. Deborah Dash Moore offers an unprecedented view of the struggles they faced, having to battle not only the enemy but also the prejudices of their fellow soldiers.
new in paperback
The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.
new in paperback
Born Losers
A History of Failure in America
This is a pioneering work of
American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and
anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and
salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all
of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with
The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American
capitalism was building a nation of winners.
new in paperback