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Products tagged with: history
A Country Called Amreeka
The history of Arab settlement in the United States stretches back nearly as far as the history of America itself. For the first time, Alia Malek brings this history to life. In each of eleven spellbinding chapters, she inhabits the voice and life of one Arab American, at one time-stopping historical moment. Separately, the chapters in A Country Called Amreeka transport us; together, they offer a vital piece of the mosaic of our American history and a fresh, urgent, and exciting perspective on a teeming community whom it has become essential for us to understand.
A Country of Vast Designs
ROBERT MERRY’S BRILLIANT AND HIGHLY ACCLAIMED HISTORY OF A CRUCIAL EPOCH IN U.S. HISTORY. In a one-term presidency, James K. Polk completed the story of America’s Manifest Destiny—extending its territory across the continent by threatening England with war and manufacturing a controversial and unpopular two-year war with Mexico.
A Country That Works
Andy Stern, one of the most visionary leaders in America today, has fought relentlessly to ensure that Americans' hard work is rewarded in today's hypercompetitive, globalized world. As the newsmaking president of the fastest-growing, most dynamic union in America, he has led the charge for modernizing the "house of labor" -- taking unions out of the past and into the twenty-first century. He has spearheaded the campaign against the "Wal-Marting" of jobs and has innovated transformative solutions to the daunting problems facing Americans, from job insecurity to runaway health care costs. In this powerful critique and call-to-arms, he offers a revelatory dissection of the gathering threats to our standard of living -- threats that our politicians have failed utterly to address -- and he puts forth a bold, unassailable plan for making vital reforms. In his eye-opening diagnosis that makes the urgency of the threats vividly clear, Stern shows that Americans are contending with the most disruptive economic upheaval in the world economy since the Industrial Revolution. Yet, in the face of this daunting challenge, the American system simply isn't working well enough for most of us. Stern powerfully portrays how with the pace of globalization relentlessly quickening, the competitive pressures on our jobs and quality of life are heating up even more, especially as housing, health care, and oil prices skyrocket. While CEO salaries soar and business and the wealthy are handed plentiful tax shelters, the incomes of both white-collar and blue-collar workers stagnate, leaving most Americans struggling to pay off ever-escalating debt, instead of saving for retirement. The plain fact is that our system is out of whack, serving the interests of the top sliver of the most wealthy while putting the squeeze on the rest of us. Meanwhile, our politicians irresponsibly sidestep the crucial solutions that we so desperately need in order to make sure Americans can move into the twenty-first century with their futures secure. As Stern so persuasively shows, it is time for bold thinking and creative solutions to overhaul a health care system in crisis; correct a tax system rigged in favor of business and the wealthy; revamp our inadequate retirement system; and make truly innovative improvements in education. He presents a set of course-correction reforms so compelling, simple, and achievable that readers will find themselves enraged that they haven't yet been enacted. Americans have a right to expect our government to work for us. Andy Stern shows how we can get things back on track to make sure it does.
A Country With No Name
In an imaginative and masterful work of history, Pulitzer Prize-winner Sebastian de Grazia has created two memorable characters. Nineteen-year-old Oliver Huggins is in for the tutorial of his life. For twelve afternoons, Claire St. John, a beguiling British graduate student, will reveal to him the untold story of American Constitutional history. Her means: the Socratic method. Her message: that the Constitution was itself unconstitutional, and that its authors' inability to choose a name for the republic muddied the document's meaning for the future ahead. Through these "tutorials" de Grazia passes in review our most revered heroes—Jefferson, Washington, Marshall, Lincoln, and Thoreau—revealing the complexity of their characters. St. John's unsettling tales arouse more in her disciple than intellectual curiosity. Their relationship unrolls in so humorous and seductive a way that only a musty academic could object. Satirical, intelligent, and sure-handed, A Country with No Name combines history and literature, politics and law to reinvigorate our best traditions.
A Critical History of Early Rome
During the period from Rome's Stone Age beginnings on the Tiber River to its conquest of the Italian peninsula in 264 B.C., the Romans in large measure developed the social, political, and military structure that would be the foundation of their spectacular imperial success. In this comprehensive and clearly written account, Gary Forsythe draws extensively from historical, archaeological, linguistic, epigraphic, religious, and legal evidence as he traces Rome's early development within a multicultural environment of Latins, Sabines, Etruscans, Greeks, and Phoenicians. His study charts the development of the classical republican institutions that would eventually enable Rome to create its vast empire, and provides fascinating discussions of topics including Roman prehistory, religion, and language. In addition to its value as an authoritative synthesis of current research, A Critical History of Early Rome offers a revisionist interpretation of Rome's early history through its innovative use of ancient sources. The history of this period is notoriously difficult to uncover because there are no extant written records, and because the later historiography that affords the only narrative accounts of Rome's early days is shaped by the issues, conflicts, and ways of thinking of its own time. This book provides a groundbreaking examination of those surviving ancient sources in light of their underlying biases, thereby reconstructing early Roman history upon a more solid evidentiary foundation.
A Cultural History of Causality
This pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding of the causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course of European and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the act of murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novels including Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy, The Trial , and Lolita , Stephen Kern devotes each chapter of A Cultural History of Causality to examining a specific causal factor or motive for murder--ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and ideology. In addition to drawing on particular novels, each chapter considers the sciences (genetics, endocrinology, physiology, neuroscience) and systems of thought (psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociology, forensic psychiatry, and existential philosophy) most germane to each causal factor or motive. Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew. The book closes by considering the revolutionary impact of quantum theory, which, though it influenced novelists only marginally, shattered the model of causal understanding that had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. Others have addressed changing ideas about causality in specific areas, but no one has tackled a broad cultural history of this concept as does Stephen Kern in this engagingly written and lucidly argued book.
A Cultural History of Madrid
Despite its international significance, Madrid has been almost entirely ignored by urban, literary and cultural studies published in English. A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban Spectacle corrects that oversight by presenting an urb an and cultural history of the city from the turn of the century to the early 1930s. Between 1900 and 1930, Madrids population doubled to almost one million, with less than half the population being indigenous to the city itself. Far from the Castili an capital it was made out to be, Madrid was fast becoming a socially magnetic, increasingly secular and cosmopolitan metropolis. Parsons explores the interface between elite, mass and popular culture in Madrid while considering the construction of a modern madrileo identity that developed alongside urban and social modernization. She emphasizes the interconnection of art and popular culture in the creation of a metropolitan personality and temperament. The book draws on literary, theatrical, ci nematic and photographic texts, including the work of such figures as Ramn Mesonero Romanos, Benito Prez Galds, Po Baroja, Ramn Gomez de la Serna, Ramn Valle-Incln and Maruja Mallo. In addition, the author examines the development of new urban-based art forms and entertainments such as the zarzuela, music halls and cinema, and considers their interaction with more traditional cultural identities and activities. In arguing that traditional aspects of culture were incorporated into the everyday li fe of urban modernity, Parsons shows how the boundaries between high and low culture became increasingly blurred as a new identity influenced by modern consumerism emerged. She investigates the interaction of the geographical landscape of the city wi th its expression in both the popular imagination and in aesthetic representations, detailing and interrogating the new freedoms, desires and perspectives of the Madrid modernista.
A Cultural History of the Chinese Language
Chinese, one of the oldest active languages, evolved over 5,000 years. As such, it makes for a fascinating case study in the development of language. This cultural history of Chinese demonstrates that the language grew and responded to its music and visual expression in a manner very similar to contemporary English and other Western languages. Within Chinese cultural history lie the answers to numerous questions that have haunted scholars for decades: How does language relate to worldview? What would happen to law after its language loses absolute binding power? How do music, visual, and theatrical images influence literature? By presenting Chinese not as a system of signs but as the history of a community, this study shows how language has expanded the scope of Chinese imagination and offers a glimpse into the future of younger languages throughout the world.
A cumulative bibliography of medieval military history and technology
Utilizing library catalogues, bibliographies, and footnotes, this bibliography has compiled the most complete list of secondary references to works in medieval military history and the history of military technology.
A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2003-2006
A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology, Update 2003-2006
A Dawn Like Thunder
One of the great untold stories of World War II finally comes to light in this thrilling account of Torpedo Squadron Eight and their heroic efforts in helping an outmatched U.S. fleet win critical victories at Midway and Guadalcanal. These 35 American men--many flying outmoded aircraft--changed the course of history, going on to become the war's most decorated naval air squadron, while suffering the heaviest losses in U.S. naval aviation history. Mrazek paints moving portraits of the men in the squadron, and exposes a shocking cover-up that cost many lives. Filled with thrilling scenes of battle, betrayal, and sacrifice, A DAWN LIKE THUNDER is destined to become a classic in the literature of World War II.
A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey
The history of Haiti throughout the twentieth century has been marked by oppression at the hands of colonial and dictatorial overlords. But set against this "day for the hunter" has been a "day for the prey," a history of resistance, and sometimes of triumph. With keen cultural and historical awareness, Gage Averill shows that Haiti's vibrant and expressive music has been one of the most highly charged instruments in this struggle—one in which power, politics, and resistance are inextricably fused. Averill explores such diverse genres as Haitian jazz, troubadour traditions, Vodou-jazz, konpa, mini-djaz, new generation, and roots music. He examines the complex interaction of music with power in contexts such as honorific rituals, sponsored street celebrations, Carnival, and social movements that span the political spectrum. With firsthand accounts by musicians, photos, song texts, and ethnographic descriptions, this book explores the profound manifestations of power and song in the day-to-day efforts of ordinary Haitians to rise above political repression.
A Dictionary of British History
When was the first motorway opened? What did the Levellers believe in? What was the book of sports? Where did the Rebecca riots take place? What prompted the Cat and Mouse Act? How long did the Hundred Years War last? When was the treaty of Worms for?Drawing on from the highly acclaimed Oxford Companion to British History, published in 1997, The Dictionary of British History published in the very popular OPR series first in 2001 and now reissued for 2003 is a handy and invaluable reference work essential for anyone with an interest in British history and in need for a compact reference source covering 2,000 years of people, events, and places, and political, economic, local, domestic, military, and social change. In morethan 3,600 entries, over 100 specialist contributors describe the people and events that have shaped and defined domestic, political, social, and cultural life in Britain over the past two millennia.The A-Z text is completely up to date with new entries on Iain Duncan Smith, terrorism, and Prince William. Existing entries on Tony Blair, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Plaid Cymru, SNP, Sinn Fein, Acts of Uniformity, and the United Nations have been updated.The text covers a wide breadth of subject matter -people: philosophers (John Locke, Herbert Spencer), writers (Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Chaucer), composers (Elgar), politicians (Dilke, Disraeli) actors (Charlie Chaplin), royalty (Joan of Kent, house of Tudor). events: disasters (fire of London, Titanic), diseases (cholera).domestic history: legal issues (jury system), technical terms, newspapers and periodicals (The Times), sport (squash) and leisure (chess), scholarship and education (public schools).local history: counties (Derbyshire, Warwickshire), towns (Chester, Ipswich), cities (London).military history: battles (Battle of Britain, battle of Mynydd Carn, battle of Dollor), treaties (treaties of Locarno, treaty of Troyes), conflicts and wars (War of Spanish succession, War of 1812).political history: reform (Speenhamland), civil unrest (Tolpuddle martyrs, Peterloo masacre), acts of parliament (Chimney Sweeps Act, Intolerable Acts, Riot Act), governmental issues.economic and social history: important inventions and innovators (Richard Trevithick), movements for change (chartism, British Association for the Advancement of Science, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), reform, changes in the economic climate (industrial revolution).
A Dictionary of Contemporary World History
This authoritative dictionary provides in-depth coverage of major recent historical events, from 1900 to the present day. It includes country entries for every country in the world, with maps and historical summaries. Additionally, the dictionary includes biographical entries on major historical and cultural figures, political and military leaders, and the thinkers who influenced events. Subject entries cover international organizations, treaties, religious and political movements,as well as key incidents, places, and battles. The new edition has been fully revised and updated, and boasts a wealth of new material including entry-level web links updated via a companion website to ensure that they remain contemporary, extended coverage of historical context in the country entries, and new and expanded biographical entries on figures such as Angela Merkel and President 'Lula' of Brazil. With over 2,600 entries, all written by an authority in the field, this is a comprehensive reference work that will prove invaluable to a range of readers from students of history, politics, and international relations, to anyone with an interest in the modern world.
A European Memory?
An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europewith a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differenceswas overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe's past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe's past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.
A Family History of Smoking
A Family History of Smoking is a compelling memoir about two European families living through the last gasps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From great-grandfather David, who saw his family's fortunes decline with the gradual rise of anti-Semitism, to the ultra-modern, glamorous mother who held her family together through World War II, Andrew Riemer paints a beautiful portrait of a now vanished world that literally went up in smoke. Set against the backdrop of the tumult of early twentieth-century Europe, A Family History of Smoking is full of eccentric characters, literary anecdotes and historical drama, and is a moving tribute to a family, its strength and its stories.