With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification - and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. Blackbourn traces Germany's evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history - the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime - are transformed, while others are unearthed and explored, as Blackbourn reveals Germany's leading role in creating modern universities and its sinister involvement in slave-trade economies. A global history for a global age, this book is a bold and original account that upends the idea that a nation's history should be written as though it took place entirely within that nation's borders.
The bestselling co-author of The Moscow Rules and Argo tells her riveting, courageous story of being a female spy at the CIA and battling against the agency's ingrained culture of sexism, all while undertaking dangerous missions for America's safety during the height of the Cold War
"After 1945 African nationalists were drawn into a battle for African hearts and minds. Rather than choose between East or West, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana promoted a vision of anticolonial modernity and competed with imperial, communist, and capitalist modernization schemes to prove the superiority of his plan for postcolonial order"--
"A compendium of one hundred sources, preceded by a short author's bio and an introduction, this volume offers an English language selection of the most representative texts on feminism and women's rights from East Central Europe between the end of the Second World War and the early 1990s. While communist era is the primary focus, the interwar years and the post-1989 transition period also receive attention. All texts are new translations from the original. The book is organised around themes instead of countries; the similarities and differences between nations are nevertheless pointed out. The editors consider women not only in their local context, but also in conjunction with other systems of thought-including shared agendas with socialism, liberalism, nationalism, and even eugenics. The choice of texts seeks to demonstrate how feminism as political thought was shaped and organised in the region. They vary in type and format from political treatises, philosophy to literary works, even films and the visual arts, with the necessary inclusion of the personal and the private. Women's political rights, right to education, their role in nation-building, women, and war (and especially women and peace) are part of the anthology, alongside the gendered division of labour, violence against women, the body, and reproduction"--
In the mid-twentieth century, a certain idea of technology emerged in the work of many influential political theorists: a critical, catastrophic concept of technology, entangled with the apocalyptic fears fuelled by two all-consuming world wars and the looming nuclear threat. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought explores the critical idea of technology as both a response to a dramatically changing world, and a radical political critique of Cold War liberalism.
No studies currently exist on consuls and consulates (often dismissed as lowly figures in the diplomatic process) in the Cold War. Research into the work of these overlooked 'poor relations' offers the chance of new perspectives in the field of Cold War studies, exploring their role in representing their country's interests in far flung and unexpected places and their support for particular communities of fellow nationals and itinerant travellers in difficulties. These unnoticed actors on the international stage played far more complicated roles than one generally imagines..Contributors are: Tina Tamman, David Schriffl, Ariane Knuesel , Lori Maguire, Laurent Cesari, Sue Onslow, Pedro Aires Oliveira, David Lee, and Marek Handerek
_Martin Packard is an extraordinary man who has led an extraordinary life. An idealist and a man of liberal instincts, his enthusiasms resulted in him having an inside track in several major events of recent decades, including the coup and bloody dictatorship in Greece and the unravelling of the Soviet Union. Easy going, warm and generous with his friendship, his life story is a ripping read_.- **Peter Murtagh, journalist and author of The Rape of Greece (Simon & Schuster, London, 1994)**_His story needed telling_ - **Peter Preston,****editor of The Guardian 1975-1995**_This gripping biography is a classic tale of fact being stranger than fiction. Martin Packard was an incurable romantic who thought he could do ethical business in the chaos of Gorbachev's perestroika Russia, but was constantly thwarted by more ruthless rivals or incompetent partners. He was a Don Quixote of the Cold War. His story is a fascinating, alternative and very personal view on the confrontations of his times, from the cynical US and UK policies towards Greece and Cyprus, to the chaotic collapse of the USSR. His tale suggests that cock-up, not conspiracy, is usually the most plausible explanation of history._ - **Quentin Peel, former Moscow Correspondent and Foreign Editor of the Financial Times.**_Wonderful. They dont make men like that anymore._ - **Helena Smith, Correspondent of The Guardian for Greece and Cyprus.**This biography describes how a British naval officer became a Kremlin favourite and CIA target as Gorbachevs Moscow tried to open its economy to the West. He would gear the riches of Siberia and they would gain technology and foreign exchange. But, as the Communist Party imploded, this previously-undescribed offer turned into a Faustian bargain, and his life became a captivating saga of rags-to-riches-to-rags.In 1985, Gorbachevs Kremlin decided to open the Soviet economy to the west. It reached out to Martin Packard, a retired British naval commander, who rose briefly to become to some Russians the most important foreign businessman in the Soviet Union, but then precipitously collapsed. This book describes his rise, the details of his freelancing for Gorbachev - and his fall.A former intelligence analyst at the British Mediterranean command in Malta, Packards role as Scarlet Pimpernel of the Greek Colonels saw him forced out of the Royal Navy. He then became one of the largest jeans manufacturers in Europe. In this capacity, the insiders of Gorbachevs perestroika made him a focus of their efforts to lift the life of the Soviet peoples, an unlikely partnership of the Kremlin and a quintessential Briton, a scion of Empire, Church and Navy, but a non-conformist in every sense.It is a political tale, where Packard finds himself at odds with the British Foreign Office and the CIA in Cyprus and the Colonels Greece. Forced out of the Navy, he begins to head the English Cell of the Greek resistance, shipping printing presses, passports and petards across Europe to Athens. He then becomes an intimate of the wayward but brilliant Dom Mintoff and survives a mysterious poison attempt by Erica at a Moscow airport.It is also a deeply human tale, of a charismatic figure who rose so high, mingled with the mighty of East and West, and then lost it all
"The Cold War still casts a long shadow over contemporary American society. It was a transformative era that continues to condition Americans' national anxieties, popular culture, consumer habits, and identity. The essays in "Red Reckoning" take an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to examine how the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century impacted American society. While historians and political scientists have explored Cold War American culture in numerous monographs on individual subjects, this collection analyzes the myriad ways the conflict forced Americans to reconsider almost every aspect of their society, culture, and identity. The essays included are lively, engaging, and cover subjects that will interest students and scholars of post-1945 United States History. They should also appeal to readers wishing to understand modern America's political, legal, and cultural foundations. The subjects include the Cold War's impact on the national security state, race relations, gun culture and masculinity, law, college football, advertising, music, film, free speech, religion, and even board games. Contributing scholars include Tony Shaw, the leading scholar on American Cold War movies, and Elaine Tyler May, whose Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988) redefined our understanding of Cold War family dynamics. "Red Reckoning" offers readers an immersion into what it was like to live through the Cold War, revealing a society that was evolving in the ways it consumed media and entertainment and reacted to the infrastructures, cultural mores, and the rise of a national security state necessary to win the conflict. The first section of the volume explores the Cold War's impact on the legal and structural contours of American life. Section two examines how the Cold War affected identity by forcing Americans to reconsider notions of racial inclusiveness, gender norms, and religiosity. Section three analyzes the production and consumption of popular culture and demonstrates how the conflict transformed movies, literature, music, and sports, making them key components in the ideological battle against communism"--
"In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past-and future-of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution."
The first book to tell the story of day-to-day life on the nuclear home front - from the host of #1 podcast Atomic Hobo**A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK and A GUARDIAN BEST PAPERBACK FOR APRIL 2024 **'So entertaining' THE TIMES'Cracking' SUNDAY TELEGRAPHThe atomic bombs of 1945 changed everything. For the next forty years, the mushroom cloud loomed large in public imaginations and fear of the blasts apocalyptic power coloured every aspect of British daily life.From makeshift shelters and herbal remedies to sirens that offered four-minute escapes, ordinary people were taught how to save themselves in the face of a catastrophe that was not survivable. Meanwhile, bunkers were readied for those officials and experts who would ensure life continued after Armageddon.At once chilling and darkly funny, this is the story of how Britain braced for nuclear conflict - and of how, so long as nuclear weapons exist, the threat of total annihilation will always be with us.'Thrilling and profoundly important' JULIET NICOLSON'Simultaneously horrifying, weirdly nostalgic and darkly hilarious' MARK HADDON'Impossible to believe, just as hard to put down' DAN SNOW
This volume examines the ways in which blind activists from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe entered the postwar international disability movement and shaped its content and its course. Maria Cristina Galmarini shows that the international work of socialist blind activists was defined by the larger politics of the Cold War and, in many respects, represented a field of competition with the West in which the East could shine. Yet, her study also reveals that socialist blind politics went beyond propaganda. When socialist activists joined the international blind movement, they initiated an exchange of experiences that profoundly impacted everyone involved. Not only did the international blind movement turn global disability welfare from philanthropy to self-advocacy, but it also gave East European and Soviet activists a new set of ideas and technologies to improve their own national movements.
The catastrophic terror Soviet power unleashed on the Ukrainian countryside in the early 1930s altered every aspect of village life. Based on extensive interviews with villagers throughout Ukraine, The Transformation of Civil Society provides an oral history of the material and cultural destruction sustained in rural Ukraine throughout the Stalinist era. Beginning with wholesale deportations and evictions, followed by the process of collectivization in Ukraine, the Soviet state's impact on peasant life extended deep into the fabric of society. Targeting the cultural life of these Ukrainians, the 1930s began with the physical repression of religious institutions and personnel, the repression of church ritual, and later, the repression of entertainment and expressive culture such as music making. By bringing to light the experiences of more than four hundred Ukrainians who witnessed the terror of the Stalinist era, William Noll privileges villagers' points of view on the near total destruction of their world and preserves the memory of their civil society. Almost twenty-five years after its Ukrainian publication, The Transformation of Civil Society makes this classic available in English for the first time
Even before World War II had ended, survivors, historians, writers, and artists tried to make sense of the Holocaust. To do so, they relied on belief systems and narratives that, as the bloc confrontation intensified, were increasingly shaped by Cold War thinking. Foregrounding the Cold War's role in shaping Holocaust memory, this book highlights how the global conflict between East and West influenced research, legal proceedings, and collective as well as individual memories of the murder of European Jews. Contributions focusing on different parts of the world reveal commonalities, differences, and entanglements between Eastern and Western memories of the Holocaust. Examining Holocaust memory from various disciplinary perspectives, the authors highlight the many ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and survivors both countered and contributed to dominant narratives shaped by oppositional ideological stances. While such distinct ideological positions often mattered greatly, at other times a shared interest in bringing perpetrators to justice, commemorating victims, and providing testimony to the atrocities committed against Europe's Jews led to cooperation and exchange across the Iron Curtain
