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Historians often think of Russia before the 1860s in terms of conservative stasis, when the ‘gendarme of Europe’ secured order beyond the country’s borders and entrenched the autocratic system at home. This book offers a profoundly different vision of Russia under Nicholas I. Drawing on an extensive array of sources, it reveals that many of modern Russia’s most distinctive and outstanding features can be traced back to an inconspicuous but exceptional year. Russia became what it did, in no small measure, because of 1837. The catalogue of the year’s noteworthy occurrences extends from the realms of culture, religion, and ideas to those of empire, politics, and industry. Exploring these diverse issues and connecting seemingly divergent historical actors, Paul W. Werth reveals that the 1830s in Russia were a period of striking dynamism and consequence, and that 1837 was pivotal for the country’s entry into the modern age. From the romantic death of Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, in January to a colossal fire at the Winter Palace in December, Russia experienced much that was astonishing in 1837: the railway and provincial press appeared, Russian opera made its debut, Orthodoxy pushed westward, the first Romanov visited Siberia—and much else besides. The cumulative effect was profound. The country’s integration accelerated, and a Russian nation began to emerge, embodied in new institutions and practices, within the larger empire. The result was a quiet revolution, after which Russia would never be the same.

Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Some observers consequently have gone so far as to suggest that human rights are a concept alien to African cultures. The International Criminal Court (ICC)’s focus on Africa in recent years has reinforced the region’s reputation as a hotspot for human rights violations. But despite Africa’s notoriety concerning human rights, Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights argues that the continent has been pivotal for helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices. Challenging prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of human rights’ origins and evolution, it demonstrates that from the colonial era to the present Africa’s peoples have drawn attention to and prompted novel ways of thinking about human rights through their encounters with the world at large. Beginning with the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State in the 1880s and ending with the ICC’s current activities in Africa, it reveals how African events, personalities, groups, and nations have influenced the trajectory of human rights history in intriguing and critical ways, in the end enlarging and universalizing a major discourse of our time.

The Black Death of 1348–9 is the most catastrophic event in recorded history, and this study—the Ford Lectures of 2019 at Oxford University—offers a major re-evaluation of its immediate impact and longer-term consequences in England. It draws upon recent inter-disciplinary research into climate and disease; renewed interest among econometricians in the origins of the Little Divergence, whereby economic performance in parts of north-western Europe began to move decisively ahead of the rest of the continent on the pathway to modernity; a close re-reading of case studies of fourteenth-century England; and original new research into manorial and governmental sources. The Black Death is placed within the wider contexts of extreme weather and epidemiological events, the institutional framework of markets and serfdom, and the role of the law in reducing risk and shaping behaviour. The government’s response to the crisis is re-considered to suggest an innovative re-interpretation of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. By 1400 the main effects of plague had worked through the economy and society, and their implications for England’s future precocity are analysed. This study rescues the third quarter of the fourteenth century from a little-understood paradox between plague and revolt, and elevates it to a critical period of profound and irreversible change in English and global history.

Species acclimatization--the organized introduction of organisms to a new region--is much maligned in the present day. However, colonization depended on moving people, plants, and animals from place to place, and in centuries past, scientists, landowners, and philanthropists formed acclimatization societies to study local species and conditions, form networks of supporters, and exchange supposedly useful local and exotic organisms across the globe. Pete Minard tells the story of this movement, arguing that the colonies, not the imperial centers, led the movement for species acclimatization. Far from attempting to re-create London or Paris, settlers sought to combine plants and animals to correct earlier environmental damage and to populate forests, farms, and streams to make them healthier and more productive. By focusing particularly on the Australian colony of Victoria, Minard reveals a global network of would-be acclimatizers, from Britain and France to Russia and the United States. Although the movement was short-lived, the long reach of nineteenth-century acclimatization societies continues to be felt today, from choked waterways to the uncontrollable expansion of European pests in former colonies.

This book explores ways of thinking, feeling, and talking about homosexuality in the 1970s, an influential decade sandwiched between the partial decriminalization of sex between men in 1969, and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Moving beyond divided Cold War Berlin, this book also shines a light on the scores of lesser-known West German towns and cities that were home to a gay group by the end of the 1970s. Yet gay liberation did not take place only in activist meetings and on street demonstrations, but also on television, in magazine editorial offices, ordinary homes, bedrooms—and beyond. In considering all these spaces and individuals, this book provides a more complex account than previous histories, which have tended to focus only on a social movement and only on the idea of ‘gay pride’. By drawing attention to ambivalence, this book shows that gay liberation was never only about pride, but also about shame; characterized not only by hope, but also by fear; and driven forward not just by the pushes of confrontation, but also by the pulls of conformism. Ranging from the painstaking emergence of the gay press to the first representation of homosexuality on television, from debates over the sexual legacy of 1968 to the memory of Nazi persecution, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation is the first English-language book to tell the story of male homosexual politics in 1970s West Germany. In so doing, this book changes the way we think about this key period in modern queer history.

The U.S.-Israel relationship that most people recognize today, which includes enormous amounts of U.S. military aid to Israel, a powerful strategic alliance, and an American willingness to acquiesce to Israeli occupation of certain Arab territories taken in 1967, came into existence between 1967 and 1975. The U.S. Congress played a key role in shaping American-Israeli relations during this period (as it does today) and, therefore, occupies a central place in this book. No book-length treatment of U.S.-Israel relations focuses primarily on the role of Congress. The imbalance in the scholarly perspective has created a misleading narrative that treats the legislative branch as being incidental to foreign policymaking. But in the years between the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the 1975 Sinai II agreement, an activist Congress, empowered by the quagmire in East Asia and popular distrust of the presidency, and increasingly influenced by the Israel lobby, played a central role in reworking U.S.-Israel relations, and U.S. relations with the Middle East more generally.

This book analyses Anna of Denmark’s material and visual patronage at the Stuart courts, examining her engagement with a wide array of expressive media including architecture, garden design, painting, music, dress, and jewellery. Encompassing Anna’s time in Denmark, England, and Scotland, it establishes patterns of interest and influence in her agency, while furthering our knowledge of Baltic-British transfer in the early modern period. Substantial archival work has facilitated a formative re-conceptualisation of James and Anna’s relationship, extended our knowledge of the constituents of consortship in the period, and has uncovered evidence to challenge the view that Anna followed the cultural accomplishments of her son, Prince Henry. This book reclaims Anna of Denmark as the influential and culturally active royal woman that her contemporaries knew. Combining politics, culture, and religion across the courts of Denmark, Scotland, and England, it enriches our understanding of royal women’s roles in early modern patriarchal societies and their impact on the development of cultural modes and fashions. This book will be of interest to upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on early modern Europe in the disciplines of Art and Architectural History, English Literature, Theatre Studies, History, and Gender Studies. It will also attract a wide range of academics working on early modern material and visual culture, and female patronage, while members of the public who enjoy the history of courts and the British royals will also find it distinctively appealing.

This book interleaves the history of post-Independence archaeology in India with the life and times of Madhukar Narhar Deshpande (1920–2008), a leading Indian archaeologist who went on to become the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. Spanning nearly a century, this is a tale about the circumstances which brought men like Deshpande to this career path; what it was like to grow up in a family devoted to India’s freedom; the watershed moment that created a large cohort that was trained by Mortimer Wheeler, the doyen of British archaeology who headed the Archaeological Survey in the twilight years of the British Raj; the unknown conservation stories around the Gol Gumbad in Bijapur and the Qutb Minar in Delhi; the forgotten story of how the fabric of a historic Hindu shrine, the Badrinath temple, was saved; the chemistry shared by the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the archaeologist, Deshpande at historic cave shrines like Ajanta and Ellora, and; the political and administrative challenges faced by director generals of archaeology. The story is told through a main character—Deshpande himself—some of whose writings have been included here. Equally, there are others who figure in the narrative as it reconstructs and recounts the story of Indian archaeology after 1947 through those lives as also through the institutional history of the Archaeological Survey and the processes that were central to the discoveries it made and the challenges it faced.

From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence how Britons work, how they are educated, the music they listen to, the food they eat, the items in their homes, and even how they remember their own history. This book is the remarkable story of an institution unlike any other—a society for the improvement of everything and anything. The book shows how this vibrant and singularly ambitious organisation has evolved and adapted, constantly having to reinvent itself to keep in step with changing times. The Society has served as a platform for Victorian utilitarian reformers, purchased and restored an entire village, encouraged the planting of more than sixty million trees, and sought technological alternatives to child labour. But this is more than just a story about unusual public initiatives. It is an engaging and authoritative history of almost three centuries of social reform and competing visions of a better world-the Society's members have been drawn from across the political spectrum, including Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Karl Marx. The book reveals how a society of public-spirited individuals tried to make their country a better place, and draws vital lessons from their triumphs and failures for all would-be reformers today.

In the tumultuous year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, 29-year-old Pete O’Neal became inspired by reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and founded the Kansas City branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP). The same year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the BPP was the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This book is the gripping story of O’Neal, one of the influential members of the movement, who now lives in Africa—unable to return to the United States but refusing to renounce his past. Arrested in 1969 and convicted for transporting a shotgun across state lines, O’Neal was free on bail pending his appeal when Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, was assassinated by the police. O’Neal and his wife fled the U.S. for Algiers. Eventually they settled in Tanzania, where they continue the social justice work of the Panthers through community and agricultural programs and host study-abroad programs for American students. Paul Magnarella—a veteran of the United Nations Criminal Tribunals and O’Neal’s attorney during his appeals process from 1997–2001—describes his unsuccessful attempts to overturn what he argues was a wrongful conviction. He lucidly reviews the evidence of judicial errors, the prosecution’s use of a paid informant as a witness, perjury by both the prosecution’s key witness and a federal agent, as well as other constitutional violations. He demonstrates how O’Neal was denied justice during the height of the COINTELPRO assault on black activists in the U.S.

The German council movements arose through mass strikes and soldier mutinies towards the end of the First World War. They brought down the German monarchy, founded several short-lived council republics, and dramatically transformed European politics. This book reconstructs how participants in the German council movements struggled for a democratic socialist society. It examines their attempts to democratize politics, the economy, and society through building powerful worker-led organizations and cultivating workers’ political agency. Drawing from the practices of the council movements and the writings of theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, and Karl Kautsky, this book returns to their radical vision of a self-determining society and their political programme of democratization and socialization. It presents a powerful argument for renewed attention to the political theories of this historical period and for their ongoing relevance today.

This book offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in nineteenth-century Britain. The Cancer Problem begins by looking at a community of doctors and patients who lived and worked in the streets surrounding The Middlesex Hospital in London. It follows in their footsteps as they walked the labyrinthine lanes and passages that branched off Tottenham Court Road; then, through seven chapters, its focus expands to successively include the rivers, lakes, and forests of England, the mountains, poverty, and hunger of the four nations of the British Isles, the reluctant and resistant inhabitants of the British Empire, and the networks of scientists and doctors spread across Europe and North America. It argues that it was in the nineteenth century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease’s incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Caritas, a form of divine grace that transformed neighbourly love into moral action, was a key concept in early modern Europe, guiding ideas about morality, the self, and becoming an embodied ethic. This book introduces the concept of an ‘emotional ethic’ to help explain the role of caritas in early modern communities, where love was not simply how one should feel about one’s neighbour but the ways that our bodies and emotions guide us to ethical action. It explores how an emotional ethic operates through a study of how caritas was deployed amongst the lower orders in eighteenth-century Scotland. With chapters that focus on marriage, childhood and youth, ‘sinful sex’, privacy and secrecy, and hospitality towards the itinerant poor, the ways in which caritas was learned and deployed as part of everyday social practice are highlighted. Caritas enjoined Christians to modesty, chastity, control of dress, and passion, but also to a generous love and care, imagined in familial terms. As an ethic that was enacted through the body, caritas produced a particular form of sociable self. Over the eighteenth century, new ideas of romantic love, as well as more secular social emotions like fraternity and benevolence, offered alternative mechanisms for justifying feeling and behaviour. This book explores how new ideas about emotion intertwined with an older model of neighbourly love, explaining not only deviant behaviours but also how the self came to be formed in this new context.

Charity is common to diaspora communities the world over, from Armenian diaspora networks to Zimbabwean ones, but the forms charitable activity takes vary across communities and sites of settlement. What was distinctive about Chinese diaspora charity? This volume explores the history of charity among overseas Chinese during the century from 1850 to 1949 with a particular focus on the Cantonese "Gold Rush" communities of the Pacific rim, a loosely integrated network of émigrés from Cantonese-speaking counties in Guangdong Province, centering on colonial Hong Kong where people lived, worked and moved among English-speaking settler societies of North America and Oceania. The Cantonese Pacific was distinguished from fabled Nanyang communities of Southeast Asia in a number of ways and the forms their charity assumed were equally distinctive. In addition to traditional functions, charity served as a medium of cross-cultural negotiation with dominant Anglo-settler societies of the Pacific. Community leaders worked through civic associations to pioneer new models of public charity to demand recognition of Chinese immigrants as equal citizens in their host societies. Their charitable innovations were shaped by their host societies in turn, exemplified by women's role in charitable activities from the early decades of the 20^th century. By focusing on charitable practices in the Cantonese diaspora over a century of trans-Pacific migration, this collection sheds new light on the history of charity in the Chinese diaspora, including institutional innovations not apparent within China itself, and on the place of the Chinese diaspora in the wider history of charity and philanthropy.

This book links key events in Chicago's development, from its marshy origins in the 1600s to today's robust metropolis. The book presents Chicago in terms of the people whose lives made the city–from the tycoons and the politicians to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. This revised and updated second edition brings Chicago's story into the twenty-first century, as it reviews the colorful and dramatic panorama of the city's explosive past. How did the pungent swamplands that the Native Americans called “the wild-garlic place” burgeon into one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cities? What is the real story behind the Great Chicago Fire? What aspects of American industry exploded with the bomb in Haymarket Square? Could the gritty blue-collar hometown of Al Capone become a visionary global city? A city of immigrants and entrepreneurs, Chicago is quintessentially American. The book brings it to life and highlights the key people, moments, and special places–from Fort Dearborn to Cabrini-Green, Marquette to Mayor Daley, the Union Stock Yards to the Chicago Bulls–that make this incredible city, the book claims, one of the best places in the world.

This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic designs, oratory, and ceremonial practices. Brown shows that distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I. This book provides the most comprehensive overview of the American war memorial as a cultural form and reframes the national debate over Civil War monuments that remain potent presences on the civic landscape.

This book provides a new interpretive framework for Western archaeological expeditions along the Silk Road in northwestern China during the first three decades of the twentieth century. By placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Sven Hedin, and other explorers back within the original political, economic, cultural, and intellectual contexts of the late Qing and early Republican eras, the author challenges the longstanding assumption that coercion, deceit, and corruption were responsible for allowing Western archaeologists to remove so many cultural relics from China. This study concludes that the majority of people who interacted with the Western archaeologist in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia made the conscious and willing decision to aid and abet his expedition in exchange for various forms of capital that were perceived to be of greater value than the objects he removed. In the decades after the 1911 revolution and World War I, however, the value of these compensations began to decrease as the value of the artifacts targeted by the archaeologist increased. As a result, a new generation of Westernized Chinese scholars began to criminalize the prior activities of Western archaeologists, who could no longer offer a form of compensation that exceeded the now priceless valuation projected onto the artifact within the newly imagined Chinese nation. This process of criminalization also played an influential role in formulating new ideas about cultural sovereignty that are still debated today.

This personal and frank book offers an insider's view on the violent confrontations in Charlottesville during the “summer of hate.” Blending memoir, courtroom drama, and a consideration of the unhealed wound of racism in our society, the book shines a light on the conflict between the value of free speech and the protection of civil rights. The author has spent his career in the thick of these tempestuous and fraught issues, from acting as lead counsel in a famous Supreme Court decision challenging Virginia's law against burning crosses, to serving as co-counsel in a libel suit brought by a fraternity against Rolling Stone magazine for publishing an article alleging that one of the fraternity's initiation rituals included gang rape. The author has also been active as a university leader, serving as dean of three law schools and president of one and railing against hate speech and sexual assault on US campuses. Well before the tiki torches cast their ominous shadows across the nation, the city of Charlottesville sought to relocate the Unite the Right rally; the author was approached to represent the alt-right groups. Though the author declined, he came to wonder what his history of advocacy had wrought. Feeling unsettlingly complicit, the author joined the Charlottesville Task Force, and realized that the events that transpired there had meaning and resonance far beyond a singular time and place. Why, he wonders, has one of our foundational rights created a land in which such tragic clashes happen all too frequently?

This collection of essays is set up to explore the dynamics of local/national political culture in seventeenth-century Britain, with particular reference to political communication. It examines the degree to which connections were forged between politics in London, Whitehall and Westminster, and politics in the localities, and the patterns and processes that can be recovered. The fundamental goal is to foster a dialogue between two prominent strands within recent historiography, and between the work of social and political historians of the early modern period. Chapters by leading historians of Stuart Britain examine how the state worked to communicate with its people and how local communities, often far from the metropole, opened their own lines of communication with the centre. The volume then is not meant to be an exhaustive study of all forms of political communication but it nevertheless highlights a variety of ways this agenda can be addressed. At present there is ongoing work on subscriptional culture across the nation from petitioning to Protestation, loyal addresses, lobbying and litigation to name but a few. It is hoped that this volume will provide a reminder of the gains to be made by placing political communication at the heart of both social and political history and to provide an impetus for further scholarship.

This book features fourteen chapters that track changes in the ways Americans have perceived the Latter-day Saints since the 1830s. From presidential politics, to political violence, to the definition of marriage, to the meaning of sexual equality—the book places Mormons in larger American histories of territorial expansion, religious mission, Constitutional interpretation, and state formation. The chapters also show that the political support of the Latter-day Saints has proven, at critical junctures, valuable to other political groups. The willingness of Americans to accept Latter-day Saints as full participants in the United States political system has ranged over time and been impelled by political expediency, granting Mormons in the United States an ambiguous status, contingent on changing political needs and perceptions.