Browse

Opposition to apartheid was one of the great moments in postwar history. Its success remains a symbol of a progressive global community. An African Volk looks at this phenomenon from the other side. It explores how the apartheid state in South Africa sought to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a new postcolonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy. Drawing upon archival research across Southern Africa and beyond, as well as over fifty hours of interviews with leading figures from the apartheid order, An African Volk shows how instead of simply resisting decolonization and African nationalism in the name of white supremacy, the white power structure looked to hijack and invert the norms of the new global era to relegitimize its rule, break out of isolation, and secure international acceptance. Situated at the nexus of African, decolonization, and Cold War history, An African Volk tells the story of how the architects of apartheid used statecraft to redefine whiteness and promote a fresh ideological basis for their rule. In doing so, it offers new global and local perspectives on the apartheid state and illuminates the complexities and contradictions of the postcolonial project. Equally, it shows how the regime’s outreach to Africa both reflected and fueled heated debates within Afrikaner society over the relationship between race, nation, and state, exposing a deeply divided polity in the midst of massive economic, cultural, and social change.

Soon after his first inauguration in 1934, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia began appointing women into his administration. By the end of his three terms he had installed almost a hundred women as lawyers, board and commission members and secretaries, deputy commissioners, and judges. No previous mayor had done anything comparable. These “Women of the La Guardia Administration” met frequently for mutual support and political strategizing. This book tells their stories. It begins with the city’s suffrage movement, which prepared them for political action. After they won the vote in 1917, they joined political party clubs and began to run for office. Their plan was to use political platforms to enact feminist and progressive public policies. Circumstances unique to mid-twentieth-century New York City advanced their progress. In 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an inquiry into alleged corruption in the city’s government, long dominated by the Democratic Party’s machine, Tammany Hall. The inquiry turned first to charges of Vice Squad entrapment of women for sex crimes and their treatment in the city’s Women’s Court. Outraged by the inquiry’s disclosures and impressed by La Guardia’s pledge to rein in Tammany, many New York City women activists supported him for mayor. As appointees in his administration, they then helped him fulfill his plans for modernizing city government. This book argues that La Guardia’s women appointees contributed to his administration’s success and left a rich legacy of experience and political wisdom to oncoming generations of women in politics.

Aid Under Fire explores American nation building and modernization efforts in South Vietnam during the decade leading up to the full-scale ground war.Beginning in the mid-1950s, American nation builders traveled to southern Vietnam, eager to help establish a permanent non-Communist state that would advance US interests in Asia.Ignoring the political concerns of the majority of the Vietnamese people, they supported the South Vietnamese government through a massive program of military, economic, and technical assistance.Based on American and Vietnamese archival sources, this book tells the story of how nation-building efforts were carried out and reveals in stark terms the limits on American power and influence in the period widely considered the apex of US supremacy in the world. This bookfocuses on the activities of the civilian aid workers who spearheaded US policies in South Vietnam.Confident in the transformative power of American models, these men and women were developmental enthusiasts who sought to reform Vietnamese institutions and garner support for the government in Saigon.However, like the government officials who recruited them, most aid workers lacked a basic knowledge and understanding of Vietnamese culture, history, and politics.As a result, they attempted to replicate political, economic, and military systems on the basis oftheir own experiences while displaying a willful blindness to the conditions and attitudes in Vietnam. By examining civilian aid workers’ role in implementing and shaping American modernization efforts in Vietnam, this book shows how nation building functioned—and ultimately failed—at the ground level.

This book reconstructs American consular activity in Ireland from 1790 to 1913 and elucidates the interconnectedness of America's foreign interests, Irish nationalism and British imperialism. Its originality lies in that it is based on an interrogation of American, British and Irish archives, and covers over one hundred years of American, Irish and British relations through the post of the American consular official while also uncovering the consul's role in seminal events such as the War of 1812, the 1845–51 Irish famine, the American Civil War, Fenianism and mass Irish emigration. The book is a history of the men who filled posts as consuls, vice consuls, deputy consuls and consular agents. It reveals their identities, how they interpreted and implemented US foreign policy, their outsider perspective on events in both Ireland and America and their contribution to the expanding transatlantic relationship.

Place matters in how Americans have responded to and sought to influence US foreign policy. The dynamic of domestic regional influence on US foreign relations was especially apparent in the American South’s role in the Vietnam War. From the general public to soldiers, college students, and crucially placed political leaders, Dixie supported the war more strongly and longer than any other section of the country. As had been the southern practice since the 1780s, the South’s bellicose foreign policy stance was grounded in distinctly regional political and economic interests, racial views, ideological and historical assumptions, and religious values. Although Dixie’s support helped to sustain an increasingly unpopular war under both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, many of these same regional interests and values spawned an articulate minority opposition to the war. These antiwar protests, together with the war’s mounting agony, led even the South and its prowar leaders to tire of the conflict by the early 1970s.

Our understanding of Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s is being transformed. For decades, historians were locked in a narrow debate about the degree of central control over the terror process. Recent archival research is underpinning new, innovative approaches and opening new perspectives. Historians are exploring the roots of the Terror in the heritage of war and mass repression in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods; in the regime’s focus not just on former ‘oppositionists’, wreckers, and saboteurs, but also on crime and social disorder; in the common European concern to identify and isolate ‘undesirable’ elements. They are examining in much greater depth and detail the precipitants and triggers that turned a determination to protect the Revolution into a ferocious mass repression. This volume brings together the work of the leading historians of Stalinist Terror in sixteen chapters, paired on eight themes, presenting not only the latest developments in the field, but the latest evolution of the debate. Some pairings reflect the diversity of sources, methodologies, and angles of approach to a given subject. Others show stark differences of opinion. Each is briefly introduced by the authors and because no pairing can exhaust a topic, each is followed by a short list of recommended further readings. These are biased towards books and articles in English for the undergraduates, postgraduates and other students of the Stalin-era who will be the main audience of this book.

This book is concerned with the modes and procedures of Anglo-papal diplomacy in the period 1305–60, when diplomatic affairs between England and the papacy intensified following the transfer of the papal curia to southern France in 1305 and on account of the on-going Anglo-French hostilities, which resulted in the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337. On the one hand, the book investigates how diplomatic and administrative practices developed in England and at the papal curia from a comparative perspective, whilst, on the other, it questions the legacy and impact of international and domestic conflicts on diplomatic and administrative practices. In Part I, the book explores how foreign and diplomatic relations, conducted through both official and unofficial diplomatic communications among polities, prompted the need to adapt and ‘translate’ different traditions in order to forge a ‘shared language of diplomacy’. This was achieved thanks to the adaptation of house styles, formularies, and ceremonial practices, as well as through the contribution of intermediaries and diplomatic agents acquainted with different diplomatic and legal traditions. Part II of the book further assesses the impact of political change and conflict on administrative and diplomatic practices by means of four relevant case studies.

Best known today as “the other speaker at Gettysburg” alongside Abraham Lincoln, Edward Everett had a distinguished and revealing career in American politics between the 1820s and the Civil War. He served as a member of both houses of Congress, governor of Massachusetts, U.S. representative to Britain, president of Harvard, and Secretary of State. On the strength of his crusade to save Mount Vernon as a shrine to the Union, Everett also appeared as a vice presidential candidate in the momentous presidential election of 1860. He was unrivalled as an orator and statesman for Union. This study of Everett’s political career illuminates vital themes at the state, national, and international levels of American politics, across several decades. Everett was deeply committed both to vision of moral and material reform and to preserving the Union by tying Americans’ hearts to a shared history. But the issue of slavery constantly threatened to derail all of Everett’s nation-building efforts. This political biography, by tracing Everett’s movement along the antislavery spectrum, exemplifies how most Northerners considered slavery within a larger context of competing priorities that alternately furthered or blocked antislavery action. Everett’s moderate position on slavery and perennial efforts to preserve the sacred Union connected him with masses of his fellow Americans. The emotional popular response to his appeals illustrates the ongoing power of Unionism even as the nation’s sectional divide worsened. This account of Everett’s career thus helps us see the coming of the Civil War as a three-sided, not a two-sided, contest.

This book sets a new agenda for the debate over education in America. It argues that both sides of the current debate—the elitist, anti-democratic conservatives and the radical champions of political correctness—have missed the point. The book argues that rather than arguing over who should be taught, what should be taught, and how it should be paid for, education must be addressed as the well-spring of democracy in the United States. Education should engender in students a commitment to community service, the literacy to live in a civil society, the competence to participate in democratic communities, the ability to think critically and deliberately in a pluralistic world, and the empathy to help people to understand their fellow citizens.

This book provides the first comprehensive history of the arms-racing phenomenon in modern international politics, drawing both on theoretical approaches and on the latest historical research. Written by an international team of specialists, it is divided into four sections: before 1914; the inter-war years; the Cold War; and extra-European and post-Cold War arms races. Twelve case studies examine land and naval armaments before the First World War; air as well as land and naval competition during the 1920s and 1930s; and nuclear as well as conventional weapons since 1945. Armaments policies are placed within the context of technological development and international politics and diplomacy, as well as that of of politics and economics within the societies concerned. An extended general introduction and conclusion, and four section introductions, provide coherence between the twelve more specialized chapters and draw out wider implications for policymakers and for political scientists. The book addresses two key questions: what causes arms races, and what is the connection between arms races and the outbreak of wars?

This book demonstrates that early utopian visions for England’s American colonies had a lasting impact. Those early plans not only influenced the future form of American cities, but they shaped the American political landscape as well. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, was one of the most powerful politicians in England when he and seven other noblemen founded the Province of Carolina. At an early stage in planning the colony, Ashley Cooper enlisted the assistance of John Locke in preparing its constitution, settlement strategy, and urban-regional design guidelines. Together they left an indelible imprint on the colony and America. Combined with other influences, notably Caribbean slave society, Carolina went on to influence the development of southern political culture. That unique political culture is rooted in ancient hierarchical traditions that stand in sharp contrast to America’s Enlightenment tradition (ironically also shaped in part by the later Locke). The book concludes with an appeal to urbanists, environmentalists, scientists, and others grounded in the Enlightenment paradigms of equality and reason to understand the powerful attraction of pre-Enlightenment political culture. Doing so, the book argues, requires understanding America’s utopian colonial origins.

What was the Holy Roman Empire in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries? At the turning point between the medieval and early modern periods, this vast central European polity was the continent’s most politically fragmented. The imperial monarchs were often weak and distant, while an array of regional actors played autonomous political roles. The Empire’s obvious differences from more centralized European kingdoms have stimulated negative judgements and fraught debates, expressed in the historiographical concepts of fractured ‘territorial states’ and a disjointed ‘imperial constitution’. This book challenges these interpretations through a wide-ranging case study of Upper Germany between 1346 and 1521. By examining the interactions of princes, prelates, nobles, and towns comparatively, it demonstrates that a range of actors and authorities shared the same toolkit of rituals, judicial systems, and configurations of government. Crucially, Upper German elites all participated in leagues, alliances, and other treaty-based associations. As frameworks for collective activity, associations were a vital means of enabling and regulating warfare, justice and arbitration, and even lordship and administration. The prevalence of associations encouraged a mentality of ‘horizontal’ membership of political communities, so that even the Empire itself came to be understood and articulated as an extensive and multi-layered association. On the basis of this evidence, the book offers a new and more coherent vision of the Holy Roman Empire as a sprawling community of interdependent elites who interacted within the framework of a shared ‘associative political culture’, which constituted an alternative structure and pathway of political development in pre-modern Europe.

‘Being Soviet’ takes a refreshing and innovative approach to the crucial years between 1939 and 1953 in the USSR. It addresses two of the key recent debates concerning Stalinism. It answers the question ‘what was the logic and language of Soviet power?’ by shifting the focus away from Russian nationalism and onto Soviet identity. ‘Sovietness’ is explored via the newspapers, films, plays, and popular music of the era. Soviet identity, in relation to the outside world, provided a powerful frame of reference in the late‐Stalin years. ‘Being Soviet's’ most significant contribution lies in its novel answer to the question ‘How did ordinary citizens relate to Soviet power?’ It avoids the current Foucault‐inspired emphasis on ‘supporters’ and ‘resistors’ of the regime. Instead it argues that most Soviet citizens did not fit easily into either category. Their relationship with Soviet power was defined by a series of subtle ‘tactics of the habitat’ (Kotkin) that enabled them to stay fed, informed, and entertained in these difficult times. ‘Being Soviet’ offers a rich and textured discussion of those everyday survival strategies including rumours, jokes, hairstyles, music tastes, sexual relationships, and political campaigning. Each chapter finishes by exploring what this everyday behaviour tells us about the collective mentalité of Stalin‐era society. ‘Being Soviet’ focuses on the place of Britain and America within Soviet identity; their evolution from wartime allies to Cold War enemies played a vital role in redefining what it meant to be Soviet in Stalin's last years.

Humor is sometimes a serious business, especially the humor of Benjamin Franklin, a master at revealing the human condition through comedy. For the country's bicentennial, Reader's Digest named Franklin “Man of the Year” for embodying the characteristics we admire most about ourselves as Americans: humor, irony, energy, and fresh insight. Recreating Franklin's words in the way that his contemporaries would have read and understood them, this book chronicles Franklin's use (and abuse) of humor for commercial, diplomatic, and political purposes. Dedicated to the uniquely appealing and enduring humor of Benjamin Franklin, the book samples Franklin's apologues on the necessity of living reasonably even when life's circumstances may seem absurd.

This book studies German Jews involved in ventures that were from the beginning, or became increasingly, of the Right. Jewish agricultural settlement, Jews’ participation in the so-called Defense of Germandom in the East, their place in military and veteran circles, and finally right-of-center politics form the core of this book. These topics created a web of social activities and political persuasions neither entirely conservative nor entirely liberal. For those German Jews engaging with these issues, their motivation came from sincere love of their German Heimat—a term for home imbued with a deep sense of belonging—and from their middle-class environment, as well as a desire to repudiate antisemitic stereotypes of rootlessness, intellectualism, or cosmopolitanism. This tension stands at the heart of the book. The book also asks when did the need for self-defense start to outweigh motivations of patriotism and class? Until when could German Jews espouse views to the right of the political spectrum without appearing extreme to either Jews or non-Jews? The book builds on recent studies of Jews’ relation to German nationalism, the experience of German Jews away from the large cities, and the increasing interest in Germans’ obsession with regional roots and the East. The study follows these lines of inquiry to investigate the participation of some German Jews in projects dedicated to originally, or increasingly, illiberal projects. As such it shines light on an area in which Jewish participation has thus far only been treated as an afterthought and illuminates both Jewish and German history afresh.

Beyond the Barricades is an original study of government after the 1848–9 revolutions. It focuses on a number of conservative ministers in Prussia who sought to learn lessons from their experiences of upheaval and introduce a wave of reforming activity in the 1850s. Using extensive primary research, the work explores Prussia’s entry into the constitutional age, charting initiatives to recast criminal justice, agriculture, industry, communications, urban life, and press management. The reforms of the 1850s strengthened state contact with the Prussian population, making this a classic episode of state-building. But Beyond the Barricades seeks to go further. It makes a case for taking notice of government activity at this particular juncture because the measures endorsed by conservative statesmen in the 1850s were designed to remove the feudal intermediaries that had lingered so long, albeit in significantly weakened forms, into the nineteenth century. In other words, this book recasts the post-revolutionary period as one in which an old world is increasingly replaced with a new one, pivotal to the making of modern Prussia and, ultimately, modern Germany.

In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. Only recently have scholars begun to realize that there is another history of international affairs in the decade. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face today—inequality, terrorism, demographic instability, energy dependence, epidemic disease, massive increases in trade and monetary flows, to name just a few examples—asserted themselves powerfully during the 1960s. The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson confronted tectonic shifts in the international environment and perhaps even the beginning of the post?Cold War world. While the East?West struggle was indisputably crucial, new forces and new actors altered international relations in profound and lasting ways. This book asks how the Johnson administration responded to this changing landscape. To what extent did US leaders understand the changes that we can now see clearly with the benefit of hindsight? How did they prioritize these issues alongside more immediate geostrategic concerns? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda?

The Birth of the New Justice explains the history of plans for ad hoc and permanent international criminal courts and new international criminal laws to repress aggressive war, war crimes, terrorism, and genocide. Rather than arguing that these legal projects were attempts by state governments to project a “liberal legalism” and create an international state system that limited sovereignty, the book shows that European jurists in a variety of transnational organizations developed their ideas due to diverse motives—liberal, conservative, utopian, humanitarian, nationalist, and particularist. European jurists at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 created a controversial new philosophy of prosecution and punishment, and during the following decades, jurists in different organizations, including the International Law Association, International Association of Criminal Law, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, transformed the idea of the legitimacy of post-war trials and the concept of international crime to deal with myriad social and political problems. The concept of an international criminal court was never static, and the idea that national tribunals would form an integral part of an international system to enforce new laws was frequently advanced as a pragmatic—and politically convenient—solution.

Blood, Sweat, and Toil is the first major history of the British working class in the Second World War. The book integrates social, political, and labour history and reflects the most recent scholarship and debates on social class, gender, and the forging of identities. It examines the war's impact on workers in the varied contexts of the family, military service, the workplace, local communities and the nation. Previous studies of the Home Front have analyzed the lives of civilians, but they have neglected the importance of social class in defining popular experience and its centrality in public attitudes, official policy, and the politics of the war years. Contrary to accounts that view the war as eroding class divisions and creating a new sense of social unity in Britain, this book argues that the 1940s was a crucial decade in which the deeply fragmented working class of the interwar decades was ‘remade’, achieving new collective status, power, and solidarity. It criticizes recent revisionist scholarship that has downplayed the significance of class in British society. Extensively researched, using official documents, diaries and letters, and the records of trade unions and numerous other institutions, the book traces the rapid growth of trade unionism, joint consultation, and strike actions in the war years. It also analyses the mobilization of women into factories and the uniformed services and the lives of men conscripted into the army, showing how these experiences shaped their social attitudes and aspirations. Using opinion polls and other evidence the book traces the evolution of popular political attitudes from the evacuation of 1939 and the desperate months of late 1940 to the election of 1945, opposing recent claims that the electorate was indifferent or apathetic at the war's end, but also eschewing blanket assumptions about popular radicalization. Labour was an active agent in fashioning itself as both a national progressive party and the representative of working-class interests in 1945; far from a mere passive beneficiary of anti-Tory feeling, it gave organizational form to the idealism and the demand for significant change that the war had generated.