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This essential book offers a compelling and original interpretation of the rise of military aviation. Jeremy Black, one of the world's finest scholars of military history, provides a lucid analysis of the use of airpower over land and sea both during the two world wars and the more limited wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Considering both the theory and praxis of air power, the author begins with hot air balloons, and then highlights the use of zeppelins, piston engine fighters...

Discusses the mythology of Japan, its origins in Shintoism and Buddhism, and the gods, spirits, men, and animals that appear in the many legends and stories.

Peru is being brought to its knees. 500 years after the Spanish conquest, a dark ideological zealotry is threatening to demolish every vestige of the European culture in that country. Former philosophy lecturer Abimael Guzman, alias Chairman Gonzalo, and self-acclaimed "fourth sword" of communism in the wake of Marx, Lenin and Mao, is leader of the Shining Path - Sendero Luminoso - the ferocious and highly secretive guerrilla organization sworn to reverse the tide of history. Shining Path consid...

The central, driving theme of this volume is democracy, its vicissitudes and its possibilities in Latin America. Guillermo O'Donnell considers the pattern of political and social alliances that have shaped Argentina's agitated history, and focuses on the tensions and intrinsic weaknesses of bureaucratic-authoritarianism, especially in its most repressive guises, at a time when it projected itself as an enduring, efficient, and potentially legitimate form of political authority. He includes detai...

An introduction to the geography, plants and animals, and people of the continent of South America.

What is it like to govern one of the world's most notoriously ungovernable, most vibrant countries? Brazil's former president offers a candid, wry and illuminating view. Fernando Henrique Cardoso received a phone call in the middle of the night asking him to be the new Finance Minister of Brazil. As he put the phone down and stared into the darkness of his hotel room, he feared he'd been handed a political death sentence. The year was 1993, and he would be responsible for an economy that had sev...

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, selected by Choice Political Culture in Spanish America, 1500-1830 examines the nature of Spanish American political culture by reevaluating the political theory, institutions, and practices of the Hispanic world. Consisting of eight case studies with a focus on New Spain and Quito, Jaime E. Rodriguez O. demonstrates that the process of independence of Spanish America differs from previous claims. In 1188 King Alfonso IX convened the Cortes, the first congre...

This title features an untold story of the most horrifying crimes and massacres of the twentieth century. In September 1910, the activist and anti-imperialist Roger Casement arrived in the Amazon to investigate reports of widespread human-rights abuses in the vast forests stretching along the Putumayo River. There, the Peruvian entrepreneur Julio Cesar Arana ran an area the size of Belgium as his own private fiefdom; his British-registered company operated a systematic programme of torture, expl...

Landscape is never static, but changes continuously when seen in relation to human occupation, movement, labor, and discourse. Contested Territory explores the ways in which Peru's early colonial landscapes were experienced and portrayed, especially by the Spanish conquerors but also by their conquered subjects. It focuses on the role played by indigenous groups in shaping the Spanish experiences of landscapes, the diverse geographical images of Peru and ways in which these were constructed and...