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A hero to many, Polish writer Adam Michnik ranks among today's most fearless and persuasive public figures. His imprisonment by Poland's military regime in the 1980s did nothing to quench his outpouring of writings, many of which were published in English as "Letters from Prison". Beginning where that volume ended, "Letters from Freedom" finds Michnik briefly in prison at the height of the 'cold civil war' between authorities and citizens in Poland, then released. Through his continuing essays,...

The ebb and flow of debate about Stalin's Russia is captured in this account, which conceptualizes the field clearly, offering a synthesis of the secondary literature in the area, and also providing the author's own evaluation of the key issues. This edition takes into account the new opportunities afforded to historians - both Russian and Western - by the collapse of communism and the greater availability to researchers of archival sources. It acknowledges the various problems and perspectives...

This book contains four talks given in 1988-89 by British historians on black African themes. They aim to set recent developments within a long-term historical perspective, and draws attention to the forces that are shaping societies. It is hoped that by delineating the major features of the common past of black peoples on the continent, their role in the future may be more constructively assessed.

When the cataclysm of the First World War impacted on British society, it particularly affected the landed classes, with their long military tradition. Country houses, as in a variety of popular TV dramas, were turned into military hospitals and convalescent homes, while many of the menfolk were killed or badly injured in the hostilities. When the war ended efforts were made to return to the pre-war world. Pleasure seeking in night-clubs, sporting events and country-house weekends became the or...

The Gulf Conflict provides the most authoritative and comprehensive account to date of Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, its expulsion by a coalition of Western and Arab forces seven months later, and the aftermath of the war. Blending compelling narrative history with objective analysis, Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh inquire into the fundamental issues underlying the dispute and probe the strategic calculations of all the participants.

Map best viewed on a tablet device. An account of the Spanish civil war which portrays the struggles of the war, as well as discussing the wider implications of the revolution in the Republican zone, the emergence of brutal dictatorship on the nationalist side and the extent to which the Spanish war prefigured World War II. No war in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals in the way that the conflict in Spain in 1936 did. The Spanish...

The early decades of the Cold War presented seemingly boundless opportunity for the construction of "laboratories" of American society abroad: microcosms where experts could scale down problems of geopolitics to manageable size, and where locals could be systematically directed toward American visions of capitalist modernity. Among the most critical tools in the U.S.'s ideological arsenal was modernization theory, and Turkey emerged as a vital test case for the construction and validation of dev...

Using John F. Kennedy as a central figure and reference point, this volume explores how postcolonial citizens viewed the US president when peak decolonization met the Cold War. Exploring how their appropriations blended with their own domestic and regional realities, the chapters span sources, cases and languages from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe to explore the history of US and third world relations in a way that pushes beyond US-centric themes. Examining a range of actors, Globalizi...

At least 130,000 Irish - from north and south of the border - served during the Second World War. Seven thousand never returned. They fought as soldiers in Europe, North Africa and the Far East, as sailors in U-boat infested seas, and as airmen in the dangerous skies. Once again, the politics of home disappeared on the battlefields as Irishmen from different religious and political backgrounds struggled and died side by side. In this poignant yet detailed book, award winning author Neil Richard...

The Vietnam War is unique in its continued influence upon American consciousness. It was the USA's most prolonged military engagement since World War II, and the first war to receive wide-spread television coverage. This study of the Vietnam War attempts to combine a broad understanding of the background to the conflict in Vietnamese and world history with detailed material on US military tactics and the failure of pacification. There are chapters on the US presidential administrations of Johnso...

Born in 1865 into a farming family of Fenian tradition near Fermoy in Co. Cork, Thomas Kent became involved in the Land League in the 1880s and lived for a time in Boston, where he was active in Irish cultural organisations. In 1889, back in Ireland he joined the fight against injustices and evictions and was imprisoned several times for his part in orchestrating a boycotting campaign. Dedicated to freeing Ireland, Thomas and his brothers mobilised in Co. Cork at Easter 1916 and waited in vain...

After spending his childhood in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and witnessing the Communist takeover of his country in 1948, a young journalist named Milan Kubic embarked on a career as a Newsweek correspondent that spanned thirty-one years and three continents, reporting on some of the most memorable events in the Middle East. Now, Kubic tells this fascinating story in depth. Kubic describes his escape to the US Zone in West Germany, his life in the Displaced Persons camps, and his arrival in 195...

As an American living in the early 1950s, you might have found yourself forced to answer the question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?" You might have heard accusations that your own government was "soft on Communism." Congress had determined that your children must include the phrase "under God" when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The Cincinnati Reds had changed their name, briefly, to "Redlegs" to avoid confusion with any other "Reds." In Indiana, some c...

The Communist Party dictatorships in Hungary and East Germany sought to win over the "masses" with promises of providing for ever-increasing levels of consumption. This policy - successful at the outset - in the long-term proved to be detrimental for the regimes because it shifted working class political consciousness to the right while it effectively excluded leftist alternatives from the public sphere. This book argues that this policy can provide the key to understanding of the collapse of th...

The grainy black-and-white television ad shows a young girl in a flower-filled meadow, holding a daisy and plucking its petals, which she counts one by one. As the camera slowly zooms in on her eye, a man's solemn countdown replaces hers. At zero the little girl's eye is engulfed by an atomic mushroom cloud. As the inferno roils in the background, President Lyndon B. Johnson's voice intones, ""These are the stakes -- to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark...