So Britain's wartime leader called for the lightning development of a completely new kind of warfare, recruiting a band of eccentric free-thinking warriors to become the first 'deniable' secret operatives to strike behind enemy lines, offering these volunteers nothing but the potential for glory and all-but-certain death.Churchill's Secret Warriors tells the story of the daring victories for this small force of 'freelance pirates', undertaking devastatingly effective missions against the Nazis, often dressed in enemy uniforms and with enemy kit, breaking all previously held rules of warfare. Master storyteller Damien Lewis brings the adventures of the secret unit to life, weaving together the stories of the soldiers' brotherhood in this compelling narrative, from the unit's earliest missions to the death of their leader just weeks before the end of the war.

    Through the stories of prisoners and their families, as well as her own family's experience of her sister's incarceration, Schenwar shows how the institution that locks up 2.3 million Americans and decimates poor communities of color is shredding the ties that, if nurtured, could foster real collective safety. The destruction does not end upon exiting the prison walls: the 95 percent of prisoners who are released emerge with even fewer economic opportunities and fewer human connections on the outside than before. Locked Down, Locked Out shows how incarceration takes away the very things that might enable people to build better lives. Looking toward a future beyond imprisonment, Schenwar profiles community-based initiatives that foster antiracist, anticlassist, prohumanity approaches to justice. These programs successfully deal with problems both individual harm and larger social wrongs through connection rather than isolation, moving toward a safer future for all of us."“This book has the power to transform hearts and minds, opening us to new ways of imagining what justice can mean for individuals, families, communities, and our nation as a whole. I turned the last page feeling nothing less than inspired.”–Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow“Maya Schenwar’s stories about prisoners, their families (including her own), and the thoroughly broken punishment system are rescued from any pessimism such narratives might inspire by the author’s brilliant juxtaposition of abolitionist imaginaries and radical political practices.”–Angela Davis, author of Are Prisons Obsolete?“A tour de force! Schenwar has written a must-read, damning account of the twisted philosophy and practice of incarceration…Until society changes its approach toward its ‘offenders,’ until we leaven punishment with forgiveness, reconciliation, and restorative justice, we are all guilty as charged.”—Dennis J. Kucinich, US Congressman (1997–2013) and presidential candidate

    The Wall—infamous symbol of divided Cold War Europe—seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gates that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime—nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.It was an accident.In The Collapse, prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte reveals how a perfect storm of decisions made by daring underground revolutionaries, disgruntled Stasi officers, and dictatorial party bosses sparked an unexpected series of events culminating in the chaotic fall of the Wall. With a novelist's eye for character and detail, she brings to vivid life a story that sweeps across Budapest, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig and up to the armed checkpoints in Berlin.We meet the revolutionaries Roland Jahn, Aram Radomski, and Siggi Schefke, risking it all to smuggle the truth across the Iron Curtain; the hapless Politburo member Günter Schabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC's Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jäger, holding the fort at the crucial border crossing that night. Soon, Brokaw starts broadcasting live from Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, where the crowds are exulting in the euphoria of newfound freedom—and the dictators are plotting to restore control.Drawing on new archival sources and dozens of interviews, The Collapse offers the definitive account of the night that brought down the Berlin Wall.

    A royal correspondent for the News of the World was caught listening to the voice-mail messages of staff at Buckingham Palace. He and a private investigator went to prison for three months. But Nick Davies, a journalist at The Guardian, knew it didn’t add up. A source at the News of the World told him that not only was hacking routine, but live phone calls were being listened to; “Trojan” e-mails were being sent; bribes were paid to the police; houses were broken into. Davies spent the next four years uncovering the truth, and in July 2009, he broke the first big story: Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. company had secretly paid $1 million to silence three people whose lawyer proved that the News of the World had hacked into their voice-mail. Davies’s story quoted police sources admitting that there had in fact been thousands of victims. No other newspaper picked up the story, and News International retaliated with all of their resources.     Hack Attack is Davies’s mesmerizing account of his battle to prove the truth, describing how politicians who dared to stand up to Murdoch were punished by his journalists; how the lawyers who sued Murdoch were spied on; how public figures who went to court found their careers threatened. Hack Attack is a blow-by-blow account of the fall of an international media empire, by the lone journalist who dared to fight it.

    Nobody knew. The intention was clear: this was the No Advantage policy. Take them to a distant island, lock them away, punish them, forget about them. Criminals were given a sentence to serve; these men were not even given that. Lost hope ebbed out of the men in uncontrollable sobs and tears. Queue jumper, boat person, illegals. Asylum seekers are contentious front-page news but obtaining information about Australia’s regional processing centres is increasingly difficult. We learn only what the government wants us to know.Mark Isaacs worked for the Salvation Army inside the Nauru Detention Centre soon after it re-opened in 2012. He provided humanitarian aid to the men interned in the camp. What he saw there moved him to speak out.The Undesirables chronicles his time on Nauru detailing daily life and the stories of the men held there; the self-harm, suicide attempts, and riots; the rare moments of joy; the moments of deep despair.Mark's eyewitness account humanises a political debate usually ruled by misleading rhetoric.About the authorMark Isaacs became impassioned by the asylum seeker debate after a visit to Villawood Detention Centre while writing for Oxfam. Months later, in October 2012, Mark was employed by the Salvation Army to work at the regional processing centre in Nauru. While there, Mark established the Recreations program and Oceans program for asylum seekers. He eventually resigned from the Salvation Army in June 2013 and spoke out publicly against the government's No Advantage policy.

    Disease. Starvation. Cannibals. From the ancient wayfarers to modern astronauts, world explorers have blazed trails fraught with danger. Yet, as History's Greatest Voyages of Exploration vividly demonstrates, exploration continues to be one of humanity's deepest impulses.Across 24 lectures that unveil the process by which we came to know the far reaches of our planet, you'll witness the awe-inspiring and surprisingly interconnected tale of global exploration. An award-winning history professor from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, revolutionizes how you view the world as he introduces you to some of the greatest and most influential explorers ever known-successful as well as unsuccessful, admirable as well as flawed. You'll be spellbound as you learn of the treacherous, at times fatal, expeditions into the unknown these adventurers embarked upon, whether to the frozen Poles, Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa, the ocean's depths, or the final frontier of space.Through it all, you consider what drove these intrepid individuals, from proselytizing and pilgrimage to the lure of wealth, conquest, fame, and new lands, as evidenced by the Vikings' arrival in North America; Marco Polo's journey along the Silk Road to China; Christopher Columbus' "Enterprise of the Indies"; the conquistadors' ravages in Latin America; and the tiny kingdom of Portugal's triumphant circumnavigation of Africa to seize control of trade in the Indian Ocean.In every lesson, you'll follow these fascinating figures - including several remarkable women - as they venture into uncharted territory and put themselves, and often their crews, in dire peril. With Professor Liulevicius' uniquely global approach, you also get a meaningful portrait of the travels of non-Westerners, as well as the perspectives of discovered people.

    Sebastian Strangio, a journalist based in the capital city of Phnom Penh, now offers an eye-opening appraisal of modern-day Cambodia in the years following its emergence from bitter conflict and bloody upheaval.   In the early 1990s, Cambodia became the focus of the UN’s first great post–Cold War nation-building project, with billions in international aid rolling in to support the fledgling democracy. But since the UN-supervised elections in 1993, the nation has slipped steadily backward into neo-authoritarian rule under Prime Minister Hun Sen. Behind a mirage of democracy, ordinary people have few rights and corruption infuses virtually every facet of everyday life. In this lively and compelling study, the first of its kind, Strangio explores the present state of Cambodian society under Hun Sen’s leadership, painting a vivid portrait of a nation struggling to reconcile the promise of peace and democracy with a violent and tumultuous past.

    Sometimes the fear derives from a pre-existing threat. At other times, crises are created or intensified to invoke a sense of panic and anxiety where none previously existed.This pattern is as predictable as it is destructive. The end result is the same: a loss of liberty. Policies that are costly, oppressive, and harmful are supported by people who abandon any interest in freedom or personal responsibility in hopes of feeling safe.Manufactured fear, with its negative impact on liberty, is a societal plague. There have been widespread casualties. We need an antidote. Feardom offers its readers a much-needed immunization.

    Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes; Tammany's corruption was real, but so was its heretofore forgotten role in protecting marginalized and maligned immigrants in desperate need of a political voice.Irish immigrants arriving in New York during the nineteenth century faced an unrelenting onslaught of hyperbolic, nativist propaganda. They were voiceless in a city that proved, time and again, that real power remained in the hands of the mercantile elite, not with a crush of ragged newcomers flooding its streets. Haunted by fresh memories of the horrific Irish potato famine in the old country, Irish immigrants had already learned an indelible lesson about the dire consequences of political helplessness. Tammany Hall emerged as a distinct force to support the city's Catholic newcomers, courting their votes while acting as a powerful intermediary between them and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling class. In a city that had yet to develop the social services we now expect, Tammany often functioned as a rudimentary public welfare system and a champion of crucial social reforms benefiting its constituency, including workers' compensation, prohibitions against child labor, and public pensions for widows with children. Tammany figures also fought against attempts to limit immigration and to strip the poor of the only power they had—the vote.While rescuing Tammany from its maligned legacy, Golway hardly ignores Tammany's ugly underbelly, from its constituents' participation in the bloody Draft Riots of 1863 to its rampant cronyism. However, even under occasionally notorious leadership, Tammany played a profound and long-ignored role in laying the groundwork for social reform, and nurtured the careers of two of New York's greatest political figures, Al Smith and Robert Wagner. Despite devastating electoral defeats and countless scandals, Tammany nonetheless created a formidable political coalition, one that eventually made its way into the echelons of FDR’s Democratic Party and progressive New Deal agenda.Tracing the events of a tumultuous century, Golway shows how mainstream American government began to embrace both Tammany’s constituents and its ideals. Machine Made is a revelatory work of revisionist history, and a rich, multifaceted portrait of roiling New York City politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    As Stephen Shore has written, Our country is made for long trips. Since the 1940s, the dream of the road trip, and the sense of possibility and freedom that it represents, has taken its own important place within our culture. Many photographers purposefully embarked on journeys across the U.S. in order to create work, including Robert Frank, whose seminal road trip resulted in The Americans. However, he was preceded by Edward Weston, who traveled across the country taking pictures to illustrate Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose 1947 trip through the American South and into the West was published in the early 1950s in Harper's Bazaar; and Ed Ruscha, whose road trips between Los Angeles and Oklahoma formed the basis of Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Hundreds of photographers have continued the tradition of the photographic road trip on down to the present, from Stephen Shore to Taiyo Onorato, Nico Krebs, Alec Soth and Ryan McGinley. The Open Road considers the photographic road trip as a genre in and of itself, and presents the story of photographers for whom the American road is muse. The book features David Campany's introduction to the genre and 18 chapters presented chronologically, each exploring one American road trip in depth through a portfolio of images and informative texts. This volume highlights some of the most important bodies of work made on the road, from The Americans to the present day.

    What exactly happened, such that Jesus came to be considered God?To ask this question is to delve into a fascinating, multilayered historical puzzle - one that offers a richly illuminating look into the origins of the Western worldview and the theological underpinnings of our civilization. This fundamental historical question and its complex answer speak penetratingly to the spiritual impulses, concerns, and beliefs that have played a seminal role in our world, even as they reveal the foundation of history's most global religious movement, and fresh insights into the Western world's single most influential human being.Tackling all of these matters and more, Great Courses favorite Professor Ehrman returns with the unprecedented historical inquiry of How Jesus Became God. In 24 provocative lectures, Professor Ehrman takes you deep into the process by which the divinity of Jesus was first conceived by his followers, demonstrating how this conception was refined over time to become the core of the Christian theology. A distinguished scholar of Christianity and New York Times best-selling author, Professor Ehrman develops the inquiry with meticulous research and in-depth analysis of texts. In these lectures, Ehrman reveals that the theological understanding of Jesus as God came about through a complex series of factors and events, each of which must be understood in order to grasp this most extraordinary and historically pivotal story.In the enthralling inquiry of How Jesus Became God Professor Ehrman lays bare the diverse elements that combined to produce both an astonishing true-life story and one of history's most significant developments. Join a renowned biblical scholar in grappling with this pivot.

    A landmark work of more than one hundred scholars, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution is a unique line-by-line analysis explaining every clause of America's founding charter and its contemporary meaning.In this fully revised second edition, leading scholars in law, history, and public policy offer more than two hundred updated and incisive essays on every clause of the Constitution.From the stirring words of the Preamble to the Twenty-seventh Amendment, you will gain new insights into the ideas that made America, important debates that continue from our Founding, and the Constitution's true meaning for our nation.

    Such schools peacefully brought Islam to much of the region, becoming striking symbols of Muslim identity. Ware shows how in Senegambia the schools became powerful channels for African resistance during the eras of the slave trade and colonization. While illuminating the past, Ware also makes signal contributions to understanding contemporary Islam by demonstrating how the schools' epistemology of embodiment gives expression to classical Islamic frameworks of learning and knowledge.Today, many Muslims and non-Muslims find West African methods of Qur'an schooling puzzling and controversial. In fascinating detail, Ware introduces these practices from the viewpoint of the practitioners, explicating their emphasis on educating the whole human being as if to remake it as a living replica of the Qur'an. From this perspective, the transference of knowledge in core texts and rituals is literally embodied in people, helping shape them--like the Prophet of Islam--into vital bearers of the word of God.

    The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering. Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars

    He lays the hidden premises of progressivism bare for all to see and then shows how they have led to the destructive policies that are dragging America down. Ostrowski exposes the mental force field progressives carry around that protects them from having to answer for their multitude of policy failures. He also deconstructs progressivism's chief opponent for the last fifty years, conservatism and its marquis strategy, constitutionalism. These approaches have failed and crowded out progressivism's only viable adversary, true liberalism: the proposition that human beings have the natural right to do as they wish with what they own. The book not only diagnoses what is wrong with America but proposes numerous and detailed strategies and tactics for what individual Americans can do right now to battle progressivism. LibertyMovement.org will be the vehicle for promoting and coordinating those efforts.

    Now the PMSCs are a bona-fide industry, an indispensable part of American foreign and military policy. PMSCs assist US forces in combat operations and replace them after the military withdraws from combat zones; they guard our embassies; they play key roles in US counterterrorism strategies; and Homeland Security depends on them. Their services include maritime security, police training, drone operations, cyber security, and intelligence analysis (as Edward Snowden has famously revealed). Even the United Nations employs them.When did this happen? The turning point came when the US found itself in a prolonged war with Iraq, but without adequate forces. So the Bush Administration turned to the PMSCs to fill the gap. Private contractors and subcontractors eventually exceeded the traditional troops. The industry has never scaled back.Ann Hagedorn profiles the members of Congress who recognize the dangers of dependence on PMSCs, but have been unable to limit them or even determine their true scope. She takes us to the exclusive club in London where the PMSCs were created, and she reveals the key figure in the evolution of the industry. She introduces us to a US Army general who studies new developments, such as PMSCs’ drone operations, and worries about PMSCs potentially fighting American troops. The Invisible Soldiers will inspire a national dialogue about a little-known international industry on which our security rests.

    But as the events were approaching, ordinary Brazilians were holding the country's biggest protest marches in decades.Sports journalist Dave Zirin traveled to Brazil to find out why. In a rollicking read that travels from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the fabled Maracan� Stadium to the halls of power in Washington, DC, Zirin examines Brazilians' objections to the corruption of the games they love; the toll such events take on impoverished citizens; and how taking to the streets opened up an international conversation on the culture, economics, and politics of sports."Millions will enjoy the World Cup and Olympics, but Zirin justly reminds readers of the real human costs beyond the spectacle." --Kirkus Reviews

    After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

    As America moved into the 20th Century, the way of life in the West was quickly disappearing, soon to exist only as the subject of myth and popular entertainment. Bee ho knew he was destined for the life of a Western performer. By the age of nineteen, he was on the road with Wild West shows where he performed with Buffalo Bill, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson and dozens other Western icons, many of whom were just getting their start in the fledgling entertainment industry. His career took him from Wild West shows to vaudeville, Broadway, silent movies and radio as he presented his unique skills to thousands of spectators in several countries. Born in 1885, Bee Ho Gray was named by Quanah Parker, last Chief of the Comanche and used his upbringing in Indian Territory as a springboard to an amazing career as a Wild West performer. During his fifty years of fame, he was the star on thousands of vaudeville stages and the key performer in several Wild West shows including the famous Miller Brothers 101 Ranch. His daily companions were legends like Buffalo Bill; will Rogers, Tom Mix, Bill Pickett, Iron Tail and many others who helped define the legacy of the American West. Through years of genealogical sleuthing, the author discovered long-lost suitcases full of personal scrapbooks, memorabilia, and diaries. He sought out the few remaining old-timers who once knew Bee Ho. As their fading memories were rekindled, fantastic stores allowed him to piece together an accurate history of his great uncle in - The Legendary Life of Bee Ho Gray.

    In the mid-17th century when the Dutch first settled at the Cape of Good Hope, built their fortress and began trading with the indigenous Khoikhoi, they were told of a mysterious people called the Chobona, who lived in stone houses deep in the interior of the country, were rich in gold and cattle and had long hair and pale skins. Believing them to be the people of Monomotapa, the legendary southern African empire from whom the Portuguese obtained their gold, the Dutch made every effort to reach them. Volunteers were selected, plans drawn up, maps supplied and expedition after expedition dispatched. None succeeded in finding the elusive Chobona. In the centuries to come historians would dismiss the Chobona as fantasy, blaming the stories on what they believed to be the over-active imagination of Eva, a young Khoikhoi girl who was the Dutchmen's main interpreter. Yet the rumours never ceased. And, as our knowledge of the past has grown, so too has the possibility that the rumours were real. The side of the sun at noon explores the truth behind the rumours, following in the footsteps of the early explorers in what is an innovative and engaging interweaving of a rich array of sources, from ancient Arab writings and indigenous oral traditions, to contemporary historical documents and modern archaeological discovery. This book makes you challenge the accepted notions of our history making you look, and look again.

    Tamara T. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets. To promote a radically quantitative approach to the market, some thinkers developed innovative forms of fiction and genre. In opposition, traditionalists reasserted the authority of classical texts and advocated a return to the historical, ethics-centered, marriage-based, agricultural economy that these texts described. The discussion of frontiers and markets thus became part of a larger debate over the relationship between the world and the written word. These Han debates helped to shape the ways in which we now define and appreciate early Chinese literature and produced the foundational texts of Chinese economic thought. Each chapter in the book examines a key genre or symbolic practice (philosophy, fu-rhapsody, historiography, money, kinship) through which different groups sought to reshape the political economy. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, Chin elaborates a new literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought.

    Required reading, I would say, for anyone remotely considering getting involved in politics. [...] It will become course material for political science courses in this province." - Marilla Stephenson for The Chronicle-HeraldOn October 8, 2013, Nova Scotia’s NDP government went down to a devastating election defeat. Premier Darrell Dexter lost his own seat, and the party held the dubious distinction of being the first one-term majority government in over 100 years. In this new memoir, former NDP finance minister and MLA Graham Steele tries to make sense of the election result and shares what he’s learned from a fifteen-year career in provincial politics. In his trademark candid style, Steele pulls no punches in assessing what’s right—and what’s often wrong—with our current political system. Includes an insert of colour photographs and a foreword from CBC Information Morning host Don Connolly.

    In the West, this period is often defined through different lenses - the Soviet intervention, the civil war, the Taliban, and the post-2001 nation-building era. Yet, as experienced by local inhabitants, the Helmand conflict is a perennial one, involving the same individuals, families and groups, and driven by the same arguments over land, water and power. This book - based on both military and re- search experience in Helmand and 150 inter- views in Pashto - offers a very different view of Helmand from those in the media. It demonstrates how outsiders have most often misunderstood the ongoing struggle in Helmand and how, in doing so, they have exacerbated the conflict, perpetuated it and made it more violent - precisely the opposite of what was intended when their interventions were launched. Mike Martin's oral history of Helmand under- scores the absolute imperative of understanding the highly local, personal, and non-ideological nature of internal conflict in much of the 'third' world.

    After a devastating financial crisis, furious voters sent a new breed of politician to Washington. These young Republican firebrands, led by "Fighting Bob" La Follette of Wisconsin, vowed to overthrow the party leaders and purge Wall Street's corrupting influence from Washington. Their opponents called them "radicals," and "fanatics." They called themselves Progressives.President Theodore Roosevelt disapproved of La Follette's confrontational methods. Fearful of splitting the party, he compromised with the conservative House Speaker, "Uncle Joe" Cannon, to pass modest reforms. But as La Follette's crusade gathered momentum, the country polarized, and the middle ground melted away. Three years after the end of his presidency, Roosevelt embraced La Follette's militant tactics and went to war against the Republican establishment, bringing him face to face with his handpicked successor, William Taft. Their epic battle shattered the Republican Party and permanently realigned the electorate, dividing the country into two camps: Progressive and Conservative.Unreasonable Men takes us into the heart of the epic power struggle that created the progressive movement and defined modern American politics. Recounting the fateful clash between the pragmatic Roosevelt and the radical La Follette, Wolraich's riveting narrative reveals how a few Republican insurgents broke the conservative chokehold on Congress and initiated the greatest period of political change in America's history.

    Yet during this period geography was not all that separated them. Increasing divergence in political opinions and eventual war between their countries meant letters contained not only family news but personal perspectives on the individual, local, and national choices that would result in the most destructive war in history. This important collection, first assembled by Irmgard Gebensleben's daughter Hedda Kalshoven, gives voice to ordinary Germans in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and in the occupied Netherlands. The correspondence between Irmgard, her friends, and four generations of her family delve into their most intimate and candid thoughts and feelings about the rise of National Socialism. The responses to the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands expose the deeply divided loyalties of the family and reveal their attempts to bridge them. Of particular value to historians, the letters evoke the writers' beliefs and their understanding of the events happening around them.This first English translation of Ik denk zoveel aan jullie:  Een briefwisseling tussen Nederland en Duitsland 1920-1949, has been edited, abridged, and annotated by Peter Fritzsche with the assent and collaboration of Hedda Kalshoven. After the book's original publication the diary of Irmgard's brother and loyal Wehrmacht soldier, Eberhard, was discovered and edited by Hedda Kalshoven. Fritzsche has drawn on this important additional source in his preface.

    That was the year the Justice Department first authorized the wiretapping of Americans. “We shudder to think of what its agents will do with this new authorization,” The Nation warned in an editorial that year. Ever since then, our writers have investigated, exposed and denounced gross violations of our most basic civil liberties. Now these articles have been collected in Surveillance Nation, a fascinating and timeless alternative history on the rise of the surveillance state. As our legal affairs correspondent, David Cole, writes in his introduction: “Time and again, writers for The Nation identified threats to privacy and liberty long before they were acknowledged by the broader public and media.” Contributors to this important collection include Victor Navasky, Diana Trilling, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Foner, Laura Flanders, Jonathan Schell, Naomi Klein, Christopher Hayes, Patricia Williams, Fred Cook, Frank Donner and Jaron Lanier. Surveillance Nation is an intellectual and historical feast for anyone who wants to learn more about the kind of widespread abuses that Edward Snowden revealed in June 2013.

    In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths.The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art.Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically--an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism.By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.

    This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the "infrastructures of dominance and privilege," arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early fifteenth century, towards a new epistemological framework that will enable a more human humanity.

    Money and its "fluid" form, capital, constitute sociality in capitalism and make access to social reality possible. Money, in other words, makes life in capitalism meaningful and frames all social relations. Following Marx, Lotz argues that money is the true Universal of modern life and that, as such, we are increasingly subjected to its control. As money and capital are closely linked to time, Lotz argues that in capitalism money also constitutes past and future "social horizons" by turning both into "monetized" horizons. Everything becomes faster, global, and more abstract. Our lives, as a consequence, become more mobile, "fluid," unstable, and precarious. Lotz presents analyses of credit, debt, and finance as examples of how money determines the meaning of future and past, imagination, and memory, and that this results in individuals becoming increasingly integrated into and dependent upon the capitalist world. This integration and dependence increases with the event of electronics industries and brain-science industries that channel all human desires towards profits, growth, and money. In this way, the book offers a critical extension of Theodor Adorno's analysis of exchange and the culture industry as the basis of modern societies. Lotz argues-paradoxically with and against Adorno-that we should return to the basic insights of Marx's philosophy, given that the principle of exchange is only possible on the basis of more fundamental social and economic categories, such as money.

    Intisar A. Rabb calls into question a controversial popular notion about Islamic law today, which is that Islamic law is a divine legal tradition that has little room for discretion or doubt, particularly in Islamic criminal law. Despite its contemporary popularity, that notion turns out to have been far outside the mainstream of Islamic law for most of its history. Instead of rejecting doubt, medieval Muslim scholars largely embraced it. In fact, they used doubt to enlarge their own power and to construct Islamic criminal law itself. Through a close examination of legal, historical, and theological sources, and a range of illustrative case studies, this book shows that Muslim jurists developed a highly sophisticated and regulated system for dealing with Islam's unique concept of doubt, which evolved from the seventh to the sixteenth century.

    It interrogates the African past through disease and demography, institutions and governance, African economies and the impact of the export slave trade, colonialism, Africa in the world economy, and culture's influence on accumulation and investment. Several of the chapters take a comparative perspective, placing Africa's developments aside other global patterns. The readership for this book spans from the informed lay reader with an interest in Africa, academics and undergraduate and graduate students, policy makers, and those in the development world."

    The volume expands the story of the war both in time and space to include the violent conflicts that preceded and followed World War I, from the 1911 Italian invasion of Libya to the massive violence that followed the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, and Austrian empires until 1923. It argues that the traditional focus on the period between August 1914 and November 1918 makes more sense for the victorious western front powers (notably Britain and France), than it does for much of central-eastern and south-eastern Europe or for those colonial troops whose demobilization did not begin in November 1918. The paroxysm of 1914-18 has to be seen in the wider context of armed imperial conflict that began in 1911 and did not end until 1923. If we take the Great War seriously as a world war, we must, a century after the event, adopt a perspective that does justice more fully to the millions of imperial subjects called upon to defend their imperial governments' interest, to theatres of war that lay far beyond Europe including in Asia and Africa and, more generally, to the wartime roles and experiences of innumerable peoples from outside the European continent. Empires at War also tells the story of the broad, global mobilizations that saw African soldiers and Chinese labourers in the trenches of the Western front, Indian troops in Jerusalem, and the Japanese military occupying Chinese territory. Finally, the volume shows how the war set the stage for the collapse not only of specific empires but of the imperial world order.

    Owing to the work of an astonishing range of visionary thinkers, this fascinating period was the era in which the foundations of the modern Western world were laid. In the medieval era's great minds we find the roots of many aspects of today's world - from the religious/philosophical thought of Augustine, Ambrose of Milan, and Thomas Aquinas to the scientific innovations of Avicenna and Alhacen, the enlightened statesmanship of Charlemagne and Lorenzo de Medici, and the literary creations of Dante and Chaucer.In these 24 lectures, Professor Armstrong leads you on an enthralling journey into the lives of the seminal thinkers of the Middle Ages. In this gallery of extraordinary minds, you'll encounter the leading lights of a world-shaping era, including figures such as Maimonides, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard, and Francesco Petrarch. Professor Armstrong goes to great lengths to bring these historic figures to life, revealing both the great intellectual contributions and the personal strivings, challenges, and triumphs of some of history's most remarkable human beings. These compelling lectures take you deeply into the heart of one of civilization's most dynamic and impactful eras.Listening Length: 11 hours and 59 minutes

    And although the destruction of 1940-1 was never repeated on the same scale, fears that Hitler possessed a secret weapon of mass destruction never entirely died, and were partially realized in the VI and V2 raids of 1944-5. The British and American response to the 'Blitz', especially from 1943 onwards, was massive and incomparably more devastating - with apocalyptic consequences for German cities such as Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin, to name but the most prominent.In this ground-breaking new book, German historian Dietmar Suss investigates the effects of the bombing on both Britain and Nazi Germany, showing how these two very different societies sought to withstand the onslaught and keep up morale amidst the material devastation and psychological trauma that was visited upon them. And, as he reflects in the conclusion, this is not a story that is safely confined to the past: the debate over the rights and the wrongs of the mass bombing of British and German cities during World War II remains a highly emotional subject even today.

    However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity.This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.

    Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers' own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington's army and the course of the war.Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers' perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers' generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America's struggle for its independence.