When a scholar as careful and learned as Mr. Kennedy is prompted by contemporary issues to reexamine the great processes of the past, the result can only be an enhancement of our historical understanding.... When the study is written as simply and attractively as this work is, its publication may have a great and beneficient impact. It is to be hoped that Mr. Kennedy's will have one, at a potentially decisive moment in America's history."Michael Howard, The New York Times Book Review"Important, learned, and lucid... Paul Kennedy's great achievement is that he makes us see our current international problems against a background of empires that have gone under because they were unaible to sustain the material cost of greatness; and he does so in a universal historical perspective of which Ranke would surely have approved."James Joll, The New York Review of Books"His strategic-economic approach provides him with the context for a shapely narrative....Professor Kennedy not only exploits his framework eloquently, he also makes use of it to dig deeper and explore the historical contexts in which some 'power centers' prospered....But the most commanding purpose of his project...is the lesson he draws from 15 centuries of statecraft to apply to the present scene....[The book's] final section is for everyone concerned with the contemporary political scene."Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times"Kennedy gives epic meaning to the nation's relative economic and industrial decline." Newsweek

    This comparison of the political and social systems of Europe and black Africa from antiquity to the formation of modern states demonstrates the black contribution to the development of Western civilization.

    This historical magnum opus covers 4,000 years of the extraordinary history of the Jews as a people, a culture, and a nation, showing the impact of Jewish character and imagination upon the world.

    From a wide array, Keegan chooses four commanders who profoundly influenced the course of history: Alexander the Great, the Duke of Wellington, Ulysses S. Grant and Adolph Hitler. All powerful leaders, each cast in a different mold, each with diverse results. “The best military historian of our generation.” –Tom Clancy “A brilliant treatise on the essence of military leadership.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “Fascinating and enlightening… marked by great intellectual liveliness… Mr. Keegan knows how to bring fighting alive on the page.” –The New York Times

    Chronicles the turbulent marriage of Logan Macintyre and Allison MacNeil as they face unsettling changes and must work together to forge a lasting marriage and create a legacy for their family.

    Imagine being able to sweep your eyes over the incredible riches and excitement of our century as reported in the important" News of the Day" experiencing the major events and savoring the human interest side-lights that made each and every day unique. Starting with January 1900...

    . . Witnessing the destruction of Pompeii. . . Accompanying Julius Caesar on his invasion of Britain. . . Flying with the crew of The Great Artiste en route to dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. . . Civilization's most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries -- remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene.

    Until now there has been no single comprehensive history of British and American poetry throughout the half century from the mid-1920s to the recent past. This David Perkins is uniquely equipped to provide; only a critic as well informed as he in the whole range of twentieth-century poetry could offer a lucid, coherent, and structured account of so diverse a body of work.Perkins devotes major discussions to the later careers of the first Modernist poets, such as Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, and to their immediate followers in the United States, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane; to W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and the period style of the 1930s; to the emergence of the New Criticism and of a poetry reflecting its tenets in William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell, and to the reaction against this style; to postwar Great Britain from Philip Larkin and the "Movement" in the 1950s to Ted Hughes, Charles Tomlinson, and Geoffrey Hill; to the theory and style of "open form" in Charles Olson and Robert Duncan; to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poetry of the 1960s; to the poetry of women's experience in Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich; to the work of Black poets from Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks to Amiri Baraka; and to Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.Perkins discusses some 160 poets, mentioning many others more briefly, and does not hesitate to explain, to criticize, to admire, to render judgments. He clarifies the complex interrelations of individuals, groups, and movements and the contexts in which the poets worked: not only the predecessors and contemporaries they responded to but the journals that published them, the expectations of the audience, changing premises about poetry, the writings of critics, developments in other arts, and the momentous events of political and social history. Readers seeking guidance through the maze of postwar poetry will find the second half of the book especially illuminating.

    . . is a reminder . . . of the sins of suppression and untruth that have been and can be committed in the name of American journalism . . . One of the last first-person statements from a generation that included Hitler, Nehru, and Mao . . . and Seldes too." --Columbia Journalism Review

    But this hope was soon destroyed. As recorded by contemporary chroniclers, the reigns of the next four Plantagenet monarchs were marked by a series of continuing horrors, of famine and war, disorder and cruelty, culminating with the Black Death - the plague that swept across Europe and killed almost half its population.

    A substantial introductory essay surveys the historiography and theoretical development of the history of cartography and situates the work of the multi-volume series within this scholarly tradition. Cartographic themes include an emphasis on the spatial-cognitive abilities of Europe's prehistoric peoples and their transmission of cartographic concepts through media such as rock art; the emphasis on mensuration, land surveys, and architectural plans in the cartography of Ancient Egypt and the Near East; the emergence of both theoretical and practical cartographic knowledge in the Greco-Roman world; and the parallel existence of diverse mapping traditions (mappaemundi, portolan charts, local and regional cartography) in the Medieval period.Throughout the volume, a commitment to include cosmographical and celestial maps underscores the inclusive definition of "map" and sets the tone for the breadth of scholarship found in later volumes of the series.

    

    The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective.These differences involved both the masters and the bondsmen. The independence and resident mentality of American slaveholders facilitated the emergence of a vigorous crusade to defend slavery from outside attack, whereas an absentee orientation and dependence on the central government rendered serfholders unable successfully to defend serfdom. Russian serfs, who generally lived on larger holdings than American slaves and faced less immediate interference in their everyday lives, found it easier to assert their communal autonomy but showed relatively little solidarity with peasants outside their own villages; American slaves, by contrast, were both more individualistic and more able to identify with all other blacks, both slave and free.Kolchin has discovered apparently universal features in master-bondsman relations, a central focus of his study, but he also shows their basic differences as he compares slave and serf life and chronicles patterns of resistance. If the masters had the upper hand, the slaves and serfs played major roles in shaping, and setting limits to, their own bondage.This truly unprecedented comparative work will fascinate historians, sociologists, and all social scientists, particularly those with an interest in comparative history and studies in slavery.

    I have sought to capture the drama of that traumatic moment, as well as to tell the story of the Wall, and of the circumstances that led up to and grew from the construction of that gruesome monument to human discord.’ Grim and forbidding, the Wall snaked through the city of Berlin like the backdrop to a nightmare. Tears have been shed here, curses uttered, threats snarled, blood spilled, lives snuffed out. The Berlin Wall was an awkward thing, outlandish and unloved, a barrier planted clear across the middle of the largest city between Paris and Moscow. It was the most dramatic example of the political architecture of modern times. Norman Gelb, writing before the Wall came down, tells how the Wall grew from the confusions of the post-war years. How the Soviet Union and the Western powers shared an uneasy occupation of the capital city of their humbled wartime enemy, and how the Berlin Wall set the stage for the Cold War. He describes the grim episodes on the way towards the final division of the city — the Berlin blockade, the bloody East Berlin workers’ uprising, and the mass migration westward of East German refugees through Berlin. He shows how this humiliating exodus, which threatened the stability of the entire Soviet East European empire, could be stopped only by the building of the Berlin Wall. The story is one of power politics and global brinkmanship, of hawks and doves, of brilliant calculation and an intelligence failure of dazzling proportions. It is about the confrontation over Berlin between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev — two of the most exciting political personalities — and about how the building of the Wall graduated into a nuclear showdown between the superpowers. Norman Gelb was there on that August night when Berlin was broken in two, and his personal experiences help define the tragedy of the divided city. Though it represented failure to both sides, the Berlin Wall dissected one of the great cities of Europe, enfolding and quarantining the only island of political freedom to survive behind Communist lines. Praise for The Berlin Wall ‘A solid documentary history, told in fine style.’ – Kirkus Reviews ‘nicely evokes the mood of the city and the face-off between Moscow and Washington that many feared might lead to war. He switches deftly between the grand dramas that were played out in Washington and Moscow and the fears and not inconsiderable heroism of the Berliners themselves.’ – New York Times Praise for Scramble ‘We now have an accurate account It is the first one to get it right’. — Group Captain Dennis David ‘Deftly combining interviews, speeches, news reports, military communications and occasional unobtrusive narrative, Gelb presents a many-sided picture of war that reflects the feeling of the battle’ — New York Times Praise for Dunkirk “Norman Gelb demonstrates in Dunkirk how productive it is to focus on an individual operation or battle … Dunkirk is both a good adventure read and an instructive case study yielding modern lessons.

    . . . Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, . . . Rotman builds a viable thesis for the semiotics of zero via a thorough examination of Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Kabbalah, and Vermeer’s paintings.”—Choice

    

    Hughes gives an account of the problems which arose when the organization of the Christian church, imported from the urban bureaucracy of the Roman Empire, had to be adapted to the heroic society of early Ireland. How was church government in Ireland brought into line with the secular law, and were the changes made without protest? Dr. Hughes finds the key to these questions in legal texts of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, and attempts, through them, to trace the gradual process of modification which culminated in the eighth century, when the church, now fully adjusted to Irish society, reached a so-far unprecedented height of power and influence. In the ninth century the Viking raids and settlements provided new problems: did they really bring about a decline in the spiritual vitality of the church and degeneracy in her institutions, as is often supposed? It is for answers to questions like these that Dr. Hughes searches the contemporary sources for each period that she examines, tracing the history of the church up to the twelfth century. The main emphasis of the book is on the church as an institution, but it also asks what Christianity meant to different people at different times, and illustrates some of Ireland's contacts with England and the continent.

    

    The author argues that the global violence and warfare of this century are the consequences of the little understood worldrevolution of Westernization. Accounting for world wars, the rise of communism and fascism, decolonization, third world dictatorships, and contemporary terrorism, he describes the twin processes of the expansion of western power and the emergence of global interdependence. The ascendance of Europe had, by the turn of the century, brought all parts of the world under its influence and control. Westerners have seen such global emulation as a civilizing process. But Von Laue contends that the rest of the world's attempt to catch up with the West militarily, economically, and politically has been a traumatic experience as societies have been forced to undergo in a few decades, changes that Europeans underwent in many centuries, causing many countries to fall prey to totalitarian regimes and military strife. Western power and western culture Von Lauewrites, have inflicted a permanent cultural revolution upon the unprepared non-western peoples by foisting upon them the necessity of abject imitation. Von Laue's journey through the 20th century begins in the 1870s with the British raj in India. He considers the colonization of Africa, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the special case of Japan, before moving on to the World War I era, the communist and fascist counter-revolutions, theGreat Depression, Stalinism and Hitler's unleashing of World War II. In his analysis of the post-war era, the United States emerges as the foremost superpower, and the nuclear arms race the most dangerous of all global tensions. He pays special attention to the experiences of leaders in newlyindependent nations: Nehru in India; Sukarno in Indonesia; Nasser in Egypt; and Nkrumah in Ghana; he also analyses Mao's China. As a challenging history of the contemporary age, this book will make its readers think, whether in agreement or disagreement, more globally and compassionately about the complex issues that threaten our peace and survival as we prepare to enter the 21st century

    She says: Remember what happened to you. What we went through. I think, on account of one sentence: The true . . .' etc. I look at her, keep quiet, write and do not publish anything. I wait. Alone. In the shadows with my typewriter, a folding table, a stack of paper and a bottle, I write: To freedom, even if it lasts only fifteen minutes.'"- from Biting SilenceThe journalist narrator of Biting Silence named no names and claimed no untruths in his brief editorials about high-level government corruption. He was not a radical, not a communist, less interested in politics than in writing itself. Nevertheless, his words proved the beginning of a harrowing journey from his home to a life in which prison, torture, and eventual exile became more than just words on a page.This, the first novel from exiled Bolivian writer Arturo von Vacano, draws heavily on the author's own experience as a journalist hampered by dictatorship and forced to choose between silence and safety. It is a wrenching, provocative portrait of the collision between free expression and uneasy power. In a remarkable real-life twist, the same government that von Vacano criticizes ordered all copies of the book's Spanish-language edition burned, and, until recently, it was unavailable in its author's homeland.Biting Silence is a searingly emotional protest against censorship and a celebration of the freedom that writing provides-a welcome discovery not only for fans of von Vacano's Latin American contemporaries, but for anyone concerned with the basic freedom to write.Arturo von Vacano was born in 1938 in La Paz, Bolivia. He worked as a journalist in Bolivia and Peru before fleeing the country in 1980 to live in exile in the United States. He currently lives outside Washington, D.C. and works as a writer and editor for United Press International.

    -- Examine the everyday lives of the world's oldest cultures and civilizations-- Filled with colorful pictures, maps and diagrams-- World History Dates covers 9000BC to the present day

    Craig discusses the two contrary visions of man's essential nature that dominated this period--one portraying man as made in the image of God and required to resemble him as closely as possible, the other depicting man as the autonomous creator of his own environment and values--and uses this context to clarify previously opaque textual detail. Illustrating how general concepts embodied by philosophical thought can be embodied in other media--especially literary--the author brings together disparate disciplines; he also reveals striking similarities between Anglo-American and certain 20th-century continental European lines of thought.

    Rescue is the moving account of the lives, struggles and persecutions of the isolated black Jews of Ethiopa--and of their valiant journey across the country to their long-awaited rescue and absorption into Israeli society.

    

    Prominent evolutionary biologists, for example, have described morality as contrary to the direction of biological evolution, and moral philosophers rarely regard evolution as relevant to their discussions.The Biology of Moral Systems adopts the position that moral questions arise out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems are ways of using confluences of interest at lower levels of social organization to deal with conflicts of interest at higher levels. Moral systems are described as systems of indirect reciprocity: humans gain and lose socially and reproductively not only by direct transactions, but also by the reputations they gain from the everyday flow of social interactions.The author develops a general theory of human interests, using senescence and effort theory from biology, to help analyze the patterning of human lifetimes. He argues that the ultimate interests of humans are reproductive, and that the concept of morality has arisen within groups because of its contribution to unity in the context, ultimately, of success in intergroup competition. He contends that morality is not easily relatable to universals, and he carries this argument into a discussion of what he calls the greatest of all moral problems, the nuclear arms race.Crammed with sage observations on moral dilemmas and many reasons why an understanding of evolution based on natural selection will advance thinking in finding practical solutions to our most difficult social problems. � Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences Richard D. Alexander is Donald Ward Tinkle Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Department of Biology, and Curator of Insects, Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan. A recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Alexander is the author of Darwinism and Human Affairs.

    

    The discovery of gunpowder in China by the 9th century AD was followed by its rapid applications. It is now clear that the whole development from bombs and grenades to the invention of the metal-barrel hand gun took place in the Chinese culture area before Europeans had any knowledge of the mixture itself. Uses in civil engineering and mechanical engineering were equally important, before the knowledge of gunpowder spread to Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Dr Needham's new work continues to demonstrate the major importance of Chinese science and technology to world history and maintains the tradition of one of the great scholarly works of the twentieth century.

    

    This book shows how Mizner's Spanish Revival buildings created a new style of resort architecture during the boom years of the 1920s.

    Beautifully written and illustrated, Rodin is the definitive biography of a man whose influence on sculpture was as profound as Michelangelo's.

    Bernard Cohen could do justice to a theme so subtle and yet so grand. Spanning five centuries and virtually all of scientific endeavor, "Revolution in Science" traces the nuances that differentiate both scientific revolutions and human perceptions of them, weaving threads of detail from physics, mathematics, behaviorism, Freud, atomic physics, and even plate tectonics and molecular biology, into the larger fabric of intellectual history.How did "revolution," a term from the physical sciences, meaning a turning again and implying permanence and recurrence--the cyclical succession of the seasons, the 'revolutions' of the planets in their orbits--become transformed into an expression for radical change in political and socioeconomic affairs, then become appropriated once again to the sciences?How have political revolutions--French, American, Bolshevik--and such intellectual forces as Darwinism further modified the concept, from revolution in science as a dramatic break with the past to the idea that science progresses by the slow accumulation of knowledge? And what does each transformation in each historical period tell us about the deep conceptual changes in our image of the scientist and scientific activity?Cohen's exploration seeks to uncover nothing less than the nature of all scientific revolutions, the stages by which they occur, their time scale, specific criteria for determining whether or not there has been a revolution, and the creative factors in producing a revolutionary new idea. His book is a probing analysis of the history of an idea and one of the most impressive surveys of the history of science ever undertaken.