Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity.   Woods shines a revealing light on the diverse, informal networks of gay people in the arts and other creative fields. Uneasily called “the Homintern” (an echo of Lenin’s “Comintern”) by those suspicious of an international homosexual conspiracy, such networks connected gay writers, actors, artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, politicians, and spies. While providing some defense against dominant heterosexual exclusion, the grouping brought solidarity, celebrated talent, and, in doing so, invigorated the majority culture.   Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Traveling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of twentieth-century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

    In the fall of 1983, when NATO staged a larger than usual series of field exercises that included, uniquely, a practice run-up to a nuclear attack, the Soviet military came very close to launching a defensive first strike on Europe and North America. With Soviet aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs warming up on East German runways, U.S. intelligence organizations finally realized the danger. Then Reagan, out of deep conviction, launched the arms-reduction campaign of his second presidential term and set the stage for his famous 1986 summit meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the breakthroughs that followed.Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives and right-wing figures such as Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz. We see how Perle in particular sabotaged the Reykjavik meeting by convincing Reagan that mutual nuclear disarmament meant giving up his cherished dream of strategic defense (the Star Wars system). Rhodes’s detailed exploration of these and other events constitutes a prehistory of the neoconservatives, demonstrating that the manipulation of government and public opinion with fake intelligence and threat inflation that the administration of George W. Bush has used to justify the current “war on terror” and the disastrous invasion of Iraq were developed and applied in the Reagan era and even before.Drawing on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants, and on a wealth of new documentation, memoir literature, and oral history that has become available only in the past ten years, Rhodes recounts what actually happened in the final years of the Cold War that led to its dramatic end. The story is new, compelling, and continually surprising—a revelatory re-creation of a hugely important era of our recent history.

    Many people and institutions have exerted enormous efforts to misrepresent or flatly deny demonstrable scientific reality to protect their nonscientific ideology, their power, or their bottom line. To shed light on this darkness, Donald R. Prothero explains the scientific process and why society has come to rely on science not only to provide a better life but also to reach verifiable truths no other method can obtain. He describes how major scientific ideas that are accepted by the entire scientific community (evolution, anthropogenic global warming, vaccination, the HIV cause of AIDS, and others) have been attacked with totally unscientific arguments and methods. Prothero argues that science deniers pose a serious threat to society, as their attempts to subvert the truth have resulted in widespread scientific ignorance, increased risk of global catastrophes, and deaths due to the spread of diseases that could have been prevented.

    Napoleon himself, expiring at 51 after a lifetime of robust health, suspected otherwise and ordered a thorough autopsy. His suspicions were well founded. So clever was the crime, however, that until recent developments in forensic science, it was impossible to prove a case of murder, let alone name the killer. Now, the authors of The Murder of Napoleon assert, it has been done-by a brilliant man whose 20-year inquest, a feat of detection, has produced one of history's greatest surprises. "Sensational...as gripping as a detective novel yet scrupulously observant of historical fact" (Publishers Weekly) Author Biography: David Hapgood was an editor and writer for The New York Times. He is author or co-author of The Murder of Napoleon, The Screwing of the Average Man, Monte Cassino, and Africa from Independence to Tomorrow. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and lives in New York City.

    Here John Ikenberry asks the question, what do states that win wars do with their newfound power and how do they use it to build order? In examining the postwar settlements in modern history, he argues that powerful countries do seek to build stable and cooperative relations, but the type of order that emerges hinges on their ability to make commitments and restrain power.The author explains that only with the spread of democracy in the twentieth century and the innovative use of international institutions--both linked to the emergence of the United States as a world power--has order been created that goes beyond balance of power politics to exhibit "constitutional" characteristics. The open character of the American polity and a web of multilateral institutions allow the United States to exercise strategic restraint and establish stable relations among the industrial democracies despite rapid shifts and extreme disparities in power.Blending comparative politics with international relations, and history with theory, "After Victory" will be of interest to anyone concerned with the organization of world order, the role of institutions in world politics, and the lessons of past postwar settlements for today. It also speaks to today's debate over the ability of the United States to lead in an era of unipolar power.

    Addressing the intersectionality of race and the US criminal justice system, social activist Fania Davis explores how restorative justice has the capacity to disrupt patterns of mass incarceration through effective, equitable, and transformative approaches.Eager to break the still-pervasive, centuries-long cycles of racial prejudice and trauma in America, Davis highlights real restorative justice initiatives that function from a racial justice perspective. These programs are utilized in schools, justice systems, and communities, intentionally seeking to ameliorate racial disparities and systemic inequities. Furthermore, she looks at initiatives that strive to address the historical harms against African Americans throughout the nation.This newest addition the Justice and Peacebuilding series is a much needed and long overdue examination of the issue of race in America. It is a beacon of hope as we learn to work together to repair damage, change perspectives, and strive to do better.

    He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.

    Big businesses, drug barons, insurers, accountants and international bureaucrats all encroach on the so-called sovereignty of the state. Professor Strange examines the implications of this rivalry and points to some new directions for research in international relations, international business and economics.

    They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor."—from The Making of the Indebted ManDebt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of “public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the “entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our “human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured.How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.

    The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross-national data. The authors explain the political intuition underlying their theory in nontechnical language, reserving formal proofs for chapter appendixes. They conclude by presenting policy prescriptions based on what has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically.

    strategy, aimed at winning hearts and minds rather than search-and-destroy, refocuses the conflict on Special Forces: unorthodox soldiers who work outside of traditional military forces to combine secret military operations with nation building. Tony Geraghty, an expert author in this field for almost thirty years, unveils the extraordinary evolution of this refined style of war-making from its roots in anti-guerrilla warfare in Ireland and Palestine, by way of the creation of the C.I.A., the S.A.S., the Green Berets, and America Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), and many others. Israel's Special Forces, including Mossad, are an organic part of the same coherent history, and their story is narrated here for the first time.This history is more than a tale of derring-do, although James Bond-like characters stalk every page. it is a sweeping examination of Black Ops at a time when they represent the future of an open-ended global war against terrorism.

    Pain and Passion tells how a small, family-run wrestling business profoundly influenced the world of professional wrestling as we know it today. Pain and Passion takes readers on a rowdy ride through the evolution of Stu Hart’s Calgary promotion, from its meagre beginnings in the 1940s, its peak in the 1980s, and its fall as Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment changed the face of wrestling forever. But this is more than a wrestling story – it’s a tale of family and of human tragedy. The Hart family lived for the wrestling business and, like Starbucks mowing down a mom-and-pop coffee shop, the emergence of McMahon’s media colossus ran Stampede into the ground. The wrestling game lost its innocence and western Canada lost a staple of its pop culture. As for the Hart family, the once-mighty clan was nearly destroyed by the business it loved. The Stampede Wrestling story is a wild blood-on-the-mat saga over fifty years in the making. It’s sure to captivate not only wrestling fans, but anyone who appreciates a powerful drama.

    In the 1960s, Edna Staebler moved in with an Old Order Mennonite family to absorb their oral history and learn about Mennonite culture and cooking. From this fieldwork came the cookbook Food That Really Schmecks. Originally published in 1968, Food That Really Schmecks instantly became a classic, selling tens of thousands of copies. Interspersed with practical and memorable recipes are Staebler's stories and anecdotes about cooking, life with the Mennonites, family, and the Waterloo Region. Described by Edith Fowke as folklore literature, Staebler's cookbooks have earned her national acclaim.Back in print as part of Wilfrid Laurier University Press's Life Writing series, a series devoted celebrating life writing as both genre and critical practice, the updated edition of this groundbreaking book includes a foreword by award-winning author Wayson Choy and a new introduction by well-known food writer Rose Murray.

    Mary Frances Berry resurrects the remarkable story of ex-slave Callie House (1861-1928) who, seventy years before the civil-rights movement, headed a demand for ex-slave reparations. A widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five, House went on to fight for African American pensions based on those offered to Union soldiers, brilliantly targeting $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton and demanding it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor. Here is the fascinating story of a forgotten civil rights crusader: a woman who emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

    James Raffan is that rare author, proving with Deep Waters that he is a masterful storyteller who has not only penned a story that is by turns harrowing and poignant, but is also a powerful investigative work that sensitively explores the nature of courage, risk and loss. On the morning of June 11, 1978, 27 boys and four leaders from St. John’s School in Ontario set out on a canoeing expedition on Lake Timiskaming. By the end of the day, 12 boys and one leader were dead, with all four canoes overturned and floating aimlessly in the wind. This tragedy, which was first deemed to be an “accident,” was actually, as James Raffan explains, a shocking tale of a school’s survival philosophy gone terribly wrong, unsafe canoes and equipment, and a total lack of emergency preparedness training. Deep Waters is a remarkable story of endurance, courage and unspeakable pain, a book that also explores the nature of risk-taking and the resilience of the human spirit.