As a child, she was asked to publicly humiliate a teacher; at seventeen, she was sent to work at a labor collective. Forbidden to speak, dress, read, write, or love as she pleased, she found a lifeline in a secret love affair with another woman. Miraculously selected for the film version of one of Madame Mao’s political operas, Min’s life changed overnight. Then Chairman Mao suddenly died, taking with him an entire world. A revelatory and disturbing portrait of China, Anchee Min’s memoir is exceptional for its candor, its poignancy, its courage, and for its prose.

    Thomas Barfield introduces readers to the bewildering diversity of tribal and ethnicgroups in Afghanistan, explaining what unites them as Afghans despite the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them. He shows how governing these peoples was relatively easy when power was concentrated in a small dynastic elite, but how this delicate political order broke downin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Afghanistan's rulers mobilized rural militias to expel first the British and later the Soviets. Armed insurgency proved remarkably successful against the foreign occupiers, but it also undermined the Afghan government's authority and rendered thecountry ever more difficult to govern as time passed. Barfield vividly describes how Afghanistan's armed factions plunged the country into a civil war, giving rise to clerical rule by the Taliban and Afghanistan's isolation from the world. He examines why the American invasion in the wake ofSeptember 11 toppled the Taliban so quickly, and how this easy victory lulled the United States into falsely believing that a viable state could be built just as easily. Afghanistan is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how a land conquered and ruled by foreign dynasties for morethan a thousand years became the graveyard of empires for the British and Soviets, and what the United States must do to avoid a similar fate.

    The Two Koreas places the tensions between North and South within a historical context, with a special emphasis on the involvement of outside powers.

    Governing a vast crescent of land that stretched from India through Burma and down to Singapore, and with troops occupying the French and Dutch colonies in southern Vietnam and Indonesia, Britain's imperial might had never seemed stronger.Yet within a few violent years, British power in the region would crumble, and myriad independent nations would struggle into existence. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper show how World War II never really ended in these ravaged Asian lands but instead continued in bloody civil wars, anti-colonial insurrections, and inter-communal massacres. These years became the most formative in modern Asian history, as Western imperialism vied with nascent nationalist and communist revolutionaries for political control.Forgotten Wars, a sequel to the authors' acclaimed Forgotten Armies, is a panoramic account of the bitter wars of the end of empire, seen not only through the eyes of the fighters, but also through the personal stories of ordinary people: the poor and bewildered caught up in India's Hindu-Muslim massacres; the peasant farmers ravaged by warfare between British forces and revolutionaries in Malaya; the Burmese minorities devastated by separatist revolt. Throughout, we are given a stunning portrait of societies poised between the hope of independence and the fear of strife. Forgotten Wars vividly brings to life the inescapable conflicts and manifold dramas that shaped today's Asia.

    John Arnold's addition to Oxford's popular Very Short Introductions series is a stimulating essay about how people studyand understand history. The book begins by inviting us to think about various questions provoked by our investigation of history, and then explores the ways in which these questions have been answered in the past. Such key concepts as causation, interpretation, and periodization are introduced byway of concrete examples of how historians work, thus giving the reader a sense of the excitement implicit in discovering the past--and ourselves.The aim throughout History: A Very Short Introduction is to discuss theories of history in a general, pithy, and accessible manner, rather than delve into specific periods. This is a book that will appeal to all students and general readers with an interest in history or historiography.About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchantand provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, theseries will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy andaffordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

    

    All of these conflicts, including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis that have flared yet again, come down, in a sense, to the extent to which the Middle East will continue to live with its political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed upon the region by the Allies after the First World War.In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies came to remake the geography and politics of the Middle East, drawing lines on an empty map that eventually became the new countries of Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all-even an alliance between Arab nationalism and Zionism-seemed possible he raises questions about what might have been done differently, and answers questions about why things were done as they were. The current battle for a Palestinian homeland has its roots in these events of 85 years ago.

    Professor Gellner asserts here that a society's affluence and economic growth depend on innovation, occupational mobility, the effectiveness of the mass media, universal literacy, and an all-embracing educational system based on a shared, standard idiom. These factors, taken together, govern the relationship between culture and the state. Political units that do not conform to the principle, one state, one culture feel the strain in the form of nationalistic activity.

    In this definitive masterwork, distinguished Oxford historian Albert Hourani offers the most lucid, enlightening history ever written on the subject. From the rise of Islam to the Palestinian issue, from the Prophet Mohammed to Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi. A History of the Arab Peoples chronicles the rich spiritual, political and cultural institutions of this civilization through thirteen centuries of war, peace, literature and religion. Lauded by authorities, encyclopedic and panoramic in its scope, here is a remarkable window on today's conflicts and on the future of a glorious and troubled land.

    From Wellington at Waterloo and Jackson at New Orleans to the surge of democratic power and the new forces of reform that emerged by 1830, this is a portrait of a period of great and rapid changes that saw the United States transform itself from an ex—colony into a formidable nation; Britain become the first industrial world power; Russia develop the fatal flaws that would engulf her in the 20th century and China and Japan set the stage for future development and catastrophe. Latin America became independent, and the dawn of modernity appeared in Turkey and Egypt, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans.It was an age of new ideas, inventions and great technological advances of every kind. Throughout the world the last wildernesses from Canada to the Himalayas to the Andes were being penetrated and settled. The new and expanding cities were being beautified—Boston was lit by gas in 1822; New York and London were being paved. There were steamboats on the Mississippi as early as 1811; the first railroad was built in 1825 in England, and in 1826 the Erie Canal was completed. Charles Babbage invented the first computer, and Turner, Constable, Delacroix and Géricault were fashioning the visual grammar of modern art. Jane Austen finished Emma during Napoleon’s Hundred Days; Goethe presided over the German literary establishment, - and Hegel was creating the theory of the modern state. Beethoven was writing his Ninth Symphony and Mendelssohn his Midsummer Night’s Dream. Byron, Shelley, Keats and Victor Hugo were leading figures in the Romantic Movement. Despite the immense social strains of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of society, constitutional government was able to survive, initiating and sustaining reforms affecting almost every part of society. And, after Waterloo, an international order was established that, for the most part, endured for a century.ln Paul Johnson's words, “The age abounded in great personalities; warriors, statesmen and tyrants; outstanding inventors and technologists; and writers, artists and musicians of the highest genius, women as well as men. I have brought them to the fore but I have also sought to paint in background, showing how ordinary men and women-—and children—lived, suffered and died, ate and drank, worked, played and traveled." This was the era of Wellington, Castlereagh, Metternich, Talleyrand and Bolivar; of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Washington and Chateaubriand; of Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday and Robert Fulton; of Madame de Staél, Mary Shelley, Lady Holland and Maria Edgeworth; of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson; of Goya, Richard Bonington and Thomas Cole.Provocative, challenging and readable, Paul Johnson’s book covers the whole spectrum of history and human affairs, bringing together the various strands into a coherent narrative and telling it through the lives and actions of its outstanding, curious and ordinary people.

    Cynthia Enloe pulls back the curtain on the familiar scenes—governments promoting tourism, companies moving their factories overseas, soldiers serving on foreign soil—and shows that the real landscape is not exclusively male. She describes how many women's seemingly personal strategies—in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty—are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. In exposing policymakers' reliance on false notions of "femininity" and "masculinity," Enloe dismantles an apparently overwhelming world system, revealing it to be much more fragile and open to change than we think.

    One of modern day's most articulate statesmen, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a on a wide variety of subjects. Describing himself as "a dabbler in many things," he committed his life not only to politics but also to nature and wild life, drama, poetry, history, and science, as well as many other fields. These two volumes help to illuminate the depth of his interests and knowledge and the skill and elegance with which he treated the written word!!

    Both sides in the fighting looked to new weapons, tactics and ideas to break a stalemate that was itself destroying Europe. In the German government a small group of men had a brilliant idea: why not sow further confusion in an increasingly chaotic Russia by arranging for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the most notorious of revolutionary extremists, currently safely bottled up in neutral Switzerland, to go home?Catherine Merridale's Lenin on the Train recreates Lenin's extraordinary journey from harmless exile in Zurich, across a Germany falling to pieces from the war's deprivations, and northwards to the edge of Lapland to his eventual ecstatic reception by the revolutionary crowds at Petrograd's Finland Station.

    The Dialectical Imagination is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School.

    A re-creation of one of the key moments of twentieth-century history: the partition and independence of India, and the final days of the Raj.