Историческая литература
Различные книги в жанре Историческая литератураA People's History of Scotland
Nation, people, land: the first history from below of Scotland in over sixty years A People's History of Scotland looks beyond the kings and queens, the battles and bloody defeats of the past. It captures the history that matters today, stories of freedom fighters, suffragettes, the workers of Red Clydeside, and the hardship and protest of the treacherous Thatcher era. With riveting storytelling, Chris Bambery recounts the struggles for nationhood. He charts the lives of Scots who changed the world, as well as those who fought for the cause of ordinary people at home, from the poets Robbie Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid to campaigners such as John Maclean and Helen Crawfurd. This is a passionate cry for more than just independence but also for a nation based on social justice.
The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations
In his neglected masterpiece, Weber brings sociology to bear on civilizations as diverse as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome Max Weber, widely recognized as the greatest of the founders of classical sociology, is often associated with the development of capitalism in Western Europe and the analysis of modernity. But he also had a profound scholarly interest in ancient societies and the Near East, and turned the youthful discipline of sociology to the study of these archaic cultures. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations – Weber’s neglected masterpiece, first published in German in 1897 and reissued in 1909 – is a fascinating examination of the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hebrew society in Israel, the city-states of classical Greece, the Hellenistic world and, finally, Republican and Imperial Rome. The book is infused with the excitement attendant when new intellectual tools are brought to bear on familiar subjects. Throughout the work, Weber blends description of socio-economic structures with an investigation into mechanisms and causes of the rise and decline of social systems. The volume ends with a magisterial explanatory essay on the underlying reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Poorer Nations
A truly global history that examines the prospects of a worldwide power shift from North to South. In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off. Since the ’70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issuebased movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival—in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful. Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism. In his foreword to the book, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes that Prashad “has helped open the vista on complex events that preceded today’s global situation and standoff.” The Poorer Nations looks to the future while revising our sense of the past.
Drone Warfare
Groundbreaking exposé of the rapid shift to robot warfare, by a leading antiwar activist. Drone Warfare is the first comprehensive analysis of one of the fastest growing—and most secretive—fronts in global conflict: the rise of robot warfare. In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had a fleet of nearly 7,500, and the US Air Force now trains more drone “pilots” than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Drones are already a $5 billion business in the US alone. The human cost? Drone strikes have killed more than 200 children alone in Pakistan and Yemen. CODEPINK and Global Exchange cofounder Medea Benjamin provides the first extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who controls these unmanned planes, and what are the legal and moral implications of their use. In vivid, readable style, this book also looks at what activists, lawyers, and scientists across the globe are doing to ground these weapons. Benjamin argues that the assassinations we are carrying out from the air will come back to haunt us when others start doing the same thing—to us.
Mapping Subaltern Studies
Part of Verso’s classic Mapping series that collects the most important writings on key topics in a changing world. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalists by adopting the paradigm of ‘history from below’. Later on, the project shifted from its social history origins by drawing upon an eclectic group of thinkers that included Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This book provides a comprehensive balance sheet of the project and its developments, including Ranajit Guha’s original subaltern studies manifesto, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak.With contributions by David Arnold, C.A. Bayly, Tom Brass, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Gyanendra Pandey, Gyan Prakash, Sumit Sarkar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and David Washbrook.
The Holocaust Industry
Controversial indictment of those who exploit the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own gain. In an iconoclastic and controversial study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in American culture to a disturbing examination of recent Holocaust compensation agreements. It was not until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel's evident strength brought it into line with US foreign policy, that memory of the Holocaust began to acquire the exceptional prominence it enjoys today. Leaders of America's Jewish community were delighted that Israel was now deemed a major strategic asset and, Finkelstein contends, exploited the Holocaust to enhance this newfound status. Their subsequent interpretations of the tragedy are often at variance with actual historical events and are employed to deflect any criticism of Israel and its supporters. Recalling Holocaust fraudsters such as Jerzy Kosinski and Binjamin Wilkomirski, as well as the demagogic constructions of writers like Daniel Goldhagen, Finkelstein contends that the main danger posed to the memory of Nazism's victims comes not from the distortions of Holocaust deniers but from prominent, self-proclaimed guardians of Holocaust memory. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, he exposes the double shakedown of European countries as well as legitimate Jewish claimants, and concludes that the Holocaust industry has become an outright extortion racket. Thoroughly researched and closely argued, The Holocaust Industry is all the more disturbing and powerful because the issues it deals with are so rarely discussed. In a devastating new postscript to this best-selling book, Norman G. Finkelstein documents the Holocaust industry's scandalous cover-up of the blackmail of Swiss banks, and in a new appendix demolishes an influential apologia for the Holocaust industry.
Britain's Empire
Magisterial history of the foundation of the British empire, and the forgotten story of resistance to its formation. This revelatory new history punctures the still widely held belief that the British Empire was an enlightened and civilizing enterprise of great benefit to its subject peoples. Instead, Britain’s Empire reveals a history of systemic repression and almost continual violence, showing how British rule was imposed as a military operation and maintained as a military dictatorship. For colonized peoples, the experience was a horrific one—of slavery, famine, battle and extermination. Yet, as Richard Gott illustrates, the empire’s oppressed peoples did not go gently into that good night. Wherever Britain tried to plant its flag, there was resistance. From Ireland to India, from the American colonies to Australia, Gott chronicles the backlash. He shows, too, how Britain provided a blueprint for the genocides of twentieth-century Europe, and argues that its past leaders must rank alongside the dictators of the twentieth century as the perpetrators of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale. In tracing this history of resistance, all but lost to modern memory, Richard Gott recovers these forgotten peoples and puts them where they deserve to be: at the heart of the story of Britain’s empire.
America’s Unholy Ghosts
America's Unholy Ghosts examines the DNA of the ideologies that shape our nation, ideologies that are as American as apple pie but that too often justify and perpetuate racist ideas and racial inequalities. MLK challenged us to investigate the «ideational roots of race hate» and Ghosts does just that by examining a philosophical «trinity»–Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith–whose works collectively helped to institutionalize, imagine, and ingrain racist ideologies into the hearts and minds of the American people.
As time passed, America's racial imagination evolved to form people incapable of recognizing their addiction to racist ideas. Thus, Ghosts comes to a close with the brilliant faith and politics of Martin Luther King, Jr. who sought to write the conscience of the Prophetic Black Church onto American hearts, minds, and laws. If our nation's racist instincts still haunt our land, so too do our hopes and desires for a faith and politics marked by mercy, justice, and equity–and there is no better guide to that land than the Prophetic Black Church and the one who saw such a land from the mountaintop.
Reincarnation
Have you ever thought that you have had a previous existence? What if you woke up one day and discovered that you had been transported back 4,000 years to an earlier life? This is what happens to Mel, a modern-day architect who is shortly to be married. He returns to his previous incarnation as Melchizedek, a warrior, king, and high priest briefly mentioned in the Bible. Although he considers himself to be ill-equipped to succeed in this role, guidance is always there when needed. From time to time Mel returns briefly to the present, and eventually has to choose between the two existences.
Very little is known about Melchizedek. But his name crops up in a few ancient texts including the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic Gospels discovered in Egypt, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, and in various Jewish oral and written traditions. Despite the sparsity of information available, the author's intention is always to try and keep the narrative as historically factual and credible as possible.
Readers are free to regard the whole account as pure fantasy–or maybe it will provide some food for thought. Hmm, could it actually have happened?
Compañeros, Spanish Edition
Un jueves de manana en 1981, cuatro mil campesinos, huyendo un escuadron de la muerte salvadoreno patrocinado por los Estados Unidos, trastabillo bajando una ladera por un monte cubierto de follaje, hacia el Rio Lempa. Algunos fueron indiscriminadamente fusilados por las ametralladoras de soldados y helicopteros; otros se ahogaron mientras la corriente los arrastraba por el rio. Los demas escaparon para vivir los proximos ocho anos en campamentos de refugiados en Honduras. In 1989 muchos de estos refugiados regresaron a El Salvador como la comunidad repatriada de Valle Nuevo.
Companeros relata las historias de una relacion de veinticinco anos de acompanamiento, sanidad, y perdon entre Valle Nuevo y una asociacion de iglesias en los Estados Unidos, las Comunidades de Mision Shalom. Los dos grupos han llegado a adoptar una comunion transnacional entre si a pesar de los abismos economicos, politicos, y espirituales que existen hoy.
Esta obra es un esfuerzo colectivo y colaborativo de relatos y reflexion teologica, entrelazando relatos orales y escritos de sufrimiento, gratitud, de compartir, recordar, y proclamar la muerte de Cristo hasta que el venga.