Approaching the early decades of the “Iron Curtain” with new questions and perspectives, this important book examines the political and cultural implications of the communists’ international initiatives. Building on recent scholarship and working from new archival sources, the seven contributors to this volume study various effects of international outreach—personal, technological, and cultural—on the population and politics of the Soviet bloc. Several authors analyze lesser-known complica...

This startling biography explores the remarkable life of an iconic figure of the twentieth century, Václav Havel, author and dissident, who became the first president of the Czech Republic.Vaclav Havel: iconoclast and philosopher king, an internationally successful playwright who became a political dissident and then, reluctantly, a president. His pivotal role in the Velvet Revolution and the modern Czech Republic makes him a key figure of the twen...

In twelve nonfiction tales, Hanna Krall reveals how the lives of World War II survivors are shaped in surprising ways by the twists and turns of historical events. A paralytic Jewish woman starts walking after her husband is suffocated by fellow Jews afraid that his coughing would reveal their hiding place to the Germans. A young American man refuses to let go of the ghost of his half brother who died in the Warsaw ghetto. He never knew the boy, yet he learns Polish to communicate with his...

This is the history of a Lie—of a cruel and terrible Lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people. Given out as fiction, by a German anti-Semitic writer, involved in the Waldeck forgery case, who concealed his identity under the pen-name of an Englishman, it was gradually changed and elaborated, and finally groomed as fact. Agents of the Russian secret police department and of the unscrupulous “Black Hundreds” then utilized this fiction as the framework for the “protoc...

A Plea for Captain John Brown is an essay by Henry David Thoreau. It is based on a speech Thoreau first delivered to an audience at Concord, Massachusetts on October 30, 1859, two weeks after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and repeated several times before Brown's execution on December 2, 1859. It was later published as a part of Echoes of Harper's Ferry in 1860. Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Srebrenica represents a dark and painful chapter in late twentieth-century European history. Here, a still unknown number of Bosnian Muslim citizens were tortured and killed in July 1995. About 8.500 deaths have so far been confirmed, but survivors say 10.701 people died as a result of the blind and racist violence of the Bosnian Serb army led by Ratko Mladic’ and mainly Serb paramilitary forces, as the Dutch UN Peacekeepers and, with them, the entire international community, stood by and ...

Founding a Balkan State examines the pivotal period in Albanian history when the country's fundamental goals and directions were most hotly contested. In 1920, liberal Albanian leaders – led by the US-educated Bishop Fan S. Noli – began working to introduce democracy to the country, hoping that it would lead to modernization, prosperity, and overturning the legacy of five hundred years of Ottoman rule. In 1924, these leaders mounted a successful revolution; by 1925, however, their...

Winner: Norman B. Tomlinson Book PrizeDespite a strategically vulnerable position, an ill-prepared army, and questionable promises of military support from the Allied Powers, Romania intervened in World War I in August 1916. In return, it received the Allies’ formal sanction for the annexation of the Romanian-inhabited regions of Austria-Hungary. As Glenn Torrey reveals in his pathbreaking study, this soon appeared to have been an impulsive and risky decision for b...

Legacy of Rescue: A Daughter’s Tribute is an illustrated intergenerational memoir of the author’s father, Morton (Miksa) Fuchs, and Zoltán Kubinyi, the Commanding Officer who saved him and over 100 other Hungarian Jewish men in forced labor under his command during the Holocaust.Captured as a POW by the liberating Russian Army, Zoltan Kubinyi, a devout Seventh Day Adventist, died a year later in a Siberian labor camp, and was buried in an unmarked grave. B...

The Pleasures of England: Lectures given in Oxford written by John Ruskin. The Pleasures of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, During his Second Tenure of the Slade Professorship (delivered 1884, published 1884–85) (Works 33). And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing...

Alvin Josephy Jr.’s groundbreaking, popular books and essays advocated for a fair and true historical assessment of Native Americans, and set the course for modern Native American studies.This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America from first settlements in the East to the long trek of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest. Th...

Poland in the Modern World presents a history of the country from the late nineteenth century to the present, incorporating new perspectives from social and cultural history and positioning it in a broad global contextChallenges traditional accounts Poland that tend to focus on national, political history, emphasizing the country's 'exceptionalism'.Presents a lively, multi-dimensional story, balancing coverage of high politics with discussion of social, cul...