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Showing 1 - 20 of 39739 items
By August Scherneckau. 2007
August Scherneckau’s diary is the most important firsthand account of the Civil War by a Nebraska soldier that has yet…
come to light. A German immigrant, Scherneckau served with the First Nebraska Volunteers from 1862 through 1865. Depicting the unit’s service in Missouri, Arkansas, and Nebraska Territory, he offers detail, insight, and literary quality matched by few other accounts of the Civil War in the West. His observations provide new perspective on campaigns, military strategy, leadership, politics, ethnicity, emancipation, and a host of other topics. Scherneckau takes readers on the march as he and his comrades plod through mud and snow during a grueling winter campaign in the Missouri Ozarks. He served as a provost guard in St. Louis, where he helped save a former slave from kidnappers and observed the construction of Union gunboats. He describes the process of transforming a regiment from infantry to cavalry, and his account of First Nebraska’s pursuit of Freeman’s Partisans in Arkansas is an exciting portrayal of mountain fighting. An annotated edition that brings to bear the editors’ and translator’s respective expertise in both the Civil War and the German language, Scherneckau’s account is an important addition to primary material on the war’s forgotten theater. It will be a valued resource for historian and Civil War enthusiast alike.By Lakshmi D. Bulathsinghala. 2024
This book explores the development of Sinhala stylistic drama from its earliest manifestations to the post-independence era.Bulathsinghala examines the impact…
of indigenous and imported folk theatrical forms on the work of the most significant postcolonial stylistic dramatists and on key plays that they produced. In the process, the book explores a number of myths and misunderstandings regarding Sri Lanka’s folk heritage and seeks to establish more reliable information on the principal indigenous Sri Lankan folk dramatic forms and their characteristics. At the same time, by drawing connections between folk drama and the post-independence stylistic theatrical movement, the author demonstrates the essential role of the former in Sinhala culture prior to the advent of Western and other influences and shows how both continue to inflect Sri Lankan drama today.This book will help to open the field of South Asian drama studies to an audience consisting not only of scholars and students but also of general readers who are interested in the fields of drama and theatre and Asian studies.By Sanghamitra Misra. 2024
This book is an enquiry into the elision of the figure of the sovereign, cotton-producing Garo in the colonial archive…
and its savage transformation into imperialism’s quintessential ‘primitive’ in the period between 1760 CE and 1900 CE.The precolonial political economy of hill cotton produced by the Garos, its unhinging from the exercise of Garo sovereignty and its eventual commodification twined with the deterritorialization of the community as it made way for elephant mehals and reserved forests form the kernel of the book. This history is seen as participating in and mirroring analogous processes of colonization across vast contiguous swathes of India, including Mymensingh, Chittagong, Bhagalpur, the Khasi hills and the Cachar valley. A central theme explored is the long history of Garo rebellions and their rationality, examined in conjunction with contiguous polities such as that of the Khasis; even as the book follows the growing arc of colonial power in eastern and northeastern India as it converted territory and revenue appropriated through conquest, into dominium.The book makes an original contribution to the historiography of the colonial state, the ‘tribe’ and primitivism by making a case for the welded histories of war, ethnogenesis, revenue extraction and anthropological knowledge otherwise often studied as disparate fields of scholarship. It therefore also offers a new interpretation of the history of the colonization of eastern and northeastern India. The book will be of interest to academics and researchers of these regions and of empire and political economy, law and ‘primitivism’, and anthropology and colonial revenue.By Nasser Abu Srour. 2022
This passionate autobiography—at once history lesson, prison memoir, metaphysical inquiry, love story, and cry for justice—provides insights into the Israeli…
occupation and the struggle of the Palestinian people.One of more than 5,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons before October 7, 2023, Nasser Abu Srour serves a life sentence with no possibility of parole. From the Nakba to the disastrous consequences of the Oslo Accords, he explains with great acumen how the Intifada of the Stones (1987–1993) ultimately provided the only option for young Palestinians in refugee camps to infuse meaning into their lives, especially as they faced a constant threat of humiliation and manipulation by Israeli intelligence. This uprising leads to Abu Srour&’s incarceration, after he was forced to confess, under torture, to involvement in the killing of a Shin Bet officer who recruited his cousin as an informant.Within his cell, Abu Srour turns the Wall that has deprived him of freedom into his interlocutor and the source of stability that allows him to endure a chaotic, hopeless existence. The limitations of this survival strategy—and singular literary device—become painfully evident when falling in love causes Abu Srour to lose his grip on the Wall. Only by writing the story of his imprisonment and the story of his love does Abu Srour find his way back. In doing so, he has created a work of art that transcends his pain while shining a glaring light on the ongoing tragedy of the Palestinian situation.By Amber Smith. 2024
Our Woke Military Could Lose the Next WarWokeness used to be an annoying distraction in the U.S. military. Now it…
is a major threat to national security.Faster than most of us thought possible, our military has become a woke, dysfunctional bureaucracy focused not on winning wars but on identity politics, gender ideology, climate change, and other favored causes of the leftist elite.Don&’t think that China isn&’t watching. Don&’t think that Russia, Iran, and North Korea haven&’t noticed.But so has Amber Smith, a former U.S. Army combat helicopter pilot and Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. In her riveting new book, Unfit to Fight, she sounds the alarm that our military and our nation are at grave risk.In Unfit to Fight, you&’ll learn:Why the military should not &“reflect American society,&” but be a select group of lethal professionalsHow the Pentagon rewards lowered standards for the sake of &“diversity&”Why failure often leads to promotion—if you have the right friendsWhy a return to combat merit, battlefield mission, and trust in leadership are essential—or we will lose our next warElections, as they say, have consequences, and catastrophic damage to national security is among the most important. Amber Smith&’s Unfit to Fight needs to be in the hands of everyone who cares about our military and our survival as a nation.By Emily Oster, Nathan Fox. 2024
From the New York Times bestselling author of Expecting Better, a guide to navigating a second pregnancy when the first…
did not go as planned—with Dr. Nathan Fox, maternal fetal medicine specialistIn Expecting Better, Emily Oster revolutionized the pregnancy landscape with her data-driven approach. In the years since, she kept hearing questions from readers on how to approach a second pregnancy when the first has not gone as planned.While The Unexpected is a book that Oster hopes no one needs, the reality is that 50 percent of pregnancies include complications, a fact we don&’t talk about. Preeclampsia, miscarriage, hyperemesis gravidarum, preterm birth, postpartum depression: these are lonely experiences, and that isolation makes treatment harder to access—and crucial research and policy change less likely to happen.The Unexpected lays out the data on recurrence and treatments shown to lower or mitigate risk for these conditions in subsequent pregnancies. It also provides readers road maps to facilitate productive conversations with their providers, with insights from lauded maternal fetal medicine specialist Dr. Nathan Fox.By bridging the knowledge gap and making space for difficult conversations, The Unexpected promises to make the hardest parts of pregnancy a little bit less so.By Stephanie Middleberg. 2024
The only guide you need to nourishing yourself and your baby from the first through fourth trimesters, from the bestselling…
author of The Big Book of Organic Baby FoodWhen you found out you were pregnant, you were probably given a long list of things you were no longer &“supposed&” to do. But what you really need is a practical guide to all the things you can do to feel as empowered and strong as possible. The Big Book of Pregnancy Nutrition is the comprehensive handbook to everything a mama-to-be needs to feel healthy and supported for her entire pregnancy—and beyond—from licensed nutritionist, registered dietitian, and mom-of-two Stephanie Middleberg.This one-of-a-kind resource covers everything from prenatal vitamins and supplements to foods that alleviate constipation and heartburn to preparing for your glucose test and what to cook and freeze before the baby comes. Learn which foods may help your baby&’s developing microbiome, decrease nausea, ease labor pains, and build your milk supply.Inside, you&’ll find more than forty delicious, easy, nutritious recipes to fit any preference, including:roasted red pepper and asparagus frittatabutternut squash and apple soupmiso salmon with bok choylemon coconut energy biteschocolate chip lactation cookiesPregnancy can be hard, but with Middleberg&’s expert guidance, you will find that fueling yourself and your growing baby doesn&’t have to be.By Sergio García-Magariño. 2024
This book offers a general theory of violent radicalization and uses case studies from a variety of different countries and…
groups to illustrate this.The first and fundamental objective of the book is to provide an explanatory framework to understand phenomena related to violent radicalization, deradicalization, the prevention of radicalization and to political violence; in particular, that inspired by religion. The second objective follows from the first. Understanding violent radicalization of religious inspiration implies delving into two key concepts: violent radicalization and religion. This second objective is indeed elusive, since, on the one hand, many liberal democracies have undergone processes of secularization or, at least, have lost interest in examining religion in public debates. Therefore, rigorously exploring social problems where religion seems to be involved, in one way or another, is complicated. Moreover, the notion of violent radicalization, in turn, is highly contested and confused with other ideas, such as polarization, extremism, terrorism or nonviolent radicalization. Finally, the book aims to bring theory into dialogue with empirical phenomena, and to test it against concrete cases related to violent radicalization and its prevention, on the one hand, and religion, on the other. The book’s originality comes from both its innovative, methodological approach and its breadth, with cases from several countries (Spain, the United States, Ireland, India, Israel, Russia and Colombia) and different ideological groups (revolutionary communists, nationalist movements, Jihadist groups, white and black supremacists).This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, radicalization, sociology and international relations in general.By Daniel Greenfield. 2024
The secret history of the American Left.The Left is America&’s oldest enemy. It was here long before the 1960s, calling…
for the execution of George Washington, plotting to stop the ratification of the Constitution, and collaborating with foreign enemies. Stolen elections, fake news, race riots, globalism, and socialism aren&’t new problems; Americans faced them from the very beginning. Domestic Enemies reveals the true origins of the Democratic Party and its radicals, who—even two centuries ago—were calling for the redistribution of wealth, the end of marriage, and the use of schools for political indoctrination. From political battles to street fights, Domestic Enemies takes you into the heart of a century of forgotten struggles between America&’s greatest heroes—such as Washington, Hamilton, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln—and radical villains like Aaron Burr. This is a 1619 Project for the American Left: a history of the Democrats as you&’ve never heard it before, told through the political debates, naval battles, race riots, scandals, secret societies, and domestic terrorism that made the Left what it is today. Learn how the Founding Fathers defeated the Left before, and how we can beat it again.By Null Anna Brinkman. 2024
What is the relationship between seapower, law, and strategy? Anna Brinkman uses in-depth analysis of cases brought before the Court…
of Prize Appeal during the Seven Years' War to explore how Britain worked to shape maritime international law to its strategic advantage. Within the court, government officials and naval and legal minds came together to shape legal decisions from the perspectives of both legal philosophy and maritime strategic aims. As a result, neutrality and the negotiation of rights became critical to maritime warfare. Balancing Strategy unpicks a complex web of competing priorities: deals struck with the Dutch Republic and Spain; imperial rivalry; mercantilism; colonial trade; and the relationships between metropoles and colonies, trade, and the navy. Ultimately, influencing and shaping international law of the sea allows a nation to create the norms and rules that constrain or enable the use of seapower during war.By Null Aziza Shanazarova. 2024
Through revealing the fascinating story of the Sufi master Aghā-yi Buzurg and her path to becoming the 'Great Lady' in…
sixteenth-century Bukhara, Aziza Shanazarova invites readers into the little-known world of female religious authority in early modern Islamic Central Asia, revealing a far more multifaceted gender history than previously supposed. Pointing towards new ways of mapping female religious authority onto the landscapes of early modern Muslim narratives, this book serves as an intervention into the debate on the history of women and religion that views gender as a historical phenomenon and construct, challenging narratives of the relationship between gender and age in Islamic discourse of the period. Shanazarova draws on previously unknown primary sources to bring attention to a rich world of female religiosity involving communal leadership, competition for spiritual superiority, and negotiation with the political elite that transforms our understanding of women's history in early modern Central Asia.Since at least the high point of the civil rights movement, African American Christianity has been widely recognized as a…
potent force for social change. Most attention to the political significance of Black churches, however, focuses on domestic protest and electoral politics. Yet some Black churches take a deep interest in the global issue of Israel and Palestine. Why would African American Christians get involved—and even take sides—in Palestine and Israel, and what does that reveal about the political significance of “the Black Church” today?This book examines African American Christian involvement in Israel and Palestine to show how competing visions of “the Black Church” are changing through transnational political engagement. Considering cases ranging from African American Christian Zionists to Palestinian solidarity activists, Roger Baumann traces how Black religious politics transcend domestic arenas and enter global spaces. These cases, he argues, illuminate how the meaning of the ostensibly singular and unifying category of “the Black Church”—spanning its history, identity, culture, and mission—is deeply contested at every turn. Black Visions of the Holy Land offers new insights into how Black churches understand their political role and social significance; the ways race, religion, and politics both converge and diverge; and why the meaning of overlapping racial and religious identities shifts when moving from national to global contexts.By Nicole Pensak. 2024
matrescence noun /mæ'tres.?nts/ the process of becoming a mother: The physical, psychological, and emotional changes you go through after the birth…
of your child . . . largely unexplored in the medical community. —Cambridge Dictionary Most new mothers bring their infants to the doctor but ignore any distressing feelings or sensations they might themselves have—that sense of being “rattled” at many moments throughout the day and night. In Rattled, Dr. Nicole Pensak shares her own experiences and those of her patients to help new mothers feel informed, validated, and guided through matrescence. After giving birth, a woman often feels like a completely different person. It may sound dramatic, but the rollercoaster of physical and psychological changes affects brain and body in a similar way that adolescence changes us. To compound that, many women hide these feelings, worrying that something is wrong with them. Dr. Nicole Pensak is here to reassure us that being “rattled” is normal, and not at all surprising. After all, seismic changes in identity and emotion have occurred. Research shows that a woman’s brain shifts in real, biological ways very quickly after giving birth. Many women become hypervigilant, for good reason: the brain is telling her to stay alert because she has a human to keep alive and safe. While these brainpower boosts can cause anxious feelings, they can also help to manage the distress and harness the advantages of the postpartum brain. In fact, this is a time of neuroplasticity, when the brain is more receptive to positive reinforcement. Trained at Yale and Harvard and certified in perinatal mental health, Dr. Pensak provides practical and emotional support, helping to relieve the anxiety and pressure for perfection in motherhood and paving the way for a better beginning for families and babies. She discusses mental health treatment and the upside of therapy during this changing time, and offers accessible scientific information, relatable anecdotes, and strategies for self-care. The result is a reassuring and practical handbook that new mothers and their families will refer to time and again.By Dmitri Alperovitch, Garrett M. Graff. 2024
The leading national security expert who predicted Putin&’s intention to invade Ukraine argues that China&’s Xi Jinping is preparing to…
conquer Taiwan in the coming years—with dire stakes for America and the world if he is not deterred We are fully in the midst of Cold War II, this time with China. Taiwan is a new West Berlin, a perilous strategic flashpoint where localized events could trigger a devastating war between nuclear powers. But this outcome is far from inevitable. Laying out the grand strategy for the United States and allies to avoid this fate, the highly respected security analyst Dmitri Alperovitch reveals key actions that could enable America to win the race for the twenty-first century. This sharp, timely book is the essential blueprint for preventing a catastrophe.This book is an international history of the foundation of modern arms control, highlighting the fact that the instrument is…
varied, resilient, successful, and enduring.The narrative begins after the Napoleonic wars when newly arisen peace movements focused on arbitration as a path to “ending the war system.” It moves on to the international community’s embrace of “total and complete disarmament” and then to its acceptance of more limited measures by 1968, including the agreements that remain in force today. The book connects the past to the present of multiple negotiations, successful and failed, and underlines how the peace movement increasingly influenced the national policy of the major Western powers, especially the United States. It also highlights the increasing diversification of arms control players, including women and people of color as well as the countries they represented. Based on original research in multinational records and the latest scholarship, the book illustrates the reasons multilateral arms control remains a key instrument of international relations. The chapters are organized both chronologically and thematically, with the result that they cover different amounts of time in order to encompass a given issue and to capture the development of particular threads. The main narrative evolves into a decadeslong quest for a global treaty on “general and complete disarmament,” which otherwise paces the book and shapes its chapters.This book will be of much interest to students of arms control, global governance, peace studies, and International Relations.By Dennis Gaffin. 2024
An intimate and personal account of the profound roles birds play in the lives of some Indigenous peopleFor many hours…
over a period of years, white anthropologist Dennis Gaffin and two Indigenous friends, Michael Bastine and John Volpe, recorded their conversations about a shared passion: the birds of upstate New York and southern Ontario. In these lively, informal talks, Bastine (a healer and naturalist of Algonquin descent) and Volpe (a naturalist and animal rehabilitator of Ojibwe and Métis descent) shared their experiences of, and beliefs about, birds, describing the profound spiritual, psychological, and social roles of birds in the lives of some Indigenous people. Birds through Indigenous Eyes presents highlights of these conversations, placing them in context and showing how Native understandings of birds contrast with conventional Western views.Bastine and Volpe bring to life Algonquin, Ojibwe, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) beliefs about birds. They reveal how specific birds and bird species are seamlessly integrated into spirituality and everyday thought and action, how birds bring important messages to individual people, how a bird species can become associated with a person, and how birds provide warnings about our endangered environment. Over the course of the book, birds such as the house sparrow, Eastern phoebe, Northern flicker, belted kingfisher, gray catbird, cedar waxwing, and black-capped chickadee are shown in a new light—as spiritual and practical helpers that can teach humans how to live well.An original work of ethno-ornithology that offers a rare close-up look at some Native views on birds, Birds through Indigenous Eyes opens rich new perspectives on the deep connections between birds and humans.By John D. Loftin, Benjamin E. Frey. 2024
According to Cherokee tradition, the place of creation is Kituwah, located at the center of the world and home to…
the most sacred and oldest of all beloved, or mother, towns. Just by entering Kituwah, or indeed any village site, Cherokees reexperience the creation of the world, when the water beetle first surfaced with a piece of mud that later became the island on which they lived. People of Kituwah is a comprehensive account of the spiritual worldview and lifeways of the Eastern Cherokee people, from the creation of the world to today. Building on vast primary and secondary materials, native and non-native, this book provides a window into not only what the Cherokees perceive and understand—their notions of space and time, marriage and love, death and the afterlife, healing and traditional medicine, and rites and ceremonies—but also how their religious life evolved both before and after the calamitous coming of colonialism. Through the collaborative efforts of John D. Loftin and Benjamin E. Frey, this book offers an in-depth understanding of Cherokee culture and society.By Beth Bailey. 2023
By the late 1960s, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in United States history was…
descending into crisis as the Vietnam War raged without end. Morale was tanking. AWOL rates were rising. And in August 1968, a group of Black soldiers seized control of the infamous Long Binh Jail, burned buildings, and beat a white inmate to death with a shovel. The days of "same mud, same blood" were over, and a new generation of Black GIs had decisively rejected the slights and institutional racism their forefathers had endured. As Black and white soldiers fought in barracks and bars, with violence spilling into surrounding towns within the United States and in West Germany, Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan, army leaders grew convinced that the growing racial crisis undermined the army's ability to defend the nation. Acclaimed military historian Beth Bailey shows how the United States Army tried to solve that racial crisis (in army terms, "the problem of race"). Army leaders were surprisingly creative in confronting demands for racial justice, even willing to challenge fundamental army principles of discipline, order, hierarchy, and authority. Bailey traces a frustrating yet fascinating story, as a massive, conservative institution came to terms with demands for changeBy Benny Morris. 2008
This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective, and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of…
the military engagements, it also focuses on the war's political dimensions. Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab sidewhere the archives are still closedis illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials. Morris stresses the jihadi character of the two-stage Arab assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Throughout, he examines the dialectic between the war's military and political developments and highlights the military impetus in the creation of the refugee problem, which was a by-product of the disintegration of Palestinian Arab society. The book thoroughly investigates the role of the Great PowersBritain, the United States, and the Soviet Unionin shaping the conflict and its tentative termination in 1949. Morris looks both at high politics and general staff decision-making processes and at the nitty-gritty of combat in the successive battles that resulted in the emergence of the State of Israel and the humiliation of the Arab world, a humiliation that underlies the continued Arab antagonism toward Israel.By Daniel P. Bolger. 1988
Discusses American military capabilities and operations undertaken since the end of the Vietnam War, detailing the tactics, the planning, the…
leadership, and the political realities that lead to the rise of the "limited engagement."