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Israel's Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation's Founding Myth
By Asaf Elia-Shalev. 2024
The powerful story of an activist movement that challenged the racial inequities of Israel. Israel's Black Panthers tells the story…
of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country's political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country's establishment and change the course of Israel's history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass. This book draws on archival documents and interviews with elderly activists to capture the movement's history and reveal little-known stories from within the group. Asaf Elia-Shalev explores the parallels between the Israeli and American Black Panthers, offering a unique perspective on the global struggle against racism and oppression. In twenty short and captivating chapters, Israel's Black Panthers provides a textured and novel account of the movement and reflects on the role that Mizrahim can play in the future of Israel.This book focuses on the war in Afghanistan. In 2010 and 2011, the author took a leave from her faculty…
position at the University of California, Irvine to train and then deploy as a cultural advisor with two U.S. Army combat units in Afghanistan. Her account begins with the U.S. Army’s four-month training program for cultural advisors, follows her deployment, much of it on missions to remote and volatile areas far from brigade headquarters, and concludes with her uneasy return home.She examines the everyday lives of Americans sent to conduct a war of counterinsurgency, including their sexual exploits on base, their superstitions, even the heroic accounts that military contractors recount in their personal stories of past wars, stories that are sometimes a little too good to be true. In turn, she explores the views of ordinary Afghans to this American occupation.Rescue at Los Baños: The Most Daring Prison Camp Raid of World War II
By Bruce Henderson. 2015
From the New York Times bestselling author of Sons and Soldiers comes the incredible true story of one of the…
greatest military rescues of all time, the 1945 World War II prison camp raid at Los Baños in the Philippines—a tale of daring, courage, and heroism that joins the ranks of Ghost Soldiers, Unbroken, and The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.In February 1945, as the U.S. victory in the Pacific drew nearer, the Japanese army grew desperate, and its soldiers guarding U.S. and Allied POWs more sadistic. Starved, shot and beaten, many of the 2,146 prisoners of the Los Baños prison camp in the Philippines—most of them American men, women and children—would not survive much longer unless rescued soon.Deeply concerned about the half-starved and ill-treated prisoners, General Douglas MacArthur assigned to the 11th Airborne Division a dangerous rescue mission deep behind enemy lines that became a deadly race against the clock. The Los Baños raid would become one of the greatest triumphs of that war or any war; hailed years later by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell: “I doubt that any airborne unit in the world will ever be able to rival the Los Baños prison raid. It is the textbook operation for all ages and all armies.”Combining personal interviews, diaries, correspondence, memoirs, and archival research, Rescue at Los Baños tells the story of a remarkable group of prisoners—whose courage and fortitude helped them overcome hardship, deprivation, and cruelty—and of the young American soldiers and Filipino guerrillas who risked their lives to save them.Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation
By Yossi Klein Halevi. 2013
Winner of the Everett Family Jewish Book of the Year Award (a National Jewish Book Award) and the RUSA Sophie…
Brody Medal.In Like Dreamers, acclaimed journalist Yossi Klein Halevi interweaves the stories of a group of 1967 paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem, tracing the history of Israel and the divergent ideologies shaping it from the Six-Day War to the present.Following the lives of seven young members from the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade, the unit responsible for restoring Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem, Halevi reveals how this band of brothers played pivotal roles in shaping Israel’s destiny long after their historic victory. While they worked together to reunite their country in 1967, these men harbored drastically different visions for Israel’s future.One emerges at the forefront of the religious settlement movement, while another is instrumental in the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. One becomes a driving force in the growth of Israel’s capitalist economy, while another ardently defends the socialist kibbutzim. One is a leading peace activist, while another helps create an anti-Zionist terror underground in Damascus.Featuring an eight pages of black-and-white photos and maps, Like Dreamers is a nuanced, in-depth look at these diverse men and the conflicting beliefs that have helped to define modern Israel and the Middle East.Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan
By Brahma Chellaney. 2010
In Asian Juggernaut, the revelatory and important International Bestseller by Brahma Chellaney, a renowned authority on Asia’s political and economic…
development offers an incisive and insightful analysis of the region’s pivotal role on the world stage. Examining the rise of China, India, and Japan as preeminent powers and their key position in the global future, Asian Juggernaut is a book that must be read by anyone interested in the shape of tomorrow’s world.Gujarat Beyond Gandhi: Identity, Society and Conflict (Routledge South Asian History and Culture Series)
By Nalin Mehta, Mona G. Mehta. 2011
The birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi and the land that produced Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, Gujarat has been…
at the centre-stage of South Asia’s political iconography for more than a century. As Gujarat, created as a separate state in 1960, celebrates its golden jubilee this collection of essays critically explores the many paradoxes and complexities of modernity and politics in the state. The contributors provide much-needed insights into the dominant impulses of identity formation, cultural change, political mobilisation, religious movements and modes of communication that define modern Gujarat. This book touches upon a fascinating range of topics – the identity debates at the heart of the idea of modern Gujarat; the trajectory of Gujarati politics from the 1950s to the present day; bootlegging, the practice of corruption and public power; vegetarianism and violence; urban planning and the enabling infrastructure of antagonism; global diasporas and provincial politics – providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat. Going well beyond the boundaries of Gujarat and engaging with larger questions about democracy and diversity in India, this book will appeal to those interested in South Asian Studies, politics, sociology, history as well as the general reader. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives (Routledge South Asian History and Culture Series)
By Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook. 2012
Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India’s history. The centuries of the ‘early modern’ in…
South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences.Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India’s modern religious cultures.This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.Kang Youwei Engages India: His Travel Narratives (1901–1902) and Predicaments of Civilization and Nation
By Kamal Sheel, Ranjana Sheel. 2024
This book is the first annotated translation of the travelogues of Kang Youwei, one of the most famous intellectuals and…
modernisers of late 19th-century China. These travelogues offer insights into Kang’s perceptions of India, which influenced modern intellectual discourse on India in China. These perceptions not only had a great impact on the thinking of other intellectuals but were also responsible for the larger construct that China developed about India during the republican and post-liberation period. The texts provide meaning to many dilemmas and predicaments that enshrouded the concept of civilisation and its linkages with the modern concepts of nationalism and modernity in Asian countries such as China and India. They are a valuable prism in gauging the early 20th-century intellectual and Chinese moderniser mind as it grappled with the challenges and uncertainties of those times. An important contribution to the study of Sino-Indian interactions, the book will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of nation, nationalism, civilisation, empire, modern history, translation studies, Chinese Studies, and Asian studies.The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China
By Robert D. Kaplan. 2023
A stunning exploration of the Greater Middle East, where lasting stability has often seemed just out of reach but may…
hold the key to the shifting world order of the twenty-first century&“Engaging . . . Even those who resist Kaplan&’s tragic sensibility have much to learn from his look at the emerging Middle East and its recent history.&”—National Review The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Soviet, American. But with the dissolution of empires in the twentieth century, postcolonial states have endeavored to maintain stability in the face of power struggles between factions, leadership vacuums, and the arbitrary borders drawn by exiting imperial rulers with little regard for geography or political groups on the ground. In the Loom of Time, Kaplan explores this broad, fraught space through reporting and travel writing to reveal deeper truths about the impacts of history on the present and how the requirements of stability over anarchy are often in conflict with the ideals of democratic governance. In The Loom of Time, Kaplan makes the case for realism as an approach to the Greater Middle East. Just as Western attempts at democracy promotion across the Middle East have failed, a new form of economic imperialism is emerging today as China's ambitions fall squarely within the region as the key link between Europe and East Asia. As in the past, the Greater Middle East will be a register of future great power struggles across the globe. And like in the past, thousands of years of imperial rule will continue to cast a long shadow on politics as it is practiced today. To piece together the history of this remarkable place and what it suggests for the future, Kaplan weaves together classic texts, immersive travel writing, and a great variety of voices from every country that all compel the reader to look closely at the realities on the ground and to prioritize these facts over ideals on paper. The Loom of Time is a challenging, clear-eyed book that promises to reframe our vision of the global twenty-first century.Life And Afterlife In Ancient China
By Jessica Rawson. 2023
The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the…
distinctive elements of Chinese civilization still in place today: an extraordinarily challenging geography and environment; formidable infrastructure; a society based on the strict hierarchy of the family; a shared written script of characters; a cuisine founded on rice and millet; a material culture of ceramics, bronze, silk, and jade; and a unique concept of the universe, in which ancestors continue to exist alongside the living. Records of these early achievements and their diverse expressions often lie not in written history but in how people marked the end of their lives: their dwellings for the afterlife. Tombs and the treasures within them are almost the only artifacts to survive from Ancient China; their scale and sophistication rivals their equivalents in Ancient Egypt. Jessica Rawson, one of the most eminent Western scholars of China, explores twelve grand tombs―each from a specific historical moment and place―showing how they reveal wider political, dynastic, and cultural developments, culminating in the lavish ambition of the First Emperor's monument, guarded by his army of terracotta warriors. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China illuminates a constellation of beliefs about life and death and provides a remarkable new perspective on one of the oldest civilizations in the world.This book provides a critical feminist analysis of the Korean Protestant Right’s gendered politics. Specifically, the volume explores the Protestant…
Right’s responses and reactions to the presumed weakening of hegemonic masculinity in Korea’s post-hypermasculine developmentalism context. Nami Kim examines three phenomena: Father School (an evangelical men’s manhood and fatherhood restoration movement), the anti-LGBT movement, and Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism. Although these three phenomena may look unrelated, Kim asserts that they represent the Protestant Right’s distinct yet interrelated ways of engaging the contested hegemonic masculinity in Korean society. The contestation over hegemonic masculinity is a common thread that runs through and connects these three phenomena. The ways in which the Protestant Right has engaged the contested hegemonic masculinity have been in relation to “others,” such as women, sexual minorities, gender nonconforming people, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.Governance, Domestic Change, and Social Policy in China: 100 Years after the Xinhai Revolution
By Jean-Marc F. Blanchard and Kun-Chin Lin. 2017
This book constitutes the first comprehensive retrospective on one hundred years of post-dynastic China and compares enduring challenges of governance…
in the period around the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to those of contemporary China. The authors examine three key areas of domestic change and policy adaptation: social welfare provision, local political institutional reform, and social and environmental consequences of major infrastructure projects. Demonstrating remarkable parallels between the immediate post-Qing era and the recent phase of Chinese reform since the late-1990s, the book highlights common challenges to the political leadership by tracing dynamics of state activism in crafting new social space and terms of engagement for problem-solving and exploring social forces that continue to undermine the centralizing impetus of the state.In People's Diplomacy, Kazushi Minami shows how the American and Chinese people rebuilt US-China relations in the 1970s, a pivotal…
decade bookended by Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China and 1979 normalization of diplomatic relations. Top policymakers in Washington and Beijing drew the blueprint for the new bilateral relationship, but the work of building it was left to a host of Americans and Chinese from all walks of life, who engaged in "people-to-people" exchanges. After two decades of estrangement and hostility caused by the Cold War, these people dramatically changed the nature of US-China relations. Americans reimagined China as a country of opportunities, irresistible because of its prodigious potential, while Chinese reinterpreted the United States as an agent of modernization, capable of enriching their country and rejuvenating their lives. Drawing on extensive research at two dozen archives in the United States and China, People's Diplomacy redefines contemporary US-China relations as a creation of the American and Chinese people.The Geography of Injustice: East Asia's Battle between Memory and History
By Barak Kushner. 2024
In The Geography of Injustice, Barak Kushner argues that the war crimes tribunals in East Asia formed and cemented national…
divides that persist into the present day. In 1946 the Allies convened the Tokyo Trial to prosecute Japanese wartime atrocities and Japan's empire. At its conclusion one of the judges voiced dissent, claiming that the justice found at Tokyo was only "the sham employment of a legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge." War crimes tribunals, Kushner shows, allow for the history of the defeated to be heard. In contemporary East Asia a fierce battle between memory and history has consolidated political camps across this debate. The Tokyo Trial courtroom, as well as the thousands of other war crimes tribunals opened in about fifty venues across Asia, were legal stages where prosecution and defense curated facts and evidence to craft their story about World War Two. These narratives and counter narratives form the basis of postwar memory concerning Japan's imperial aims across the region. The archival record and the interpretation of court testimony together shape a competing set of histories for public consumption. The Geography of Injustice offers compelling evidence that despite the passage of seven decades since the end of the war, East Asia is more divided than united by history.China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen
By David Hinton. 2020
A beautifully compelling and liberating guide to the original nature of Zen in ancient China by renowned author and translator…
David Hinton.Buddhism migrated from India to China in the first century C.E., and Ch'an (Japanese: Zen) is generally seen as China's most distinctive and enduring form of Buddhism. In China Root, however, David Hinton shows how Ch'an was in fact a Buddhist-influenced extension of Taoism, China's native system of spiritual philosophy. Unlike Indian Buddhism's abstract sensibility, Ch'an was grounded in an earthy and empirically-based vision. Exploring this vision, Hinton describes Ch'an as a kind of anti-Buddhism. A radical and wild practice aspiring to a deeply ecological liberation: the integration of individual consciousness with landscape and with a Cosmos seen as harmonious and alive.In China Root, Hinton describes this original form of Zen with his trademark clarity and elegance, each chapter exploring in enlightening ways a core Ch'an concept--such as meditation, mind, Buddha, awakening--as it was originally understood and practiced in ancient China. Finally, by examining a range of standard translations in the Appendix, Hinton reveals how this original understanding and practice of Ch'an/Zen is almost entirely missing in contemporary American Zen, because it was lost in Ch'an's migration from China through Japan and on to the West.Whether you practice Zen or not, taking this journey on the wings of Hinton's remarkable insight and powerful writing will transform how you understand yourself and the world.Special Men: A LRP's Recollections
By Dennis Foley. 1994
A recipient of two Purple Hearts gives readers an inside view of US Army special forces through his own trial…
by fire during the Vietnam War. Days before he was drafted in 1962, Dennis Foley volunteered to join the army in the hopes of someday getting into West Point. He was only eighteen years old. At basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey, a presentation by two impressive, self-confident special forces sergeants made an indelible impression on him. His career would come full circle. In 1972, wearing a green beret, Foley would be given command of his own A-Team. But between those two pivotal moments, his determination, loyalty, and mental and physical strength would be tested as never before, fighting in the jungles of Vietnam alongside the bravest men he would ever know. In Special Men, Foley describes his experience at the 7th Army NCO Academy in Germany, where he learned more about leadership than at any other school he would later attend. He takes us moment-by-moment on his heart-pounding introduction to combat—a nighttime, amphibious ambush patrol with the South Vietnamese Navy. We see the shock set in upon realizing that conventional training left him unprepared for the guerrilla army he faced in Vietnam. And we share his sadness over fallen comrades and his own relief at surviving his injuries. This is an unvarnished account of horror and heroism and a tribute to the unselfish devotion to duty of the LRPs, Rangers, and Green Berets.The 'Early Medieval' Origins of India
By Manu V. Devadevan. 2020
India is generally regarded as a civilization with a set of intrinsic attributes that emerged in the age of the…
Vedas or, better still, in the Harappan times. In recent decades, historical studies have moved away from rigid perspectives of singularity in origin and expansion; the emphasis now is on pluralities and long-term processes spanning centuries and millennia. There is also an influential school of thought which rejects antiquity claims such as these and holds that India is a construct of the colonial and nationalist imagination. In his radical reinterpretation of India's past, Manu V. Devadevan moves away from these reifying assessments to examine the evolution of institutions, ideas and identities that are characterized, typically, as Indian. In lieu of endorsing their Indianness, he traces their emergence to specific conditions that developed in India between 600 and 1200 CE, a period which historians now call the 'early medieval'.Modernization and Revolution in China
By June Grasso, Jay Corrin, Michael Kort. 2024
Extensively revised and fully updated in this sixth edition, this popular textbook conveys the drama of China’s struggle to modernize…
against the backdrop of a proud and difficult history. Featuring a new analysis of the issues facing China’s fifth generation of leaders, it explores prominent developments including China’s relations with its neighbors and the United States, the humanitarian crises in Tibet and Xinjiang, and the progression of Xi Jinping. Incorporating new analytical summaries in each chapter and updated suggested readings, this new edition covers: The breakdown of imperial China in the face of Japanese and Western encroachments The struggles between the ideologies and armies of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and the resulting dismantling of socialism and economic growth • China’s position as a world superpower and Xi Jinping’s leadership The Covid-19 pandemic Spanning the years from China’s defeat in the Opium Wars to its current status as a world superpower, the sixth edition of Modernization and Revolution in China is an essential textbook for courses on modern Chinese history, Chinese politics, and modern East Asia.Empires of the Indus
By Alice Albinia. 2024
10th anniversary edition with new PrefaceOne of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains,…
flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistans fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated cities grew and traded on its banks. In the ruins of these elaborate metropolises, Sanskrit-speaking nomads explored the river, extolling its virtues in Indias most ancient text, the Rig-Veda. During the past two thousand years a series of invaders - Alexander the Great, Afghan Sultans, the British Raj - made conquering the Indus valley their quixotic mission. For the people of the river, meanwhile, the Indus valley became a nodal point on the Silk Road, a centre of Sufi pilgrimage and the birthplace of Sikhism. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance.This book encapsulates a long period of history of human progress by highlighting crucial social, economic, and cultural dynamics. It…
presents recent historiography and new analytical tools used to analyse multi-dimensional themes involved in social formations in different parts of the world. This is a reader-friendly book with simple and lucid language and fulfils the pressing needs of students studying the course on Social Formations and Cultural Patterns of the ancient and medieval world at various universities across the world. The summary, key words, and representative questions at the end of each chapter would assist in revision and a better understanding of the issues dealt with therein. A detailed chapter-end reference would enable and motivate the readers to engage in further studies for a better understanding of the themes.This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics in the area of history – ancient and medieval world history, in particular, and anthropology. It will also be an interesting read for general readers interested in knowing about the ancient and medieval world.