General History
Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the "New World." Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?
In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not--as we are so often told, even today--Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.
Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.
While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories--siloed and piecemeal--were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic "rise of the West" theories that have endured to this day.
"Capacious and compelling" (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton--and of the greatest "commodity" of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the "New World," whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
Why did Hamas attack? What is Israel trying to achieve? Did this catastrophe have to happen? And is there a way forward? The book's expert contributors address these and other questions, which have never been more urgent.
In September 2023, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted that the Middle East "is quieter today than it has been in two decades." One week later, unprecedented violence in Gaza and Israel shattered the status quo and shocked the world.
Hamas's Operation Al-Aqsa Deluge punctured delusions of stability as hundreds of militants burst forth from the Gaza prison camp. In the ensuing carnage and firefights, 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage.
Israel's retaliation turned the besieged enclave into a howling wasteland. Nearly 30,000 people were killed in four months, including more than 12,000 children, and over 60 percent of homes were damaged or destroyed. Israel targeted the wounded and infirm, newborns and near-dead, as Gaza's healthcare system-hospitals, clinics, ambulances, medical personnel--came under a systematic attack unprecedented in the annals of modern warfare.
The Hamas massacre and the genocidal Israeli campaign which followed together mark a historic turning point in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The reverberations have also shaken politics far beyond, not least in Europe and the United States, where gigantic, round-the-clock protests for Palestinian rights pitted politicians against the public and exposed a growing statist authoritarianism.
In this groundbreaking book--the first published about the 2023 Gaza war--leading Palestinian, Israeli, and international authorities put these momentous developments in context and provide an initial taking-stock.
Contributors: Musa Abuhashhash, Ahmed Alnaouq, Nathan J. Brown, Yaniv Cogan, Clare Daly MEP, Talal Hangari, Khaled Hroub, R. J., Colter Louwerse, Mitchell Plitnick, Mouin Rabbani, Sara Roy, and Avi Shlaim
In this book, former Warren Commission lawyer Burt Griffin examines anew the Kennedy assassination, its various investigations, its effects on the Cold War and the civil rights movement, and the motives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Griffin begins with his own skeptical reaction to the assassination, proceeds to the Dallas police investigation, and continues with the efforts of himself and his colleagues to sift truth from those who concealed, withheld, or exaggerated evidence.
After nearly six decades of study, Judge Griffin is satisfied that Oswald acted alone. He concludes that violence in the Cold War and civil rights movement caused Oswald to believe that blame for Kennedy's death might be placed on followers of rightwing activist and former U.S. Army general Edwin Walker. Walker was an outspoken enemy of Oswald's idol, Cuban president Fidel Castro, and a firm opponent of racial integration--and Oswald had already attempted to murder Walker in April 1963. The author gives the Walker movement a more prominent place in the assassination story and traces the conflicting ambitions of Walker, Oswald, Kennedy and Ruby as they collided in October and November 1963. This book will help serious readers separate truth from fiction and to become examiners of how insignificant, unsuspected, powerless people driven by very personal needs and fears can, with the help of a firearm, alter the course of history.
The extraordinary family story of George V, Wilhelm II, and Nicholas II: they were tied to one another by history, and history would ultimately tear them apart.
Known among their families as Georgie, Willy, and Nicky, they were, respectively, the royal cousins George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Nicholas II of Russia--the first two grandsons of Queen Victoria, the latter her grandson by marriage. In 1914, on the eve of world war, they controlled the destiny of Europe and the fates of millions of their subjects. The outcome and their personal endings are well known--Nicky shot with his family by the Bolsheviks, Willy in exile in Holland, Georgie still atop his throne. Largely untold, however, is the family saga that played such a pivotal role in bringing the world to the precipice.
Drawing widely on previously unpublished royal letters and diaries, made public for the first time by Queen Elizabeth II, Catrine Clay chronicles the riveting half century of the royals' overlapping lives, and their slow, inexorable march into conflict. They met frequently from childhood, on holidays, and at weddings, birthdays, and each others' coronations. They saw themselves as royal colleagues, a trade union of kings, standing shoulder to shoulder against the rise of socialism, republicanism, and revolution. And yet tensions abounded between them.
Clay deftly reveals how intimate family details had deep historical significance: the antipathy Willy's mother (Victoria's daughter) felt toward him because of his withered left arm, and how it affected him throughout his life; the family tension caused by Otto von Bismarck's annexation of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark (Georgie's and Nicky's mothers were Danish princesses); the surreality surrounding the impending conflict. "Have I gone mad?" Nicholas asked his wife, Alexandra, in July 1914, showing her another telegram from Wilhelm. "What on earth does Willy mean pretending that it still depends on me whether war is averted or not?" Germany had, in fact, declared war on Russia six hours earlier. At every point in her remarkable book, Catrine Clay sheds new light on a watershed period in world history.
In America, lipstick is the foundation of empires; it's a signature of identity; it's propaganda, self-expression, oppression, freedom, and rebellion. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry and one of our most iconic accessories of gender. This engaging and entertaining history of lipstick in America throughout the twentieth century and into the present will give readers a new view of the little tube's big place in modern America; marching with the Suffragettes, building Fortune 500 businesses, being present at Stonewall, and engineered for space travel.