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The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History
Modeled after CQ Press' popular documentary histories, this primary-source rich volume offers researchers an invaluable look into the key events that have shaped this dynamic region since World War I. Organized into thematic chapters, and loaded with both full-text and excerpted primary source documents, The Contemporary Middle Eastis designed to be an accessible support for courses in Middle Eastern history, international affairs, and comparative politics. Researchers in high school and undergraduate libraries will want this resource handy.
Defining Documents in World History - The 20th Century (1900-1950)
By 1950, the technological advances of the 20th century were in full swing and several important social and political reforms were making their mark. This set offers in-depth analysis of a broad range of historical documents, including legal codes, letters, speeches, constitutions, reports, and books, from "Essential Truths" by Rufus Jones to the Nato Treaty.
Defining Documents in World History: The Nuclear Age
The nuclear era challenged previous assumptions about war and peace, as political leaders were forced to ponder how nuclear war could be fought, how it could be prevented, and what the meaning of victory, defense, and survival were. With the Cold War between the Soviets and Western nations growing, one key guiding principle became deterrence through strength, resulting in massive buildups of nuclear arsenals: enough weapons were present to destroy the world a thousand time over.
Along with lingering fears of mass destruction, the nuclear age brought with it serious efforts to reduce nuclear capabilities in order to ensure the survival of the planet. It also brought the promise of nuclear energy, a promise fraught with numerous obstacles regarding safety and security. In recent years new concerns have arisen around the spread of nuclear technology and the potential for “dirty bombs.”
These volumes explore the development of nuclear technology and its use in military weapons and power generation. Documents examined include policy statements, international agreements, threat assessments, reports by watchdog organizations, historical accounts, political speeches, and more.
Defining Documents in World History: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union
A two volume set that provides a comprehensive exploration of the key events, individuals, and ideological shifts that shaped the Soviet Union's rise and eventual collapse.
Defining Moments: The Attack on Pearl Harbor
Provides a detailed account of the Pearl Harbor attack and the war in the Pacific. Covers the dramatic events of December 7, 1941; chronicles America's victory over Japan; and explores the legacy of Pearl Harbor. Includes a narrative overview, biographies, primary source documents, and other helpful features.
Defining Moments: The Cuban Missile Crisis
Provides users with a detailed and authoritative overview of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962 that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Includes biographies of principal figures involved in this pivotal episode in U.S. history, primary source documents, and more.
Eyewitness History: World War I
Examines one of the most pivotal points in 20th-century history, exploring the social, cultural, military, and political impacts of World War I on American society, as well as the role the United States played in the conflict. This volume discusses World War I's place in American history as the catalyst for World War II and the cold war.
Voices of World War II
Drawing together a wide variety of primary source documents from across the United States, Europe, and Asia, this book illuminates the events and experiences of World War II--the most devastating war in human history. * A chronology lists all major events of World War II * A bibliography provides an up-do-date selection of basic books, Internet sources, and movies and television series on World War II * A glossary defines key World War II terms and phrases * Extensive commentary, contextual information, and guiding questions accompany each document
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Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq
In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events. In a voice in turn eloquent, angry, reflective and darkly comic, Riverbend recounts stories of life in an occupied city--of neighbors whose homes are raided by US troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. At times, the tragic blends into the absurd, as she tells of her family jumping out of bed to wash clothes and send e-mails in the middle of the night when the electricity is briefly restored, or of their quest to bury an elderly aunt when the mosques are all overbooked for wakes and the cemeteries are all full. The only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman's perspective, she also describes a once-secular city where women are now afraid to leave their homes without head covering and a male escort. Interspersed with these vivid snapshots from daily life are Riverbend's analyses of everything from the elusive workings of the Iraqi Governing Council to the torture in Abu Ghraib, from the coverage provided by American media and by Al-Jazeera to Bush's State of the Union speech. Here again, she focuses especially on the fate of women, whose rights and freedoms have fallen victim to rising fundamentalisms in a chaotic postwar society. With thousands of loyal readers worldwide, the Riverbend blog is widely recognized around the world as a crucial source of information not available through the mainstream media. The book version of this blog will have "value-added" features: an introduction and timeline of events by veteran journalist James Ridgeway, excerpts from Riverbend's links and an epilogue by Riverbend herself.
The Liberators: America's witnesses to the Holocaust
At last, the everyday fighting men who were the first Americans to know the full and horrifying truth about the Holocaust share their astonishing stories. Rich with powerful never-before-published details from the author's interviews with more than 150 U.S. soldiers who liberated the Nazi death camps, The Liberators is an essential addition to the literature of World War II--and a stirring testament to Allied courage in the face of inconceivable atrocities. Taking us from the beginnings of the liberators' final march across Germany to V-E Day and beyond, Michael Hirsh allows us to walk in their footsteps, experiencing the journey as they themselves experienced it. But this book is more than just an in-depth account of the liberation. It reveals how profoundly these young men were affected by what they saw--the unbelievable horror and pathos they felt upon seeing "stacks of bodies like cordwood" and "skeletonlike survivors" in camp after camp. That life-altering experience has stayed with them to this very day. It's been well over half a century since the end of World War II, and they still haven't forgotten what the camps looked like, how they smelled, what the inmates looked like, and how it made them feel. Many of the liberators suffer from what's now called post-traumatic stress disorder and still experience Holocaust-related nightmares. Here we meet the brave souls who--now in their eighties and nineties--have chosen at last to share their stories. Corporal Forrest Robinson saw masses of dead bodies at Nordhausen and was so horrified that he lost his memory for the next two weeks. Melvin Waters, a 4-F volunteer civilian ambulance driver, recalls that a woman at Bergen-Belsen "fought us like a cat because she thought we were taking her to the crematory." Private Don Timmer used his high school German to interpret for General Dwight Eisenhower during the supreme Allied commander's visit to Ohrdruf, the first camp liberated by the Americans. And Phyllis Lamont Law, an army nurse at Mauthausen-Gusen, recalls the shock and, ultimately, "the hope" that "you can save a few." From Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany to Mauthausen in Austria, The Liberators offers readers an intense and unforgettable look at the Nazi death machine through the eyes of the men and women who were our country's witnesses to the Holocaust. The liberators' recollections are historically important, vivid, riveting, heartbreaking, and, on rare occasions, joyous and uplifting. This book is their opportunity, perhaps for the last time, to tell the world.
The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians
The first collection ever of the writings and insights of the original creators of the atomic bomb, along with pieces by the most important historians and interpreters of the subject, is now in paperback. Born out of a small research program begun in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people, including our foremost scientists and thinkers, and cost nearly $2 billion'and it was operated under a shroud of absolute secrecy. This groundbreaking collection of documents, essays, articles, and excerpts from histories, biographies, plays, novels, letters, and the oral histories of key eyewitnesses is the freshest, most exhaustive exploration yet of the topic. Compiled by experts at the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the book features first-hand material by Albert Einstein, Leslie Groves, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Henry Stimson, and many others. Dozens of photographs depict key moments and significant figures, and concise explanatory material accompanies each selection. The project's aftermath and legacy are covered as well, making this the most comprehensive account of the birth of the atomic age.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War: An American Correspondent's Journal from the Chinese Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam
In the years following World War II, the United States suffered its most severe military and diplomatic reverses in Asia while Mao Zedong laid the foundation for the emergence of China as a major economic and military world power. As a correspondent for the International News Service, the Associated Press, and later for the New York Times, Seymour Topping documented on the ground the tumultuous events during the Chinese Civil War, the French Indochina War, and the American retreat from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In this riveting narrative, Topping chronicles his extraordinary experiences covering the East-West struggle in Asia and Eastern Europe from 1946 into the 1980s, taking us beyond conventional historical accounts to provide a fresh, first-hand perspective on American triumphs and defeats during the Cold War era. At the close of World War II, Topping -- who had served as an infantry officer in the Pacific -- reported for the International News Service from Beijing and Mao's Yenan stronghold before joining the Associated Press in Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek's capital. He covered the Chinese Civil War for the next three years, often interviewing Nationalist and Communist commanders in combat zones. Crossing Nationalist lines, Topping was captured by Communist guerrillas and tramped for days over battlefields to reach the People's Liberation Army as it advanced on Nanking. The sole correspondent on the battlefield during the decisive Battle of the Huai-Hai, which sealed Mao's victory, Topping later scored a world-wide exclusive as the first journalist to report the fall of the capital. In 1950, Topping opened the Associated Press bureau in Saigon, becoming the first American correspondent in Vietnam. In 1951, John F. Kennedy, then a young congressman on a fact-finding visit to Saigon, sought out Topping for a briefing. Assignments in London and West Berlin followed, then Moscow and Hong Kong for the New York Times. During those years Topping reported on the Chinese intervention in the Korean conflict, Mao's Cultural Revolution and its preceding internal power struggle, the Chinese leader's monumental ideological split with Nikita Khrushchev, the French Indochina War, America's Vietnam War, and the genocides in Cambodia and Indonesia. He stood in the Kremlin with a vodka-tilting Khrushchev on the night the Cuban missile crisis ended and interviewed Fidel Castro in Havana on its aftermath. Throughout this captivating chronicle, Topping also relates the story of his marriage to Audrey Ronning, a world-renowned photojournalist and writer and daughter of the Canadian ambassador to China. As the couple traveled from post to post reporting on some of the biggest stories of the century in Asia and Eastern Europe, they raised five daughters. In an epilogue, Topping cites lessons to be learned from the Asia wars which could serve as useful guides for American policymakers in dealing with present-day conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. From China to Indochina, Burma to Korea and beyond, Topping did more than report the news; he became involved in international diplomacy, enabling him to gain extraordinary insights. In On the Front Lines of the Cold War, Topping shares these insights, providing an invaluable eyewitness account of some of the pivotal moments in modern history.
Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust - A New History in the Words of the Men and Women Who Survived
A landmark achievement in Holocaust scholarship, Remembering Voices of the Holocaust is culled from hours of first person accounts from survivors recorded for inclusion in the sound archives of both the Imperial War Museum in London, and the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. In their own words, Jewish survivors as well as Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and both perpetrators and ordinary observers recount the entire horrific arc of the Holocaust from the ominous rise of the Nazi party during the Weimar days through the liquidation of the ghettos and the institution of Hitler's "final solution," continuing on to the liberation of the camps and the harrowing aftermath of the War.
Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China
In the spring of 1989, millions of citizens across China took to the streets in a nationwide uprising against government corruption and authoritarian rule. What began with widespread hope for political reform ended with the People's Liberation Army firing on unarmed citizens in the capital city of Beijing, and those leaders who survived the crackdown became wanted criminals overnight. Among the witnesses to this unprecedented popular movement was Rowena Xiaoqing He, who would later join former student leaders and other exiles in North America, where she has worked tirelessly for over a decade to keep the memory of the Tiananmen Movement alive. This moving oral history interweaves He's own experiences with the accounts of three student leaders exiled from China. Here, in their own words, they describe their childhoods during Mao's Cultural Revolution, their political activism, the bitter disappointments of 1989, and the profound contradictions and challenges they face as exiles. Variously labeled as heroes, victims, and traitors in the years after Tiananmen, these individuals tell difficult stories of thwarted ideals and disconnection, but that nonetheless embody the hope for a freer China and a more just world.
We Were Each Other's Prisoners: An Oral History of World War II American and German Prisoners of War
During the Second World War, Germany captured nearly 94,000 American soldiers, while the Allies shipped almost 380,000 Germans to the United States. We Were Each Other's Prisoners compares, for the first time ever, stories of POWs from both sides of the conflict: From the anti-Nazi German soldier who tried desperately to turn himself in rather than fight for Hitler, to the U.S. prisoner who thrice escaped his German captors--the last time to join Russian troops in the Battle of Berlin, to the Jewish-American prisoner who was sent to a slave labor camp.Culled from more than 150 interviews with 35 American and German surviving POWs, the book addresses larger political and psychological issues:* What does it mean to be a prisoner, especially for men whose cultures prize individual heroism?* Why did conditions differ so dramatically in American and German camps? How were these men received upon their return to their homeland?* How have they coped with the long-term effects of incarceration?
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