This book, first published in 1983, is a radical reinterpretation of the Hungarian revolution in the context of world politics and Eastern Europe as a whole. It examines the events and protagonists with a fresh eye, and relies on witnesses and participants for the rigorous documentary backing.

During the last 20 years, Israel has reached unprecedented prosperity, yet it is haunted by existential fears for its future, identity, and survival. Israel's legitimacy is under assault from within and without by a coalition of left-wing radicals, Palestinians and their sympathizers, and Muslim fundamentalists. All these groups deny the existence of a Jewish nation and argue that Jews do not need a nation state. Hence, Israel should either disappear completely or become 'a state of all its citizens' devoid of any Jewish symbol or identity. The origins of this campaign are twofold. One derives from the traditional opposition that has accompanied Zionism from its inception. The second is contemporary, articulating the post-ist fads that swamped the West since the 1980s. The past occupies a prominent place in this crusade that aims at the present and future. Traditional historiography, scientific and pseudo-scientific, and the new vogue of memory and narrative, that claims to be the true history of human experience, are equally abused to delegitimize Israel. This book follows these two paths, while avoiding disputes over current political issues. First, it portrays the disciplinary background - the evolution of the modern history discipline. Subsequently, it focuses on the conflicting approaches to the cardinal issue of Zionism's essence: Is it a national liberation movement of European origin that offered a solution to the modern Jewish Question in a world of nationalities? Or is it a colonial movement that oppressed equally Arabs and oriental Jews?

Essays on History and Human Survival from the viewpoint of a Psychohistorian

Mimesis: the idea of imitation. Alterity: the idea of difference, the opposition of Self and Other. In his most accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig explores these complex and often interwoven concepts. Arguing that mimesis is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, he maintains that mimesis - variously experienced in different societies - is not only a faculty but also a history. That history, Taussig writes, is deeply tied to "Euroamerican colonialism, the felt relation of the civilizing process to savagery, to aping, sensateness caught in the net of passionful images spun for several centuries by the colonial trade with wildness." For anthropologists, social scientists, cultural critics, artists and everyone else caught up in the enigma of the postmodern, framing the question "What is Reality" is crucial to gaining an understanding of what it is we know and who we are. Why is it important to understand that traditions are inventions and that social life is a construction when they grip us with all the force of the "natural"? And how is it that we understand reality as both real and really made up? In Mimesis and Alterity Taussig undertakes an eccentric history of the mimetic faculty. He moves easily from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, backwards to the fable of colonial "first-contact" and alleged mimetic prowess of "primitives," and then forward to contemporary time, when the idea of alterity is increasingly unstable. Utilizing anthropological theory, Taussig blends Latin American ethnography and colonial history with the insights of Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Vigorous and unorthodox, Taussig's understanding of mimesis in different cultures deepens our meanings of ethnography, racism and society.

Torture has lately become front page news, featured in popular movies and TV shows, and a topic of intense public debate. It grips our imagination, in part because torturing someone seems to be an unthinkable breach of humanity—theirs and ours. And yet, when confronted with horrendous events in war, or the prospect of catastrophic damage to one’s own country, many come to wonder whether we can really afford to abstain entirely from torture. Before trying to tackle this dilemma, though, we need to see torture as a multifaceted problem with a long history and numerous ethical and legal aspects. Confronting Torture offers a multidisciplinary investigation of this wrenching topic. Editors Scott A. Anderson and Martha C. Nussbaum bring together a diversity of scholars to grapple with many of torture’s complexities, including: How should we understand the impetus to use torture? Why does torture stand out as a particularly heinous means of war-fighting? Are there any sound justifications for the use of torture? How does torture affect the societies that employ it? And how can we develop ethical or political bulwarks to prevent its use? The essays here resist the temptation to oversimplify torture, drawing together work from scholars in psychology, history, sociology, law, and philosophy, deepening and broadening our grasp of the subject. Now, more than ever, torture is something we must think about; this important book offers a diversity of timely, constructive responses on this resurgent and controversial subject.

In September 1952, John Lukacs, then a young and unknown historian, wrote George Kennan (1904-2005), the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, asking one of the nation's best-known diplomats what he thought of Lukacs's own views on Kennan's widely debated idea of containing rather than militarily confronting the Soviet Union. A month later, to Lukacs's surprise, he received a personal reply from Kennan.So began an exchange of letters that would continue for more than fifty years. Lukacs would go on to become one of America's most distinguished and prolific diplomatic historians, while Kennan, who would retire from public life to begin a new career as Pulitzer Prize-winning author, would become revered as the man whose strategy of containment led to a peaceful end to the Cold War. Their letters, collected here for the first time, capture the writing and thinking of two of the country's most important voices on America's role and place in world affairs. From the division of Europe into East and West after World War II to its unification as the Soviet Union disintegrated, and from the war in Vietnam to the threat of nuclear annihilation and the fate of democracy in America and the world, this book provides an insider's tour of the issues and pivotal events that defined the Cold War.The correspondence also charts the growth and development of an intellectual and personal friendship that was intense, devoted, and honest. As Kennan later wrote Lukacs in letter, "perceptive, understanding, and constructive criticism is . . . as I see it, in itself a form of creative philosophical thought." It is a belief to which both men subscribed and that they both practiced.Presented with an introduction by Lukacs, the letters in Through the History of the Cold War reveal new dimensions to Kennan's thinking about America and its future, and illuminate the political-and spiritual-philosophies that the two authors shared as they wrote about a world transformed by war and by the clash of ideologies that defined the twentieth century.

“Pre-eminent among historians of labor history.†—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the “roaring twenties†looked very different. Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and repression. Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Rooseveltâ€s inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s. "In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition. —From the new introduction by Frances Fox Piven

Shortlisted for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review Fiction plays a vital role in describing history and transmitting culture. How writers understand and use history can play an equally important role in how they navigate a novel. This book explores the nature of the author's relationship with history and fiction - often using writers' own words - as well as the role history plays in fiction. Focusing on genre fiction, this study considers key issues in the relationship between history and fiction, such as how writers contextualise the history they use in their fiction and how they incorporate historical research. The book also addresses the related topic of world building using history, discussing the connections between the science fiction writers' notion of world building and the scholarly understanding of story space and explaining the mechanics of constructing the world of the novel. This book places the writing of fiction into a wider framework of history and writing and encourages dialogue between writers and historians.

It is precisely with the emergence of history as we know it today that Professor Gilbert s important book is concerned. . . . Instead of treating these two great figures in isolation, Professor Gilbert puts them into the context of their times, into the stream of political thinking and historical writing of which they were a part. . . .His book is the fruit of years of writing of which they were a part. . . .His book is the fruit of years of original research among Florentine archives and of careful thought about the problems of Renaissance politics and historiography. F.A. Yates, New York Times Review of Books

Shortlisted for the 2021 Society for Army Historical Research's Templer Medal Operation Crusader, launched in November 1941, was the third and final British attempt to relieve the siege of Tobruk and break the German and Italian forces in North Africa. After tough initial fighting, the British made important gains, only to be countered by a stunning breakthrough overseen personally by Lt. General Erwin Rommel. As the British situation teetered, the commander of the 8th Army, Lt. General Alan Cunningham, was relieved of duty by his superior, General Claude Auchinleck. This decision changed the direction of the battle and perhaps the war itself. Why and how Cunningham was relieved has been the subject of commentary and speculation since it occurred. Using newly discovered evidence, Alexander Joffe rethinks the events that brought about the sudden relief of the operation's commanding officer, including insubordination. The book then discusses how narratives regarding the operation were created, were incorporated into British and Commonwealth official and unofficial historical writing about the war, and contributed to British historical memory. Based on a decade of archival work, the book presents a new and detailed analysis of a consequential battle and, importantly, of how its history was written and received in the context of post-war Britain.

First published in 1970, Professor Gerschenkron's theme is the contribution which the study of Russian economic history can make to the problems which have preoccupied Western historians. He first considers the way in which the case of the old Believers in Russia, who refused to support the official church but played an important entrepreneurial role in nineteenth-century economic development, bears upon Max Weber's celebrated thesis on the relations between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. In the course of his discussion, Professor Gerschenkron provides important information on the doctrinal beliefs of this group, their social status and the extent to which they were persecuted and discriminated against by the State. His conclusion is that the persecution certainly afforded sufficient impulse to engage in profitable activities and to develop the traits Weber considered as specific features of the 'capitalist' spirit.

This title is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author's personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the 20th century's experiments in social engineering

Book by Lukacs, John

Who hasn't heard of him - Oedipus, the tragic figure from Greek mythology whose shocking fate has moved so many generations, inspired so many writers and even found his way into modern psychology through Sigmund Freud? Is it conceivable that this figure and his fate was not a creation of human fancy at all but the conversion of real historical happenings? This question is posed by Immanuel Velikovsky in the present book. Like a detective, he takes the reader on a unique investigation full of suspense, breathtaking surprises and insights while meticulously searching for traces of a finding that seems to be even more incredible than the original myth itself. The most popular pharaonic family of all - Akhnaton along with his wife Nefertiti and his son Tutankhamen - are exposed as the real protagonists of the Oedipus saga.

"A Cornelia & Michael Bessie book."Includes index.