LITMIR.BIZ

A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era Out of the grey expanse of official records in Spanish, English and French, The Common Wind provides a gripping and colorful account of inter-continental communication networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the new world. A powerful «history from below,» this book follows those «rumors of emancipation» and the people who spread them, bringing to life the protagonists in the revolution against slavery. Though it's been said that The Common Wind is «the most original dissertation ever written,» and is credited for having «opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,» the PhD project has remained unpublished for thirty-two years, since it's completion at Duke University in 1986. Now, after decades of achieving wide acclaim by leading historians of slavery and the new world, it will finally be released by Verso for the first time, with a foreword from Marcus Rediker.

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Between 1959 and 1966, the late CBC Radio journalist Imbert Orchard travelled across British Columbia with recording engineer Ian Stephen interviewing nearly a thousand of the province’s pioneers. The resulting collection — 2,700 hours of audiotapes describing both extraordinary events and everyday experiences — is considered by historians to be one of the best sources of primary information about the province. To the general public, however, the tales in these tapes remain virtually unknown.Combining text, archival photographs and the original sound recordings from the CBC Archives onto three CDs, Voices of British Columbia draws 24 stories from this collection to immerse us in daily life in the early 20th century. You’ll meet Sarah Glassey, a spirited homesteader who carried a rifle and bagged more birds than any man in the Kispiox Valley. You’ll hear Bill LaChance, the sole survivor of the 1910 Glacier Snowslide, describe that tragic avalanche. And you’ll discover how Great Chief Kwah of Fort St. James spared the life of James Douglas, future governor of British Columbia.By turns sad, contemplative, insightful and funny, these stories reveal as much about the spirit and resilience of people as they do about the history of the province.

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Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England. [/b][b] Those possessed by the devil in early modern England usually exhibited a common set of symptoms: fits, vomiting, visions, contortions, speaking in tongues, and an antipathy to prayer. However, it was a matter of interpretation, and sometimes public opinion, if these symptoms were visited upon the victim, or if they came from within. Both early modern England and colonial New England had cases that blurred the line between witchcraft and demonic possession, most famously, the Salem witch trials. While historians acknowledge some similarities in witch trials between the two regions, such as the fact that an overwhelming majority of witches were women, the histories of these cases primarily focus on local contexts and specifics. In so doing, they overlook the ways in which manhood factored into possession and witchcraft cases. Vexed with Devils is a cultural history of witchcraft-possession phenomena that centers on the role of men and patriarchal power. Erika Gasser reveals that witchcraft trials had as much to do with who had power in the community, to impose judgement or to subvert order, as they did with religious belief. She argues that the gendered dynamics of possession and witchcraft demonstrated that contested meanings of manhood played a critical role in the struggle to maintain authority. While all men were not capable of accessing power in the same ways, many of the people involved—those who acted as if they were possessed, men accused of being witches, and men who wrote possession propaganda—invoked manhood as they struggled to advocate for themselves during these perilous times. Gasser ultimately concludes that the decline of possession and witchcraft cases was not merely a product of change over time, but rather an indication of the ways in which patriarchal power endured throughout and beyond the colonial period. Vexed with Devils reexamines an unnerving time and offers a surprising new perspective on our own, using stories and voices which emerge from the records in ways that continue to fascinate and unsettle us.

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A comparative history of cross-cultural encounters and the critical role of cannibalism in the early modernperiod Cannibalism, for medieval and early modern Europeans, was synonymous with savagery. Humans who ate other humans, they believed, were little better than animals. The European colonizers who encountered Native Americans described them as cannibals as a matter of course, and they wrote extensively about the lurid cannibal rituals they claim to have witnessed. In this definitive analysis, Kelly L. Watson argues that the persistent rumors of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. These colonizers had to forge new identities for themselves in the Americas and find ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples. They established hierarchical categories of European superiority and Indian inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated. In her close read of letters, travel accounts, artistic renderings, and other descriptions of cannibals and cannibalism, Watson focuses on how gender, race, and imperial power intersect within the figure of the cannibal. Watson reads cannibalism as a part of a dominant European binary in which civilization is rendered as male and savagery is seen as female, and she argues that as Europeans came to dominate the New World, they continually rewrote the cannibal narrative to allow for a story in which the savage, effeminate, cannibalistic natives were overwhelmed by the force of virile European masculinity. Original and historically grounded, Insatiable Appetites uses the discourse of cannibalism to uncover the ways in which difference is understood in the West.

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Since its emergence in the 1960s, belief in alien abduction has saturated popular culture, with the ubiquitous image of the almond-eyed alien appearing on everything from bumper stickers to bars of soap. Drawing on interviews with alleged abductees from the New York area, Bridget Brown suggests a new way for people to think about the alien phenomenon, one that is concerned not with establishing whether aliens actually exist, but with understanding what belief in aliens in America may tell us about our changing understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves looks at how the belief in abduction by extraterrestrials is constituted by and through popular discourse and the images provided by print, film, and television. Brown contends that the abduction phenomenon is symptomatic of a period during which people have come to feel increasingly divested of the ability to know what is real or true about themselves and the world in which they live. The alien abduction phenomenon helps us think about how people who feel left out create their own stories and fashion truths that square with their own experience of the world.

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Katja H., Tochter eines ehemaligen ranghohen DDR-Offiziers, blickt auf ihr gleichermaßen turbulentes wie schillerndes Leben zurück. Als Nesthäkchen wächst sie recht behütet im Kreis ihrer Familie auf, was einerseits viele Privilegien, andererseits aber auch manche Zwänge für die Heranwachsende mit sich bringt. Im DDR-Familienidyll zeigen sich erste Risse und Spannungen, die sich nach der Wende maßgeblich verschärfen. Ausgerechnet der Vater, der bis zu seinem Tod an die Idee von einer besseren Welt glaubt, legt die Probleme sowohl in der Familie als auch im politischen System vor und nach der Wende unverblümt, ja mitunter schonungslos in einer Familienchronik dar. Katja, beim Mauerfall 1989 gerade mal zwanzig, genießt die neue, grenzenlose Freiheit in vollen Zügen. Bis auch sie nach bewegten Jahren in der Schweiz die hässliche Kehrseite des Kapitalismus kennenlernt: Eine irre Talfahrt zwischen New Yorker High Society, Endlos-Sommer auf Ibiza und ernüchterndem Berliner Arbeitsalltag beginnt. Und natürlich ist dies auch eine Geschichte über die Liebe – über ihren Zauber, aber auch über ihre alles vernichtende Zerstörungskraft.

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100-летие Ленина и проблемы в СССР. Борьба за Власть – 20-е и 30-е годы. Конституция 1936 года. Красный и Западный проекты. Государственный переворот в 1953 году и отказ от Красного проекта. Массовые отъезды советских людей в капстраны в 70-е годы. Балет А. Петрова Сотворение мира и опера Петр Первый – связь с разрушением СССР. Кто назвал Петра «великим»? Меняющийся смысл образа Петра Первого в 30-е и 70-е годы. Патетическая оратория Свиридова и 13-ая симфония Шостаковича. Шостакович в лагере защитников СССР и возвращение в лагерь противников. Отношение к России Прокофьева и Шостаковича. Фортепианные концерты Прокофьева – портрет 20-го века. Прокофьев в СССР 1936-1953. Завещание Прокофьева.

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