The Guantánamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices

The Guantánamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices
University of California Press | 2009-09-01 | ISBN: 0520261763 | 232 Pages | PDF | 3.2MB

This book, based on a two-year study of former prisoners of the U.S. government's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of the Bush administration's "war on terror." Scrupulously researched and devoid of rhetoric, the book deepens the story of post-9/11 America and the nation's descent into the netherworld of prisoner abuse. Researchers interviewed more than sixty former Guantánamo detainees in nine countries, as well as key government officials, military experts, former guards, interrogators, lawyers for detainees, and other camp personnel. We hear directly from former detainees as they describe the events surrounding their capture, their years of incarceration, and the myriad difficulties preventing many from resuming a normal life upon returning home. Prepared jointly by researchers with the Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, and the International Human Rights Law Clinic, University of California, Berkeley School of Law, in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights, The Guantánamo Effect contributes significantly to the debate surrounding the U.S.'s commitment to international law during war time.


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Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America

Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America
Richard F. America | Praeger Publishers | Pages: 150 | 2001-06-27 | ISBN : 0275944506 | PDF | 6.6 MB

Richard America here redefines the complex problems of racial economic injustice, poverty, inequality, and lagging competitiveness and productivity in the United States. In a sure-to-be-controversial analysis, the author argues that there is a true debt owed by White America to Black America, that this debt is significant, and that it has now come due. He estimates the size of Whites' debt to Blacks, shows how that debt came to be, and suggests creative ways of paying it back. This book argues persuasively that the social and racial problems in the United States cannot be solved until we acknowledge that the "haves" truly and literally owe money to the "have nots."

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The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga, and the Jesuits, 1584--1630

The University of Mantua, the Gonzaga, and the Jesuits, 1584--1630
The Johns Hopkins University Press | 2009-06-22 | ISBN: 080189171X | 312 Pages | PDF | 2.4MB

Universities were driving forces of change in late Renaissance Italy. The Gonzaga, the ruling family of Mantua, had long supported scholarship and dreamed of founding an institution of higher learning within the city. In the early seventeenth century they joined forces with the Jesuits, a powerful intellectual and religious force, to found one of the most innovative universities of the time.

Paul F. Grendler provides the first book in any language about the Peaceful University of Mantua, its official name. He traces the efforts of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga, a prince savant who debated Galileo, as he made his family's dream a reality. Ferdinando negotiated with the Jesuits, recruited professors, and financed the school. Grendler examines the motivations of the Gonzaga and the Jesuits in the establishment of a joint civic and Jesuit university.

The University of Mantua lasted only six years, lost during the brutal sack of the city by German troops in 1630. Despite its short life, the university offered original scholarship and teaching. It had the first professorship of chemistry more than 100 years before any other Italian university. The leading professor of medicine identified the symptoms of angina pectoris 140 years before an English scholar named the disease. The star law professor advanced new legal theories while secretly spying for James I of England. The Jesuits taught humanities, philosophy, and theology in ways both similar to and different from lay professors.

A superlative study of education, politics, and culture in seventeenth-century Italy, this book reconsiders a period in Italy's history often characterized as one of feckless rulers and stagnant learning. Thanks to extensive archival research and a thorough examination of the published works of the university's professors, Grendler's history tells a new story.


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One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (Jewis Cultures of the World)

One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (Jewis Cultures of the World)
Rutgers University Press | 2009 | ISBN: 0813545412 | 288 pages | PDF | 1.7MB

The Feres Mura, Ethiopian Jews whose families converted to Christianity during the nineteenth century and then reasserted their Jewish identity in the late twentieth century, still await acceptance by Israel. Since the 1980s, they have sought homecoming through the state's right of return law. Instead of a welcoming embrace, Israel's government and society regard them with reticence and suspicion. Using more over ten years of ethnographical research, One People, One Blood expertly documents this tenuous relationship and the challenges facing the Feres Mura.


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Mao's China and the Cold War

Mao's China and the Cold War By Chen Jian
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press 2000 | 416 Pages | ISBN: 0807826170 | PDF | 2 MB

The author, formerly a student in Shanghai and at Southern Illinois University, uses primary sources from Chinese archival materials to provide new information on and analysis of Chinese leader Mao Zedong's behavior during the Cold War. Chen takes further the current literature on Chinese security interests (see Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross's The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress, LJ 7/97; for Mao's life, see Philip Short's Mao: A Life, LJ 11/15/99, and Ross Terrill's Mao Zedong: A Biography, Stanford Univ., 2000) and presents two important points: First, he argues that Mao made decisions primarily based on his ability to promote "continuous revolution" in China and bolster his own power. And, second, he asserts that Mao used the Chinese people's "victim mentality" (i.e., the feeling that foreign powers were poised to take unfair advantage of China's vulnerabilities) to rally public opinion. The author investigates several case studies, including the rise of the Cold War, America's "loss" of China, the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, the first and second Indochina War, the Polish-Hungarian crisis, and the Taiwan Strait crisis. We are fortunate to have this book because of the author's analysis and use of sources that are not generally available to non-Chinese. Highly recommended for all academic libraries and public libraries with international relations collections.

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West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace

West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace By Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press 2009 | 304 Pages | ISBN: 0807832782 | PDF | 2 MB

Most Civil War generals were graduates of West Point, and many of them helped transform the U.S. Army from what was little better than an armed mob that performed poorly during the War of 1812 into the competent fighting force that won the Mexican War. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh offers an insightful and original portrait of the American army from 1814 to the end of the Civil War.

Hsieh demonstrates how the "old army" transformed itself into a professional military force after 1814, and, more important, how "old army" methods profoundly shaped the conduct of the Civil War. The dominance of both armies by West Point-trained generals prevented either side from gaining a marked superiority in military competence. Moreover, the long, grinding war, with heavy casualties on both sides, had unforeseen political implications--for instance, the war's great length strengthened the hand of the abolitionists, which would not have been the case if the North had won a quick and decisive victory.

The first book to show how the antebellum U.S. Army, and especially West Point graduates, affected the course of the Civil War, this volume makes a unique contribution to the history of America's greatest cataclysm.

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Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia

Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia By Jane Dailey
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press 2000 | 292 Pages | ISBN: 0807825875 | PDF | 1 MB

Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics.
Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.

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Domestic Secrets: Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857

Domestic Secrets: Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857 By Maria Agren
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press 2009 | 285 Pages | ISBN: 0807833207 | PDF | 2 MB

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualized. Maria Agren chronicles changes in married women's property rights, revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex tale of unintended consequences.

A public sphere of influence--including the wife's family and the local community--held sway over spousal property rights throughout most of the seventeenth century, Agren argues. Around 1700, a campaign to codify spousal property rights as an arcanum domesticum, or domestic secret, aimed to increase efficiency in legal decision making. New regulatory changes indeed reduced familial interference, but they also made families less likely to give land to women.

The advent of the print medium ushered property issues back into the public sphere, this time on a national scale, Agren explains. Mass politicization increased sympathy for women, and public debate popularized more progressive ideas about the economic contributions of women to marriage, leading to mid-nineteenth-century legal reforms that were more favorable to women. Agren's work enhances our understanding of how societies have conceived of women’s contributions to the fundamental institutions of marriage and the family, using as an example a country with far-reaching influence during and after the Enlightenment.

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Singing Out: An Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals

Singing Out: An Oral History of America's Folk Music Revivals By David King Dunaway
Publisher: Oxford University Press 2010 | 272 Pages | ISBN: 0195378342 | PDF | 1 MB

Intimate, anecdotal, and spell-binding, Singing Out offers a fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from 1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures, including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near. Together they tell the stories of such musical groups as the Composers' Collective, the Almanac Singers, People's Songs, the Weavers, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Freedom Singers. Folklorists, musicians, musicologists, writers, activists, and aficionados reveal not only what happened during the folk revivals, but what it meant to those personally and passionately involved. For everyone who ever picked up a guitar, fiddle, or banjo, this will be a book to give and cherish. Extensive notes, bibliography, and discography, plus a photo section.

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John Calvin's American Legacy

John Calvin's American Legacy By Thomas Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press 2010 | 304 Pages | ISBN: 0195390970 | PDF | 1 MB

Though his influence on American society has often been forgotten or misunderstood, John Calvin played a formative role in the traditions of almost every sector of American life. This wide-ranging study, comprising twelve essays, shows for the first time the extraordinary extent to which Calvinist thoughts and practices are woven into the fabric of American society, theology, and letters, from the colonial period to the twenty-first century.

John Calvin's American Legacy examines the economics of the Colonial period, Calvin's effect on American identity, and the evidence for Calvin's influence on American democracy. The book next addresses Calvin's critical role in American theology, inspecting the relationship between Jonathan Edwards's and Calvin's church practices, the diverse views on the Calvinist theological tradition in the nineteenth century, the ways in which Calvin was understood in the historiography of Williston Walker and Perry Miller, and Calvin's influence on twentieth-century theologies. Finally, the book explores Calvinism's influence on American literature, examining the work of such writers as Samson Occom, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Max Weber, Mark Twain, John Updike, and Marilynne Robinson.

This important book is the first to introduces readers to the breadth and depth of Calvin's influence along the spectrum of American thought and society, from the 18th century to modern times.

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Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680

Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 By Stuart B. Schwartz
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press 2003 | 368 Pages | ISBN: 0807828750 | PDF | 1 MB

The idea that sugar, plantations, slavery, and capitalism were all present at the birth of the Atlantic world has long dominated scholarly thinking. In nine original essays by a multinational group of top scholars, Tropical Babylons re-evaluates this so-called "sugar revolution." The most comprehensive comparative study to date of early Atlantic sugar economies, this collection presents a revisionist examination of the origins of society and economy in the Atlantic world.
Focusing on areas colonized by Spain and Portugal (before the emergence of the Caribbean sugar colonies of England, France, and Holland), these essays show that despite reliance on common knowledge and technology, there were considerable variations in the way sugar was produced. With studies of Iberia, Madeira and the Canary Islands, Hispaniola, Cuba, Brazil, and Barbados, this volume demonstrates the similarities and differences between the plantation colonies, questions the very idea of a sugar revolution, and shows how the specific conditions in each colony influenced the way sugar was produced and the impact of that crop on the formation of "tropical Babylons"--multiracial societies of great oppression.

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Roman Gods (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World)

Roman Gods (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World)
Brill | English | April 30, 2009 | ISBN: 9004175032 | PDF | 219 pages | 2MB

The book is concerned with the question of how the concept of 'god' in urban Rome can be analyzed along the lines of six constituent concepts, i.e. space, time, personnel, function, iconography and ritual. While older publications tended to focus on the conceptual nature of Roman gods only in those (comparatively rare) instances in which different concepts patently overlapped (as in the case of the deified emperor or hero-worship), this book develops general criteria for an analysis of pagan, Jewish and Christian concepts of gods in ancient Rome (and by extension elsewhere). While the argument of the book is exclusively based on the evidence from the capital up to the age of Constantine, in the concluding section the results are compared to other religious belief systems, thus demonstrating the general applicability of this conceptual approach.

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The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Third Series)

The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Third Series)
Cambridge University Press | August 21 2008 | 268 pages | English | ISBN : 052161919X,0521619196 | PDF | 1.7MB

Product Description
This book examines the way in which the central English government dealt with Irish ecclesiastical matters from the time of the invasion and partial conquest of Ireland by Henry II in 1171 up to the Statute of Kilkenny. The struggle involved the king, the clergy in Ireland, both Irish and English, and the pope. Using manuscript material and printed sources, which have not been previously used for this purpose, Dr Watt shows how an attempt was made to 'colonize' Ireland by ecclesiastical means, and traces the changing fates and fortunes of the 'two nations' in their relations with one another. Dr Watt also deals very fully with the rôle played in the struggle by the religious orders, particularly the Cistercians and the friars, and with the effect which the English common law had on the Irish clergy.

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The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Third Series)

The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: Third Series)
Cambridge University Press | August 21 2008 | 268 pages | English | ISBN : 052161919X,0521619196 | PDF | 1.7MB

Product Description
This book examines the way in which the central English government dealt with Irish ecclesiastical matters from the time of the invasion and partial conquest of Ireland by Henry II in 1171 up to the Statute of Kilkenny. The struggle involved the king, the clergy in Ireland, both Irish and English, and the pope. Using manuscript material and printed sources, which have not been previously used for this purpose, Dr Watt shows how an attempt was made to 'colonize' Ireland by ecclesiastical means, and traces the changing fates and fortunes of the 'two nations' in their relations with one another. Dr Watt also deals very fully with the rôle played in the struggle by the religious orders, particularly the Cistercians and the friars, and with the effect which the English common law had on the Irish clergy.

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