RIT Libraries Recent Acquisitions - History

Understanding the European Union : a Concise Introduction / John McCormick

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: An immediate success on first publication, Understanding the European Union provides a broad-ranging but concise introduction to the EU, covering all major aspects of European integration. This revised and updated new edition includes fuller coverage of policy and policy making and of theoretical approaches to the study of the EU.

Added: Thursday, Oct 2 2008

Rivals : How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade / Bill Emmott

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: The former editor in chief of the Economist returns to the territory of his bestselling book The Sun Also Sets to lay out an entirely fresh analysis of the growing rivalry between China, India, and Japan and what it will mean for America, the global economy, and the twenty-first-century world. Though books such as The World Is Flat and China Shakes the World consider them only as individual actors, Emmott argues that these three political and economic giants are closely intertwined by their fierce competition for influence, markets, resources, and strategic advantage. Rivals explains and explores the ways in which this sometimes bitter rivalry will play out over the next decadein business, global politics, military competition, and the environmentand reveals the efforts of the United States to manipulate and benefit from this rivalry. Identifying the biggest risks born of these struggles, Rivals also outlines the ways these risks can and should be managed by all of us.

Added: Thursday, Oct 2 2008

Leningrad : State of Siege / Michael Jones

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: "All offers of surrender from Leningrad must be rejected," wrote Adolph Hitler on September 29, 1941, at the outset of Operation Barbarossa. "In this struggle for survival, we have no interest in keeping even a proportion of the city's population alive." During the famed 900-day siege of Leningrad, the German High Command deliberately planned to eradicate the city's population through starvation. Viewing the Slavs as sub-human, Hitler embarked on a vicious program of ethnic cleansing. By the time the siege ended in January 1944, almost a million people had died. Those who survived would be marked permanently by what they endured as the city descended into chaos. In Leningrad, military historian Michael Jones chronicles the human story of this epic siege. Drawing on newly available eyewitness accounts and diaries, he reveals the true horrors of the ordealincluding stories long-suppressed by the Soviets of looting, criminal gangs, and cannibalism. But he also shows the immense psychological resources on which the citizens of Leningrad drew to survive against desperate odds. At the height of the siege, for instance, an extraordinary live performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony profoundly strengthened the city's will to resist. A riveting account of one of the most harrowing sieges of world history, Leningrad also portrays the astonishing power of the human will in the face of even the direst catastrophe.

Added: Thursday, Oct 2 2008

Fidel Castro : My Life : a Spoken Autobiography / Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet ; Translated By Andrew Hurley

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: Fidel Castro is perhaps the most charismatic and controversial head of state in modern times. A dictatorial pariah to some, he has become a hero and inspiration for many of the world's poor, defiantly charting an independent and revolutionary path for Cuba over nearly half a century.Numerous attempts have been made to get Castro to tell his own story. But only now, in the twilight of his years, has he been prepared to set out the details of his remarkable biography for the world to read. This book is nothing less than his living testament. As he told reporters, his desire to finish checking its text was the one thing that kept him going through his recent illness. He presented a copy of the book in its Spanish edition to his compadre President Hugo Chí¡vez of Venezuela.In these pages, Castro narrates a compelling chronicle that spans the harshness of his elementary school teachers; the early failures of the revolution; his intense comradeship with Che Guevara and their astonishing, against-all-odds victory over the dictator Batista; the Cuban perspective on the Bay of Pigs and the ensuing missile crisis; the active role of Cuba in African independence movements (especially its large military involvement in fighting apartheid South Africa in Angola); his relations with prominent public figures such as Boris Yeltsin, Pope John Paul II, and Saddam Hussein; and his dealings with no less than ten successive American presidents, from Eisenhower to George W. Bush.Castro talks proudly of increasing life expectancy in Cuba (now longer than in the United States); of the half million students in Cuban universities; and of the training of seventy thousand Cuban doctors nearly half of whom work abroad, assisting the poor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He is confronted with a number of thorny issues, including democracy and human rights, discrimination toward homosexuals, and the continuing presence of the death penalty on Cuban statute books. Along the way he shares intimacies about more personal matters: the benevolent strictness of his father, his successful attempt to give up cigars, his love of Ernest Hemingway's novels, and his calculation that by not shaving he saves up to ten working days each year.Drawing on more than one hundred hours of interviews with Ignacio Ramonet, a knowledgeable and trusted interlocutor, this spoken autobiography will stand as the definitive record of an extraordinary life lived in turbulent times.

Added: Thursday, Oct 2 2008

Russia's Capitalist Revolution : Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed / Anders ?slund

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: The Russian revolution, collapse of the Soviet Union, and Russia's ensuing transformation belong to the greatest dramas of our time. Revolutions are usually messy and emotional affairs, challenging much of the conventional wisdom, and Russia's experience is no exception. This book focuses on the transformation from Soviet Russia to Russia as a market economy, and explores why the country has failed to transform into a democracy. It examines the period from 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet Union's Secretary General of the Communist Party, to the present Russia of Vladimir Putin. í�…slund provides a broad overview of Russia's economic change, highlighting the most important issues and their subsequent resolutions, including Russia's inability to sort out the ruble zone during its revolution, several failed coups, and the financial crash of August 1998. Includes photos, maps, graphs and charts.

Added: Thursday, Oct 2 2008

Voting the Gender Gap / Edited By Lois Duke Whitaker

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: This book concentrates on the gender gap in voting--the difference in the proportion of women and men voting for the same candidate. Evident in every presidential election since 1980, this polling phenomenon reached a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 election. The contributors discuss the history, complexity, and ways of analyzing the gender gap; the gender gap in relation to partisanship; motherhood, ethnicity, and the impact of parental status on the gender gap; and the gender gap in races involving female candidates. Voting the Gender Gap analyzes trends in voting while probing how women's political empowerment and gender affect American politics and the electoral process. Contributors are Susan J. Carroll, Erin Cassese, Cal Clark, Janet M. Clark, M. Margaret Conway, Kathleen A. Dolan, Laurel Elder, Kathleen A. Frankovic, Steven Greene, Leonie Huddy, Mary-Kate Lizotte, Barbara Norrander, Margie Omero, and Lois Duke Whitaker.

Added: Thursday, Oct 2 2008

Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant : the Politics of Immigration Reform / Lina Newton

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: While the United States cherishes its identity as a nation of immigrants, the country's immigration policies are historically characterized by cycles of openness and xenophobia. Outbursts of anti-immigrant sentiment among political leaders and in the broader public are fueled by a debate over who is worthy of being considered for full incorporation into the nation, and who is incapable of assimilating and taking on the characteristics and responsibilities associated with being an American.In Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant, Lina Newton carefully dissects the political debates over contemporary immigration reform. Beginning with a close look at the disputes of the 1980s and 1990s, she reveals how a shift in legislators' portrayals of illegal immigrantsfrom positive to overwhelmingly negativefacilitated the introduction and passing of controversial reforms. Newton's analysis reveals how rival descriptions of immigrant groups and the flattering or disparaging myths that surround them define, shape, and can ultimately determine fights over immigration policy. Her path-breaking findings will shed new light on the current political battles, their likely outcomes, and where to go from here.

Added: Thursday, Sep 25 2008

The Day Freedom Died : the Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction / Charles Lane

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: The untold story of the slaying of a Southern town's ex-slaves and a white lawyer's historic battle to bring the perpretators to justice Following the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town, like many, where African Americans and whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex—Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse. With skill and tenacity, The Washington Post's Charles Lane transforms this nearly forgotten incident into a riveting historical saga. Seeking justice for the slain, one brave U.S. attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetratorsbut they all went free. What followed was a series of courtroom dramas that culminated at the Supreme Court, where the justices' verdict compromised the victories of the Civil War and left Southern blacks at the mercy of violent whites for generations. The Day Freedom Died is an electrifying piece of historical detective work that captures a gallery of characters from presidents to townspeople, and re-creates the bloody days of Reconstruction, when the often brutal struggle for equality moved from the battlefield into communities across the nation.

Added: Thursday, Sep 25 2008

The Return of History and the End of Dreams / Robert Kagan

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains "unipolar," but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that after the Cold War the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong. For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End ofDreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.

Added: Thursday, Sep 25 2008

Who Hates Whom : Well-armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up : a Woefully Incomplete Guide / Bob Harris

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: The daily news gives you events but rarely context. So what do al-Qaeda, North Korea, and Iran really want? Which faction is which in Iraq and who's arming whom? What's the deal with Somalia, Darfur, and Kashmir? Fatah, Hamas, and Hezbollah? Finally, here's Who Hates Whoma handy, often stunning guide to the world's recent conflicts, from the large and important to the completely absurd. '¢ Which countries are fighting over an uninhabitable glacier with no real strategic valueat an annual cost of half a billion dollars? '¢ Which underreported war has been the deadliest since World War IIworse even than Vietnamwith a continuing aftermath worse than most current conflicts combined? '¢ Which royal family members were respected as godsuntil the crown prince machine-gunned the king and queen? '¢ Which country's high school students think the Nazis had a "good side"? Which nation's readers recently put Mein Kampf on the bestseller list? And which other country watches itself with four million security cameras? (Hint: All three are U.S. allies.) Detailed with more than fifty original maps, photographs, and illustrations, Who Hates Whom summarizes more than thirty global hotspots with concise essays, eye-catching diagrams, and (where possible) glimmers of kindness and hope. In which bodies of water can you find most of the world's active pirates? Which dictatorship is bulldozing its own villages? Where exactly are Waziristan, Bangsamoro, Kurdistan, Ituri, Baluchistan, and Jubalandand how will they affect your life and security? Find out in Who Hates Whom, a seriously amusing look at global humanityand the lack thereof.

Added: Thursday, Sep 25 2008

Nepal, Through the Ages : Approach to Ancient History, Art, Architecture, Culture & Society / R.N. Pandey

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Added: Tuesday, Sep 23 2008

Hegemony Constrained : Evasion, Modification, and Resistance to American Foreign Policy / Edited By Davis B. Bobrow

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: In the post-cold war era, the United States has risen to a position of unprecedented dominance in the world and has often pursued a primarily unilateral approach to international policy issues. Hegemony Constrained examines how nations, ethnic and religious groups, and international organizations cope with American hegemony. The chapters reveal the various ways in which foreign actors attempt and sometimes succeed in keeping official Washington from achieving its preferred outcomes. An international group of contributors considers how and why a variety of foreigners act strategically to avoid, delay, or change American policy with respect to a broad range of issues in world affairs. Individual chapters analyze the Kurds and Shia in Iraq; the governments of China, Japan, Turkey, and Germany; the G-7; liberalizing the international economy; coping with global warming; regulating harmful tax competition; controlling missile proliferation; limiting public health damage from tobacco; and international public opinion bearing on the politics of responding to a hegemonic America. By recognizing and illustrating moves that challenge American unilateralism, Hegemony Constrained provides a framework for understanding and anticipating the goals, motives, and means others in the world bring to their dealings with American hegemony in specific situations. Thus, it offers a corrective to naively optimistic unilateralism and naively optimistic multilateralism.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

Citizenship, Political Engagement, and Belonging : Immigrants in Europe and the United States / Edited By Deborah Reed-Danahay, Caroline B. Brettell

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: Immigration is continuously and rapidly changing the face of Western countries. While newcomers are harbingers of change, host nations also participate in how new populations are incorporated into their social and political fabric. Bringing together a transcontinental group of anthropologists, this book provides an in-depth look at the current processes of immigration, political behavior, and citizenship in both the United States and Europe. Essays draw on issues of race, national identity, religion, and more, while addressing questions, including: How should citizenship be defined? In what ways do immigrants use the political process to achieve group aims? And, how do adults and youth learn to become active participants in the public sphere? Among numerous case studies, examples include instances of racialized citizenship in "Algerian France," Ireland's new citizenship laws in response to asylum-seeking mothers, the role of Evangelical Christianity in creating a space for the construction of an identity that transcends state borders, and the Internet as one of the new public spheres for the expression of citizenship, be it local, national, or global.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

Do Voters Look to the Future? : Economics and Elections / Brad Lockerbie

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: Argues in favor of a different model of voting behavior.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

Qualitative Methods in International Relations : a Pluralist Guide / Edited By Audie Klotz and Deepa Prakash

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: The main terrain of methodological disputes in the social sciences is empirical research, including the delineation of legitimate research questions, allocation of funding for projects, and employment in the profession. Yet we still lack practical answers to one of the most basic questions: How should researchers interpret meanings? The contributors take seriously the goals of both post-modernist and positivist researchers, as they offer detailed guidance on how to apply specific tools of analysis and how to circumvent their inherent limitations. Readers will understand what is at stake in selecting from discourse, speech acts, and semiotics — or even content analysis. Researchers will be able to decide when to combine tools drawn from different analytical traditions — perhaps discourse analysis to inform the construction of a dictionary for context-sensitive computerized coding. The results will be deeper interdisciplinary understanding and better research.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

The Age of Reagan : a History, 1974-2008 / Sean Wilentz

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: <blockquote> One of the nation's leading historians offers a groundbreaking and provocative chronicle of America's political history since the fall of Nixon. </blockquote> The past thirty-five years have marked an era of conservatism. Although briefly interrupted in the late 1970s and temporarily reversed in the 1990s, a powerful surge from the right has dominated American politics and government. In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz accounts for how a conservative movement once deemed marginal managed to seize power and hold it, and the momentous consequences that followed. Ronald Reagan has been the single most important political figure of this age. Without Reagan, the conservative movement would have never been as successful as it was. In his political persona as well as his policies, Reagan embodied a new fusion of deeply right-leaning politics with some of the rhetoric and even a bit of the spirit of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. In American political history there have been a few leading figures who, for better or worse, have placed their political stamp indelibly on their times. They include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Rooseveltand Ronald Reagan. A conservative hero in a conservative age, Reagan has been so admired by a minority of historians and so disliked by the others that it has been difficult to evaluate his administration with detachment. Drawing on numerous primary documents that have been neglected or only recently released to the public, as well as on emerging historical work, Wilentz offers invaluable revelations about conservatism's ascendancy and the era in which Reagan was the preeminent political figure. Vivid, authoritative, and illuminating from start to finish, The Age of Reagan raises profound questions and opens passionate debate about our nation's recent past.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

The Challenge : Hamdan V. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power / Jonathan Mahler

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: An inspiring legal thriller set against the backdrop of the war on terror, The Challenge tells the inside story of a historic Supreme Court showdown. At its center are a Navy JAG and a young constitutional law professor who, in the aftermath of 9/11, find themselves defending their nation in the unlikeliest of ways: by suing the president of the United States on behalf of an accused terrorist in order to prevent the American government from breaking the law and violating the Constitution. Jonathan Mahler traces the journey of their client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, from the Yemeni mosque where he was first recruited for jihad in 1998, through his years working as a driver for Osama bin Laden, to his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001 and his subsequent transfer to Guantanamo Bay. It was there that Hamdan was designated by President Bush to be tried before a special military tribunal and assigned a military lawyer to represent him, a thirty-five-year-old graduate student of the Naval Academy, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift. No one expected Swift to mount much of a defense. Not only were the rules of the tribunals, America's first in more than fifty years, stacked against him, his superiors at the Pentagon were pressuring him to persuade Hamdan to plead guilty. But Swift didn't believe that the tribunals were either legal or fair, so he enlisted a young Georgetown law professor named Neal Katyal to help him sue the Bush administration over their legality. In the spring of 2006, Katyal, who had almost no trial experience, took the case to the Supreme Court and won. The landmark ruling has been called the Court's most important decision ever on presidential power and the rule of law. Written with the cooperation of Swift and Katyal, The Challenge follows the braided stories of Swift's intense, precarious relationship with Hamdan and the unprecedented legal case itself. Combining rich character portraits and courtroom drama reminiscent of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action with sophisticated yet accessible legal analysis, The Challenge is a riveting narrative that illuminates some of the most pressing constitutional questions of the post-9/11 era.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

The U.S. Constitution A to Z / Robert L. Maddex

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: There is no other volume that so clearly and concisely explains every key aspect of the U.S. Constitution. This classic, easy-to-use reference is thoroughly updated with new entries covering the events of recent years including court cases with impact on Constitutional rights. Each of the more than 250 entries, arranged in encyclopedic A-to-Z format, provides accessible insight into the key questions readers have about the U.S. Constitution. All entries are updated with content through the end of 2007.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

The Forsaken : an American Tragedy in Russia / Tim Tzouliadis

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: A remarkable piece of forgotten historythe story of how thousands of Americans were lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives only to meet a tragic, and until now forgotten, end The Forsaken starts with a photograph of a baseball team. The year is 1934, the image black and white: two rows of young men, one standing, the other crouching with their arms around one another's shoulders. They are all somewhere in their late teens or twenties, in the peak of health. We know most, if not all, of their names: Arthur Abolin, Walter Preeden, Victor Herman, Eugene Peterson. They hail from ordinary working families from across AmericaDetroit, Boston, New York, San Francisco. Waiting in the sunshine, they look just like any other baseball team except, perhaps, for the Russian lettering on their uniforms. These men and thousands of others, their wives, and children were possibly the least heralded migration in American history. Not surprising, maybe, since in a nation of immigrants few care to remember the ones who leave behind the dream. The exiles came from all walks of life. Within their ranks were Communists, trade unionists, and radicals of the John Reed school, but most were just ordinary citizens not overly concerned were politics. What united them was the hope that drives all emigrants: the search for a better life. And to any one of the millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression, even the harshest Moscow winter could sustain that promise. Within four years of that June day in Gorky Park, many of the young men in that photograph will be arrested and along with them unaccounted numbers of their fellow countrymen. As foreign victims of Stalin's Terror, some will be executed immediately in basement cells or at execution grounds outside the main cities. Others will be sent to the "corrective labor" camps, where they will be starved and worked to death, their bodies buried in the snowy wasteland. Two of the baseball players who survive and whose stories frame this remarkable work of history will be inordinately lucky. This book is the story of these mens' livesThe Forsaken who lived and those who died. The result of years of groundbreaking research in American and Russian archives, The Forsaken is also the story of the world inside Russia at the time of Terror: the glittering obliviousness of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the duplicity of the Soviet government in its dealings with Roosevelt, and the terrible finality of the Gulag system. In the tradition of the finest history chronicling genocide in the twentieth century, The Forsaken offers new understanding of timeless questions of guilt and innocence that continue to plague us today.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008

The Bill of Rights in Modern America / Edited By David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely, Jr

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Description: This newly revised and expanded edition of The Bill of Rights in Modern America captures the contentious national debate about the nature and extent of our individual rights. Free speech, the separation of church and state, public safety and gun control, property rights, the rights of criminals and victims, the limits of law enforcement, the death penalty, affirmative action, the right to privacy, abortion, states' rights--the Bill of Rights has been evoked as the legal basis for every one of these issues. Twelve distinguished legal scholars discuss the history of and the current debates on these and other important rights issues in a book that is certain to stimulate thoughtful discussion among all citizens.

Added: Wednesday, Sep 17 2008