Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter here tell the story of how the chemical industry, abetted by a compliant government, set loose a plague of pollution that began in the years before and directly following World War II, a plague that still lingers today. The advent of new synthetic chemical products such as Nylon and DDT created new hazards just as the expansion and mechanization of industry exacerbated old ones. Environmental dangers well known today--smog, pesticides, lead, chlorinated solvents, asbestos, and even global warming--were already recognized in that era by chemists, engineers, doctor.
The chemical pollution that irrevocably damages today's environment is, although many would like us to believe otherwise, the legacy of conscious choices made long ago. During the years before and just after World War II, discoveries like leaded gasoline and DDT came to market, creating new hazards even as the expansion and mechanization of industry exacerbated old ones. Dangers still felt today--smog, pesticides, lead, chromium, chlorinated solvents, asbestos, even global warming--were already recognized by chemists, engineers, doctors, and business managers of that era. A few courageous individuals spoke out without compromise, but still more ignored scientific truth in pursuit of money and prestige. The Polluters reveals at last the crucial decisions that allowed environmental issues to be trumped by political agendas. It spotlights the leaders of the chemical industry and describes how they applied their economic and political power to prevent the creation of an effective system of environmental regulation. Research was slanted, unwelcome discoveries were suppressed, and friendly experts were placed in positions of influence, as science was subverted to serve the interests of business. The story of The Polluters is one that needs to be told, an unflinching depiction of the onslaught of chemical pollution and the chemical industry's unwillingness to face up to its devastating effects.
In following author Henry Roth's tortured life from his childhood on the Jewish Lower East Side to his twilight years in New Mexico, literary critic Steven Kellman has uncovered FBI files, spoken with family members and friends, and gained access to the tape in which Roth discussed the long-buried incest of his youth.
Here's my promise to you. Everything you read in these pages is my true lived experience. I'm sharing my life with you so you will be able to see what I see, know what I know, and understand what I believe. I guarantee you that, at some points along the way, you will reject my words. You'll reject what I say out of hand. I know you will. I know that my story seems crazy. I won't blame you if you don't want to listen, or if, even when you listen, you don't believe me. My words are tough words. My story is really strange. My life is like something out of a science fiction movie, only stranger even than that.
Germany’s transition from Nazism to peaceful, if at times reluctant, integration into the western and Soviet spheres during the decade immediately following the Second World War is one of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century. Shattered relations between Germans and their wartime enemies and victims had rendered prospects for peaceful relations between these groups unimaginable, or a dream belonging to the distant future. However, numerous grassroots initiatives found varying degrees of success in fostering reconciliation. Drawing on underutilized archival materials, To Forget It All and Begin Anew reveals a nuanced mosaic of like-minded people – from Germany and other countries, and from a wide variety of backgrounds and motives – who worked against considerable odds to make right the wrongs of the Nazi era. While acknowledging the enormous obstacles and challenges to reconciliatory work in postwar Germany, Steven M. Schroeder highlights the tangible and lasting achievements of this work, which marked the first steps toward new modes of peaceful engagement and cooperation in Germany and Europe.
Deng Xiaoping joined the Chinese Communist movement as a youth and rose in its ranks to become an important lieutenant of Mao's from the 1930s onward. Two years after Mao's death in 1976, Deng became the de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the prime architect of China's post-Mao reforms. Abandoning the Maoist socio-economic policies he had long fervently supported, he set in motion changes that would dramatically transform China's economy, society, and position in the world. Three decades later, we are living with the results. China has become the second largest economy and the workshop of the world. And while it is essentially a market economy ("socialism with Chinese characteristics"), Deng and his successors ensured the continuation of CCP rule by severely repressing the democratic movement and maintaining an iron grip on power. When Deng died at the age of 92 in 1997, he had set China on the path it is following to this day. Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine's new biography of Deng Xiaoping does what no other biography has done: based on newly discovered documents, it covers his entire life, from his childhood and student years to the post-Tiananmen era. Thanks to unprecedented access to Russian archives containing massive files on the Chinese Communist Party, the authors present a wealth of new material on Deng dating back to the 1920s. In a long and extraordinary life, Deng navigated one epic crisis after another. Born in 1904, Deng, like many Asian revolutionary leaders, spent part of the 1920s in Paris, where he joined the CCP in its early years. He then studied in the USSR just as Stalin was establishing firm control over the Soviet communist party. He played an increasingly important role in the troubled decades of the 1930s and 1940s that were marked by civil war and the Japanese invasion. He was commissar of a communist-dominated area in the early 1930s, loyal henchman to Mao during the Long March, regional military commander in the anti-Japanese war, and finally a key leader in the 1946-49 revolution. During Mao's quarter century rule, Deng oscillated between the heights and the depths of power. He was purged during the Cultural Revolution, only to reemerge after Mao's death to become China's paramount leader until his own death in 1997. This objective, balanced, and unprecedentedly rich biography changes our understanding of one of the most important figures in modern history.
Tabernae were ubiquitous in all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections. This volume focuses on food and drink outlets in particular, combining analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources to offer a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop.
This book provides the first systematic and comparative analysis of the German right-wing populist protest movement “PEGIDA”. It offers an in-depth reconstruction of the movement’s historical development, its organisational structure and its programmatic orientation. It depicts the protestors and their motivations, reactions in politics, media and society, and PEGIDA’s European network. The volume presents and compares the results of scientific surveys among PEGIDA-participants and brings them into the context of long-time studies on political culture in Germany, representing a comprehensive study of the emergence of contemporary right-wing populist movements. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students focusing on comparative politics, (right-wing) populism, protest movements in western democracies, and political culture in Germany, as well as journalists, political educators and policy makers.
The United States military did not lose the Vietnam War! The South Vietnamese government lost the Vietnam War. With many inaccurate books, biased statements, lack of understanding, and facts, I decided to write a Vietnamese history book with emphasis on the Second Indochina War. This book will correct many of those misconceptions about the Vietnam War, answer controversial questions, and give readers a microcosm and basic dynamics of the Vietnam War. I recorded and archived highlights of the Vietnam War and the accounts of American military heroes whose sacrifices and heroic exploits might otherwise be lost to history. The poignant, riveting, and the gripping reality of war and the demons and misfortune of the Vietnam veterans will be depicted in the book. This book is intended for a variety of audiences: veterans, family members, gold star mothers, organizations, agencies, clubs, college students, faculty, and history buffs. Search-and-destroy operations in South Vietnam will be described in comprehensive detail and why President Johnson later changed the name of search-and-destroy operations to reconnaissance in force. This book will show that the worst atrocity of the Vietnam War occurred in the United States when America shunned and discriminated against its Vietnam War veterans and gold star mothers! This book is a first-person account of high school teenyboppers suddenly answering the call for duty and turning into elite combat warriors virtually overnight. Vietnam War veterans saw and experienced horrific savage and direct combat repeatedly that humans aren't intended to see. Testimonies of seasoned combat Airborne Infantry soldiers, Pathfinders, and Special Forces whose average age was twenty-one will be depicted through empirical vignettes. These first-person vignettes will describe the carnage of firefights, mortar attacks, the stench of human decay and flesh torn and broken, and the camaraderie and bonds of men at war. Do not judge these warrior-leader heroes unless you have walked a mile in their jungle boots through a jungle in a combat environment. Remember, once upon a time, we were all like you! Myths of the Vietnam War will be refuted, rebutted, and debunked. Agent Orange and other herbicides used in the Vietnam War will be discussed. This book will help all veterans, their families, and America to better understand and come to some closure and aid in catharsis. We are awesome! It is chic and vogue to be a Vietnam veteran now.
This is a case study of the Cult of the Sebastoi that was established in the city of Ephesus by the province of Asia during the late first century CE. It served as a prototypical manifestation of socio-religious developments during the late first and early second centuries in the Eastern Mediterranean.
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
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