War—organized violence against an enemy of the state—seems part and parcel of the American journey. Indeed, the United States was established by means of violence as ordinary citizens from New Hampshire to Georgia answered George Washington’s call to arms. Since then, war has become a staple of American history. Counting the War for Independence, the United States has fought the armed forces of other nations at least twelve times, averaging a major conflict every twenty years. In so doing, the objectives have been simple: advance the cause of freedom, protect U.S. interests, and impose America’s will upon a troubled world. More often than not, the results have been successful as America’s military has accounted itself well. Yet the cost has been high, in both blood and treasure. Americans have fought and died around the globe—on land, at sea, and in the air. Without doubt, their actions have shaped the world in which we live. In this comprehensive collection, Terence T. Finn provides a set of narratives—each concise and readable—on the twelve major wars America has fought. He explains what happened, and why such places as Saratoga and Antietam, Manila Bay and Midway are important to an understanding of America’s past. Readers will easily be able to brush up on their history and acquaint themselves with those individuals and events that have helped define the United States of America.
Dolphin Square - the large, imposing red brick building on the North bank of the Thames - was and is no ordinary block of flats. Created for MPs, peers and entertainers required to work in London, the Square was built on a massive scale to a high density in the mid-1930s. It was a pioneering example of concrete design, and when built was the largest single residential building in Europe. This book tells the story of the project and captures what it has been like to live in the square for figures including Sir Menzies Campbell, Alistair Darling, William Hague, Mo Mowlam, Sir David Steel, Christine Keeler, Sid James, Barbara Windsor and Princess Anne. Beginning with the antecedents of the seven-acre site, the book charts the square's changing ownership and eventual creation of the Dolphin Square Trust, which managed the flats on a non profit-making basis for 40 years. Its unique blend of quasi-charitable purpose and commercial management enabled long-standing tenants to enjoy below-market rentals before the Trust came under immense pressure to realise the value of the existing leases and sell them off in 2006 ... provide[s] a detailed examination of a major example of urban property speculation and management"--Publisher's description.
Literary artefacts—the stories people tell, the songs they sing, the scenes they enact—are neither a by-product nor a side-issue in human culture. They provide a model of everything that cognition does. They refuse to separate thought from emotion, bodily responses from ethical reflection, perception from imagination, logic from desire. Above all, they demonstrate the essential fluidity and mobility of human cognition, its adaptive inventiveness. If we are astonished by the art of Chauvet or Lascaux as an early model of human cognition, then we should be continually astonished by what literature is and does as it reaches beyond itself to reimagine the world. This book argues that literary artefacts are quasi-autonomous living entities, fashioned to animate captured environments, embodied people and other creatures, ways of being and living that remain virtual. They own a freely delegated agency that allows them to speak to listeners and readers present and distant, present and future, adapting themselves and their meanings to whatever cognitive environment they encounter. Such an approach offers a way of linking a close attention to the specific properties of literary artefacts with the insights of cognitive anthropology and archaeology, and thus of satisfying the conditions for a properly interdisciplinary understanding of literature. It aims both to defend literary study against utilitarian and reductive arguments of all kinds and to argue that literary artefacts may give us new insights into how the mind (and its indispensable substratum, the brain) functions in the human ecology.
A groundbreaking history of Europe's "new lefts," from the antifascist 1920s to the anti-establishment 1960s In the 1960s, the radical youth of Western Europe's New Left rebelled against the democratic welfare state and their parents' antiquated politics of reform. It was not the first time an upstart leftist movement was built on the ruins of the old. This book traces the history of neoleftism from its antifascist roots in the first half of the twentieth century, to its postwar reconstruction in the 1950s, to its explosive reinvention by the 1960s counterculture. Terence Renaud demonstrates why the left in Europe underwent a series of internal revolts against the organizational forms of established parties and unions. He describes how small groups of militant youth such as New Beginning in Germany tried to sustain grassroots movements without reproducing the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and supposedly obsolete structures of Social Democracy and Communism. Neoleftist militants experimented with alternative modes of organization such as councils, assemblies, and action committees. However, Renaud reveals that these same militants, decades later, often came to defend the very institutions they had opposed in their youth. Providing vital historical perspective on the challenges confronting leftists today, this book tells the story of generations of antifascists, left socialists, and anti-authoritarians who tried to build radical democratic alternatives to capitalism and kindle hope in reactionary times.
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