Haunted Victory: The American Crusade to Destroy Saddam and Impose Democracy on Iraq
Author: WILLIAM NESTER Haunted Victory: The American Crusade to Destroy Saddam and Impose Democracy on Iraq explores the dynamic trajectory of beliefs, actions, and their consequences in what will forever be debated as among the most controversial and costly operations in U.S. history in terms of security, power, wealth, and honor. While many others have written about the Iraq War, William Nester unveils the moral dilemmas that entangled the George W. Bush administration and the American public through each stage of planning, selling, fighting, and attempting to end the Iraq War. He includes vivid revelations of the administrations internal tugs-of-war over whether to invade Iraq and then how to fight the war. Nester pulls no punches and discloses who deserves credit for what went right and who deserves condemnation for what went wrong. In his engaging style, Nester has written a page-turner. General readers, students, and experts alike will eagerly welcome Haunted Victory for its concise and comprehensive analysis of the key facets of the Iraq War.
Author: Robert Jarvenpa
Circumpolar Lives and Livelihood is a cross-cultural ethnoarchaeological study of the gendered nature of subsistence in northern hunter-gatherer-fisher societies. Based on field studies of four circumpolar societies, it documents the complexities of womens and mens involvement in food procurement, processing, and storage, and the relationship of such behaviors to the built landscape. Avoiding simplistic stereotypes of male and female roles, the framework of gendered landscapes reveals the variability and flexibility of womens and mens actual lives in a manner useful for archaeological interpretations of hunter-foragers.Innovative in scope and design, this is the first study to employ a controlled, four-way, cross-cultural comparison of gender and subsistence. Members of an international team of anthropologists experienced in northern scholarship apply the same task-differentiation methodology in studies of Chipewyan hunter-fishers of Canada, Khanty hunter-fisher-herders of Western Siberia, Sami intensive reindeer herders of northwestern Finland, and Inupiaq maritime hunters of the Bering Strait of Alaska. This database on gender and subsistence is used to reassess one of the bedrock concepts in anthropology and social science: the sexual division of labor.
Author: Robert L. Dyer
The Civil War in Missouri was a time of great confusion, violence, and destruction. Although several major battles were fought in the state between Confederate and Union forces, much of the fighting in Missouri was an ugly form of terrorism carried out by loose bands of Missouri guerrillas, by Kansas Jayhawkers, or by marauding patrols of Union soldiers. This irregular warfare provided a training ground for people like Jesse and Frank James who, after the war, used their newly learned skills to form an outlaw band that ultimately became known all over the world. Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri discusses the underlying causes of the Civil War as they relate to Missouri and reveals how the war helped create both the legend and the reality of Jesse James and his gang. Written in an accessible style, this valuable little book will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in the Civil War, the legend of Jesse James, or Missouri history.
Author: By Jeremy M. Schott
In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire.Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.
Author: Colin Burgess
Near the end of the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott and fellow moonwalker James Irwin conducted a secret ceremony unsanctioned by NASA: they placed on the lunar soil a small tin figurine called The Fallen Astronaut, along with a plaque bearing a list of names. By telling the stories of those sixteen astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the quest to reach the moon between 1962 and 1972, this book enriches the saga of humankinds greatest scientific undertaking, Project Apollo, and conveys the human cost of the space race. Many people are aware of the first manned Apollo mission, in which Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives in a fire during a ground test, but few know of the other five fallen astronauts whose stories this book tells as well, including Ted Freeman and C.C. Williams, who died in the crashes of their T-38 jets; the Gemini Twins, Charlie Bassett and Elliot See, killed when their jet slammed into the building where their Gemini capsule was undergoing final construction; and Ed Givens, whose fatal car crash has until now been obscured by rumors. Supported by extensive interviews and archival material, the extraordinary lives and accomplishments of these and other fallen astronautsincluding eight Russian cosmonauts who lost their lives during trainingunfold here in intimate and compelling detail. Their stories return us to a stirring time in the history of our nation and remind us of the cost of fulfilling our dreams. This revised edition includes expanded and revised biographies and additional photographs.
Author: Tanya Harmer
This ms is an international history of the inter-American Cold War. Harmer looks at Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and outlines how he proposed a constitutional Chilean road to socialism. This call for a peaceful transformation of the inter-American system and international economic relations abroad resulted in a violent, unconstitutional future for Chile, with a right-wing dictatorship drowning out the promise of a revolution in the Southern Cone as well as the global Souths continued dependency on the North.
Author: Karl Steel
How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages tracks human attempts to cordon humans off from other life through a wide range of medieval texts and practices, including encyclopedias, dietary guides, resurrection doctrine, cannibal narrative, butchery law, boar-hunting, and teratology. Karl Steel argues that the human subjugation of animals played an essential role in the medieval concept of the human. In their works and habits, humans tried to distinguish themselves from other animals by claiming that humans alone among worldly creatures possess language, reason, culture, and, above all, an immortal soul and resurrectable body. Humans convinced themselves of this difference by observing that animals routinely suffer degradation at the hands of humans. Since the categories of human and animal were both a retroactive and relative effect of domination, no human could forgo his human privileges without abandoning himself. Medieval arguments for both human particularity and the unique sanctity of human life have persisted into the modern age despite the insights of Darwin. How to Make a Human joins with other works in critical animal theory to unsettle human pretensions in the hopes of training humans to cease to project, and to defend, their human selves against other animals.
Author: Mark Maslan
Whitman has long been more than a celebrated American author. He has become a kind of hero, whose poetry vindicates beliefs not only about poetry but also about sexuality and power. In Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority, Mark Maslan presents a challenging theory of Whitman's poetics of possession and his understandings of individual and national identity. By reading his works in relation to nineteenth-century theories of sexual desire, poetic inspiration, and political representation, Maslan argues that the disintegration of individuality in Whitman's texts is not meant to undermine cultural hierarchies, but to make poetic and political authority newly viable. In particular, Maslan explores the social impact of nineteenth-century sexual hygiene literature on Whitman's works. He argues that Whitman developed his ideas about poetry, sexuality, and authority by responding to a prominent argument that desire subjected male bodies to a penetrating and feminizing force. By identifying poetic inspiration with this erotic dynamic, Whitman imbued his poetic voice with a kind of transformative power. Whitman aligned his poetry with an impartial authority hard to find elsewhere and inclined his work as a poet to speak for the voiceless, for the masses, and for an entire nation.
Author: Fred Hobson
Why should a particular game, played with a round ball by twenty-year-olds in short pants often hundreds of miles away, mean so much to me, since I seem to have so little to gain or lose by its outcome? Fred Hobson thus begins Off the Rim, his narrative of college basketball and society, of growing up and not growing up. He seeks the answer to this question by delving into the particulars of his own experience.
Author: Robert Burgess
Robert Burgess's study of Platonism in Desportes poetry rounds out those of his predecessors in the 16th-century field, particularly Merrill, Kerr, and Lefrancz.