Download or read book Remembering the Revolution written by Michael A. McDonnell and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How conflicting memories of the nation's origins shaped the political culture of the early American republic

Download or read book Ghosts of Revolution written by Shahla Talebi and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was pushed through the gate and the door was slammed behind me. After more than eight years, here I was, finally, out of jail . . . ." In this haunting account, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi, along with her husband, was imprisoned for nearly a decade and tortured, first under the Shah and later by the Islamic Republic. Writing about her own suffering and survival and sharing the stories of her fellow inmates, she details the painful reality of prison life and offers an intimate look at a critical period of social and political transformation in Iran. Somehow through it all—through resistance and resolute hope, passion and creativity—Talebi shows how one survives. Reflecting now on experiences past, she stays true to her memories, honoring the love of her husband and friends lost in these events, to relate how people can hold to moments of love, resilience, and friendship over the dark forces of torture, violence, and hatred. At once deeply personal yet clearly political, part memoir and part meditation, this work brings to heartbreaking clarity how deeply rooted torture and violence can be in our society. More than a passing judgment of guilt on a monolithic "Islamic State," Talebi's writing asks us to reconsider our own responses to both contemporary debates of interrogation techniques and government responsibility and, more simply, to basic acts of cruelty in daily life. She offers a lasting call to us all. "The art of living in prison becomes possible through imagining life in the very presence of death and observing death in the very existence of life. It is living life so vitally and so fully that you are willing, if necessary, to let that very life go, as one would shed chains on the legs. It is embracing, and flying on the wings of death as though it is the bird of freedom."

Download or read book Total Recall written by C. Gordon Bell and published by Dutton Adult. This book was released on 2009 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the attempt to record an entire life digitally, an enormous undertaking requiring intense attention to detail and the development of memory-emulating technology, and the implications of this research.

Download or read book Rewriting Revolution written by Immanuel Kim and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), is firmly fixed in the Western imagination as a barbaric vestige of the Cold War, a “rogue” nation that refuses to abide by international norms. It is seen as belligerent and oppressive, a poor nation bent on depriving its citizens of their basic human rights and expanding its nuclear weapons program at the expense of a faltering economy. Even the North’s literary output is stigmatized and dismissed as mere propaganda literature praising the Great Leader. Immanuel Kim’s book confronts these stereotypes, offering a more complex portrayal of literature in the North based on writings from the 1960s to the present. The state, seeking to “write revolution,” prescribes grand narratives populated with characters motivated by their political commitments to the leader, the Party, the nation, and the collective. While acknowledging these qualities, Kim argues for deeper readings. In some novels and stories, he finds, the path to becoming a revolutionary hero or heroine is no longer a simple matter of formulaic plot progression; instead it is challenged, disrupted, and questioned by individual desires, decisions, doubts, and imaginations. Fiction in the 1980s in particular exhibits refreshing story lines and deeper character development along with creative approaches to delineating women, sexuality, and the family. These changes are so striking that they have ushered in what Kim calls a Golden Age of North Korean fiction. Rewriting Revolution charts the insightful literary frontiers that critically portray individuals negotiating their political and sexual identities in a revolutionary state. In this fresh and thought-provoking analysis of North Korean fiction, Kim looks past the ostensible state propaganda to explore the dynamic literary world where individuals with human emotions reside. His book fills a major lacuna and will be of interest to literary scholars and historians of East Asia, as well as to scholars of global and comparative studies in socialist countries.

Download or read book Fighting Over the Founders written by Andrew M. Schocket and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-01-23 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in US history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also a site to work out the present, and the future. What are we using the Revolution to debate? In Fighting over the Founders, Andrew M. Schocket explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. Identifying competing “essentialist” and “organicist” interpretations of the American Revolution, Schocket shows how today’s memories of the American Revolution reveal Americans' conflicted ideas about class, about race, and about gender—as well as the nature of history itself. Fighting over the Founders plumbs our views of the past and the present, and illuminates our ideas of what United States means to its citizens in the new millennium.

Download or read book Roads to the Temple written by Leon Aron and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leon Aron considers the “mystery of the Soviet collapse” and finds answers in the intellectual and moral self-scrutiny of glasnost that brought about a profound shift in values. Reviewing the entire output of the key glasnost outlets in 1987-1991, he elucidates and documents key themes in this national soul-searching and the “ultimate” questions that sparked moral awakening of a great nation: “Who are we? How do we live honorably? What is a dignified relationship between man and state? How do we atone for the moral breakdown of Stalinism?” Contributing both to the theory of revolutions and history of ideas, Aron presents a thorough and original narrative about new ideas’ dissemination through the various media of the former Soviet Union. Aron shows how, reaching every corner of the nation, these ideas destroyed the moral foundation of the Soviet state, de-legitimized it and made its collapse inevitable.

Download or read book Memories of Revolution written by Anna Horsbrugh Porter and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preserving the childhood memories of some of the last generation of White Russian women to experience the revolution first-hand, this poignant collection of interviews and photographs provides a unique record of life in Russia.

Download or read book Revolution 2 0 written by Wael Ghonim and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The former Google executive and political activist tells the story of the Egyptian revolution he helped ignite through the power of social media. In the summer of 2010, thirty-year-old Google executive Wael Ghonim anonymously launched a Facebook page to protest the death of an Egyptian man at the hands of security forces. The page’s following expanded quickly and moved from online protests to a nonconfrontational movement. On January 25, 2011, Tahrir Square resounded with calls for change. Yet just as the revolution began in earnest, Ghonim was captured and held for twelve days of brutal interrogation. After he was released, he gave a tearful speech on national television, and the protests grew more intense. Four days later, the president of Egypt was gone. In this riveting story, Ghonim takes us inside the movement and shares the keys to unleashing the power of crowds in the age of social networking. “A gripping chronicle of how a fear-frozen society finally topples its oppressors with the help of social media.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Revolution 2.0 excels in chronicling the roiling tension in the months before the uprising, the careful organization required and the momentum it unleashed.” —NPR.org

Download or read book Music as Mao s Weapon written by Lei X. Ouyang and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) produced propaganda music that still stirs unease and, at times, evokes nostalgia. Lei X. Ouyang uses selections from revolutionary songbooks to untangle the complex interactions between memory, trauma, and generational imprinting among those who survived the period of extremes. Interviews combine with ethnographic fieldwork and surveys to explore both the Cultural Revolution's effect on those who lived through it as children and contemporary remembrance of the music created to serve the Maoist regime. As Ouyang shows, the weaponization of music served an ideological revolution but also revolutionized the senses. She examines essential questions raised by this phenomenon, including: What did the revolutionization look, sound, and feel like? What does it take for individuals and groups to engage with such music? And what is the impact of such an experience over time? Perceptive and provocative, Music as Mao's Weapon is an insightful look at the exploitation and manipulation of the arts under authoritarianism.

Download or read book Memories of War written by Thomas A. Chambers and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even in the midst of the Civil War, its battlefields were being dedicated as hallowed ground. Today, those sites are among the most visited places in the United States. In contrast, the battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War had seemingly been forgotten in the aftermath of the conflict in which the nation forged its independence. Decades after the signing of the Constitution, the battlefields of Yorktown, Saratoga, Fort Moultrie, Ticonderoga, Guilford Courthouse, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens, among others, were unmarked except for crumbling forts and overgrown ramparts. Not until the late 1820s did Americans begin to recognize the importance of these places. In Memories of War, Thomas A. Chambers recounts America's rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Travelers in this period, Chambers finds, wanted more than recitations of regimental movements when they visited battlefields; they desired experiences that evoked strong emotions and leant meaning to the bleached bones and decaying fortifications of a past age. Chambers traces this impulse through efforts to commemorate Braddock's Field and Ticonderoga, the cultivated landscapes masking the violent past of the Hudson River valley, the overgrown ramparts of Southern war sites, and the scenic vistas at War of 1812 battlefields along the Niagara River. Describing a progression from neglect to the Romantic embrace of the landscape and then to ritualized remembrance, Chambers brings his narrative up to the beginning of the Civil War, during and after which the memorialization of such sites became routine, assuming significant political and cultural power in the American imagination.

Download or read book Remembering Akbar written by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Set in the tumultuous aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979, Remembering Akbar weaves together the stories of a group of characters who share a crowded death row cell in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. A teeming world is evoked vividly through the relationships, memories, and inner lives of these political prisoners, many of whom were eventually executed. Told through a series of linked memories by the narrator, Akbar, whose striking candor is infused with a mordant sense of humor, the story takes the reader beyond mere political struggles and revelations, to a vibrant alternative history, as it were, by the losers. Rather than exalting the heroic, or choosing to focus merely on despair or redemption, Remembering Akbar reveals eloquently how life unfolds when death is starkly imminent. It is a deeply moving story of great camaraderie, biting humor, and soulful remembrance."--Back cover.

Download or read book The Shoemaker and the Tea Party written by Alfred F. Young and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2001-01-17 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who participated in such key events of the American Revolution as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, might have been lost to history if not for his longevity and the historical mood of the 1830's. When the Tea Party became a leading symbol of the Revolutionary ear fifty years after the actual event, this 'common man' in his nineties was 'discovered' and celebrated in Boston as a national hero. Young pieces together this extraordinary tale, adding new insights about the role that individual and collective memory play in shaping our understanding of history.

Download or read book History of the Russian Revolution written by Leon Trotsky and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unparalleled account of one of the most pivotal and hotly debated events in world history.

Download or read book October written by China Miéville and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multi-award-winning author China Miéville captures the drama of the Russian Revolution in this “engaging retelling of the events that rocked the foundations of the twentieth century” (Village Voice) In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St. Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilization that still resonates loudly today.

Download or read book Remember Henry Harris Lost Icon of a Revolution A Story of Hope and Self Sacrifice in America written by Sam Heys and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping narrative nonfiction account of the forgotten life and legacy of Henry Harris, the first black athlete at Auburn University during the final days of the civil rights movement. A former newspaper reporter, Sam Heys traces Harris's odyssey from living in a converted store in rural Alabama to his suicide six years later.

Download or read book The Long American Revolution and Its Legacy written by Lester D. Langley and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together Lester D. Langley’s personal and professional link to the long American Revolution in a narrative that spans more than 150 years and places the Revolution in multiple contexts—from the local to the transatlantic and hemispheric and from racial and gendered to political, social, economic, and cultural perspectives. It offers a reminder that we are an old republic but a young nation and shows how an awareness of that dynamic is critical to understanding our current political, cultural, and social malaise. The United States of America is still a work in progress. A descendant on his father’s side from a long line of Kentuckians, Langley grew up torn between a father who embodied the idea of the Revolution’s poor white male driven by economic self-interest and racial prejudices and a devoted and pious mother who saw life and history as a morality play. The author’s intellectual and professional “encounter” with the American Revolution came in the 1960s as a young historian specializing in U.S. foreign relations and Latin American history, an era when the U.S. encounter with the revolution in Cuba and with the civil rights movement at home served as a reminder of the lasting and troublesome legacy of a long American Revolution. In a sweeping account that incorporates both the traditional, iconic literature on the Revolution and more recent works in U.S., Canadian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic world history, Langley addresses fundamental questions about the Revolution’s meaning, continuing relevance, and far-reaching legacy.

Download or read book Revolution written by Russell Brand and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER We all know the system isn’t working. Our governments are corrupt and the opposing parties pointlessly similar. Our culture is filled with vacuity and pap, and we are told there’s nothing we can do: “It’s just the way things are.” In this book, Russell Brand hilariously lacerates the straw men and paper tigers of our conformist times and presents, with the help of experts as diverse as Thomas Piketty and George Orwell, a vision for a fairer, sexier society that’s fun and inclusive. You have been lied to, told there’s no alternative, no choice, and that you don’t deserve any better. Brand destroys this illusory facade as amusingly and deftly as he annihilates Morning Joe anchors, Fox News fascists, and BBC stalwarts. This book makes revolution not only possible but inevitable and fun.