Download or read book The Last Revolutionaries written by Catherine Epstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Last Revolutionaries" tells a story of unwavering political devotion: it follows the lives of German communists across the tumultuous twentieth century. Before 1945, German communists were political outcasts in the Weimar Republic and courageous resisters in Nazi Germany; they also suffered Stalin's Great Purges and struggled through emigration in countries hostile to communism. After World War II, they became leaders of East Germany, where they ran a dictatorial regime until they were swept out of power by the people's revolution of 1989. In a compelling collective biography, Catherine Epstein conveys the hopes, fears, dreams, and disappointments of a generation that lived their political commitment. Focusing on eight individuals, "The Last Revolutionaries" shows how political ideology drove people's lives. Some of these communists, including the East German leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, enjoyed great personal success. But others, including the purge victims Franz Dahlem and Karl Schirdewan, experienced devastating losses. And, as the book demonstrates, female and Jewish communists faced their own sets of difficulties in the movement to which they had given their all. Drawing on previously inaccessible sources as well as extensive personal interviews, Epstein offers an unparalleled portrait of the most enduring and influential generation of Central European communists. In the service of their party, these communists experienced solidarity and betrayal, power and persecution, sacrifice and reward, triumph and defeat. At once sordid and poignant, theirs is the story of European communism--from the heroic excitement of its youth, to the bureaucratic authoritarianism of its middle age, to the sorry debacle of its death.
Download or read book The Last Revolutionaries written by Laura Mason and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a poor man and radical activist who fought to revive the French Revolution, and whose failure heralded the republic's defeat "Very much a book for our times. Mason's retelling of the trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the French Revolution shows how democracies end. Historians of revolutions and all those concerned with the arc of social justice movements have much to learn from this remarkable story."--Sophia Rosenfeld, University of Pennsylvania Laura Mason tells a new story about the French Revolution by exploring the trial of Gracchus Babeuf. Named by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as the "first modern communist," Babeuf was a poor man, an autodidact, and an activist accused of conspiring to reignite the Revolution and renew political terror. In one of the lengthiest and most controversial trials of the revolutionary decade, Babeuf and his allies defended political liberty and social equality against a regime they accused of tyranny. Mason refracts national political life through Babeuf's trial to reveal how this explosive event destabilized a fragile republic. Although the French Revolution is celebrated as a founding moment of modern representative government, this book reminds us that the experiment failed in just ten years. Mason explains how an elected government's assault on popular democracy and social justice destroyed the republic, and why that matters now.
Download or read book Mao s Last Revolution written by Roderick MACFARQUHAR and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.
Download or read book Revolutionaries written by Jack Rakove and published by HMH. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] wide-ranging and nuanced group portrait of the Founding Fathers” by a Pulitzer Prize winner (The New Yorker). In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted to family and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become “revolutionary.” But when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved quickly from protest to war. In Revolutionaries, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers—how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. From the Boston Tea Party to the First Continental Congress, from Trenton to Valley Forge, from the ratification of the Constitution to the disputes that led to our two-party system, Rakove explores the competing views of politics, war, diplomacy, and society that shaped our nation. We see the founders before they were fully formed leaders, as ordinary men who became extraordinary, altered by history. “[An] eminently readable account of the men who led the Revolution, wrote the Constitution and persuaded the citizens of the thirteen original states to adopt it.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Superb . . . a distinctive, fresh retelling of this epochal tale . . . Men like John Dickinson, George Mason, and Henry and John Laurens, rarely leading characters in similar works, put in strong appearances here. But the focus is on the big five: Washington, Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton. Everyone interested in the founding of the U.S. will want to read this book.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Download or read book The Last Episode of the French Revolution written by ERNEST BELFORT. BAX and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Last Episode of the French Revolution: Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf, and the Conspiracy of the Equals 'page line 10 from top, for former read latter. Page 40, line 7 from top, for Rousin read Bonsin. Page 86, line 13 from bottom, insert comma after issued. Page 104, line 4 from top, for arrest read his attempted arrest. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Download or read book Bunker Hill written by Nathaniel Philbrick and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and In the Hurricane's Eye tells the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution, in this "masterpiece of narrative and perspective." (Boston Globe) In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns his keen eye to pre-Revolutionary Boston and the spark that ignited the American Revolution. In the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party and the violence at Lexington and Concord, the conflict escalated and skirmishes gave way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was the bloodiest conflict of the revolutionary war, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists. Philbrick gives us a fresh view of the story and its dynamic personalities, including John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and George Washington. With passion and insight, he reconstructs the revolutionary landscape—geographic and ideological—in a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America.
Download or read book The Revolutionaries Try Again written by Mauro Cardenas and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extravagant, absurd, and self-aware, The Revolutionaries Try Again plays out against the lost decade of Ecuador's austerity and the stymied idealism of three childhood friends—an expat, a bureaucrat, and a playwright—who are as sure about the evils of dictatorship as they are unsure of everything else, including each other. Everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio's manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn't read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador. Mauro Javier Cardenas grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in Economics from Stanford University. Excerpts from his first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, have appeared in Conjunctions, the Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, and BOMB. His interviews and essays on/with László Krasznahorkai, Javier Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Antonio Lobo Antunes have appeared in Music & Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and the Quarterly Conversation.
Download or read book The Revolution s Last Men written by Don N. Hagist and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographical sketches of six veterans of the American Revolutionary War still alive during the American Civil War : Samuel Downing (2nd New Hampshire Regiment) -- Daniel Waldo (Connecticut Militia) -- Lemuel Cook (2nd Dragoons) -- Alexander Milliner (1st New York Regiment) -- William Hutchings (Massachusetts Militia) -- Adam Link (Pennsylvania Militia).
Download or read book The Last Revolutionaries written by Laura Mason and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a poor man and radical activist who fought to revive the French Revolution, and whose failure heralded the republic’s defeat “Very much a book for our times. Mason’s retelling of the trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the French Revolution shows how democracies end. Historians of revolutions and all those concerned with the arc of social justice movements have much to learn from this remarkable story.”—Sophia Rosenfeld, University of Pennsylvania Laura Mason tells a new story about the French Revolution by exploring the trial of Gracchus Babeuf. Named by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as the “first modern communist,” Babeuf was a poor man, an autodidact, and an activist accused of conspiring to reignite the Revolution and renew political terror. In one of the lengthiest and most controversial trials of the revolutionary decade, Babeuf and his allies defended political liberty and social equality against a regime they accused of tyranny. Mason refracts national political life through Babeuf’s trial to reveal how this explosive event destabilized a fragile republic. Although the French Revolution is celebrated as a founding moment of modern representative government, this book reminds us that the experiment failed in just ten years. Mason explains how an elected government’s assault on popular democracy and social justice destroyed the republic, and why that matters now.
Download or read book Pierre Bourdieu written by Gad Yair and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009-10-26 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pierre Bourdieu: The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution argues that Bourdieu appointed himself as the representative of the French people and acted as its National Assembly. In that capacity, he set himself to work with the charter of the preamble toThe Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to remind the members of the social body of their rights and obligations; to monitor the legislative and executive powers and compare them with the Republican purposes of ideal political and social agendas decreed by the revolutionaries of 1789; and, overall, to maintain the tenets of the French constitution. In that sense, like d'Artagnan in Dumas'The Three Musketeers, Bourdieu took it upon himself to be the fighter for true France, namely the keeper of the Republican tradition of the French Revolution. Bourdieu's entire oeuvre was indeed motivated by the failed promise of the French Revolution and by the demise of its most noble ideals. His passionate analyses_of educational stratification, cultural production and consumption, gender relations, the social structure of the economy, and the effects of globalization_were always carried out with the moral benchmark of the revolution in mind. Bourdieu was indeed passionately tied to the values of the French Revolution, notably to liberty and meritocracy, to social equality and to the democratization and universalization of government. But wherever he looked, he saw those values betrayed by the very people who argued for their implementation, and by the governmental bodies which were devised in order to guarantee their effectiveness. Committed to the values of the Declaration, he was constantly frustrated by the betrayals of universalization by the Fifth Republic.
Download or read book Give Me Liberty written by Naomi Wolf and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-16 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, bestselling author Naomi Wolf illustrates the changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately, the nation. As the practice of democracy becomes a lost art, Americans are increasingly desperate for a restored nation. Many have a general sense that the “system” is in disorder—if not on the road to functional collapse. But though it is easy to identify our political problems, the solutions are not always as clear. In Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, bestselling author Naomi Wolf illustrates the breathtaking changes that can take place when ordinary citizens engage in the democratic system the way the founders intended and tells how to use that system, right now, to change your life, your community, and ultimately, the nation.
Download or read book Rules for Revolutionaries written by Becky Bond and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lessons from the groundbreaking grassroots campaign that helped launch a new political revolution Rules for Revolutionaries is a bold challenge to the political establishment and the “rules” that govern campaign strategy. It tells the story of a breakthrough experiment conducted on the fringes of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign: A technology-driven team empowered volunteers to build and manage the infrastructure to make seventy-five million calls, launch eight million text messages, and hold more than one-hundred thousand public meetings—in an effort to put Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign over the top. Bond and Exley, digital iconoclasts who have been reshaping the way politics is practiced in America for two decades, have identified twenty-two rules of “Big Organizing” that can be used to drive social change movements of any kind. And they tell the inside story of one of the most amazing grassroots political campaigns ever run. Fast-paced, provocative, and profound, Rules for Revolutionaries stands as a liberating challenge to the low expectations and small thinking that dominates too many advocacy, non-profit, and campaigning organizations—and points the way forward to a future where political revolution is truly possible.
Download or read book Revolutionaries written by Joshua Furst and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Austin Chronicle Best Book of the Year Fred, given name Freedom, is the sole offspring of Lenny Snyder, the infamous pied piper of 1960s counterculture. From a young age, Fred has been exploited by his father and used to enhance Lenny's mystique. Now middle-aged, Fred looks back on life with this charismatic, brilliant, and volatile ringmaster, who is as captivating in these pages as he was to his devoted disciples back then. We see Lenny in his prime and then as he gradually loses his magnetic confidence and leading role at the end of the sixties. Lenny demands loyaty but gives none back in return; he preaches love but treats his family with almost reflexive cruelty. And Fred remembers all of it--the chaos, the spite, the affection. A kaledoscopic saga, this novel is at once a profound allegory for America and a deeply intimate portrait of a father and son.
Download or read book Trotsky written by Bertrand M. Patenaude and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much passion, controversy, and curiosity as Leon Trotsky. His role in history—his epic rise and fall, his fiery persona, his violent end in Mexico in August 1940—holds a fascination that transcends the history of the Russian Revolution. Bertrand M. Patenaude masterfully interweaves the story of Trotsky’s final years with flashbacks to pivotal episodes in his career as a young Marxist, revolutionary hero, Red Army chief, Bolshevik leader, outcast from Stalin’s USSR, and ultimately heretic of the Kremlin, targeted for assassination by its secret police. Gripping, tragic, and based on extensive firsthand research, Trotsky brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history’s most captivating and important figures.
Download or read book Revolutionaries written by Eric Hobsbawm and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays which represent a lifetime's writing,lectures & thoughts on revolutionary modern political developments throughout Europe.
Download or read book The Revolution that Failed written by Brendan Rittenhouse Green and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A theoretical analysis and historical investigation of the Cold War nuclear arms race that challenges the nuclear revolution.
Download or read book Revolution without Revolutionaries written by Asef Bayat and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the Arab Spring and its aftermath alongside the revolutions of the 1970s. The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leaving much of the old political and social order intact. In this book, noted author Asef Bayat—whose Life as Politics anticipated the Arab Spring—uncovers why this occurred, and what made these uprisings so distinct from those that came before. Revolution without Revolutionaries is both a history of the Arab Spring and a history of revolution writ broadly. Setting the 2011 uprisings side by side with the revolutions of the 1970s, particularly the Iranian Revolution, Bayat reveals a profound global shift in the nature of protest: as acceptance of neoliberal policy has spread, radical revolutionary impulses have diminished. Protestors call for reform rather than fundamental transformation. By tracing the contours and illuminating the meaning of the 2011 uprisings, Bayat gives us the book needed to explain and understand our post–Arab Spring world. Praise for Revolution without Revolutionaries “Bayat is in the vanguard of a subtle and original theorization of social movements and social change in the Middle East. His attention to the lives of the urban poor, his extensive field work in very different countries within the region, and his ability to see over the horizon of current paradigms make his work essential reading.” —Juan Cole, University of Michigan “An astute analyst of the Middle East, Asef Bayat is one of the very few researchers equipped to historicize the region’s contemporary uprisings. In Revolution without Revolutionaries, he deftly and sympathetically employs his own observations of Iran, immediately before and after the 1979 revolution, to reflect on the epochal shifts that have re-worked the political regimes, economic structures, and revolutionary imaginaries across the region today.” —Arang Keshavarzian, New York University “Bayat provocatively questions the Arab Spring’s apparent moderation, tracing its softness to decades of neoliberalism that have undermined the national state and discarded old-fashioned forms of revolutionary violence. This groundbreaking book is not an obituary for the Arab Spring but a hopeful glimpse at its future.” —Olivier Roy, author of The Failure of Political Islam
