Download or read book The Flame Trees of Thika written by Elspeth Huxley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-02-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an open cart Elspeth Huxley set off with her parents to travel to Thika in Kenya. As pioneering settlers, they built a house of grass, ate off a damask cloth spread over packing cases, and discovered—the hard way—the world of the African. With an extraordinary gift for detail and a keen sense of humor, Huxley recalls her childhood on the small farm at a time when Europeans waged their fortunes on a land that was as harsh as it was beautiful. For a young girl, it was a time of adventure and freedom, and Huxley paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up among the Masai and Kikuyu people, discovering both the beauty and the terrors of the jungle, and enduring the rugged realities of the pioneer life.

Download or read book Europe Under Napoleon written by Michael Broers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Napoleon Bonaparte dominated the public life of Europe like no other individual before him. Not surprisingly, the story of the man himself has usually swamped he stories of his subjects. This book looks at the history of the Napoleonic Empire from an entirely new perspective – that of the ruled rather than the ruler. Michael Broers concentrates on the experience of the people of Europe – particularly the vast majority of Napoleon's subjects who were neither French nor willing participants in the great events of the period – during the dynamic but short-lived career of Napoleon, when half of the European content fell under his rule.

Download or read book Napoleon s Integration of Europe written by Stuart Woolf and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of the Napoleonic period are almost exclusively biographies of the man, or political-military accounts of his wars. But such wars were only the first stage in a far more ambitious programme; the establishment of a rational state which would force the pace of modernising society. Through an examination of the experiences of French domination, Napoleon's Integration of Europe explores the implications of such a project for France and its relationship with the rest of Europe. It examines the problems of ruling a progressively expanding empire, as seen through the eyes of a trained corps of bureaucrates who were convinced that their scientific methods would enable them to understand and govern the mechanisms of society. However it also looks at the populations subjected to French rule, at the nature of their resistance and adaptation to the principles of the Napoleonic project. This book is the first overall comparative study of Europe in the Napoleonic years. It is a study not only of an early exercise in imperialism, but of the conflict that is aroused between the rationalising tendencies of the modern state and the spatial and cultural heterogeneity of individual societies. As well as a history of France, it is also a history of Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Poland and Spain at a crucial moment in the history of each nation state.

Download or read book Making History written by Alex Callinicos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making History is about the question - central to social theory - of how human agents draw their powers from the social structures they are involved in. Drawing on classical Marxism, analytical philosophy, and a wide range of historical writing, Alex Callinicos seeks to avoid two unacceptable extremes - dissolving the subject into an impersonal flux, as poststructuralists tend to - and treating social structures as the mere effects of individual action (for example, rational-choice theory). Among those discussed are Althusser, Anderson, Benjamin, Brenner, Cohen, Elster, Foucault, Giddens, Habermas, and Mann. Callinicos has written an extended introduction to this new edition that reviews developments since Making History was first published in 1987. This republication gives a new generation of readers access to an important intervention in Marxism and social theory.