Title: To craft democracies: an essay on democratic transitions 
Author: Di Palma, Giuseppe
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | History
Publisher's Description: Is democracy a hot-house plant? Is it difficult to transplant it into new soil? The fall of so many dictatorships in the last few years - first in Southern Europe, then in Latin America, now in Eastern Europe - opens new, more optimistic perspectives on democratic development. The crises of dictatorships and the search for a new political order offer fertile ground for an examination of how best to effect democratic transitions.By focusing on the objective conditions that make democracy probable, sociological and historical theories of democracy often lose sight of what is possible. Here Giuseppe Di Palma instead explores those conciliatory political undertakings that political actors on all sides now engage in to make the improbable possible. His emphasis is on political crafting: in regard to constitutional choices, to alliances and convergences between contestants, to trade-offs, to the pacing of the transitions. Di Palma also examines the reasons - stalemate, the high cost of repression, a loss of goals, international constraints and inducements - that may motivate incumbents and nondemocratic political actors to accept democracy, even in those cases, as in Central America and Eastern Europe, where acceptance would seem least likely.An original and imaginative work that, in the light of recent transitions, challenges our assumptions about fledgling democracies and breaks new theoretical ground, To Craft Democracies will appeal to anyone interested in the way we forge our political communities today.   [brief]
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Title: Lucrecia's dreams: politics and prophecy in sixteenth-century Spain
Author: Kagan, Richard L 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | Women's Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Branded by the Spanish Inquisition as an "evil dreamer," a "notorious mother of prophets," the teenager Lucrecia de León had hundreds of bleak but richly imaginative dreams of Spain's future that became the stuff of political controversy and scandal. Based upon surviving transcripts of her dreams and on the voluminous records of her trial before the Inquisition, Lucrecia's Dreams traces the complex personal and political ramifications of Lucrecia's prophetic career. This hitherto unexamined episode in Spanish history sheds new light on the history of women as well as on the history of dream interpretation.Charlatan or clairvoyant, sinner or saint, Lucrecia was transformed by her dreams into a cause celébre , the rebellious counterpart to that other extraordinary woman of Golden Age Spain, St. Theresa of Jesus. Her supporters viewed her as a divinely inspired seer who exposed the personal and political shortcomings of Philip II of Spain. In examining the relation of dreams and prophecy to politics, Richard Kagan pays particular attention to the activities of the streetcorner prophets and female seers who formed the political underworld of sixteenth-century Spain.   [brief]
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Title: Fascist modernities: Italy, 1922-1945
Author: Ben-Ghiat, Ruth
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: European Studies | History | Intellectual History | European History
Publisher's Description: Ruth Ben-Ghiat's innovative cultural history of Mussolini's dictatorship is a provocative discussion of the meanings of modernity in interwar Italy. Eloquent, pathbreaking, and deft in its use of a broad range of materials, this work argues that fascism appealed to many Italian intellectuals as a new model of modernity that would resolve the contemporary European crisis as well as long-standing problems of the national past. Ben-Ghiat shows that - at a time of fears over the erosion of national and social identities - Mussolini presented fascism as a movement that would allow economic development without harm to social boundaries and national traditions. She demonstrates that although the regime largely failed in its attempts to remake Italians as paragons of a distinctly fascist model of mass society, twenty years of fascism did alter the landscape of Italian cultural life. Among younger intellectuals in particular, the dictatorship left a legacy of practices and attitudes that often continued under different political rubrics after 1945.   [brief]
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Title: A different shade of colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the mastery of the Sudan
Author: Powell, Eve Troutt
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This incisive study adds a new dimension to discussions of Egypt's nationalist response to the phenomenon of colonialism as well as to discussions of colonialism and nationalism in general. Eve M. Troutt Powell challenges many accepted tenets of the binary relationship between European empires and non-European colonies by examining the triangle of colonialism marked by Great Britain, Egypt, and the Sudan. She demonstrates how central the issue of the Sudan was to Egyptian nationalism and highlights the deep ambivalence in Egyptian attitudes toward empire and the resulting ambiguities and paradoxes that were an essential component of the nationalist movement. A Different Shade of Colonialism enriches our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egyptian attitudes toward slavery and race and expands our perspective of the "colonized colonizer."   [brief]
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Title: Political protest and cultural revolution: nonviolent direct action in the 1970s and 1980s
Author: Epstein, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Politics | American Studies | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: From her perspective as both participant and observer, Barbara Epstein examines the nonviolent direct action movement which, inspired by the civil rights movement, flourished in the United States from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Disenchanted with the politics of both the mainstream and the organized left, and deeply committed to forging communities based on shared values, activists in this movement developed a fresh, philosophy and style of politics that shaped the thinking of a new generation of activists. Driven by a vision of an ecologically balanced, nonviolent, egalitarian society, they engaged in political action through affinity groups, made decisions by consensus, and practiced mass civil disobedience.The nonviolent direct action movement galvanized originally in opposition to nuclear power, with the Clamshell Alliance in New England and then the Abalone Alliance in California leading the way. Its influence soon spread to other activist movements - for peace, non-intervention, ecological preservation, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights.Epstein joined the San Francisco Bay Area's Livermore Action Group to protest the arms race and found herself in jail along with a thousand other activists for blocking the road in front of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. She argues that to gain a real understanding of the direct action movement it is necessary to view it from the inside. For with its aim to base society as a whole on principles of egalitarianism and nonviolence, the movement sought to turn political protest into cultural revolution.   [brief]
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Title: The University of California Press: the early years, 1893-1953. [ON ORDER FOR CAL & CAL*]
Author: Muto, Albert
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Californian and Western History | Reference | Publishing
Publisher's Description: In 1893, when the University of California was just twenty-five years old, its governing board took a bold step in voting the money to set up a publishing program for the works of its faculty. Like many of the American universities established in the late nineteenth century, California followed the German model of emphasizing original research among its faculty. But, then as now, commercial publishers were not prepared to publish the results, and so these early research universities began to publish for themselves. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Johns Hopkins, California, Chicago, and Columbia all began to publish. All four, in time, became scholarly publishers of consequence.In this book, published to commemorate the centennial of the University of California Press, Albert Muto chronicles the early history of the Press, from its beginnings as a printer of monographs by the University's own faculty to its emergence in the early 1950s as a full-fledged university press in the Oxbridge tradition.Profusely illustrated with archival photos and examples of early book design, this book gives us a new perspective on the history of publishing in the United States, and on the early years of the nation's largest public university.   [brief]
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Title: What difference does a husband make?: women and marital status in Nazi and postwar Germany
Author: Heineman, Elizabeth D 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | German Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In October 1946, seven million more women than men lived in occupied Germany. In this study of unwed, divorced, widowed, and married women at work and at home across three political regimes, Elizabeth Heineman traces the transitions from early National Socialism through the war and on to the consolidation of democracy in the West and communism in the East.Based on thorough and extensive research in German national and regional archives as well as the archives of the U.S. occupying forces, this pathbreaking book argues that marital status can define women's position and experience as surely as race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Heineman finds that, while the war made the experience of single women a dramatic one, state activity was equally important. As a result, West German women continued to be defined in large part by their marital status. In contrast, by the time of reunification marital status had become far less significant in the lives of East German women.In one broad, comprehensive sweep, Elizabeth Heineman compares prewar and postwar, East and West, lived experience and public policy. Her sharp analytical insights will enrich our understanding of the history of women in modern Germany and the role of marital status in twentieth-century life worldwide.   [brief]
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Title: Divided loyalties: nationalism and mass politics in Syria at the close of Empire
Author: Gelvin, James L 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Politics
Publisher's Description: James L. Gelvin brings a new and distinctive perspective to the perennially fascinating topic of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. Unlike previous historians who have focused on the activities and ideas of a small group of elites, Gelvin details the role played by non-elites in nationalist politics during the early part of the twentieth century. Drawing from previously untapped sources, he documents the appearance of a new form of political organization - the popular committee - that sprang up in cities and villages throughout greater Syria in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. These committees empowered a new type of nationalist leadership, made nationalist politics a mass phenomenon for the first time, and articulated a view of nation and nationalism that continues to inform the politics of the region today.Gelvin does more than recount an episode in the history of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. His examination of leaflets, graffiti, speeches, rumors, and editorials offers fresh insights into the symbolic construction of national communities. His analysis of ceremonies - national celebrations, demonstrations, theater - contributes to our understanding of the emergence of mass politics. By situating his study within a broader historical context, Gelvin has written a book that will be of interest to all who wish to understand nationalism in the region and beyond.   [brief]
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Title: War stories: the search for a usable past in the Federal Republic of Germany
Author: Moeller, Robert G
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | European Studies | German Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Robert G. Moeller powerfully conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War. He rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans, crimes that - according to some contemporary accounts - were comparable to the crimes of Germans against Jews. Moeller draws on a wide range of U.S. and German government documents, political debates, film archives, letters, oral histories, and newspaper accounts.   [brief]
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Title: Provincial passages: culture, space, and the origins of Chinese communism
Author: Yeh, Wen-hsin
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian History | China | History
Publisher's Description: Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective.Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and vividly evokes the changing landscapes, historical circumstances, and personalities involved. The human dimension of this transformation is captured through the biography of Shi Cuntong (1899-1970), a student from the Neo-Confucian county of Jinhua who became a founding member of the Party. Yeh's in-depth analysis of the dynamics of change is combined with a compelling narrative of the moral dilemmas in the lives of Shi Cuntong and other early leaders. Using sources previously closed to scholars, including recently discovered documents in the archives of the First United Front, Yeh shows the urban Communist movement as an intellectual revolution in social consciousness.The Maoist legacy has often been associated with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Yeh's historical reconstruction of a pre-Mao, non-organizational dimension of Chinese socialism is thus of vital interest to those seeking to redefine the place of the Communist Party in a post-Mao political order.   [brief]
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Title: Aryans and British India
Author: Trautmann, Thomas R
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | South Asia | Asian History | European History
Publisher's Description: "Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry.In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.   [brief]
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Title: Engendering the Chinese revolution: radical women, communist politics, and mass movements in the 1920s
Author: Gilmartin, Christina K
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Christina Kelley Gilmartin rewrites the history of gender politics in the 1920s with this compelling assessment of the impact of feminist ideals on the Chinese Communist Party during its formative years. For the first time, Gilmartin reveals the extent to which revolutionaries in the 1920s were committed to women's emancipation and the radical political efforts that were made to overcome women's subordination and to transform gender relations.Women activists whose experiences and achievements have been previously ignored are brought to life in this study, which illustrates how the Party functioned not only as a political organization but as a subculture for women as well. We learn about the intersection of the personal and political lives of male communists and how this affected their beliefs about women's emancipation. Gilmartin depicts with thorough and incisive scholarship how the Party formulated an ideological challenge to traditional gender relations while it also preserved aspects of those relationships in its organization.   [brief]
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Title: The French worker: autobiographies from the early industrial era
Author: Traugott, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Sociology | European History | Gender Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: This anthology, drawn from the autobiographies of seven men and women whose lives span the nineteenth century, provides a rare glimpse of the everyday lives of workers in the age of early industrialization in France. Appearing for the first time in English, these stories vividly convey the ambitions, hardships, and reversals of ordinary people struggling to gain a measure of respectability.The workers' livelihoods are diverse: chair-maker, embroiderer, joiner, mason, silk weaver, machinist, seamstress. Their stories of daily activities, work life, and popular politics are filled with lively, often poignant moments. We learn of dismal, unsanitary housing; of disease; workplace accidents; and terrible hardship, especially for the children of the poor. We read of exploitation and injustice, of courtship and marriage, and of the sociability of the wine-merchant's shop and the boardinghouse.Traugott's analytic introduction discusses the many shifts in French society during the nineteenth century. Used in combination with other sources, these autobiographies illuminate the relationship between changes in working conditions and in the forms of political participation and protest occurring as the century came to a close.   [brief]
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Title: Possessors and possessed: museums, archaeology, and the visualization of history in the late Ottoman Empire
Author: Shaw, Wendy M. K 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Art | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums - characteristically Western institutions - emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research, Possessors and Possessed lays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.   [brief]
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Title: Two churches: England and Italy in the thirteenth century
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: History | European History | Medieval History | Medieval Studies | Religion
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Title: The rise of the Paris red belt 
Author: Stovall, Tyler Edward
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Social Science | French Studies
Publisher's Description: From 1920 until the present, the working-class suburbs of Paris, known as the Red Belt, have constituted the heart of French Communism, providing the Party not only with its most solid electoral base but with much of its cultural identity as well. Focusing on the northeastern suburb of Bobigny, Stovall explores the nature of working-class life and politicization as he skillfully documents how this unique region and political culture came into being. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt reveals that the very process of urban development in metropolitan Paris and the suburbs provided the most important opportunities for the local establishment of Communist influence.The rapid increase in Paris' suburban population during the early twentieth century outstripped the development of the local urban infrastructure. Consequently, many of these suburbs, often represented to their new residents as charming country villages, soon degenerated into suburban slums. Stovall argues that Communists forged a powerful political block by mobilizing the disillusionment and by improving some of the worst aspects of suburban life.As a social history of twentieth-century France, The Rise of the Paris Red Belt calls into question traditional assumptions about the history of both French Communism and the French working-class. It suggests that those interested in working-class politics, especially in the twentieth century, should consider the significance of residential and consumer issues as well as those relating to the workplace. It also suggests that urban history and urban development should not be considered autonomous phenomena, but rather expressions of class relations. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt brings to life a world whose citizens, though often overlooked, are nonetheless the history of modern France.   [brief]
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Title: Cultural encounters: the impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World 
Author: Perry, Mary Elizabeth 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Anthropology | European History | Religion | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: More than just an expression of religious authority or an instrument of social control, the Inquisition was an arena where cultures met and clashed on both shores of the Atlantic. This pioneering volume examines how cultural identities were maintained despite oppression.Persecuted groups were able to survive the Inquisition by means of diverse strategies - whether Christianized Jews in Spain preserving their experiences in literature, or native American folk healers practicing medical care. These investigations of social resistance and cultural persistence will reinforce the cultural significance of the Inquisition.   [brief]
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Title: Islam, politics, and social movements
Author: Burke, Edmund 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Taken together the essays in this work not only provide new research essential to the study of Islamic societies and Muslim peoples, but also set a new standard for the concrete study of local situations and illuminate the forces shaping the history of modern Muslim societies.This collection is unique in its sophisticated interpretation of the social protest and political resistance movements in Muslim countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors take two principal approaches to the study of their subject. Utilizing "new cultural history," they explore how particular movements have deployed the cultural and religious resources of Islam to mobilize and legitimize insurgent political action. Others rely on "new social history" to study the economic, political, and social contexts in which movements of anti-colonial resistance and revolution have developed. This work brings together contributions from specialists on Islamic North Africa, Egypt, the Arab fertile crescent, Iran and India.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of backwardness in Eastern Europe: economics and politics from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century
Author: Chirot, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Politics | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Reaching back centuries, this study makes a convincing case for very deep roots of current Eastern European backwardness. Its conclusions are suggestive for comparativists studying other parts of the world, and useful to those who want to understand contemporary Eastern Europe's past. Like the rest of the world except for that unique part of the West which has given us a false model of what was "normal," Eastern Europe developed slowly. The weight of established class relations, geography, lack of technological innovation, and wars kept the area from growing richer.In the nineteenth century the West exerted a powerful influence, but it was political more than economic. Nationalism and the creation of newly independent aspiring nation-states then began to shape national economies, often in unfavorable ways.One of this book's most important lessons is that while economics may limit the freedom of action of political players, it does not determine political outcomes. The authors offer no simple explanations but rather a theoretically complex synthesis that demonstrates the interaction of politics and economics.   [brief]
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Title: Khomeinism: essays on the Islamic Republic 
Author: Abrahamian, Ervand 1940-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: "Fanatic," "dogmatic," "fundamentalist" - these are the words most often used in the West to describe the Ayatollah Khomeini. The essays in this book challenge that view, arguing that Khomeini and his Islamic movement should be seen as a form of Third World political populism - a radical but pragmatic middle-class movement that strives to enter, rather than reject, the modern age.Ervand Abrahamian, while critical of Khomeini, asks us to look directly at the Ayatollah's own works and to understand what they meant to his principal audience - his followers in Iran. Abrahamian analyzes political tracts dating back to 1943, along with Khomeini's theological writings and his many public statements in the form of speeches, interviews, proclamations and fatwas (judicial decrees). What emerges, according to Abrahamian, is a militant, sometimes contradictory, political ideology that focuses not on issues of scripture and theology but on the immediate political, social, and economic grievances of workers and the middle class.These essays reveal how the Islamic Republic has systematically manipulated history through televised "recantations," newspapers, school textbooks, and even postage stamps. All are designed to bolster the clergy's reputation as champions of the downtrodden and as defenders against foreign powers. Abrahamian also discusses the paranoia that permeates the political spectrum in Iran, contending that such deep distrust is symptomatic of populist regimes everywhere.   [brief]
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