164 books match the query 'Revolution' and 11 start with b

cover of Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime

Backstage at the Revolution

How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime

Victoria Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2008

On July 14, 1789, a crowd of angry French citizens en route to the Bastille broke into the Paris Opera and helped themselves to any sturdy weapon they could find. Yet despite its long association with the royal court, its special privileges, and the splendor of its performances, the Opera itself was spared, even protected, by Revolutionary officials. Victoria Johnson’s Backstage at the Revolution tells the story of how this legendary opera house, despite being a lightning rod for charges of tyranny and waste, weathered the most dramatic political upheaval in European history.
            Sifting through royal edicts, private letters, and Revolutionary records of all kinds, Johnson uncovers the roots of the Opera’s survival in its identity as a uniquely privileged icon of French culture—an identity established by the conditions of its founding one hundred years earlier under Louis XIV. Johnson’s rich cultural history moves between both epochs, taking readers backstage to see how a motley crew of singers, dancers, royal ministers, poet entrepreneurs, shady managers, and the king of France all played a part in the creation and preservation of one of the world’s most fabled cultural institutions.
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cover of Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914

Beer and Revolution

The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914

Tom Goyens

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Understanding an infamous political movement's grounding in festivity and defiance

Beer and Revolution examines the rollicking life and times of German immigrant anarchists in New York City from 1880 to 1914. Offering a new approach to an often misunderstood political movement, Tom Goyens puts a human face on anarchism and reveals a dedication less to bombs than to beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fundraising events, and theater groups were held.

Goyens brings to life the fascinating relationship between social space and politics by examining how the intersection of political ideals, entertainment, and social activism embodied anarchism not as an abstract idea, but as a chosen lifestyle for thousands of women and men. He shows how anarchist social gatherings were themselves events of defiance and resistance that aimed at establishing anarchism as an alternative lifestyle through the combination of German working-class conviviality and a dedication to the principle that coercive authority was not only unnecessary, but actually damaging to full and free human development as well. Goyens also explores the broader circumstances in both the United States and Germany that served as catalysts for the emergence of anarchism in urban America and how anarchist activism was hampered by police surveillance, ethnic insularity, and a widening gulf between the anarchists' message and the majority of American workers.

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cover of Belarusian Nation-Building in Times of War and Revolution

Belarusian Nation-Building in Times of War and Revolution

Lizaveta Kasmach

Central European University Press, 2023

The proclamation of Belarusian independence on March 25, 1918, and the rival establishment of the Soviet Belarusian state on January 1, 1919, created two distinct and mutually exclusive national myths, which continue to define contemporary Belarusian society. This book examines the processes that resulted in this dual resolution in the context of World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolutions.

Based on original archival material, Lizaveta Kasmach scrutinizes the development of competing concepts of Belarusian nationhood in the context of rivaling national aspirations and imperial policies. The analysis convincingly demonstrates the divisions within the nationalist movement, both politically between the moderates and socialists, and geographically between German-occupied territory with Vilna as a center versus Russian-controlled territory around Minsk. Besides the case study of Belarusian nation-building efforts, the book is a contribution to the study of the First World War in East Central Europe, approaching the war and its aftermath as a mobilizational moment in the region.

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cover of Between Past and Future: The Revolution of 1989 and Their Aftermath

Between Past and Future

The Revolution of 1989 and Their Aftermath

Sorin Antohi

Central European University Press, 2000

The tenth anniversary of the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe is the basis for this text which reflects upon the past ten years and what lies ahead for the future. An international group of academics and public intellectuals, including former dissidents and active politicians, engage in an exchange on the antecedents, causes, contexts, meanings and legacies of the 1989 revolutions. The contributors address various issues including liberal democracy and its enemies; modernity and discontent; economic reforms and their social impact; ethnicity; nationalism and religion; geopolitics; electoral systems and political power; European integration; and the demise of Yugoslavia.
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cover of Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest

Between Resistance and Revolution

Cultural Politics and Social Protest

Fox, Richard G.

Rutgers University Press, 1997

Peasants in India hugging trees to protest logging, Brazilian feminists marching to impeach a president, Okinawan television comedians joke-starting ethnic activity. All are instances of social protest that exist in the charged territory between the cataclysmic upheaval of revolutionary war and the everyday acts of private resistance. Yet these movements "in between" resistance and revolution have remained invisible to scholars of politics, culture, and society. Leading scholars in anthropology, political science, history, sociology, and ethnomusicology examine dissent and direct action in Australia, Brazil, Germany, Colombia, India, Korea, Peru, and the United States and demonstrate the importance of looking beyond these poles of protest to the midways of mobilization.

The contributors are Nancy Abelmann, Sonia Alvarez, Arturo Escobar, Richard Fox, Faye Ginsburg, Ramachandra Guha, Ingrid Monson, Yoshinobu Ota, Orin Starn, and Nathan Stoltzfus.

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cover of Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico

Biography of a Hacienda

Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico

Elizabeth Terese Newman

University of Arizona Press, 2014

Winner, James Deetz Book Award (Society for Historical Archaeology)

Biography of a Hacienda is a many-voiced reconstruction of events leading up to the Mexican Revolution and the legacy that remains to the present day. Drawing on ethnohistorical, archaeological, and ethnographic data, Elizabeth Terese Newman creates a fascinating model of the interplay between the great events of the Revolution and the lives of everyday people.

In 1910 the Mexican Revolution erupted out of a century of tension surrounding land ownership and control over labor. During the previous century, the elite ruling classes acquired ever-increasingly large tracts of land while peasants saw their subsistence and community independence vanish. Rural working conditions became so oppressive that many resorted to armed rebellion. After the war, new efforts were made to promote agrarian reform, and many of Mexico’s rural poor were awarded the land they had farmed for generations. 

Weaving together fiction, memoir, and data from her fieldwork, Newman reconstructs life at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, a site located near a remote village in the Valley of Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Exploring people’s daily lives and how they affected the buildup to the Revolution and subsequent agrarian reforms, the author draws on nearly a decade of interdisciplinary study of the Hacienda Acocotla and its descendant community. Newman’s archaeological research recovered information about the lives of indigenous people living and working there in the one hundred years leading up to the Mexican Revolution.

Newman shows how women were central to starting the revolt, and she adds their voices to the master narrative. Biography of a Hacienda concludes with a thoughtful discussion of the contribution of the agrarian revolution to Mexico’s history and whether it has succeeded or simply transformed rural Mexico into a new “global hacienda system.”
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cover of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia

Blood of the Earth

Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia

By Kevin A. Young

University of Texas Press, 2017

Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century.

Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.

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cover of Bolivia: Revolution and the Power of History in the Present

Bolivia

Revolution and the Power of History in the Present

James Dunkerley

University of London Press, 2007

This volume brings together essays written over three decades on Bolivian history and politics. The book opens with a contemporary survey of the new government of the MAS headed by Evo Morales. Subsequent chapters review the neoliberal experiments of the 1980s and 1990s, the strategic and intellectual failures of Che Guevara's guerrilla foco; the origins of the Revolution of 1952; explanations for the dominance of the caudillos of the 19th century; and the extraordinary story of Francisco Burdett O'Connor, whose life combined liberation struggles on both sides of the Atlantic.
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cover of Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin

Bride of the Revolution

Krupskaya and Lenin

Robert H. McNeal

University of Michigan Press, 1972

Some four years after the wedding of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov in the splendor of the Kremlin, two obscure political convicts—Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) and Nadezhda Krupskaya--were married in Siberia. Twenty years later Lenin and Krupskaya were themselves living in the Kremlin, and the royal Romanovs had been shot by Lenin's police. This book re-creates for the first time the full story of the devoted and determined woman who married the greatest among European revolutionary leaders.Krupskaya's marriage was remarkable in many ways. It began with Lenin's ambiguous proposal smuggled into her jail cell, and ended in the intrigue of succession as Lenin lay dying. From close political collaboration during the early emigrant years of the Bolshevik Party, to her role in the long-suppressed story of Lenin's affair with Inessa Armand, Krupskaya proved herself a loyal bride of the revolution. Yet Krupskaya in her own right comes alive in these pages—as a youthful Tolstoyan; as an advocate of progressive education and the liberation of women; as chief cryptologist, secretary, and paymaster for the tiny network of revolutionaries; as an ultimately tragic figure, struggling to defend her husband's legacy against the machinations of Joseph Stalin.Nadezhda Krupskaya has long been revered in Russia as the greatest woman of the Communist era, yet no Soviet writer has dared to write frankly of her fascinating and turbulent life. In this book—based on extensive research in Soviet publications as well as Tsarist and Trotskyan archive materials—the author has succeeded in unraveling many of the enigmas of Krupskaya's biography, and has provided often intimate and very human glimpses of her famous relationship with Lenin. Here, for the first time, Krupskaya at last takes her place as a great figure of the modern age.
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cover of British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution

British Soldiers, American War

Voices of the American Revolution

Donald N. Hagist

Westholme Publishing, 2012

Advisor for Ken Burns The American Revolution on PBS®
Nine Rare and Fascinating First-Person Profiles of Soldiers Who Fought for the British Crown
Much has been written about the colonists who took up arms during the American Revolution and the army they created. Far less literature, however, has been devoted to their adversaries. The professional soldiers that composed the British army are seldom considered on a personal level, instead being either overlooked or inaccurately characterized as conscripts and criminals. Most of the British Redcoats sent to America in defense of their government’s policies were career soldiers who enlisted voluntarily in their late teens or early twenties. They came from all walks of British life, including those with nowhere else to turn, those aspiring to improve their social standing, and all others in between. Statistics show that most were simply hardworking men with various amounts of education who had chosen
the military in preference to other occupations. Very few of these soldiers left writings from which we can learn their private motives and experiences.
British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution is the first collection of personal narratives by British common soldiers ever assembled and published. Author Don N. Hagist has located first-hand accounts of nine soldiers who served in America in the 1770s and 1780s. In their own words we learn of the diverse population—among them a former weaver, a boy who quarelled with his family, and a man with wanderlust—who joined the army and served tirelessly and dutifully, sometimes faithfully and sometimes irresolutely, in the uniform of their nation. To accompany each narrative, the author provides a contextualizing essay based on archival research giving background on the soldier and his military service. Taken as a whole these true stories reveal much about the individuals who composed what was, at the time, the most formidable fighting force in the world.
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cover of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War

Burning Country

Syrians in Revolution and War

Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami

Pluto Press, 2018

In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Seven years later, Syria is a warzone, and there seems to be no end in sight. 

Burning Country explores the complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new firsthand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists. Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami expertly interweave these stories with an incisive analysis of the militarization of the uprising, the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of Syria’s government in exacerbating the brutalization of the conflict. Through these accounts and a broad range of secondary source material, the authors persuasively argue that the international community has failed in its stated commitments to support the Syrian opposition movements.

This new edition brings the story up to the present, with a new chapter that covers the internationalization of the conflict, including interventions by the United States, Russia, and Iran; the rollback of ISIS; the fall of Daraya and Aleppo; the crushing of local democracy; sectarian cleansing; and the forced exile of millions of Syrians.
 
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