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In May 1782, Colonel William Crawford led over 450 volunteers across Ohio to attack British-allied Native Americans who had been raiding the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia for years. An experienced yet reluctant commander, Crawford and his men clashed with a similarly sized force of British Rangers and Wyandot, Delaware, and Shawnee Indians on the Sandusky River in early June. After three days, the Americans were routed in one of the worst defeats American arms suffered on the frontier during the American Revolution. During the retreat, Native American warriors captured dozens of men, including Colonel Crawford. Many were horrifically tortured to death in revenge for the Gnadenhutten massacre earlier that spring, when American volunteers bludgeoned nearly one hundred unarmed and unresisting Delaware Indians to death. 
   The Battle of Upper Sandusky, 1782 places military operations at the forefront of events in the waning months of the American Revolution on the frontier. Importantly, it gives long-deserved credit to Native American leaders, particularly Dunquat of the Wyandot and Hopocan of the Delaware, for their roles and commands on the battlefield. For over two centuries, their victory was attributed to the presence of British Rangers and a few officers, but Dunquat and Hopocan made the critical decisions before and after the battle while Native American warriors constituted the bulk of their army. 
   The book also reconsiders the effectiveness of American operations. Crawford was an unenthusiastic commander who had to be talked into leading the campaign to help prevent a repeat of the Gnadenhutten massacre. Despite his long service on the frontier and experience in the Continental Army, Crawford failed to unite his ad hoc command, suffered from constant indecision, and could not put his own stamp on the campaign. The unprofessional nature of his army also contributed to its defeat as it lacked organization, experience, leadership, training, and standardization.
   The presence of Simon Girty, demonized by Americans on the frontier as a turncoat, and the gruesomeness of Crawford’s execution focused stories about the campaign on those two individuals, rather than the military operations themselves or the Indians who won the victory. Myths were accepted as fact. Afterward, interest in the campaign and the combatants faded. The Battle of Upper Sandusky, 1782 gives Crawford’s campaign its proper place as one of the largest battles between frontier forces and Native Americans during the Revolutionary War.

While most books and articles on Cuba seek to analyse the island’s socialist experiment from the perspective of internal dynamics or international relations, this book attempts to understand the revolutionary process as part of a counter-current against neoliberal globalisation.

Rather than presenting Cuba as a socialist survivor, whose performance must be measured against the standards set by the ‘international community’, George Lambie judges Cuban socialism on the goals which the revolution sets for itself. He shows that despite Cuba’s isolation in the ‘New World Order’, and the enormous pressures it has faced to ‘conform’, its faith in an alternative socialist project has continued and grown.

Now that neoliberalism is in crisis, Cuba’s promotion of socialist values is finding a renewed relevance. In this fascinating study Lambie argues that Cuba is again becoming a symbol, and practical example, of socialism in action. This book is essential reading for students of politics and Latin American studies.

A detailed, empirically grounded account of the Prague Spring.

Prague Spring 1968 focuses on the key political and social developments between January and August, while situating them within the broader context of the deepening crisis of Czechoslovak state socialism since 1967. Structured chronologically into five parts, the book traces the fall of Antonín Novotný, the rise of Alexander Dubček and the reform project known as “socialism with a human face,” the rapid emancipation of media and civil society, the escalating conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies, and the Warsaw Pact invasion, followed by the Moscow negotiations. Drawing primarily on edited archival sources and critically engaging with extensive Czech and international scholarship, the study analyzes the Prague Spring as a distinctive democratization process centered on the transformation of the Communist Party’s leading role. Emphasizing empathetic historical interpretation, it provides a nuanced portrayal of key actors and decision-making dynamics, highlighting both the possibilities and structural limits of reform within a non-democratic socialist system.

With his monumental work The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59)—best known for his classic Democracy in America—envisioned a multivolume philosophical study of the origins of modern France that would examine the implications of French history on the nature and development of democratic society. Volume I, which covered the eighteenth-century background to the Revolution, was published to great acclaim in 1856. On the continuation of this project, he wrote: "When this Revolution has finished its work, [this volume] will show what that work really was, and what the new society which has come from that violent labor is, what the Revolution has taken away and what it has preserved from that old regime against which it was directed."

At dawn on March 18, 1871, Parisian women stepped between cannons and French soldiers, using their bodies to block the army from taking the artillery from their working-class neighborhood. When ordered to fire, the troops refused and instead turned and arrested their leaders. Thus began the Paris Commune, France’s revolutionary civil war that rocked the nineteenth century and shaped the twentieth. 

Considered a golden moment of hope and potential by the left, and a black hour of terrifying power inversions by the right, the Commune occupies a critical position in understanding modern history and politics. A 72-day conflict that ended with the ferocious slaughter of Parisians, the Commune represents for some the final insurgent burst of the French Revolution’s long wake, for others the first “successful” socialist uprising, and for yet others an archetype for egalitarian socio-economic, feminist, and political change. Militants have referenced and incorporated its ideas into insurrections across the globe, throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, keeping alive the revolution’s now-iconic goals and images.  Innumerable scholars in countless languages have examined aspects of the 1871 uprising, taking perspectives ranging from glorifying to damning this world-shaking event.  

The Commune stands as a critical and pivotal moment in nineteenth-century history, as the linchpin between revolutionary pasts and futures, and as the crucible allowing glimpses of alternate possibilities.  Upending hierarchies of class, religion, and gender, the Commune emerged as a touchstone for the subsequent century-and-a-half of revolutionary and radical social movements.