For years people have tried to persuade the leader of the Cuban Revolution to tell his own life story. Here, finally, Ignacio Ramonet, well-known activist and editor of "Le Monde Diplomatique", has succeeded. For the first time, in a series of probing interviews, Fidel Castro describes his life, from the 1950s all the way up to the present day. He discusses his parents, his earliest influences, the beginnings of the revolution, his relationship with Che Guevara, the Bay of Pigs, the Carter years, Cuban migration to the US. And along the way, Ramonet challenges Castro to discuss his views on a number of controversial questions, from human rights and freedom of the press to the repression of homosexuality and the survival of the death penalty, and he gives his opinion of other leaders, alive and dead, including George Bush and Tony Blair.

During the twentieth century, black Greek-Letter organizations (BGLOs) united college students dedicated to excellence, fostered kinship, and uplifted African Americans. Members of these organizations include remarkable and influential individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr., Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, novelist Toni Morrison, and Wall Street pioneer Reginald F. Lewis. Despite the profound influence of these groups, many now question the continuing relevance of BGLOs, arguing that their golden age has passed. Partly because of their perceived link to hip-hop culture, black fraternities and sororities have been unfairly reduced to a media stereotype—a world of hazing without any real substance. The general public knows very little about BGLOs, and surprisingly the members themselves often do not have a thorough understanding of their history and culture or of the issues currently facing their organizations. To foster a greater engagement with the history and contributions of BGLOs, Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty-first Century: Our Fight Has Just Begun brings together an impressive group of authors to explore the contributions and continuing possibilities of BGLOs and their members. Editor Gregory S. Parks and the contributing authors provide historical context for the development of BGLOs, exploring their service activities as well as their relationships with other prominent African American institutions. The book examines BGLOs’ responses to a number of contemporary issues, including non-black membership, homosexuality within BGLOs, and the perception of BGLOs as educated gangs. As illustrated by the organized response of BGLO members to the racial injustice they observed in Jena, Louisiana, these organizations still have a vital mission. Both internally and externally, BGLOs struggle to forge a relevant identity for the new century. Internally, these groups wrestle with many issues, including hazing, homophobia, petty intergroup competition, and the difficulty of bridging the divide between college and alumni members. Externally, BGLOs face the challenge of rededicating themselves to their communities and leading an aggressive campaign against modern forms of racism, sexism, and other types of fear-driven behavior. By embracing the history of these organizations and exploring their continuing viability and relevance, Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty-first Century demonstrates that BGLOs can create a positive and enduring future and that their most important work lies ahead.

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln declared that as president he would “have no lawful right” to interfere with the institution of slavery. Yet less than two years later, he issued a proclamation intended to free all slaves throughout the Confederate states. When critics challenged the constitutional soundness of the act, Lincoln pointed to the international laws and usages of war as the legal basis for his Proclamation, asserting that the Constitution invested the president “with the law of war in time of war.” As the Civil War intensified, the Lincoln administration slowly and reluctantly accorded full belligerent rights to the Confederacy under the law of war. This included designating a prisoner of war status for captives, honoring flags of truce, and negotiating formal agreements for the exchange of prisoners—practices that laid the intellectual foundations for emancipation. Once the United States allowed Confederates all the privileges of belligerents under international law, it followed that they should also suffer the disadvantages, including trial by military courts, seizure of property, and eventually the emancipation of slaves. Even after the Lincoln administration decided to apply the law of war, it was unclear whether state and federal courts would agree. After careful analysis, author Burrus M. Carnahan concludes that if the courts had decided that the proclamation was not justified, the result would have been the personal legal liability of thousands of Union officers to aggrieved slave owners. This argument offers further support to the notion that Lincoln’s delay in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation was an exercise of political prudence, not a personal reluctance to free the slaves. In Act of Justice, Carnahan contends that Lincoln was no reluctant emancipator; he wrote a truly radical document that treated Confederate slaves as an oppressed people rather than merely as enemy property. In this respect, Lincoln’s proclamation anticipated the psychological warfare tactics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Carnahan’s exploration of the president’s war powers illuminates the origins of early debates about war powers and the Constitution and their link to international law.

* A massively topical reprise of the critical debate about western images and stereotypes of the Arab world and Islam.
* Provides essential background to understanding this part of the world.
* Offers a brief history of the debate regarding orientalism, as defined by Said and others.
* Summarises and comments on a number of significant texts.
* Details a number of case studies which have been inspired by the debate.
* Provides a useful chronology.
* Will be important briefing document for anyone commentating on or communicating with the East - journalists, Foreign Office officials, diplomats etc.
In the 1960s and 1970s a powerful assault was launched on orientalism - the study of the Orient. At the center of this attack was Edward Said, whose devastating critique accused Western orientalists of creating stereotypical images of the East, thereby facilitating imperialism and colonialism and inciting chauvinism and racism. The debate ranged far beyond the traditional limits of 'dry-as-dust' orientalism, involving questions concerning the nature of identity, the nature of imperialism, Islamophobia, myth, Arabism, racialism, intercultural relations and feminism. Charting the history of the vigorous debate about the nature of orientalism, this timely account revisits the arguments and surveys the case studies inspired by that debate. It summarizes and comments on a number of significant texts, details a number of case studies which have been inspired by the debate, and provides a useful chronology.

The Welsh princes were one of the most important ruling elite in medieval Western Europe and this text examines their behavior, influence and power. From the mid-eleventh century to the end of the thirteenth, conquest and foreign 'colonial' settlement profoundly transformed Wales. Massive changes took place in the political, economic, social and religious spheres, and Welsh culture was significantly affected. Roger Turvey looks at this transformation, its impact on the Welsh princes and the part they themselves played in it. Drawing out the human qualities of flesh and blood characters, Turvey paints a vivid and compelling picture of a fascinating elite. For those interested in Medieval or British history.

What special vulnerabilities does the world of the 21st century have to terrorist attacks? What kind of role does the United States see itself playing as the world's only superpower in the coming decades? How should we now characterize the conduct of the US foreign policy? Answers to such questions are perhaps not much clearer now than they were immediately after the attacks, but one of the more positive effects of these attacks has been to stimulate much serious discussion about them, and thus about the place of violence about changing forms of warfare, about different forms of terror, and about challenges to prevailing accounts of the legitimacy of violence in contemporary political life in the context of emerging and in many respects dangerously unstable structures of power and authority on a global scale.

The literature of Anglo-Saxon England is unique among contemporary European literatures in that it features a vast amount of saints' lives in the vernacular. This study analyzes the most important author Aelfric's lives of five important saints in the light of their cults in Anglo-Saxon England, providing the reader fascinating glimpses of 'Aelfric at work'. He adapts the cults and rewrites the received Latin hagiography so that each of their lives conveys a distinct message to the contemporary political elite as well as to a lay audience at large.

This book investigates how scholars from a variety of disciplines have defined and explained political development across what was formerly known as the "age of absolutism". It assesses whether the term still has utility as a tool of analysis and it explores the wider ramifications of the process of state-formation from the experience of central Europe from the early 17th century to the start of the 19th.

An A-Z of Modern Europe 1789-1999is a comprehensive dictionary which defines modern Europe through its important events and people. It includes entries on:
*key people from Napoleon Bonaparte to Hitler
*key political and military events
*influential political, social, cultural and economic theories.
The book offers accessible and concise definitions of nearly 1000 separate items. It is cross-referenced and thus provides associated links and connections while the appendices contain essential extra information. There are five helpful maps to guide the reader along.

Historian Lewis (Considerable Passions) takes an extremely thorough if not always entertaining approach to a combined study of golf in America and Eisenhower's stamp on history. She includes fascinating stories of how during WWII General Eisenhower ordered an air force pilot to drop a bomb on a new army golf course in Italy to quickly dig a hole for a sand trap, and how as president he took to the links with not only golf clubs but a "doomsday" briefcase that held the codes to launch a nuclear attack. Eisenhower used golf as a way to relax from stress and as recuperative exercise after his first heart attack in 1955. Lewis explores how Eisenhower often directed national policy from fairways and clubhouses, including Little Rock's Central High School integration standoff and the response to the American spy plane crash in the Soviet Union. Lewis's narrative sometimes lags with an abundance of unnecessary details such as frequent lists of names of Eisenhower's golfing partners. She ultimately ranks Eisenhower with Bobby Jones and Arnold Palmer (both of whom the president befriended) as well as Tiger Woods as the most influential figures in popularizing the game in America.

A growing number of historians, political commentators, and cultural critics have sought to analyze Ireland's past and present in colonial terms. For some, including Irish Republicans, it is the only proper framework for understanding Ireland. Others reject the very use of the colonial label for Ireland's history; amongst some Ulster Unionists the term is greeted with outrage. This book evaluates and analyzes these controversies, which range from debates over the ancient and medieval past to those in current literary and postcolonial theory. Scholarly, at times polemical, it is the most comprehensive study of these themes ever to appear. It will undoubtedly arouse sharp controversy.

The volume explores late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as selected aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The essays span a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks.