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“Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Well researched and eloquently presented.” —The Atlantic * “Delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —The New York Times Book Review A celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, ...
Civil wars are the biggest danger to world peace today - this book shows us why they happen, and how to avoid them. 'When one of the world's leading scholars of civil war tells us that a country is on the brink of violent conflict, we should pay attention' Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die We are now living in the world's greatest era of civil wars. While violence has declined worldwide, major civil wars are now being fought in countries Iraq, Syria and Libya as well as smaller civil wars in India and Malaysia. Even countries we thought could never experience another - such as the USA, Sweden and Ireland - are showing signs of unrest. So how can we stop them? In How Civil Wars Start, Professor Barbara F. Walter, an expert who has advised the CIA, Senate and UN, explains the rise of civil wars, the conditions that create them and a path back toward peace. *Sunday Times Smart Thinking Book of the Year 2022 & New York Times Bestseller*
As a leading Confederate general, Braxton Bragg (1817–1876) earned a reputation for incompetence, for wantonly shooting his own soldiers, and for losing battles. This public image established him not only as a scapegoat for the South's military failures but also as the chief whipping boy of the Confederacy. The strongly negative opinions of Bragg's contemporaries have continued to color assessments of the general's military career and character by generations of historians. Rather than take these assessments at face value, Earl J. Hess's biography offers a much more balanced account of Bragg, the man and the officer. While Hess analyzes Bragg's many campaigns and battles, he also emphasize...
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This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.
The Civil Wars Experienced is an exciting new history of the civil wars, which recounts their effects on the 'common people'. This engaging survey throws new light onto a century of violence and political and social upheaval By looking at personal sources such as diaries, petitions, letters and social sources including the press, The Civil War Experienced clearly sets out the true social and cultural effects of the wars on the peoples of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and how common experiences transcended national and regional boundaries. It ranges widely from the Orkneys to Galway and from Radnorshire to Norfolk. The Civil Wars Experienced explores exactly how far-reaching the changes caused by civil wars actually were for both women and men and carefully assesses individual reactions towards them. For most people fear, familial concerns and material priorities dictated their lives, but for others the civil revolutions provided a positive force for their own spiritual and religious development. By placing the military and political developments of the civil wars in a social context, this book portrays a very different interpretation of a century of regicide and republic.
While South Carolina's preemptive strike on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's subsequent call to arms started the Civil War, South Carolina's secession and Lincoln's military actions were simply the last in a chain of events stretching as far back as the early 1750s. Increasing moral conflicts and political debates over slavery--exacerbated by the inequities inherent between an established agricultural society and a growing industrial one--led to a fierce sectionalism which manifested itself through cultural, economic, political and territorial disputes. This historical study reduces sectionalism to its most fundamental form, examining the underlying source of this antagonistic climate. From protective tariffs to the expansionist agenda, it illustrates the ways in which the foremost issues of the time influenced relations between the North and the South.
The recent efforts to reach a settlement of the enduring and tragic conflict in Darfur demonstrate how important it is to understand what factors contribute most to the success of such efforts. In this book, Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie review data from all negotiated civil war settlements between 1945 and 1999 in order to identify these factors. What they find is that settlements are more likely to produce an enduring peace if they involve construction of a diversity of power-sharing and power-dividing arrangements between former adversaries. The strongest negotiated settlements prove to be those in which former rivals agree to share or divide state power across its economic, military, political, and territorial dimensions. This finding is a significant addition to the existing literature, which tends to focus more on the role that third parties play in mediating and enforcing agreements. Beyond the quantitative analyses, the authors include a chapter comparing contrasting cases of successful and unsuccessful settlements in the Philippines and Angola, respectively.