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A guide to the ancient Olympics features a program of events, transportation options as provided by passenger ferry and ox cart, accommodations, and dining options, all as they would have appeared in 338 BC in the spectacle's early days.
The Russian Revolution may be the most misunderstood and misrepresented event in modern history, its history told in a mix of legends and anecdotes. In A People's History of the Russian Revolution, Neil Faulkner sets out to debunk the myths and pry fact from fiction, putting at the heart of the story the Russian people who are the true heroes of this tumultuous tale. In this fast-paced introduction, Faulkner tells the powerful narrative of how millions of people came together in a mass movement, organized democratic assemblies, mobilized for militant action, and overturned a vast regime of landlords, profiteers, and warmongers. Faulkner rejects caricatures of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as authoritarian conspirators or the progenitors of Stalinist dictatorship, and forcefully argues that the Russian Revolution was an explosion of democracy and creativity--and that it was crushed by bloody counter-revolution and replaced with a form of bureaucratic state-capitalism. Grounded by powerful first-hand testimony, this history marks the centenary of the Revolution by restoring the democratic essence of the revolution, offering a perfect primer for the modern reader.
If you want a gripping, well-written, detailed story of insurrection against Rome, supported by splendid illustrations, start here.?The Sunday Telegraph
From the hunter-gatherers two million years ago to the ancient empires of Persia and China, and from the Russian Revolution to modern imperialism, humans have always struggled to create a better society than what came before. All over the world at numerous points in the past, a different way of life has become an absolute necessity, over and over again. This is a history of the humans in these struggles--the hominid and the hunter, the emperor and the slave, the dictator and the revolutionary. Reading against the grain of mainstream histories, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past has never been predetermined. From antiquity to feudalism, and from fascism to our precarious pol...
Why did Rome abandon Britain in the early 5th century? According to Neil Faulkner, the centralized, military-bureaucratic state, governed by a class of super-rich landlords and apparatchiks, had siphoned wealth out of the province, with the result that the towns declined and the countryside was depressed. When the army withdrew to defend the imperial heartlands, the remaining Romano-British elite succumbed to a combination of warlord power, barbarian attack, and popular revolt.
This magisterial analysis of human history - from "Lucy," the first hominid, to the Great Recession of 2008 - combines the insights of earlier generations of Marxist historians with radical new ideas about the historical process.Reading history against the grain, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past was not predetermined. Choices were frequent and numerous. Different outcomes - liberation or barbarism - were often possible. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives great events.At the beginning of the 21st century - with economic disaster, war, climate catastrophe and deep class divisions - humans face perhaps the greatest crisis in the long history of our species. The lesson of A Marxist History of the World is that, since we created our past, we can also create a better future.
A panoramic, provocative account of the clash between British imperialism and Arab jihadism in Africa between 1870 and 1920 The Ottoman Sultan called for a "Great Jihad" against the Entente powers at the start of the First World War. He was building on half a century of conflict between British colonialism and the people of the Middle East and North Africa. Resistance to Western violence increasingly took the form of radical Islamic insurgency. Ranging from the forests of Central Africa to the deserts of Egypt, Sudan, and Somaliland, Neil Faulkner explores a fatal collision between two forms of oppression, one rooted in the ancient slave trade, the other in modern "coolie" capitalism. He reveals the complex interactions between anti-slavery humanitarianism, British hostility to embryonic Arab nationalism, "war on terror" moral panics, and Islamist revolt. Far from being an enduring remnant of the medieval past, or an essential expression of Muslim identity, Faulkner argues that "Holy War" was a reactionary response to the violence of modern imperialism.
A wealth of new research and thinking on Lawrence, the Arab Revolt, and World War One in the Middle East, providing essential background to today's violent conflicts Rarely is a book published that revises our understanding of an entire world region and the history that has defined it. This groundbreaking volume makes just such a contribution. Neil Faulkner draws on ten years of field research to offer the first truly multidisciplinary history of the conflicts that raged in Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, and Syria during the First World War. In Lawrence of Arabia's War, the author rewrites the history of T. E. Lawrence's legendary military campaigns in the context of the Arab Revolt. He explores the intersections among the declining Ottoman Empire, the Bedouin tribes, nascent Arab nationalism, and Western imperial ambition. The book provides a new analysis of Ottoman resilience in the face of modern industrialized warfare, and it assesses the relative weight of conventional operations in Palestine and irregular warfare in Syria. Faulkner thus reassesses the historic roots of today's divided, fractious, war-torn Middle East.
From the preserved remains of the mighty Przemyśl fortress to the underwater wreckage of German warship SMS Scharnhorst near the Falkland Islands, Abandoned Places of World War I features more than 150 striking photographs from around the world. An overgrown concrete bunker at Ypres; a rusting gun carriage in a field in Flanders; perfectly preserved trenchworks at Vimy, northern France; a rocky mountaintop observation post high in the Tyrolean mountains. More than 100 years after the end of World War I, the conflict's legacy can still be seen from Europe to the South Atlantic. Abandoned Places of World War I explores more than 100 bunkers, trench systems, tunnels, fortifications, and gun emplacements from North America to the Pacific. Included are defensive structures, such as Fort Douaumont at Verdun, the site of the Western Front's bloodiest battle; the elaborately constructed tunnels of the Wellington Quarry, near Arras, designed to provide a safe working hospital for wounded British soldiers; and crumbling concrete pill boxes in Anzac Cove, Turkey.
The Roman Empire is widely admired as a model of civilization. It was, however, contends Neil Faulkner, a ruthless system of robbery with violence. With this book, Faulkner presents a strongly anti-imperialist grand narrative of Roman history.