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In this collection, J.P. Lewis and Joanna Everitt bring together a group of up-and coming-political scientists as well as senior scholars to explore the recent history of the Conservative Party of Canada, covering the pre-merger period (1993-2003) and both the minority and majority governments under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The contributors provide nuanced accounts about the experience of conservatives in Canada which reflect the contemporary evolution of Canadian politics in both policy and practice. They challenge the assumption that Harper's government was built upon traditional "toryism" and reveal the extent to which the agenda of the CPC was shaped by its roots to the Reform and Canadian Alliance Parties. Organized thematically, the volume delves into such topics as interest advocacy, ethno-cultural minorities, gender, the media, foreign policy, and more. The Blueprint showcases the renewed vigour in political studies in Canada while revealing the contradictory story of the modern Conservative Party.
The familiar story of Soviet power in Cold War Eastern Europe focuses on political repression and military force. But in Empire of Friends, Rachel Applebaum shows how the Soviet Union simultaneously promoted a policy of transnational friendship with its Eastern Bloc satellites to create a cohesive socialist world. This friendship project resulted in a new type of imperial control based on cross-border contacts between ordinary citizens. In a new and fascinating story of cultural diplomacy, interpersonal relations, and the trade of consumer-goods, Applebaum tracks the rise and fall of the friendship project in Czechoslovakia, as the country evolved after World War II from the Soviet Union's m...
This compelling new account of Russian constructivism repositions the agitator Aleksei Gan as the movement’s chief protagonist and theorist. Primarily a political organizer during the revolution and early Soviet period, Gan brought to the constructivist project an intimate acquaintance with the nuts and bolts of “making revolution.” Writing slogans, organizing amateur performances, and producing mass-media objects define an alternative conception of “the work of art”—no longer an autonomous object but a labor process through which solidarities are built. In an expansive analysis touching on aesthetic and architectural theory, the history of science and design, sociology, and feminist and political theory, Kristin Romberg invites us to consider a version of modernism organized around the radical flattening of hierarchies, a broad distribution of authorship, and the negotiation of constraints and dependencies. Moving beyond Cold War abstractions, Gan’s Constructivism offers a fine-grained understanding of what it means for an aesthetics to be political.
Stalin's Gulag at War places the Gulag within the story of the regional wartime mobilization of Western Siberia during the Second World War. Far from Moscow, Western Siberia was a key area for evacuated factories and for production in support of the war effort. Wilson T. Bell explores a diverse array of issues, including mass death, informal practices such as black markets, and the responses of prisoners and personnel to the war. The region's camps were never prioritized, and faced a constant struggle to mobilize for the war. Prisoners in these camps, however, engaged in such activities as sewing Red Army uniforms, manufacturing artillery shells, and constructing and working in major defense...
“Unexpectedly delightful reading—there is much to learn from the buck-toothed rodents of yore” (National Post). Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent’s most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever there was wood and water, there were beavers—sixty million, or more—and wherever there were beavers, there were intricate natural communities that depended on their activities. Then the European fur traders arrived. Once They W...
Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the 19th century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, Jarrod Tanny examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the 19th century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il'ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives.
Suffrage at 100 looks at women's engagement in US electoral politics and government over the one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In the 2018 midterm elections, 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate—a record for both bodies. And yet nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020—a stated goal of the National Women's Political Caucus at the time of its founding in 1971—remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow bring together twenty-two scholars to take stock of women's engagement in electoral politics over the past one hundred y...
The Science Magpie is Simon Flynn's bestselling collection of enthralling facts, stories, poems and more from science's history, from the Large Hadron Collider rap to the sins of Isaac Newton. With Antiques Roadshow regular Marc Allum as your guide, go in search of stolen masterpieces, explore the first museums, learn the secrets of the forgers and brush up on your auction technique with The Antiques Magpie . And with acclaimed nature writer Daniel Allen, join naturalists, novelists and poets as they explore the most isolated parts of the planet and discover which plants can be used to predict the weather in The Nature Magpie .
When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological c...
Drawing on archival sources and eyewitness accounts, this book explores Soviet Russians' experience of Nazi rule in German-occupied northwest Russia.