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This text analyzes the events leading up to genocidal conflicts in Rwanda during 1994 and discusses the country's prospects in their aftermath. In tracing the political machinations that preceded the genocide, the author argues that there was a carefully orchestrated plan which set the killings in motion. For Prunier, therefore, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict was not the result of insatiable bloodlust and ancestral hatreds, but an act of political mass murder. Accordingly, he delineates the leading political actors and explains their role in events of 1991-1994.
Offering an up-to-date historical perspective which should enable readers to fathom how the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese came to pass in 1994, this volume includes a new chapter that brings the analysis up to the end of 1996. Gerard Prunier probes into how the genocidal events in Rwanda were part of a deadly logic - a plan that served central political and economic interests - rather than a result of primordial tribal hatreds, a notion often invoked by the media to dramatize genocide.
This is the first complete study of Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, one of the most distinguished diplomats and statesmen of eighteenth-century France. Vergennes represented France as a diplomat in Germany, Constantinople, and Stockholm, and was Louis XVI's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Orville Murphy traces Vergennes' career as he steadily rose from the provincial nobility of the robe to the ranks of the court aristocracy; from the post of an obscure diplomat to the lofty position of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Murphy, however, has written much more than an interesting biography. The book develops a link between diplomatic personalities, the foreign policies of the French kings Louis XV and Louis XVI, and the contemporary social, economic, and political problems during much of the eighteenth century. Indeed, Vergennes and his policies are central to any study of the American Revolution, the underlying causes of the French Revolution, and of the subsequent "Age of Revolutions" in Europe.
With a special focus on Europe and the role of German, English and Italian Jewish communities in creating a new Jewish Ethiopian identity, the book investigates the formation of a new Ethiopian Jewish elite.
Sanctified Aggression allies itself neither with the easy assumption that religions are by definition violent (and that only the secular/humanist/humane can offer a place of refuge from the ravages of religious authority) nor with the equally facile opposing view that religion expresses the "best" of human aspirations and that this best is always capable of diffusing or sublating the worst. Rather, it works from the premise that biblical, Jewish and Christian vocabularies continue to resonate, inspire and misfire. Some of the essays here explore how these vocabularies and symbols have influenced, or resonate with, events such as the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland (1941), the Rwandan Ma...
"Physiognomy in Profile affirms and assesses Lavater's contribution to European culture in the two hundred years after his death. It examines how Lavater's vision of physiognomy as a viable method of interpreting the modern world has been repeatedly affirmed and challenged. Previous monographs on Lavater have tended to focus on one particular theme, discipline, or historical period, but this study deliberately adopts a cross-disciplinary approach, and covers a broad historical time frame. Some widely different material is juxtaposed (painting, photography, fiction, journalism, medical texts) in order to explore recurring issues in physiognomical thought." "Essays are arranged in chronological order so that the reader can gain a sense of the shared preoccupations of Lavater's contemporaries and successors. But the book may also be read thematically."--BOOK JACKET.
"This book presents, one by one, the different groups of Black Jews in Western central, eastern, and southern Africa and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity. It explores the ways in which Africans have interacted with the ancient mythological sub-strata of both western and African ideas of Judaism."--Résumé de l'éditeur.
Tudor explains how many African peoples came to think of themselves as descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel. Pursuing medieval and modern race narratives over a millennium in which Jews were cast as black and black Africans were cast as Jews, he reveals a complex interaction between religious and racial labels and their political uses.
The Trafalgar Chronicle, the yearbook of The 1805 Club, has established itself as a prime source of information and the publication of choice for new research about the Georgian navy, sometimes also loosely called Nelson's navy. Successive editors have widened the scope to include all sailing navies of the period, while a recurring theme is the Trafalgar campaign and the epic battle of 21 October 1805. Contributors to The Trafalgar Chronicle have included leading experts in their field, whether they are Professor John Hattendorf from the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, Professor Andrew Lambert from Kings College, London, or antiquarians and enthusiasts. Each volume is themed and this ne...