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By tracing the English word permafrost back to its Russian roots, this unique intellectual history uncovers the multiple, contested meanings of permafrost as a scientific idea and environmental phenomenon.
Cover -- Copyright page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Note to the Reader on Transliteration -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Beau Monde on the Borderlands -- 1 The Russian Imperial Southwest: Theatre in the Age of Modernism and Pogroms -- 2 The Literary Fair: Mikhail Bulgakov and Mykola Kulish -- 3 Comedy Soviet and Ukrainian? Il'f-Petrov and Ostap Vyshnia -- 4 The Official Artist: Solomon Mikhoels and Les' Kurbas -- 5 The Arts Official: Andrii Khvylia, Vsevolod Balyts'kyi, and the Kremlin -- 6 The Soviet Beau Monde: The Gulag and Kremlin Cabaret -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index
This anthology provides an historical overview of the scientific ideas behind environmental prediction and how, as predictions about environmental change have been taken more seriously and widely, they have affected politics, policy, and public perception. Through an array of texts and commentaries that examine the themes of progress, population, environment, biodiversity and sustainability from a global perspective, it explores the meaning of the future in the twenty-first century. Providing access and reference points to the origins and development of key disciplines and methods, it will encourage policy makers, professionals, and students to reflect on the roots of their own theories and practices.
Roughly ten million children were victims of political repression in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era, the sons and daughters of peasants, workers, scientists, physicians, and political leaders considered by the regime to be dangerous to the political order. Ten grown victims, who as children suffered banishment, starvation, disease, anti-Semitism, and trauma resulting from their parents' condemnation and arrest, now freely share their stories. The result is a powerful and moving oral history that will profoundly deepen the reader's understanding of life in the U.S.S.R. under the despotic reign of Joseph Stalin.
This book is an in-depth study of evolving state-society-environment relationships of the Jianghan Plain in late imperial China, as well as the transformation of landscape and waterscape in central China through lenses that have been overlooked in previous scholarship.
In 1908, thunderous blasts and blazing fires from the sky descended upon the desolate Tunguska territory of Siberia. The explosion knocked down an area of forest larger than London and was powerful enough to obliterate Manhattan. The mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation, including from those who suspected that aliens from outer space had been involved. In this deeply researched account of the Tunguska explosion and its legacy in Russian society, culture, and the environment, Andy Bruno recounts the intriguing history of the disaster and researchers' attempts to understand it. Taking readers inside the numerous expeditions and investigations that have long occupied scientists, he foregrounds the significance of mystery in environmental history. His engaging and accessible account shows how the explosion has shaped the treatment of the landscape, how uncertainty allowed unusual ideas to enter scientific conversations, and how cosmic disasters have influenced the past and might affect the future.
Historians of Russia were relative latecomers to the field of environmental history. Yet, in the past decade, the exploration of Russian environmental history has burgeoned. Thinking Russia’s History Environmentally showcases collaboration amongst an international set of scholars who focus on the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. Through discerning analysis of natural resources, the environment as a factor in historical processes such as industrialization, and more recent human-animal interactions, this volume challenges stereotypes of Russian history and in so doing, highlights the unexpected importance of Russian environments across a time frame well beyond the ecological catastrophes of the Soviet period.
A harrowing account of brainwashing’s pervasive role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries This gripping book traces the evolution of brainwashing from its beginnings in torture and religious conversion into the age of neuroscience and social media. When Pavlov introduced scientific approaches, his research was enthusiastically supported by Lenin and Stalin, setting the stage for major breakthroughs in tools for social, political, and religious control. Tracing these developments through many of the past century’s major conflagrations, Dimsdale narrates how when World War II erupted, governments secretly raced to develop drugs for interrogation. Brainwashing returned to the spotlight during the Cold War in the hands of the North Koreans and Chinese. In response, a huge Manhattan Project of the Mind was established to study memory obliteration, indoctrination during sleep, and hallucinogens. Cults used the techniques as well. Nobel laureates, university academics, intelligence operatives, criminals, and clerics all populate this shattering and dark story—one that hasn’t yet ended.
The compelling and little-known history of satellite communications that reveals the Soviet and Eastern European roles in the development of its infrastructure. Taking its title from Hannah Arendt’s description of artificial earth satellites, No Heavenly Bodies explores the history of the first two decades of satellite communications. Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren trace how satellite communications infrastructure was imagined, negotiated, and built across the Earth’s surface, including across the Iron Curtain. While the United States’ and European countries’ roles in satellite communications are well documented, Evans and Lundgren delve deep into the role the Soviet Union and ...
An analysis of slave and slaveholder understanding and manipulation of formal legal systems in the region known as the American Confluence during the antebellum era.