You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Texts and Contexts is concerned with the development of Pacific Islands history as a specialization in its own right. Specifically, this volume examines the foundational texts that pioneered and consolidated the new subdiscipline and served as the building blocks and stepping stone for further developments in the field. Thirty-five texts, all of which represent defining points in the development of Pacific Islands historiography, are examined. Much more than retrospective appraisals of the foundational texts, the individual chapters consider a text or complimentary texts within the context of the time of writing and gauge what ongoing influence they exerted. In some cases they suggest how a ...
Historians have long understood that the notion of "the cold war" is richly metaphorical, if not paradoxical. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a war that fell ambiguously short of war, an armed truce that produced considerable bloodshed. Yet scholars in the rapidly expanding field of Cold War studies have seldom paused to consider the conceptual and chronological foundations of the idea of the Cold War itself. In Uncertain Empire, a group of leading scholars takes up the challenge of making sense of the idea of the Cold War and its application to the writing of American history. They interrogate the concept from a wide range of disciplinary vantage points--diplomatic history, the history of science, literary criticism, cultural history, and the history of religion--highlighting the diversity of methods and approaches in contemporary Cold War studies. Animating the volume as a whole is a question about the extent to which the Cold War was an American invention. Uncertain Empire brings debates over national, global, and transnational history into focus and offers students of the Cold War a new framework for considering recent developments in the field.
War at the Margins offers a broad comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Lin Poyer examines how Indigenous communities emerged from the trauma of the wartime era with social forms and cultural ideas that laid the foundations for their twenty-first-century emergence as players on the world’s political stage. With a focus on Indigenous voices and agency, a global overview reveals the enormous range of wartime activities and impacts on these groups, connecting this work with comparative history, Indigenous studies, and anthropology. The distinctiveness of Indigenous peoples offers a valuable perspective on World War I...
None
Essential single-volume history of the Pacific region and the global interactions which define it.
This text evaluates how anthropological research in the Trust Territory has affected the Micronesian people, the US colonial administration and the discipline of anthropology itself. It analyzes the interplay between anthropology and history, in particular how American colonialism affected anthropologists' use of history, and examines the research that has been conducted by American anthropologists in specific topical areas of sociocultural anthropology. The text concentrates on disciplinary concerns, but also considers the connections between work done in the era of applied anthropology and that completed later when anthropology was persued mainly for its own sake.
A candid reassessment of the role of anthropologists in mediating encounters between Western armies and non-Western peoples.
The most comprehensive study of regional politics in Oceania produced to date. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary sources and providing a systematic account of major issues facing the region, this book will appeal to anyone engaged in any aspect of regional studies in Oceania and beyond.
Naval Warfare 1919–45 is a comprehensive history of the war at sea from the end of the Great War to the end of World War Two. Showing the bewildering nature and complexity of the war facing those charged with fighting it around the world, this book ranges far and wide: sweeping across all naval theatres and those powers performing major, as well as minor, roles within them. Armed with the latest material from an extensive set of sources, Malcolm H. Murfett has written an absorbing as well as a comprehensive reference work. He demonstrates that superior equipment and the best intelligence, ominous power and systematic planning, vast finance and suitable training are often simply not enough in themselves to guarantee the successful outcome of a particular encounter at sea. Sometimes the narrow difference between victory and defeat hinges on those infinite variables: the individual’s performance under acute pressure and sheer luck. Naval Warfare 1919–45 is an analytical and interpretive study which is an accessible and fascinating read both for students and for interested members of the general public.
Mass violence comes not only from states, but also from people. By analyzing mass violence as social interaction through survivor accounts and other sources, this book presents understudied agents, aims and practices of direct violence and ways of action of those under persecution. Sound history – examining the noises of mass violence and persecution – is particularly telling about such practices. This volume shows that violence can become socially hegemonic, and some people claim a freedom to kill as a political right. To scrutinize indirect violence, which is often imperialist in character and claims many victims, the book proposes the concept of conditions of violence. These conditions are produced by definable groups of actors and foreseeably harm definable groups (which differs from the anonymous and static ‘structural violence’). This is exemplified in a case study concerning famines in World War II and another on COVID-19 as mass violence. Less global in character, other case studies in this volume deal with Rwanda, Bangladesh/East Pakistan and the Soviet Union.