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Middle graders will laugh and cry with thirteen-year-old Vanessa Martin as she tries to be like Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. In this semi-autobiographical debut novel set in 1983, Vanessa Martin's real-life reality of living with family in public housing in Newark, New Jersey is a far cry from the glamorous Miss America stage. She struggles with a mother she barely remembers, a grandfather dealing with addiction and her own battle with self-confidence. But when a new teacher at school coordinates a beauty pageant and convinces Vanessa to enter, Vanessa's view of her own world begins to change. Vanessa discovers that her own self-worth is more than the scores of her talent ...
With contributions from renowned experts in the field, this book provides an excellent background to the history of Anglo-Iranian relations. Focusing on the political and economic relationship of Britain and issues of strategic sensitivity, the book also illuminates British relations with society and the state and describes the interaction between various representatives and agents of both countries. Anglo-Iranian relations have had a long and complex history, characterized on the one hand by mistrust and intrusion and on the other by mutual exchange and understanding. This book explores the intriguing history of this interactive relationship since 1800, looking at it from a variety of perspectives. Drawing on previously unavailable documents in English and Persian, the book argues that Iran in the nineteenth century had a national state, which strongly defended the national interests.
"Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded ...
In this work Stephen C. Poulson, a scholar of collective action and social movements, investigates cycles of social protest in Iran from 1890 to the present era. He illuminates the following social movements: the 1890-1892 Tobacco Movement; the 1906-1909 Constitutional Revolution; two post-World War II movements, the Tudeh (Masses) and the National Front; the 1963 Qom Protest; and the 1978-1979 Iranian Revolution. These movements confronted two primary questions: How should the Iranian state achieve independence in the world and what rights should individual Iranians enjoy in their political and social system? Poulson examines the framing of these questions and their answers by various Iranian political actors over time, revealing both continuity and change.
This work explores the interaction of American Protestant missionaries with Iranians during the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the missionary activities of four American Protestant groups: Presbyterians, Assemblies of God, International Missions, and Southern Baptists. It argues that American missionaries’ predisposition toward their own culture confused their message of the gospel and added to the negative perception of Christianity among Iranians. This bias was seen primarily in the American missionaries’ desire to modernize Iran through education and healthcare, and between the missionaries’ relationship with Iranian Christians. Iranian attitudes towards missionary involvement in these areas are investigated, as is the changing American missionary strategy from a traditional method where missionaries had the final say on most matters related to American and Iranian Christian interaction, to the beginnings of an indigenous system where a partnership developed between the missionary and the Iranian Christian.
White slave films, dramas documenting sex scandals, filmed prize fights featuring the controversial African-American boxer Jack Johnson, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—all became objects of public concern after 1906, when the proliferation of nickelodeons brought moving pictures to a broad mass public. Lee Grieveson draws on extensive original research to examine the controversies over these films and over cinema more generally. He situates these contestations in the context of regulatory concerns about populations and governance in an early-twentieth-century America grappling with the powerful forces of modernity, in particular, immigration, class formation and conflict, and chan...
The articles in this collection provide an alternative view of Middle Eastern history by focusing on the oppressed and the excluded, offering a challenge to the usual elite narratives. The collection is unique in its historical depth - ranging from the medieval period to the present - and its geographical reach, including Iran, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, the Balkans, the Arab Middle East and North Africa. The first to focus on the oppressed and the excluded, and their differing strategies of survival, of negotiation, and of protest and resistance, the book covers: both major social classes and sectors the working class the peasantry the urban poor women marginal groups such as gypsies and slaves Based on perspectives drawn from the work of the great European social historians, and particularly inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the collection seeks to restore a sense of historical agency to subaltern classes in the region, and to uncover ‘the politics of the people’.
Rather than a centralized state, Iran in the nineteenth century was a delicate balance between tribal groups, urban merchant communities, religious elites, and an autocratic monarchy. While Russia gained an increasingly dominant political role in Iran over the course of this century, Russian influence was often challenged by banditry on the roads, riots in the cities, and the seeming arbitrariness of the Shah. Iran and Russian Imperialism develops a comprehensive picture of Russia’s historical entanglements with one of its most important neighbours in Asia. It recounts how the Russian Empire strived to gain political influence at the Persian court, promote Russian trade, and secure the eno...
We are not alone...and Nick Redfern can prove it. Contactees contains the fascinating stories of the select group of people chosen by visitors to Earth to spread their message. Are aliens really among us? Don't be too quick to dismiss their claims. This book relates their thought-provoking, lluminating, controversial, and sometimes bizarre stories in all their appropriately out-of-this-world glory.
The Qajar Pact explores new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Iranian state and society, and is the first broad study of lower social groups in this period. Vanessa Martin argues that Qajar government was certainly despotic, but was also founded on a consensus based on the Islamic principles of consultation and negotiation. The author focuses on the role of the non-elite groups in urban society up to the years before the Constitutional Revolution.