Motherland, Fatherland, Whateverland

Motherland, Fatherland, Whateverland
Author: Erik Smalhout
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496839218

Erik Smalhout was born a child of privilege in the Netherlands East Indies. Smalhout’s father sent his unruly son to a boarding school in Australia, just months before the Japanese seized the Netherlands East Indies in early 1942. While young Smalhout adapted to life in rural Australia, his sister and father back home were placed in Japanese prison camps, an experience that proved fateful for his father and changed his sister’s life forever. Serendipity followed him through induction in the WWII Dutch military, his postwar service on merchant ships circling the globe, and eventually to the most southern place on earth: the Mississippi Delta. Smalhout spent the rest of his life adapting to challenging circumstances time after time: first as a progressive Dutchman in the American South, then as an IRS agent in the nation’s second-largest financial center, and finally as a man who, due to a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, often could not identify himself. Motherland, Fatherland, Whateverland: Searching for Home is Smalhout’s memoir, edited by his granddaughter, Erika Berry, and supported with pictures and documents that he saved throughout his lifetime. Smalhout’s story reminds readers that place is secondary to experience and that no matter where we are or what fortunate or unfortunate circumstances placed us there, an eternal curiosity for humanity will help us find a place in the world.

Motherland, Fatherland, Whateverland

Motherland, Fatherland, Whateverland
Author: Erik Smalhout
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781496839206

From the former Dutch East Indies to the Mississippi Delta, the touching, true story of a man's search for home

Stories of Khmelnytsky

Stories of Khmelnytsky
Author: Amelia M. Glaser
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2015-08-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804794960

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.

The Urban Enigma

The Urban Enigma
Author: Simone Vegliò
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786613905

This book explores how Latin America indicated an autonomous form of postcolonialism that was marked by the production of multiple conceptualisations of time. The analysis particularly focuses on iconic urban transformations in capital cities such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Brasilia, diachronically, and investigates each case’s specific representations of past, present, and future. By exploring these three episodes, the book shows how Latin America’s postcolonialism involved specific spatial dynamics that were inherently working over global socio-political geographies resulting from the legacy of a “long” colonial imagination. The text is divided into two parts. The first part discusses some theoretical questions concerning the very conceptualization of Latin American space and the importance of exploring a genealogy of its urban geographies. The second part analyses the themes proposed through the discussion of the “materiality” of specific historical examples. The section delves into urban transformations in the aforementioned capital cities and focuses on how iconic material forms are able to encapsulate the main socio-political features defining each country’s post-colonial project. The book aims to depict a historical geography capable of describing how controversial relations between power and knowledge had materialised in the shapes of the urban environment and had iconically contributed to the multifaceted production of the global area known as Latin America. Without any pretension to offer an all-embracing perspective, the book discusses the Latin America experience within the broader question concerning the genealogy of global socio-political geographies.

Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s–1950s

Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s–1950s
Author: C. Chu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2005-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1403980551

This collection of essays describes adaptations of minority ethnic groups to cross-cultural situations in Hong Kong from the 1840s through the 1950s. It aims to portray Hong Kong history through the perspectives of foreign communities - the British, Germans, Americans, Indians and Japanese - and to understand how they perceived the economic situation, political administration and culture of the colony.

The Chief Culprit

The Chief Culprit
Author: Viktor Suvorov
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2013-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1612512682

Bestselling author Victor Suvorov probes newly released Soviet documents and reevaluates existing material to analyze Stalin's strategic design to conquer Europe and the reasons behind his controversial support for Nazi Germany. A former Soviet army intelligence officer, the author explains that Stalin's strategy leading up to World War II grew from Vladimir Lenin's belief that if World War I did not ignite the worldwide Communist revolution, then a second world war would be needed to achieve it. Stalin saw Nazi Germany as the power that would fight and weaken capitalist countries so that Soviet armies could then sweep across Europe. Suvorov reveals how Stalin conspired with German leaders to bypass the Versailles Treaty, which forbade German rearmament, and secretly trained German engineers and officers and provided bases and factories for war. He also calls attention to the 1939 nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany that allowed Hitler to proceed with his plans to invade Poland, fomenting war in Europe. Suvorov debunks the theory that Stalin was duped by Hitler and that the Soviet Union was a victim of Nazi aggression. Instead, he makes the case that Stalin neither feared Hitler nor mistakenly trusted him. Suvorov maintains that after Germany occupied Poland, defeated France, and started to prepare for an invasion of Great Britain, Hitler's intelligence services detected the Soviet Union's preparations for a major war against Germany. This detection, he argues, led to Germany's preemptive war plan and the launch of an invasion of the USSR. Stalin emerges from the pages of this book as a diabolical genius consumed by visions of a worldwide Communist revolution at any cost—a leader who wooed Hitler and Germany in his own effort to conquer the world. In contradicting traditional theories about Soviet planning, the book is certain to provoke debate among historians throughout the world.

The Last Slave Ship

The Last Slave Ship
Author: Ben Raines
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2023-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1982136154

The “enlightening” (The Guardian) true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors’ founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day—by the journalist who discovered the ship’s remains. Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts. Traveling from Alabama to the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day Benin, Raines recounts the ship’s perilous journey, the story of its rediscovery, and its complex legacy. Against all odds, Africatown, the Alabama community founded by the captives of the Clotilda, prospered in the Jim Crow South. Zora Neale Hurston visited in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, telling the story of his enslavement in the New York Times bestseller Barracoon. And yet the haunting memory of bondage has been passed on through generations. Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities—the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their fellow American enslavers. This connection binds these groups together to this day. At the turn of the century, descendants of the captain who financed the Clotilda’s journey lived nearby—where, as significant players in the local real estate market, they disenfranchised and impoverished residents of Africatown. From these parallel stories emerges a profound depiction of America as it struggles to grapple with the traumatic past of slavery and the ways in which racial oppression continues to this day. And yet, at its heart, The Last Slave Ship remains optimistic—an epic tale of one community’s triumphs over great adversity and a celebration of the power of human curiosity to uncover the truth about our past and heal its wounds.

Mississippi Barking

Mississippi Barking
Author: Chris McLaughlin
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-08-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496836014

On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around the world, Chris McLaughlin watched the tragedy of Katrina unfold on a television screen from the comfort of her living room on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the devastation afterwards, almost 2,000 people and an estimated 250,000 animals had perished. Miraculously, many pets did manage to survive. But in the months that followed the hurricane, thousands of them were fending for themselves in the ruins of devastated neighborhoods. They roamed the streets in feral packs or struck out alone. Their plight triggered a grassroots rescue effort unlike any this country had ever seen, and while relief organizations such as the Red Cross were tending to the human survivors, and movie stars and celebrities were airlifting food and endorsing seven-figure checks, a much smaller and meagerly funded effort was underway to save the four-legged victims. With no prior experience in disaster response and no real grasp of the hell that awaited them, scores of animal lovers, including McLaughlin, made their way to the Gulf Coast to help in any way they could. Including photos from four-time Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, Mississippi Barking spans the course of two years as McLaughlin and others ventured into the wreckage of the Gulf Coast to rescue the animals left behind. McLaughlin tells the moving stories of the people she met along the way, both those who lost everything to the hurricane and those working beside her rescuing and transporting animals away from the neglected, derelict conditions in which they barely survived. Within this story of tragedy and cruelty, suffering and ignorance, Mississippi Barking also bears witness to selfless acts of bravery and compassion, and the beauty and heroics of those who risked everything to save the animals that could not save themselves.

... and Spain Sings

... and Spain Sings
Author: Maír José Benardete
Publisher: New York, Vanguard
Total Pages: 152
Release: 1937
Genre: +Spanish ballads and songs
ISBN:

Walter Anderson

Walter Anderson
Author: Robert St. John
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-11-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9780999222911

Robert St. John and Anthony Thaxton have produced a beautiful new volume of art and family stories highlighting the prolific and reclusive Walter Inglis Anderson. It is a stunning collection filled with beautiful imagery and writings from an artist some critics have called "America's Van Gogh." Though featured in countless books and exhibitions (including a 2003 retrospective show at the Smithsonian Institution on the centennial of his birth), Walter Anderson has not yet achieved his deserved place in American art history. This book shines light on all the facets of Anderson's unbelievable output and presents a thoughtful progression of his life and art.With complete access to the Anderson family archives and the vaults of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, this comprehensive volume brings together much of the artist's finest work as well as paintings and photographs which have never before been published. Also included with the purchase of this book are complimentary download links to the acclaimed documentary film and soundtrack. Walter Anderson: The Extraordinary Life and Art of The Islander is an eye-opening and inspiring book to be treasured and dipped into again and again.