Peasants under Siege

Peasants under Siege
Author: Gail Kligman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2011-07-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400840430

In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian country, following the Soviet model. Peasants under Siege provides the first comprehensive look at the far-reaching social engineering process that ensued. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery examine how collectivization assaulted the very foundations of rural life, transforming village communities that were organized around kinship and status hierarchies into segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by the language of "class warfare" yet saturated with vindictive personal struggles. Collectivization not only overturned property relations, the authors argue, but was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the "new persons" that were its subjects. The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet Union through actions that contributed to the excessive use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to control. In addition, the authors show how local responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes. Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic data, Peasants under Siege sheds new light on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the complex tensions underlying and constraining political authority.

The Great Siege, Malta 1565

The Great Siege, Malta 1565
Author: Ernle Bradford
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1497617308

The indispensable account of the Ottoman Empire’s Siege of Malta from the author of Hannibal and Gibraltar. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was thought to be invincible. Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan, had expanded his empire from western Asia to southeastern Europe and North Africa. To secure control of the Mediterranean between these territories and launch an offensive into western Europe, Suleiman needed the small but strategically crucial island of Malta. But Suleiman’s attempt to take the island from the Holy Roman Empire’s Knights of St. John would emerge as one of the most famous and brutal military defeats in history. Forty-two years earlier, Suleiman had been victorious against the Knights of St. John when he drove them out of their island fortress at Rhodes. Believing he would repeat this victory, the sultan sent an armada to Malta. When they captured Fort St. Elmo, the Ottoman forces ruthlessly took no prisoners. The Roman grand master La Vallette responded by having his Ottoman captives beheaded. Then the battle for Malta began in earnest: no quarter asked, none given. Ernle Bradford’s compelling and thoroughly researched account of the Great Siege of Malta recalls not just an epic battle, but a clash of civilizations unlike anything since the time of Alexander the Great. It is “a superior, readable treatment of an important but little-discussed epic from the Renaissance past . . . An astonishing tale” (Kirkus Reviews).

The Habsburg Empire Under Siege

The Habsburg Empire Under Siege
Author: GEORG B. MICHELS
Publisher:
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2021-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9780228005759

During the seventeenth century Hungary's diverse population of peasants, townsmen, soldiers, and county nobles rose up against the violent imposition of the Counter-Reformation, the Habsburg military occupation, and exhorbitant war taxes. In The Habsburg Empire under Siege Georg Michels explores the little-known grassroots revolts that threatened the Habsburgs' hold over the Hungarian borderlands. Based on extensive research in Hungarian, Austrian, and Dutch archives, this revisionist study shifts attention away from high politics, diplomacy, and military confrontation to the popular revolts that took place during the two decades before the 1683 siege of Vienna. Michels reveals a complex environment in which Calvinist Hungarians, Lutheran Slovaks, Lutheran Germans, and Orthodox Ukrainians worked to defend their religion against brutal Habsburg Counter-Reformation campaigns. Challenging preconceived notions of European, Middle Eastern, and East European history, this book tells a dramatic story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation violence, covering proxy wars, guerrilla warfare, refugee flight, migration from Hungary into Ottoman territory, and largely unknown Christian-Muslim encounters. Offering a trans-imperial perspective that reassesses the complex relationship between Hungarians, Habsburgs, and Ottomans, The Habsburg Empire under Siege portrays the resistance of ordinary men and women and their hopes for liberation from Habsburg oppression, reclaiming their place in history.

Souls under Siege

Souls under Siege
Author: Nicole Archambeau
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501753673

In Souls under Siege, Nicole Archambeau explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, she finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. Archambeau draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years' War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Souls under Siege illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that "healing" had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.

Solidarity Under Siege

Solidarity Under Siege
Author: Jeffrey L. Gould
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108419194

Depicts the rise and fall of the militant labor movement in modern El Salvador.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism
Author: S. A. Smith
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
Total Pages: 674
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199602050

Draws on documentation released since the fall of the Soviet Union to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century.

The Habsburg Empire under Siege

The Habsburg Empire under Siege
Author: Georg B. Michels
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-03-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 022800697X

During the seventeenth century Hungary's diverse population of peasants, townsmen, soldiers, and county nobles rose up against the violent imposition of the Counter-Reformation, the Habsburg military occupation, and exhorbitant war taxes. In The Habsburg Empire under Siege Georg Michels explores the little-known grassroots revolts that threatened the Habsburgs' hold over the Hungarian borderlands. Based on extensive research in Hungarian, Austrian, and Dutch archives, this revisionist study shifts attention away from high politics, diplomacy, and military confrontation to the popular revolts that took place during the two decades before the 1683 siege of Vienna. Michels reveals a complex environment in which Calvinist Hungarians, Lutheran Slovaks, Lutheran Germans, and Orthodox Ukrainians worked to defend their religion against brutal Habsburg Counter-Reformation campaigns. Challenging preconceived notions of European, Middle Eastern, and East European history, this book tells a dramatic story of Reformation and Counter-Reformation violence, covering proxy wars, guerrilla warfare, refugee flight, migration from Hungary into Ottoman territory, and largely unknown Christian-Muslim encounters. Offering a trans-imperial perspective that reassesses the complex relationship between Hungarians, Habsburgs, and Ottomans, The Habsburg Empire under Siege portrays the resistance of ordinary men and women and their hopes for liberation from Habsburg oppression, reclaiming their place in history.

Communism in Eastern Europe

Communism in Eastern Europe
Author: Melissa Feinberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2021-12-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000518337

Communism in Eastern Europe is a ground-breaking new survey of the history of Eastern Europe since 1945. It examines how Communist governments came to Eastern Europe, how they changed their societies and the legacies that persisted after their fall. Written from the perspective of the 21st century, this book shows how Eastern Europe’s trajectory since 1989 fits into the longer history of its Communist past. Rather than focusing on high politics, Communism in Eastern Europe concentrates on the politics of daily life, melding political history with social, cultural and gender history. It tells the history of this complicated era through the voices and experiences of ordinary people. By focusing on the complex interactions of everyday life, Communism in Eastern Europe illuminates the world Communism made in Eastern Europe, its politics and culture, values and dreams, successes and failures. This book is an engaging introduction to the history of Communist Eastern Europe for any reader. It is ideal for adoption in a wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses in 20th century European history.

Vauban Under Siege

Vauban Under Siege
Author: Jamel Ostwald
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004154892

"Vauban under Siege" is the first systematic comparison of the theory of Vaubanian siegecraft with its reality, contrasting military engineering's pursuit of the efficient siege with generals' contradictory search for rapid conquest, purchased at the cost of additional lives.

A Chateau Under Siege

A Chateau Under Siege
Author: Martin Walker
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2024-07-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593313992

When an actor in a local play is attacked during a performance, Bruno must learn whether it was an accident, a crime of passion, or an assassination attempt with implications far beyond the small French village. The town of Sarlat is staging a reenactment of its liberation from the British in the Hundred Years War when the play’s French hero, Brice Kerquelin, is stabbed and feared fatally wounded. Is it an unfortunate prop malfunction—or something more sinister? The stricken man happens to be number two in the French intelligence service, in line for the top job. Bruno is tasked with the safety of the victim’s daughters, Claire and Nadia, as well as their father’s old Silicon Valley buddies, ostensibly in town for a reunion. One friend from Taiwan, a tycoon in chip fabrication, soon goes missing, and Bruno suspects there may be a link to the French government’s efforts to build a chip industry in Europe—something powerful forces in Russia and China are determined to scuttle. Wading through a tangle of rivalries and secrets, Bruno begins to parse fact from fiction—while also becoming embroiled in some romantic complications, and, of course, finding time to put together some splendid meals.