This is based on edited and revised excerpts from Eslanda: the large and unconventional life of Mrs. Paul Robeson, the first biography of Paul Robeson’s wife, Essie, an important thinker and activist ...on a range of progressive causes. It details her stand against McCarthyism in the 1950s, the treatment of significant Black figures during the scare and how struggles for racial justice and political freedom were seen as intertwined.
After World War II, South Africa, swimming against the tide of history, attempted to annex the adjacent international mandate of South West Africa (present-day Namibia). Pretoria was confident of UN ...approval for such an unprecedented move—too confident, as it turned out. Into the breach—and into the United Nations—stepped an unlikely duo, the Reverend Michael Scott and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to stop the absorption of 350,000 Africans into a white-supremacist state. This seemingly odd couple—a maverick, communist-leaning Anglican minister and a staid, staunchly anti-communist bureaucratic organization—launched a skillful assault in the UN to strip the veneer of legitimacy away from South Africa's annexationist scheme. Within the span of five years, the NAACP and Scott had carved out the political space and established the right of nongovernmental organizations and individual spokesmen to penetrate the boundaries of national sovereignty, speak before an international audience, and in the process reshape the UN, despite its founders' intentions, into an arena that could incorporate the voices of the stateless and the dispossessed.
This volume examines six summits spanning the beginning and the end of the Cold War. Using declassified documents from U.S., British, and other archives, Chris Tudda shows how the Cold War developed ...from an ideological struggle between capitalism and communism into a truly global struggle.
Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers' role in the annus mirabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; ...diary entries from Gorbachev's senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand; and high-level CIA analyses. Complementing the documents is the inclusion for the first time of the proceedings of an extraordinary face-to-face mutual interrogation (with scholars and documents ) in 1998 of Russian and American senior former officials-Gorbachev advisers Anatoly Chernyaev and Georgy Shakhnazarov, Shevardnadze aide Sergei Tarasenko, U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock and CIA chief Soviet analyst Douglas MacEachin-aimed at assessing and explaining Moscow and Washington's policies during the miraculous year of 1989.
Wood talks about the musical instrument harpsichord. In a 1970 episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Fred Rogers introduces his viewers to the harpsichord and explains that the harpsichord is like ...a piano but it sounds different. He points out that harpsichords have two manuals before moving to a more subtle distinction between the two instruments. Now the difference about a harpsichord is that it has little jacks that pluck the strings. Rogers marks the harpsichord as both fancy and mechanistically accessible. Fitting within his larger project of demystifying technology, of unveiling the materials and processes behind everyday commodities, Rogers's description makes plain the harpsichord's inner workings: its plucking action, the shape and function of its jacks and little plucks, the motion of turning a tuning pin. He even touches on the idea of old versus modern materials in noting that a long time ago the plectra would have made out of a different material.
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