Outros livros que poderiam interessá-lo

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  History of Iran - Events Turning...

  Kelly Mass

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  The history of Iran, once known as Persia in the Western world until the mid-twentieth century, is deeply intertwined with the history of a much broader region, referred to as Greater Iran. This expansive area stretches from Anatolia in the west to the borders of ancient India and the Syr Darya in the east, and from the Caucasus and Eurasian Steppe in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in the south. This vast territory has been home to a series of powerful civilizations and empires, each contributing to Iran's rich and complex history. 
  Iran's historical roots date back to around 7000 BC, with evidence of ancient settlements that make it one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations. From the Early Bronze Age onward, the southwestern and western regions of the Iranian Plateau became integrated into the broader tapestry of the Ancient Near East. Early inhabitants such as the Elamites, followed by the Kassites, Mannaeans, and Gutians, played significant roles in shaping the region's cultural and political landscape. The Persians themselves are often regarded as the "first historical people" by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, reflecting their pivotal role in the development of world history. 
  In 625 BC, the Medes, a people native to the Iranian Plateau, succeeded in uniting Iran into a single nation and empire. This marked the beginning of the country's transformation into a major power. However, it was the Achaemenid Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC, that truly set Iran on the global stage. Under Cyrus, the Achaemenid Empire became the first true superpower in history, stretching across three continents—from the Balkans and North Africa to Central Asia.

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  Tom Nairn: Old Nations Auld...

  Tom Nairn

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  Tom Nairn has been the most forceful and original mind to confront, de-mask and anatomise the British state. The perception that Great Britain was a multinational state and not a united nation had never quite been lost over the centuries, but it was Nairn who almost single-handedly hammered this truth into the skull of British intellectuals and campaigners until it became – as it is today – practically uncontested by the political class.
  
  NEAL ASCHERSON, London Review of Books
  
  
  For the last fifty years Tom Nairn has been one of Britain's most consistently provocative and influential voices. No other writer has left so deep an impression on mainstream debates about Scotland, Britain and nationalism. No other writer has so thoroughly interrogated the United Kingdom's post-war crisis and decline.
  
  
  Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times brings together, for the first time, the full span of Nairn's work, from his ground-breaking analysis of the British state in the 1960s and '70s to his more recent examinations of globalisation, the English question and Scotland's independence referendum.
  
  
  
  Nairn stands alongside the great Scottish intellectual and literary figures of recent decades. Old Nations is the definitive Nairn collection – and an indispensable guide for anyone looking to understand the current moment in Scottish and British politics.
  
  
  For originality of mind, Tom Nairn is without equal among his contemporaries. In fifty years, there has never been a time in my memory in which that he was saying went with the flow of opinion, on the left or at large ... All of this in a style of extraordinary vigour and beauty – and not least humour: writing as democratic as his own unswerving politics. One thinks: if only there were more like him. But that would be a contradiction in terms.
  
  PERRY ANDERSON, New Left Review
  
  Tom Nairn is well known both as a major contributor to debates about Scottish nationalism and the re-configuring of the current UK, and as a supremely thoughtful and witty writer. This collection of his writings illustrates the evolution of his ideas and will be invaluable. Whether one agrees with Nairn or not, his arguments always make one think afresh.
  
  LINDA COLLEY, Professor of History, Princeton University

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  The Eagle in the Mirror

  Jesse Fink

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  The longest serving spy for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Charles Howard "Dick" Ellis came to New York at the beginning of World War II as deputy to William Stephenson at British Security Coordination (BSC) and helped set up for William Donovan the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), what would eventually evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 
   
   
   
  Ellis allegedly received prior warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and, through the conduit of Stephenson, relayed that warning to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After World War II, Ellis was awarded the Legion of Merit by President Harry S. Truman. 
   
   
   
  But in the 1980s espionage writer Chapman Pincher and retired Security Service (MI5) intelligence officer Peter Wright posthumously accused Ellis of having operated as a "triple agent" for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. 
   
   
   
  In 1965, while under interrogation in London, Ellis had allegedly made a confession that he had supplied information to the Nazis prior to the war. However, Pincher's and Wright's accusations against Ellis have never been comprehensively proven. Was Ellis guilty or was an innocent man framed? Did he take the fall for someone else?

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  Crisis of Command - How We Lost...

  Stuart Scheller

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  Combat-decorated Marine officer Stuart Scheller speaks out against the debacle of the Afghan pullout as the culmination of a decades-long and still-ongoing betrayal of military members by top leadership, from generals to the commander in chief, comes to light. 
   
   
   
  Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller was the perfect Marine. Battle tested. A leader. Decorated for valor. Yet when the United States acted like the Keystone Cops in a panicked haphazard exit from Afghanistan for political reasons, Scheller spoke out, and the generals lashed out. In fact, they jailed him to keep him quiet, claiming he lost the "trust and confidence" bestowed upon him by the Marines—when the faith and trust is exactly what our generals and even our commander-in-chief betrayed by exercising such reckless and derelict policies. Now Scheller is free from the shackles of the Marine Corps and can speak his mind. And in Crisis of Command, that he does. He holds our generals' feet to the fire. The same generals who play frivolously with the lives of our service men and women for political gain. The same generals who lied to political leaders to further their own agendas and careers. Stuart Scheller is here to say that the buck stops here. Accountability starts now. It's time to demand accountability and stand up for our military. In this book, Stuart Scheller shows us how.

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  South Africa: The History and...

  Charles River Editors

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  The Boer War was the defining conflict of South African history and one of the most important conflicts in the history of the British Empire. Naturally, complicated geopolitics underscored it, going back centuries. In fact, the European history of South Africa began with the 1652 arrival of a small Dutch flotilla in Table Bay, at the southern extremity of the African continent, which made landfall with a view to establishing a victualing station to service passing Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) ships. The Dutch at that point largely dominated the East Indian Trade, and it was their establishment of the settlement of Kaapstad, or Cape Town, that set in motion the lengthy and often turbulent history of South Africa. 
  	The Napoleonic Wars radically altered the old, established European power dynamics, and in 1795, the British, now emerging as the globe’s naval superpower, assumed control of the Cape as part of the spoils of war. In doing so, they recognized the enormous strategic value of the Cape as global shipping routes were developing and expanding. Possession passed back and forth once or twice, but more or less from that point onwards, the British established their presence at the Cape, which they held until the unification of South Africa in 1910. However, it would only come after several rounds of conflicts.  
  	On June 1, 1948, Daniel Malan arrived in Pretoria by train to take office, and there he was met by a huge crowd of cheering whites. He told the audience, “In the past, we felt like strangers in our own country, but today, South Africa belongs to us once more. For the first time since Union, South Africa is our own. May God grant that it always remain our own.” Back in Johannesburg, the leadership of the ANC, including the young attorney Nelson Mandela, listened to these celebratory prognostications in a grim mood. As strangers in their own country, they all understood that the South African liberation struggle would not be won overnight. In fact, the era of apartheid was only just about to formally start.  
  	Although apartheid is typically dated from the late 1940s until its dismantling decades later, segregationist policies had been the norm in South Africa from nearly the moment European explorers sailed to the region and began settling there. Whether it was displacing and fighting indigenous groups like the Khoi and San, or fighting other whites like the Boer, separation between ethnicities was the norm in South Africa for centuries before the election of Malan signaled the true rise of the Afrikaner far right.  
  	The man most associated with dismantling apartheid, of course, is Nelson Mandela. With the official policy of apartheid instituted in 1948 by an all-white government, Mandela was tried for treason between the years of 1956-61 before being acquitted. He participated in the Defiance Campaign of 1952, and oversaw the 1955 Congress of the People, but when the African National Congress was banned in 1960, he proposed a military wing, despite his initial reluctance toward violent resistance, a reluctance which had its roots in original nonviolent protests through the South African Communist Party. The ANC did not openly discourage such an idea, and the Umkhonto we Sizwe was established. Mandela was again arrested in 1962 and tried for attempts to overthrow the government by violence. The sentence was five years of hard labor, but this was increased to a life sentence in 1964, a sentence handed down to seven of his closest colleagues as well. 

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  The Hebrew Saga

  Gershon Rubin

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  A personal and philosophical meditation on the Hebrew Bible, its stories, and its sages.In this volume, Gershon Rubin attempts to draw the secrets of the antediluvian world into the modern day. Through the lens of a lifetime of spiritual learning, he explores the ancient saga of creation, Adam and Eve, and the generations to come after. As Rubin states by way of introduction to The Hebrew Saga, “My first name, Gershon, is similar to the Greek word geron (old man). Thus through my ‘geronoscope,’ I view the over-four-thousand-year-long written history of the Hebrew nation, which resulted in the origination of this my world-view, or world outlook.”

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