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  Hitler's Home Front - Memoirs of...

  Don A Gregory, Wilhelm R Gehlen

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  A “candid and revealing memoir shows a normal boy and a family at war and in its aftermath, determined to do what it took to survive . . . fascinating” (The Great War).   When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in 1933, he promised the downtrodden, demoralized, and economically broken people of Germany a new beginning and a strong future. Millions flocked to his message, including a corps of young people called the Hitlerjugend—the Hitler Youth.   By 1942 Hitler had transformed Germany into a juggernaut of war that swept over Europe and threatened to conquer the world. It was in that year that a nine-year-old Wilhelm Reinhard Gehlen, took the ‘Jungvolk’ oath, vowing to give his life for Hitler.   This is the story of Wilhelm Gehlen’s childhood in Nazi Germany during World War II and the awful circumstances which he and his friends and family had to endure during and following the war. Including a handful of recipes and descriptions of the strange and sometimes disgusting food that nevertheless kept people alive, this book sheds light on the truly awful conditions and the twisted, mistaken devotion held by members of the Hitler Youth—that it was their duty to do everything possible to save the Thousand Year Reich.

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  Fighting Authoritarianism -...

  Britt Haas

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  “This engaging study of progressive youth organizations charts their origins, their quest to fashion an America true to its ideals, and their demise.” —Phillip Deery, Victoria University, Melbourne 
   
  During the Great Depression, young radicals in New York developed a vision of and for America, molded by their understanding of the Great War and global economic collapse as well as other events unfolding both at home and abroad. They worked to make their vision of a free, equal, democratic society based on peaceful coexistence a reality. Their attempts were ultimately unsuccessful—but their voices were heard on a number of issues, including free speech, racial justice, and peace. 
   
  A major contribution to the historiography of the era, Fighting Authoritarianism provides an important new examination of US youth activism of the 1930s, including the limits of the New Deal and how youth activists pushed FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other New Dealers to do more to address economic distress and social inequality, and promote more inclusionary politics. Britt Haas questions the interventionist-versus-isolationist paradigm, and also explores the era not as a precursor to WWII, but as a moment of hope about institutionalizing progress in freedom, equality, and democracy. 
   
  Fighting Authoritarianism corrects misconceptions about these activists’ vision, heavily influenced by the American Dream they’d been brought up to revere. For them, that meant embracing radical ideologies, especially the socialism and communism widely discussed, debated, and promoted on the city’s college campuses. They didn’t believe they were turning their backs on American values—instead, they thought such ideologies were the only way to make America live up to its promises. This study also outlines the careers of Molly Yard, Joseph Lash, and James Wechsler, how they retracted—and for Yard and Lash, reclaimed—their radical past, and how New York continued to hold a prominent platform in their careers. (Lash and Wechsler worked for the New York Post, the latter as editor until 1980.) Examining the decade from this perspective highlights the promise of America as young people understood it: a historic moment when anything seemed possible.

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  The History of Democracy Has Yet...

  Thomas Geoghegan

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  End the filibuster. Abolish the Senate. Make everyone vote. Only if we do this (and then some), says Thomas Geoghegan, might we heal our fractured democracy. In 2008 Geoghegan?then an established labor lawyer and prolific writer?embarked on a campaign to represent Chicago's Fifth District in the U.S. House, in a special election called when the sitting congressman, Rahm Emanuel, stepped down to serve as newly elected President Barack Obama's chief of staff. For ninety days leading up to the election Geoghegan, a political neophyte at age sixty, knocked on doors and shook hands at train stations and made fundraising calls. On election night he lost, badly. But this humbling experience helped him develop a framework for re-imagining American government in a way that is truly just, fair, and Constitutional. Taking its title from Whitman, The History of Democracy Is Yet to Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again, combines tales from the campaign trail with an incisive vision of how we might get there. In a polarized country, where 100 million citizens don't vote, and those who do are otherwise rarely politically engaged, he makes an impassioned and witty case for the possibility of a truly representative democracy, one built on the ideals of the House, the true chamber of the people, and inspired by the poet who gives the book its name. At once an engaging memoir and a call to arms, The History of Democracy Is Yet to Be Written will inspire and invigorate political veterans and young activists alike.

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  Bloody Tuesday - The Untold...

  John M. Giggie

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  The dramatic story of one of the most violent episodes of the civil rights movement and its role in the ongoing reckoning with racial injustice in the United States.On Tuesday, June 9, 1964, police attacked more than 600 Black men, women, and children inside First African Baptist Church (Tuscaloosa, Alabama), where Reverend Martin Luther King had launched the Tuscaloosa campaign for integration three months earlier. As the group gathered to march, they faced over seventy law enforcement officers and hundreds more deputized white citizens and Klansmen eager to end their protests for good. Police smashed the historic church's stained-glass windows with water hoses and fired rounds of tear gas inside. As demonstrators streamed from the church, many choking and soaked, they beat them with nightsticks, cattle prods, and axe handles, arrested nearly a hundred, and sent over thirty to the hospital. Here this event is recounted through the eyes of locals—a charismatic Black preacher trained by Rev. King, an aging police chief, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Black women who were the backbone of the protests.In Bloody Tuesday, John Giggie powerfully recovers one of the last great untold stories of the civil rights movement and its role in the reckoning with America's ongoing struggle for racial justice.

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  The Marxism of Che Guevara -...

  Michael Löwy

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   “Excellent. . . .The book gives one a clear understanding of the relationship of Guevara's thought to traditional Russian and Marxist philosophy.” —Choice Reviews   In this seminal exploration of Che Guevara’s contributions to Marxist thinking, Michael Löwy traces Che's ideas about Marxism both as they related to Latin America and to more general philosophical, political, and economic issues. Now revised and updated, this edition includes a chapter on Guevara's search for a new paradigm of socialism and a substantive essay by Peter McLaren on Che’s continued relevance today. Löwy portrays Guevara as a revolutionary humanist who considered all political questions from an internationalist viewpoint. For him, revolutionary movements in Latin America were part of a world process of emancipation. Löwy considers especially Che's views on the contradiction between socialist planning and the law of value in the Cuban economy and his search for an alternative road to the “actually existing socialism” of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet bloc. Che’s varied occupations—doctor and economist, revolutionary and banker, agitator and ambassador, industrial organizer and guerrilla fighter—were expressions of a deep commitment to social change. This book eloquently captures his views on humanity, his contributions to the theory of revolutionary warfare, and his ideas about society’s transition to socialism, offering a cohesive, nuanced introduction to the range of Guevara's thought.   “An excellent classroom tool for anyone teaching about Latin America or revolution.” ―Science & Society “[This book] provides us with the picture of [Guevara’s] great, flexible, and searching mind.” —Carleton Beals   “Michael Löwy’s brief but penetrating book takes Che Guevara not as a romantic adventurer but as a serious revolutionary militant.” ―Telos  

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  War of Songs - Popular Music and...

  Andrei Rogatchevski, Yngvar B....

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  This multi-authored monograph consists of the sections: “Pop Rock, Ethno-Chaos, Battle Drums, and a Requiem: The Sounds of the Ukrainian Revolution”, “The Euromaidan’s Aftermath and the Genre of Answer Song: A Musical Dialogue Between the Antagonists?”, “Exposing the Fault Lines beneath the Kremlin’s Restorative Geopolitics: Russian and Ukrainian Parodies of the Russian National Anthem”, “‘Lasha Tumbai’, or ‘Russia, Goodbye’? The Eurovision Song Contest as a Post-Soviet Geopolitical Battleground”, and “(Post-)Soviet Rock Soundtracks the Donbas Conflict”.

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