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Religious sectarianism played a significant role in the early settlement and social development of the United States. Although historians have minimized what these societies contributed to the creation of a uniquely American "social imaginary," this era of social experimentalism drew the attention of highly influential European writers including Goethe, Tolstoy, Marx and Weber. More recent social thinkers like Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor, and Robert Wuthnow emphasize the importance of discourses (familial, dynastic, religious) in the creation of community. They contend that literary analysis, in particular, is critical for understanding how "social imaginaries" develop, sustain themselves, and transform. Drawing on thinkers like Marx, Weber, Dawkins, and Goethe, Nineteenth-Century Utopianism and the American Social Imaginary explores the "evolution" of the American social imaginary within these discursive traditions. Goethe, in particular, becomes a major contributor to this discussion, not simply because of his profound international influence during the period, but because he was a contemporary witness to these events. His final novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (1828) depicts an emigrant society about to start an intentional community in the New World as an illustration of "cultural metamorphosis"that becomes central to understanding social development during the period. Utilizing a theoretical framework that draws on Lacan, the Frankfurt School, and post-structuralist thinkers like Fredric Jameson SlavocZizek, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the author shows how communities develop within specific discursive structures and how American adaptations of these structures have the potential to create more radical and equitable democracies.

The impetus for this book emerged from our belief that as Africans across the globe are confronted with a myriad of challenges that have been birthed by globalization (i.e. the process of going to a more interconnected world by diminishing the world’s social dimension and expansion of overall global consciousness), they must turn to their own ideas for solutions. While many books exist on individual African Isms, such as Afrocentrism, Nasserism, and Pan-Africanism, none exists that has looked at a series of these Isms together. This book is the first to do so and, thus, its justification. Consequently, through this edited volume, we address the applicability of different African Isms to various issues, particularly current issues, on the continent of Africa. Each chapter provides a theoretical framework and topics or issues concerning African people of the continent. It is therefore an innovative scholarly work as no other work has examined these Isms in this manner. Thus, the ideas are quite appealing. Reexamining and applying each of the African Ism in order to challenge Eurocentric myth and reality in current African political, economic, cultural and social matters is quite logical and clear.

Mit dem Aufkommen der ersten deutschsprachigen Hebammenordnungen ab der Mitte des 15.　Jahrhunderts kam es zu Kompetenzverschiebungen innerhalb der Geburtshilfe und zur Kontrolle von Hebammen durch Stadträte und Ärzte. Gleichzeitig erschienen die ersten gedruckten deutschsprachigen Hebammenlehrbücher, die von männlichen Autoren explizit an Frauen und Geburtshelferinnen adressiert wurden. ‚Der Swangern Frauwen vnd hebam(m)en Rosegarten‘ (1513) von Eucharius Rösslin beantwortet Fragen zur Praxistauglichkeit der Lehrbücher und zeigt die Rolle männlicher Mediziner und Praktiker innerhalb der Geburtshilfe auf. Diese Forschungsarbeit beleuchtet neben dem Hebammenwesen am Beginn seiner Professionalisierung auch den Buchdruck und seine Rolle bei der Verbreitung obstetrischen Wissens.

Blended with the author’s own family remembrances and diverse sources including his doctoral and post-doctoral research and fieldwork, this is a recounting of ural Muslim historiography in Colonial Bengal, a largely ignored swathe in the dominant chronicles of South Asia. Between the twilight of the 19th century and nearly the first half of the 20th century, the Muslims in Colonial Bengal in India were haunted by misgivings about an alien rule and its cohorts. Resistance to change, self-denial, religiosity, the conflicting urges of survival, the spiraling Hindu-Muslim discord, the feudal constraints and marginalization by the bhadralok swirled around them. The British Indian Bengal wracked by religious, cultural, social, and political conflicts come alive in the intergenerational narrative in this book. With its 9 main chapters plus a preface and introduction, this volume seeks out ordinary individuals' lives amidst such turmoil while it amplifies the larger challenges of the Muslims in Bengal. This gripping true-life account is set against such a sweep of history; it is built around real people—not about imagined characters.

Not rigidly structured, this multi-layered account has used wider and flexible methods of research. The village-focused and memory-based tale evokes the concrete historical, social, and political trajectory that confronted the Muslims in Colonial Bengal—an out-of-the narrative in the conventional history and social science books on the region. Authored by an academician and a well-published scholar on South Asia, this is a meticulous, insightful, and comprehensive portrait of a rural Muslim family in a historical context. It addresses scholars, students, and specialists as well as general readers about a rural Muslim family’s existential challenges intertwined with history, society, political conflicts, identity, and religiosity. Conjoined by the known historical context and backed by reliable oral narratives, qualitative interviews, authentic memoirs, and scholarly sources, this is not a chronological autobiographical memoir. Relevant to the academics and interesting to avid readers, this account touches several disciplines from history and politics to anthropology as well as the probing readers.

Das Spezialinventar erfasst die militärgeschichtlichen Quellen des Brandenburgischen Landeshauptarchivs aus den Jahren 1914−1945 (ca. 5 000 Archivalieneinheiten). Damit hat das dreibändige Inventarprojekt zur brandenburgischen Militärgeschichte (1806−1945) seinen Abschluss gefunden.

Überlieferungsschwerpunkte der v.a. in der brandenburgischen Provinzial- und Kommunalverwaltung sowie in der Wirtschaft Brandenburgs entstandenen »zivilen« Unterlagen sind bisher kaum ausgewertete Aspekte der brandenburgischen Militärgeschichte wie

• die militär- und kriegsbezogene Gedenk- und Erinnerungskultur in und zwischen den Weltkriegen (u.a. Militärdenkmäler und -vereine oder die »Kriegsgräberfürsorge«)
• der extensive, häufig menschenverachtende Einsatz von ausländischen Kriegsgefangenen in der brandenburgischen Wirtschaft
• die Auswirkungen des Luftkriegs auf Brandenburg
• das Mitwirken brandenburgischer Behörden bei Mobilmachung, Demobilmachung und Ersatzgestellung
• Aufbau und Einsatz des Volkssturms

Personen-, Orts- und Sachregister sowie eine Aufstellung über »Militärgeschichtliche Quellenkomplexe« führen an die Inventarinhalte heran.

Do leaders make war decisions individually or do they consider other ongoing conflicts? Most researchers assume dyadic independence out of convenience. In Military Resource Division, Dr. Carnegie presents evidence that this is a faulty assumption. First, he develops a formal theory in which limited military resources act as a constraint on the ability of leaders to engage in international conflicts. Country leaders consider plan accordingly by considering the entire picture of conflicts. This theory, in contrast to dyadic dependence, implies a different data-generating process for international conflicts. Second, he tests both theories using summary statistics, network analysis, and logistic regression. All three methods show strong support for military resource division theory. He further shows that the dependent effects change with time, even when controlling for polarity. The effects also differ between regions, which implies cultural factors at work. Third, he suggests for the future that researchers use multiple methods to account for different types of dependencies, because no single method can address them all. He shows how to make the best use of logistic regression and social network analysis for conflict statistics. He offers suggestions to policy makers for how best to incorporate this theory in analysis. Finally, he concludes by comparing predictions of the two theories regarding conflicts for the United States, especially Iran and North Korea. This book will be of interest to conflict researchers in academia and government who want to better understand the effect of coalitions on modern warfare.

This monograph deals with Polish foreign policy shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In tracing the diplomatic activity of foreign minister Józef Beck, it discusses six general problems: (1) the Polish political situation under the pressure of appeasement; (2) the project of Intermarium and efforts to implement it; (3) the action against Czechoslovakia and the conflict with the Soviet Union; (4) the Polish attitude towards the German concept of Gesamtlosung in Germany’s relations with Poland; (5) the genesis of the Polish alliance with Great Britain; (6) the Allies’ military inaction after Nazi Germany’s aggression. In these conditions, Poland made four key decisions: it stood against Czechoslovakia, it rejected German demands, it allied itself with the United Kingdom, and it rejected the Soviet Union’s claim for the Red Army to march across Polish lands.

Das Staatenlexikon vermittelt grundlegende Kenntnisse zu Geographie, Kultur, Politik und Wirtschaft der asiatischen Staatenwelt. In alphabetischer Reihenfolge – von Afghanistan bis Vietnam – werden alle 46 Staaten behandelt. Die Besonderheit des Lexikons besteht in der Analyse gegenwärtiger gesellschaftspolitischer und ökonomischer Entwicklungen als historisch bedingte Prozesse. Alle Länderprofile geben kompakt und profund Auskunft über historische und aktuelle Entwicklungen. Das Buch weist zudem weiterführende Literatur zu jedem Land aus. Zielgruppen sind vor allem Wissenschaftler, Studierende, Dozenten, Journalisten und sonstige Mittler politischer Bildung sowie alle politisch Interessierten. Ein Grundlagenwerk für alle, die sich mit den Staaten Asiens beschäftigen.

Depuis plus de trente ans, les analyses scientifiques sur les changements environnementaux globaux sont débattues au niveau international. Parmi les solutions avancées, figure la nécessité de s’engager dans une transition vers davantage de durabilité.

Les contributions de l’ouvrage réfléchissent à la dimension géographique de cette transition, notamment à l’échelle locale. Si les processus de transition sont souvent analysés dans leur dimension temporelle, ils ont en effet également une dimension spatiale　: ils supposent des changements de pratiques et de représentations, ils émergent et concernent des lieux donnés, ils se traduisent par une redistribution d’activités et la transformation de certains espaces. Les multiples qualificatifs accolés au terme transition – écologique, énergétique, etc. – témoignent de la diversité des phénomènes et des changements observés.

C’est notamment en s’intéressant à des territoires peu touchés par le processus de métropolisation, des villes moyennes ou des espaces ruraux, que cette question est abordée dans l’ouvrage, autour de l’hypothèse que l’idée de transition y a rapidement été appropriée par certains acteurs. Se croisent dans ces territoires des dynamiques descendantes dans le cadre de politiques publiques en faveur de la transition impulsées au niveau national, mais également des dynamiques spontanées issues par exemple d’initiatives de la société civile. Les trois parties de l’ouvrage illustrent différentes facettes de ce processus à travers le cas de filières productives, notamment le secteur agricole, le domaine de l’aménagement et celui des pratiques quotidiennes de consommation et de loisirs.

Black Religious Landscaping in Africa and the United States uses the prism of spatial theory to explore various aspects of Black landscapes on the African continent and Black Atlantic diasporic locations. The volume explores the ways in which Black people in Africa and in the Diaspora have identified obstacles and barriers to Black freedoms and have constructed counter-landscapes in response to these obstacles. The chapters in the book present diverse representations of the Black creative impulse to form religious landscapes and construct social, economic and political spaces that are habitable for Black people and Black bodies. These landscapes and spaces are physical, psychological and conceptual. They are gendered and racialized in ways that are shaped by their specific religious, geographic and socio-historical contexts. These contexts are influenced by colonial systems and institutions of modern slavery. The landscapes that people of African descent struggle to construct, reshape and inhabit are intended to counter the effects of these oppressive systems and institutions and often include attempts to reclaim and adapt sources, concepts, tools and techniques that are indigenous to specific geographical contexts or ethno-racial groups. The contributors hope in this volume to offer a look at how the cartographic struggles and constructive engagements within these Black-inhabited spaces are rooted in Black movements that support the emancipation of Black lives and Black bodies from the oppressive forces of dominant geographies.