In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, The October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed master work on The State and Revolution … This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois state and the replacement of capitalism by the, dictatorship of the proletariat. The result, as Robert Service suggests in his stimulating Introduction, is ‘a choral ode to action, intolerance, combat and collectivism, the anthem of Bolshevism in its revolutionary era’. Immediately established as a standard text, it was selectively cited by leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev in support of programmes which differed in important ways. As both historical document and political statement, its importance can hardly be exaggerated..
Category: North America
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian : John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
The author recounts the successes and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. ‘No library of western/southwestern materials can be without this book. . . ‘.– Books of the Southwest..
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse : The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement
Kept off the shelves for eight years by legal battles, this is the comprehensive history of the desperate Indian efforts to maintain their traditions and preserve the sacredness of the earth. Matthiessen reveals the Lakota Indians’ long struggle with the U.S. Government, from Red Cloud’s War and Little Big Horn to the Indian wars of the 1970s. 3 maps..
The Selling of the President
Pilgrims in Their Own Land : 500 Years of Religion in America
Sweetness and Power : The Place of Sugar in Modern History
The Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History
Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America
The original edition of this now classic work was hailed by Jacob Cohen in ‘The Nation’ as ‘the finest one-volume interpretation of American history extant.’ For this Third Edition of ‘Out of Our Past,’ Carl Degler has added a comprehensive new chapter on the historical development of American families, brought up to date the discussion of U.S. foreign policy, greatly expanded sections dealing with the place and history of women in our past, and made numerous changes throughout the text in light of scholarship published since the appearance of the 1970 Revised Edition..
The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England
Confederate Nation: 1861-1865
We have for years needed a serious, scholarly, readable work on the Confederate nation that rounds up modem scholarship and offers a fresh and detached view of the whole subject. This work fills that order admirably … Thomas sensibly and deftly integrates the course of Southern military fortunes with the concerns that shaped them and were shaped by them. In doing so he also manages to convey a sense of how the war itself deteriorated from something spirited and gallant to something base and mean and modern on both sides..