Britain's Gulag

Author: Caroline Elkins
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448162734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437

Book Description
Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold. Caroline Elkins conducted years of research to piece together this story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors. Britain's Gulag reveals, for the first time, the full savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire.

Imperial Reckoning

Author: Caroline Elkins
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1429900296
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498

Book Description
A major work of history that for the first time reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain's civilizing mission in Kenya As part of the Allied forces, thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu-some one and a half million people. The compelling story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold-the victim of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence. Caroline Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, spent a decade in London, Nairobi, and the Kenyan countryside interviewing hundreds of Kikuyu men and women who survived the British camps, as well as the British and African loyalists who detained them. The result is an unforgettable account of the unraveling of the British colonial empire in Kenya-a pivotal moment in twentieth- century history with chilling parallels to America's own imperial project. Imperial Reckoning is the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Imperial Intimacies

Author: Hazel V. Carby
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

Day of Reckoning

Author: Patrick J. Buchanan
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312539382
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
WITH HIS INCISIVE MIND AND RAZOR-SHARP PEN, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR PAT BUCHANAN TAKES ON THE GREATEST QUESTION FACING THE NATION: WILL THE AMERICA WE KNOW AND LOVE SURVIVE ?

Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century

Author: Caroline Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136077464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Postcolonial states and metropolitan societies still grapple today with the divisive and difficult legacies unleashed by settler colonialism. Whether they were settled for trade or geopolitical reasons, these settler communities had in common their shaping of landholding, laws, and race relations in colonies throughout the world. By looking at the detail of settlements in the twentieth century--from European colonial projects in Africa and expansionist efforts by the Japanese in Korea and Manchuria, to the Germans in Poland and the historical trajectories of Israel/Palestine and South Africa--and analyzing the dynamics set in motion by these settlers, the contributors to this volume establish points of comparison to offer a new framework for understanding the character and fate of twentieth-century empires.

The Santo Rebellion

Author: John Beasant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Espíritu Santo Island (Vanuatu)
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description

Unbowed

Author: Wangari Maathai
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307492338
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A remarkable memoir of courage, faith, and the power of persistence about one woman's extraodinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. “[Maathai’s] story provides uplifting proof of the power of perseverance—and of the power of principled, passionate people to change their countries and inspire the world.” —The Washington Post In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary life. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country.

Imperial

Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101105151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1789

Book Description
From the author of Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.

Imperial from the Beginning

Author: Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300194560
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
Eminent scholar Saikrishna Prakash offers the first truly comprehensive study of the original American presidency. Drawing from a vast range of sources both well known and obscure, this volume reconstructs the powers and duties of the nation's chief executive at the Constitution's founding. Among other subjects, Prakash examines the term and structure of the office of the president, as well as the president's power as constitutional executor of the law, authority in foreign policy, role as commander in chief, level of control during emergencies, and relationship with the Congress, the courts, and the states. This ambitious and even-handed analysis counters numerous misconceptions about the presidency and fairly demonstrates that the office was seen as monarchical from its inception.

A Heavy Reckoning

Author: Emily Mayhew
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 178283222X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
What happens when you reach the threshold of life and death - and come back? As long as humans have lived on the planet, there have been wars, and injured soldiers and civilians. But today, as we engage in wars with increasingly sophisticated technology, we are able to bring people back from ever closer encounters with death. Historian Emily Mayhew explores the reality of medicine and injury in wartime, from the trenches of World War One to the plains of Afghanistan and the rehabilitation wards of Headley Court in Surrey. Mixing vivid and compelling stories of unexpected survival with astonishing insights from the front line of medicine, A Heavy Reckoning is a book about how far we have come in saving, healing and restoring the human body. From the plastic surgeon battling to restore function to a blasted hand to the double amputee learning to walk again on prosthetic legs, Mayhew gives us a new understanding of the limits of human life and the extraordinary costs paid physically and mentally by casualties all over the world.