Lincoln's Gettysburg address

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Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii

"This is the first book in any language to offer a comprehensive analysis of the political culture of the Russian Revolution. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii examine the diverse ways that language and other symbols - including flags and emblems, public rituals, songs, and codes of dress - were used to identify competing sides and to create new meanings in the political struggles of 1917. The Revolution was in many ways a battle to control these systems of symbolic meaning, the authors find."--BOOK JACKET. "Figes and Kolonitskii consider the fundamental clash between the Western political discourse of the socialist parties and the traditional political culture of the Russian masses. They show how the particular conditions and perceptions that coloured Russian politics in 1917 led to the emergence of the cult of the revolutionary leader and the culture of the Terror."--BOOK JACKET.

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Manfred Gailus

"Woran glaubten die 65 Millionen Deutschen im Dritten Reich? Welche Rolle spielte die »religiöse Frage« für Bestand und Stabilität des NS-Regimes? Wie dieses Buch zeigt, war die Hitlerzeit nicht, wie bisher weithin angenommen, von Säkularisierungsprozessen oder sogar von »Gottlosigkeit« bestimmt, sondern vielmehr von multiplen religiösen Erneuerungen geprägt. Bereits das politische Umbruchsjahr 1933 war von einem tiefgehenden »religious revival« begleitet. Eine uns heute paradox anmutende Gemengelage von christlichen Traditionsbeständen und einem völkisch-politischen Neuglaube spielte eine wesentliche Rolle im Nationalsozialismus"-- Back cover.

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[compiled by] Tony Crowley

"For almost a thousand years language has been an important and contentious issue in Ireland. The story of the relations between the English and Irish languages is a complex one full of unexpected alliances, strange accounts of historical origins, and peculiar forms of cultural identity. Above all it reflects the great themes of Irish history: colonial invasion, native resistance, religious and cultural difference.". "Collected here for the first time are texts on the politics of language from the date of the first legislation against Irish, the Statute of Kilkenny of 1366, to the constitution of the Free State in 1922. Crowley's introduction connects these texts to current debates, taking the Belfast Agreement as an example, and illustrates how the language debates continue to have historical resonance today. Divided into six historical sections with detailed introductions, this unique sourcebook includes familiar cultural texts such as Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland and essays and letters by Yeats and Synge, alongside less familiar writings, from introductions to the first Irish-English and English-Irish dictionaries to the Preface to the New Testament in Irish (1602).". "Providing direct access to original texts, this is an historical resource book which can be used as a case study in the relations between language and cultural identity both in the present and the past."--BOOK JACKET.

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[by] Patrick Vinton Kirch

In How Chiefs Became Kings, PKirch addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology: the emergence of "archaic states" whose distinctive feature was divine kingship. Kirch takes as his focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from his own four decades of research, Kirch argues that Hawaiian polities had become states before the time of Captain Cook's voyage (1778-1779). The status of most archaic states is inferred from the archaeological record. But Kirch shows that because Hawai'i's kingdoms were established relatively recently, they could be observed and recorded by Cook and other European voyagers. Substantive and provocative, this book makes a major contribution to the literature of precontact Hawai'i and illuminates Hawai'i's importance in the global theory and literature about divine, kingship, archaic states, and sociopolitical evolution. --Jacket.