Squandered victory

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Ira Berlin

A leading historian offers a sweeping new account of the African American experience over four centuries Four great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since the late 1960s, the arrival of black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. These epic migra¡tions have made and remade African American life.Ira Berlin's magisterial new account of these passages evokes both the terrible price and the moving triumphs of a people forcibly and then willingly migrating to America. In effect, Berlin rewrites the master narrative of African America, challenging the traditional presentation of a linear path of progress. He finds instead a dynamic of change in which eras of deep rootedness alternate with eras of massive move¡ment, tradition giving way to innovation. The culture of black America is constantly evolving, affected by (and affecting) places as far away from one another as Biloxi, Chicago, Kingston, and Lagos. Certain to gar¡ner widespread media attention, The Making of African America is a bold new account of a long and crucial chapter of American history.

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Eric G.E. Zuelow

"From the dark shadow of civil war to the pastel-painted tourist towns of today, Making Ireland Irish provides a sweeping account of the evolution of the Irish tourist industry over the twentieth century. Drawing on an extensive array of previously untapped or underused sources, Eric G. E. Zuelow examines how a small group of tourism advocates, inspired by tourist development movements in countries such as France and Spain, worked tirelessly to convince their Irish compatriots that tourism was the secret to Ireland's success. Over time, tourism went from being a national joke to a national interest. Men and women from across Irish society joined in, eager to help shape their country and culture for visitors' eyes. The result was Ireland as it is depicted today, a land of blue skies, smiling faces, pastel towns, natural beauty, ancient history, and timeless traditions. With lucid prose and vivid detail, Zuelow explains how careful planning transformed Irish towns and villages from grey and unattractive to bright and inviting, sanitized Irish history to avoid offending Ireland's largest tourist market, the English, and supplanted traditional rural fairs revolving around muddy animals and featuring sexually suggestive ceremonies with new family-friendly festivals and events filling the tourist calendar today. By challenging existing notions that the Irish tourist product is either timeless or the consequence of colonialism, Zuelow demonstrates that the development of tourist imagery and Irish national identity was not the result of a handful of elites or a postcolonial legacy, but rather the product of an extended discussion that ultimately involved a broad cross-section of society, both inside and outside Ireland. Tourism, he argues, played a vital role in 'making Ireland Irish.'"--Publisher's website.

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John Newman

How involved was the CIA with Lee Harvey Oswald? Why was Oswald's file tampered with before the assassination of John Kennedy? And why were significant documents from it removed afterward? Finally, we have answers to these questions, answers not from theories, but from the primary sources themselves. John Newman has interviewed dozens of high-placed officials who have never before spoken candidly on these sensitive issues. He has thoroughly examined the vast body of new material forced into release by the JFK Records Act of 1992. Oswald and the CIA is a devastating report based on indisputable evidence. Written by a historian who spent more than twenty years with the U.S. intelligence community, it is an insider's account of the secret record. Bit by bit, document by document, the reader watches Oswald's file build as it was observed through the eyes of the intelligence officers who actually handled those files. The Oswald paper trail inside the CIA is a gripping journey through the darkest corners of the Agency's Clandestine Services.

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Nicholas Papayanis

Historical writings and art and literature of the period depict the coachmen of nineteenth-century Paris in a variety of ways - from unflinchingly honest to unspeakably rude to utterly criminal. In this captivating book, Nicholas Papayanis sets about to penetrate the popular image of the coachman and present a realistic picture of this frequently maligned segment of the Paris population. On one level, The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris offers a definitive history of Paris cabbies, providing a sociological portrait of these workers, their backgrounds, marriage patterns, social networks, neighborhood choices, work experience, organizations, strikes, patterns of social mobility, response to technological change particularly the advent of the automobile and development of political and class consciousness. Most coachmen had migrated to Paris from outlying regions of France, a fact that Papayanis uses to illuminate the broader theme of the social integration of rural inhabitants into urban life. On another level, the book deals with the economic and structural history of the Paris cab trade, describing its organization and regulation, the impact it felt from major events like the Paris Expositions of 1879 and 1889, and the effect of government efforts to unify the cab trade under a municipal monopoly. Both as a focused investigation of urban service workers, hitherto unstudied in this period, and as an examination of transportation in the French capital during the era of the horse-drawn cab, the Coachmen of Nineteen the Century Paris is unparalleled. Papayanis concentrates on midcentury and thereafter, for from that time more than merely anecdotal material on coachmen is especially abundant. His research encompasses a remarkably broad range of sources, among them previously unexamined coachmen's newspapers, government statistical surveys, records of major cab companies, minutes of coachmen's union meetings, cab company contracts, and the private archives of the largest Parisian cab company of the nineteenth century, which include personnel files and the minutes of the company's executive committee. Rich in detail though the book is, Papayanis has sculpted this treasure of information into a readily grasped form that is a delight to read. The Coachmen of Nineteenth-Century Paris makes an important contribution to the fields of labor, social, urban, and transportation history. It fills a gap in the literature dealing with Paris and its working class, addresses questions concerning class consciousness and collective action against the nontraditional background of the male service worker, and tells the intriguing story of expanding public transportation in Paris.