The Other Special Relationship

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Tracy Fisher

"What's Left of Blackness analyzes the political transformations in black women's socially engaged community-based political work in England from the late 1960s until the 2000s. Tracy Fisher situates these transformations alongside shifts in Britain's political economy and against the discourse and deployment of blackness as a political imaginary through which to engage in struggles for social justice. She argues, that mapping black women's socially engaged political groups--within Britain's changing sociopolitical economic context--reveals the ways in which groups transformed from anti-imperialist organizations to service provisioning groups, all the while they redefined and expanded the very meaning of "the political.""--

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S.P. Mackenzie

Today we laugh at 'Dad's Army', but in 1940 the threat of a German invasion of Britain appeared very real. S. P. MacKenzie's detailed and readable history of the Home Guard offers a new perspective on the men who took up the challenge. Despite its popular image of old men and teenagers playing soldiers, the Home Guard, often as large as the wartime army, became an astonishingly strong political force in its own right. Quite literally the people in arms, it proved able to exert a good deal of influence on policy. The Home Guard was never called upon to fulfil its military role, though there was a brief attempt to resurrect it in the 1950s. Since then it has been largely neglected by military historians and there have been few serious examinations of the part it played in the Home Front.

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Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys (23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an administrator of the navy of England and Member of Parliament. The detailed private diary that Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London. Pepys recorded his daily life for almost ten years. Pepys has been called the greatest diarist of all time due to his frankness in writing concerning his own weaknesses and the accuracy with which he records events of daily British life and major events in the 17th century. Pepys wrote about the contemporary court and theater, his household, and major political and social occurrences. Historians have been using his diary to gain greater insight and understanding of life in London in the 17th century. Pepys wrote consistently on subjects such as personal finances, the time he got up in the morning, the weather, and what he ate. He talked at length about his new watch which he was very proud of (and which had an alarm, a new thing at the time), a country visitor who did not enjoy his time in London because he felt that it was too crowded, and his cat waking him up at one in the morning. Pepys's diary is one of the only known sources which provides such length in details of everyday life of an upper-middle-class man during the seventeenth century. His diary reveals his jealousies, insecurities, trivial concerns, and his fractious relationship with his wife. It has been an important account of London in the 1660s. Aside from day-to-day activities, Pepys also commented on the significant and turbulent events of his nation. England was in disarray when he began writing his diary. Oliver Cromwell had died just a few years before, creating a period of civil unrest and a large power vacuum to be filled. Pepys had been a strong supporter of Cromwell, but he converted to the Royalist cause upon the Protector’s death. He was on the ship that brought Charles II home to England. He gave a firsthand account of events, such as the coronation of King Charles II and the Restoration of the British Monarchy to the throne, the Anglo-Dutch war, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London.

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Lorenzo Vidino

"Al Qaeda in Europe is the first book in English that dissects Islamic terrorism on the Continent. Lorenzo Vidino, a European expert for the Investigative Project - a Washington, DC-based counterterrorism institute and America's largest private data-gathering center on militant Islamic activities - analyzes the causes of this dangerous situation while providing an extensive historical overview of Islamic terrorist activities in Europe. Divided into four parts, Al Qaeda in Europe begins by identifying European terrorists - their location and when they converted to fundamentalism. Vidino notes the difficulties that law enforcement agencies worldwide have had in shutting down terror cells." "Aside from their fanaticism, what binds the al Qaeda networks together? Vidino addresses this question and points to facets of European government that have allowed - and, in some cases, inadvertently encouraged - radical Islam to grow. The book shows how terrorists, most of them native to the Continent, raise money, communicate, and hide in plain sight in the suburbs of London, Paris, or Amsterdam. Vidino includes information taken from a dozen countries' original documentation, plus transcripts of conversations among al Qaeda operatives that have been intercepted by intelligence agencies." "Al Qaeda in Europe will become a valuable resource for scholars and government officials."--Jacket.