The way back

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Elizabeth York Enstam

Throughout the history of Dallas, women have worked both alongside and apart from the men now remembered as the city's founders and builders. In truth, women helped to create the definitive forms of urban life by establishing organizations and agencies that altered the responsibilities and functions of local government, amended the public conception of political issues, changed the city's physical structure, and affected the day-to-day lives of thousands of people. In Women and the Creation of Urban Life, Elizabeth York Enstam examines how women stretched, redefined, and at times erased the essentially artificial boundaries between female and male, between "the private" and "the public" as aspects of human endeavor. Enstam traces the ways national trends were expressed at the local level and analyzes women's accomplishments and the importance of their work as they assumed community leadership in perpetuating the traditions, education, fine arts, and customs of the larger culture, and in implementing Progressive principles in a specific community.

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Thomas Benjamin

Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, burst into international news in January 1994. Several thousand insurgents, given a voice in the communiques of Subcomandante Marcos, took control of the capital and other key towns and held the Mexican army and government at bay for weeks. Proclaiming themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, they captured both land and headlines. Worldwide, people wanted to know the answer to one question: why had revolutionaries taken over a Mexican state? No other study of Chiapas answers that question as thoroughly as does this book. Benjamin delineates the basic continuity in the history of Chiapas from the 1890s to 1995. The uprising and government's armed occupation of the state are but the latest violent episodes in a region that is now and has always been a rich land worked by poor people. By studying the impoverishment of the laboring class in Chiapas, Benjamin addresses how the Chiapan elite survived the Revolution of 1910 and remain in control of the state's development and destiny.

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Abbas Abdelkarim

This book analyses some important social, economic and political processes of change, stagnation and development in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council as a result of oil revenue. Part I addresses the impact of oil in redefining the distributive role of the state and in shaping economic policies. Lack of population policies, problems of national human resources development and the slow change in gender relations is presented in part II with reference to some country experiences. Part III deals with the impact of the Gulf War on causing limited change in the regional political systems and in raising security fears which have led to a huge increase in the already high military expenditure.

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Eric Foner

A critical biography of the Revolutionary pamphleteer, exploring the origins, expression, and impact of his ideas and the place of his radical ideology in the eighteenth-century world.