Women in civil society

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Patricia Herlihy

"Russians are famed for their debilitating love of vodka. During the late imperial period, alcohol was blamed for health problems, workplace accidents and absenteeism, rioting and pogroms, and the decline of the army. Many outsiders have cited it as the primary cause of Russia's "backwardness" and a barrier to its modernization. Alcoholism continues to plague modern Russia, causing major social, economic, and health problems." "In The Alcoholic Empire, Patricia Herlihy illuminates the complex relationship between vodka and politics in Russia, focusing on the history and role of temperance organizations in the late imperial period. She traces the beginning of temperance activities to 1894, when Nicholas II created a monopoly on the sale and production of alcohol. Temperance advocates - a diverse group that ranged from Tolstoy to illiterate peasants and included laity, clergy, and workers, men and women, the medical professions, the Duma, and the military - disagreed about the causes and remedies for alcoholism, but they agreed that it was a social and moral problem for which the government should be held accountable."--Jacket.

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Dan Berger

>This powerful collection is a compelling assessment of left-wing social movements in a period many have described as dominated by conservatism or confusion. Scholars examine critical and largely buried legacies of the 1970s. The decade of Nixon's fall and Reagan's rise also saw widespread indigenous militancy, prisoner uprisings, transnational campaigns for self-determination, pacifism, and queer theories of play as political action. Contributors focus on diverse topics, including the internationalization of Black Power and Native sovereignty, organizing for Puerto Rican independence among Latinos and whites, and women's self-defense. - publisher

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Stephen Lovell

Almost twenty years after the Soviet Union's end, what are we to make of its existence? Was it a heroic experiment, an unmitigated disaster, or a viable if flawed response to the modern world? What was the Soviet Union like? How did it evolve over seven decades? What was the relationship between the regime and the general population? This introduction blends political history with an investigation into the society and culture at the time. The author examines aspects of patriotism, mass culture, political violence, poverty, and ideology; and provides answers to some of the big questions about the Soviet experience.

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Young-Sun Hong

This is the first comprehensive study of the turbulent relationship among state, society, and church in the making of the modern German welfare system during the Weimar Republic. Young-Sun Hong examines the competing conceptions of poverty, citizenship, family, and authority held by the state bureaucracy, socialists, bourgeois feminists, and the major religious and humanitarian welfare-organizations. She shows how these conceptions reflected and generated bitter conflict in German society. And she argues that this conflict undermined parliamentary government within the welfare sector in a way that paralleled the crisis of the entire Weimar political system and created a situation in which the Nazi critique of republican "welfare" could acquire broad political resonance.