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This book presents research on the eastern front of World War I, a subject comparatively eclipsed by scholarly study of the western front. Focusing on the first two years of the war, the volume concentrates primarily on elements of the conflict between the Central Powers (specifically Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary) and pre-revolutionary Russia. The book approaches topics of interest through a tripartite structure, addressing the operational conduct of the war, the combatants’ cultural conceptions of themselves and the enemy, and how the conflict has been understood and commemorated in the years since the end of the war. The volume concludes with a chapter that brings together themes studied throughout the book in a discussion of the potential continuities between the German conduct and perception of war from the First World War to the Second.

This book describes the remarkable life of Paul Rusch, a Kentuckian who went to Japan after the Great Kanto Earthquake. Rusch embarked on an unlikely journey from a YMCA worker to college instructor, missionary, prisoner of war, and military intelligence officer, ultimately founding Seisen-Ryo lodge and the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project (KEEP) in Kiyosato, Japan. Through KEEP, Rusch introduced new agricultural methods and technology to highland Japan, endeavoring to help feed an impoverished region in the postwar era. Credited with introducing American-style football to Japan, Rusch was also instrumental in recruiting Japanese Americans (Nisei) for military service during World War II. As an army intelligence officer during the Allied Occupation of Japan, Rusch gathered evidence employed to absolve Emperor Hirohito of responsibility for the Pacific War. Rusch used his vast social network in Japan to acquire evidence of a Communist espionage ring in Japan led by the spymaster Richard Sorge, a development that affected the anti-Communist policies of Occupied Japan and McCarthy-era politics in the United States. Rusch’s dreams of evangelizing Japan did not come to fruition, but, despite some failures, Paul Rusch’s memory has endured into the twenty-first century, inspiring Japanese and Americans to foster cultural exchange, environmental sustainability, and international peace.

Richard Wright left readers with a trove of fictional and nonfictional works about suffering, abuse, and anger in the United States and around the globe. He composed unforgettable images of institutionalized racism, postwar capitalist culture, Cold War neo-imperialism, gender roles and their violent consequences, and the economic and psychological preconditions for personal freedom. He insisted that humans unflinchingly confront and responsibly reconstruct their worlds. He therefore offered not only honest social criticisms but unromantic explorations of political options. The book is organized in five sections. It opens with a series of broad discussions about the content, style, and impact of Wright’s social criticism. Then the book shifts to particular dimensions of and topics in Wright’s writings, such as his interest in postcolonial politics, his approach to gendered forms of oppression, and his creative use of different literary genres to convey his warnings. The anthology closes with discussions of the different political agendas and courses of action that Wright’s thinking prompts—in particular, how his distinctive understanding of psychological life and death fosters opposition to neoslavery, efforts at social connectivity, and experiments in communal refusal. Most of the book’s chapters are original pieces written for this volume. Other entries are excerpts from influential, earlier published works, including four difficult-to-locate writings by Wright on labor solidarity, a miscarriage of justice, the cultural significance Joe Louis, and the political duties of black authors. The contributors include experts in Africana studies, history, literature, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis.

Using an extensive body of sources, including more than thirty interviews, this biography details and analyzes the life of human rights activist Gloria Richardson, leader of the Cambridge movement in Maryland during the 1960s. Because her radical and uncompromising positions on black liberation were highly influential on the Black Power wave of the black liberation movement, this book depicts Richardson as a progenitor of Black Power who served in its leadership vanguard. This book also moves the geographic borders of Black Power’s roots south to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, detailing the Cambridge movement’s social justice campaign for more jobs and improvements in housing, health care, and education. Activists in Cambridge used the vote and armed self-defense to achieve their goals, and Black Power activists embraced these same strategies and tactics in the mid-1960s, seeing Richardson as a transitional human rights leader and role model. In addition to examining Richardson’s social, economic, and political philosophies—secular humanism, socioeconomic egalitarianism, and gender egalitarianism—and how they impacted her human rights activism, this book analyzes the gendered interpretation of Richardson’s activism and discusses how she was both similar to and different from other national civil rights leaders. Readers also get an insider’s view of her personal life before and after the 1960s, including her marriages, motherhood, and careers and her assessments of recent social justice movements.

When launching the Alliance for Progress in 1961, John F. Kennedy promised that this new development program would transform Latin America into a community of modern, prosperous, and politically stable allies. Yet, when Richard Nixon ended the program ten years later, there was more evidence of broken promises, political coups, and covert military operations than of transformative cooperation. Sandwiched between Kennedy’s and Nixon’s presidencies, Lyndon Johnson’s marked a transformative era in inter-American relations as Johnson and his chief inter-American aide, Thomas C. Mann, struggled to deliver on their predecessors’ bold promises while grappling with the demands of Cold War national security. In this first in-depth study of Johnson, Mann, and Latin America in the 1960s, Thomas Tunstall Allcock provides a nuanced and balanced assessment of two often maligned yet hugely influential policy makers during this vital period. In demonstrating that Johnson and Mann were New Dealers, keen to operate as good neighbors and support Latin American development and regional integration, Tunstall Allcock illuminates the difficulties faced by US modernization efforts. Ranging from domestic challenges from both right and left to a series of military and political crises including riots in the Panama Canal Zone and the threat of “another Cuba” in the Dominican Republic, these difficulties would be handled with wildly varying degrees of success. In Tunstall Allcock’s account, Johnson and Mann emerge as complex, rounded figures struggling to overcome a host of challenges and their own limitations even as the flaws and shortcomings of US policy are laid bare.