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Gujarat Beyond Gandhi: Identity, Society and Conflict (Routledge South Asian History and Culture Series)
by Nalin Mehta Mona G. MehtaThe birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi and the land that produced Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, Gujarat has been at the centre-stage of South Asia’s political iconography for more than a century. As Gujarat, created as a separate state in 1960, celebrates its golden jubilee this collection of essays critically explores the many paradoxes and complexities of modernity and politics in the state. The contributors provide much-needed insights into the dominant impulses of identity formation, cultural change, political mobilisation, religious movements and modes of communication that define modern Gujarat. This book touches upon a fascinating range of topics – the identity debates at the heart of the idea of modern Gujarat; the trajectory of Gujarati politics from the 1950s to the present day; bootlegging, the practice of corruption and public power; vegetarianism and violence; urban planning and the enabling infrastructure of antagonism; global diasporas and provincial politics – providing new insights into understanding the enigma of Gujarat. Going well beyond the boundaries of Gujarat and engaging with larger questions about democracy and diversity in India, this book will appeal to those interested in South Asian Studies, politics, sociology, history as well as the general reader. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
The Gujarat Carnage
by Asghar Ali EngineerIn February 2002, 59 Hindu pilgrims were burnt alive in a rail coach at Godhra. The National Human Rights Commission investigated the episode. This is a compilation of reports, surveys, and other significant material on the carnage.
Gujarat na Sirchatra Sardar
by Mukulbhai Kalarthi“તમે તમારું સાચું અને મજબૂત સંગઠન ખડું કરો. ઉપરાંત મેં જે નબળાઈઓ ચીંધી છે તે દૂર કરો, આળસ છોડી દો, વહેમો ફગાવી દો, કોઈનો ડર ન રાખો, કુસંપનો ત્યાગ કરો, કાયરતા ખંખેરી નાખો, હિંમત રાખો, બહાદુર બનો અને આત્મવિશ્વાસ રાખતાં શીખો.” “આટલું કરશો તો તમે જે ઇચ્છો છો તે એની મેળે આવી મળશે. જગમાં જેને માટે જે લાયક હોય છે તેને મળે જ છે. આપણી ઉમેદ મોટી છે. આપણે ગુલામીની બેડીઓ તોડી, સ્વતંત્રતા મેળવી રાજસત્તાની લગામ આપણા હાથમાં લેવા માગીએ છીએ. આવી મોટી ઉમેદ રાખવાનો આપણો અધિકાર છે. આવો મોટો અધિકાર પ્રાપ્ત કરવા માટે આપણે ભગીરથ પ્રયત્ન કરવો જોઈએ. પ્રયત્ન કરનારને પ્રભુ મદદ કરે છે. પ્રભુ તમારું ભલું કરો!”
Gulaami: Indentured Labour - Fiji
by Dr Kamlesh SharmaGulaami documents the experiences of a Girmitiya (Indentured Labourer) in Fiji who is originally from the village of Devadeha in the district of Basti in Uttar Pradesh. The reinvented slave trade of the mid 1850s by the British resulted in the removal of hundreds of thousands of Indians from their motherland, India and transplanted against their wishes in the British colonies (including Fiji) across the globe. In the South Pacific setting, slavery in Fiji is a story of the forgotten stolen generation right in the backyard of countries such as Australia and New Zealand. The story of Gulaami is about the ancestors of the Fijiindians who sacrificed so much for the betterment of Fiji and the emergence of the Fijiindian society, who are still struggling for equality and justice in the only country that they have known since their birth, Fiji.
Gulag: Historia de los campos de concentración soviéticos (Annals Of Communism Ser.)
by Anne ApplebaumUna extensa y detallada historia del origen y el desarrollo de los Gulags soviéticos y su herencia hasta la actualidad. El Gulag aparece en la conciencia de occidente en 1977 con la publicación de la obra de Aleksandr Solzhenitsin Archipiélago Gulag. A partir de nuevos estudios, memorias publicadas tras la caída de la URSS y algunos archivos hasta ahora secretos, Anne Applebaum realiza una reconstrucción histórica del origen y la evolución de los campos de concentración soviéticos que devuelve este infausto e inolvidable episodio al centro de la tormentosa historia del convulso siglo XX. Con detalle y precisión asistimos a la vida cotidiana en el campo: las automutilaciones para evitar los trabajos forzados, las bodas entre prisioneros, la vida de las mujeres y los niños, las rebeliones y los intentos de fuga. El libro, documentado y riguroso, sostiene que el Gulag nació no solo por la necesidad de aislara los elementos que el Partido Comunista consideraba enemigos, sino para conseguir, al mismo tiempo, una masa de trabajadores-esclavos que trabajara a cambio de comida en inmensos proyectos como el canal del mar Blanco o las minas de Kolimá. Tras la descripción del horror organizado por el régimen soviético, el libro narra cómo Gorbachov, cuya familia se vio directamente afectada por esta política represiva, decidió terminar con este régimen carcelario liberando a la ciudadanía de uno de los más perversos y crueles sistemas represivos que el mundo ha conocido. Reseña:«El Gulag de Anne Applebaum es un libro importante. Sus muchos años de minuciosa investigación han provisto a la autora de un inmenso caudal de fascinantes detalles para recrear una terrible e inolvidable historia.»Anthony Beevor, autor de Stalingrado
Gulag: A History
by Anne ApplebaumThe Gulag--the vast array of Soviet concentration camps--was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust. The Gulag entered the world's historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. It is an epic feat of investigation and moral reckoning that places the Gulag where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of the troubled history of the twentieth century. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country's barely habitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union's time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned. But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West. Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth. <P><P> Pulitzer Prize Winner
Gulag
by Anne ApplebaumEl Gulag aparece en la conciencia de occidente en 1977 con la publicación de la obra de Aleksandr Solzhenitsin Archipiélago GULAG. A partir de nuevos estudios, memorias publicadas tras la caída de la URSS y algunos archivos hasta ahora secretos, Anne Applebaum realiza una reconstrucción histórica del origen y la evolución de los campos de concentración soviéticos que devuelve este infausto e inolvidable episodio al centro de la tormentosa historia del convulso siglo XX. Con detalle y precisión asistimos a la vida cotidiana en el campo: las automutilaciones para evitar los trabajos forzados, las bodas entre prisioneros, la vida de las mujeres y los niños, las rebeliones y los intentos de fuga. El libro, documentado y riguroso, sostiene que el Gulag nació no solo por la necesidad de aislar a los elementos que el Partido Comunista consideraba enemigos, sino para conseguir, al mismo tiempo, una masa de trabajadores-esclavos que trabajara a cambio de comida en inmensos proyectos como el canal del mar Blanco o las minas de Kolimá. Tras la descripción del horror organizado por el régimen soviético, el libro narra cómo Gorbachov, cuya familia se vio directamente afectada por esta política represiva, decidió terminar con este régimen carcelario liberando a la ciudadanía de uno de los más perversos y crueles sistemas represivos que el mundo ha conocido. «El Gulag de Anne Applebaum es un libro importante. Sus muchos años de minuciosa investigación han provisto a la autora de un inmenso caudal de fascinantes detalles para recrear una terrible e inolvidable historia.» ANTHONY BEEVOR, autor de Stalingrado
The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, 1953-1964
by Jeffrey S. HardyIn The Gulag after Stalin, Jeffrey S. Hardy reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. Hardy argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that reeducated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a "progressive" system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Reeducation proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s, they joined with a coalition of party officials, criminologists, procurators, newspaper reporters, and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan “The camp is not a resort” and succeeded in reimposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system, the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s, and the ensuing counterreform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Gulag Archipelago
by Alexander SolzhenitsynThis combines history, autobiography, documentary and political analysis as it examines the Soviet apparatus of repression from its inception following the October Revolution of 1917.
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P. S. Ser.)
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New YorkerThe Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature, the searing record of four decades of terror and oppression, in one abridged volume (authorized by the author). Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.Drawing on his own experiences before, during and after his eleven years of incarceration and exile, on evidence provided by more than 200 fellow prisoners, and on Soviet archives, Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state that once ruled all-powerfully with its creation by Lenin in 1918. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims-this man, that woman, that child-we encounter the secret police operations, the labor camps and prisons, the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the “welcome” that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness astounding moral courage, the incorruptibility with which the occasional individual or a few scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and degradation. And Solzhenitsyn’s genius has transmuted this grisly indictment into a literary miracle.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword
The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker“Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword
The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker“Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword
The Gulag Archipelago Volume 3: An Experiment in Literary Investigation
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time <P><P>Volume 3 of the Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece: Solzhenitsyn's moving account of resistance within the Soviet labor camps and his own release after eight years. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. <P><P>“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times.” —George F. Kennan <P><P>“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, New Yorker <P><P>“Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece. . . . The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword
The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps
by Dan HealeyA pioneering history of medical care in Stalin&’s Gulag—showing how doctors and nurses cared for inmates in appalling conditions A byword for injustice, suffering, and mass mortality, the Gulag exploited prisoners, compelling them to work harder for better rations in shocking conditions. From 1930 to 1953, eighteen million people passed through this penal-industrial empire. Many inmates, not reaching their quotas, succumbed to exhaustion, emaciation, and illness. It seems paradoxical that any medical care was available in the camps. But it was in fact ubiquitous. By 1939 the Gulag Sanitary Department employed 10,000 doctors, nurses and paramedics—about 40 percent of whom were prisoners. Dan Healey explores the lives of the medical staff who treated inmates in the Gulag. Doctors and nurses faced extremes of repression, supply shortages, and isolation. Yet they still created hospitals, re-fed prisoners, treated diseases, and &“saved&” a proportion of their patients. They taught apprentices and conducted research too. This groundbreaking account offers an unprecedented view of Stalin&’s forced-labour camps as experienced by its medical staff.
Gulag Letters
by Arsenii Formakov Emily D. JohnsonA poignant collection of letters written by the Latvian poet, novelist, and newspaper editor Arsenii Formakov while interned in Soviet labor camps Emily Johnson has translated and edited a fascinating collection of letters written by Arsenii Formakov, a Latvian Russian poet, novelist, and journalist, during two terms in Soviet labor camps, 1940 to 1947 in Kraslag and 1949 to 1955 in Kamyshlag and Ozerlag. This correspondence, which Formakov mailed home to his family in Riga, provides readers with a firsthand account of the workings of the Soviet penal system and testifies to the hardships of daily life for Latvian prisoners in the Gulag.
Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia's Repressive Past
by Zuzanna BogumiłThough the institution of the Gulag was nominally closed over half a decade ago, it lives on as an often hotly contested site of memory in the post-socialist era. This ethnographic study takes a holistic, comprehensive approach to understanding memories of the Gulag, and particularly the language of commemoration that surrounds it in present-day Russian society. It focuses on four regions of particular historical significance—the Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma—to carefully explore how memories become a social phenomenon, how objects become heritage, and how the human need to create sites of memory has preserved the Gulag in specific ways today.
The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System
by Nanci AdlerEven before its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union was engaged in an ambivalent struggle to come to terms with its violent and repressive history. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, entrenched officials attempted to distance themselves from the late dictator without questioning the underlying legitimacy of the Soviet system. At the same time, the Gulag victims to society opened questions about the nature, reality, and mentality of the system that remain contentious to this day.The Gulag Survivor is the first book to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalin's victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. As such, it is an essential companion to the classic work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, and recently opened archives, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding the existence of the returnees evolved from the fifties up to the present.Adler establishes the social and historical context of the first wave of returnees who were ""liberated"" into exile in Stalin's time. She reviews diverse aspects of return including camp culture, family reunion, and the psychological consequences of the Gulag. Adler then focuses on the enduring belief in the Communist Party among some survivors and the association between returnees and the growing dissident movement. She concludes by examining how issues surrounding the survivors reemerged in the eighties and nineties and the impact they had on the failing Soviet system. Written and researched while Russian archives were most available and while there were still survivors to tell their stories, The Gulag Survivor is a groundbreaking and essential work in modern Russian history. It will be read by historians, political scientists, Slavic scholars, and sociologists.
Gulag to Spitfire: A Polish Serviceman's Fight to Survive in the Second World War
by Andrew Hubert von StauferStalin is quoted as saying 'One man's death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic'. This is the story of a man who was determined to be neither. Kazimierz Tomasz 'Tomek' Hubert was 17 when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Despite his young age, he was quickly deported to the Vorkuta Gulag in the Arctic Circle, for the crime of being the son of a military governor. Here he would survive torture, starvation and even the threat of cannibalism, before he managed to escape and set off on a 6,000km walk to freedom. In this moving tale of endurance against all odds, Andrew Hubert von Staufer traces his father's footsteps from the gulags of Siberia to flying Spitfires in air battles against the Luftwaffe. This is a remarkable account of the Second World War and its long-reaching impact.
Gulag Town, Company Town
by Alan BarenbergThis insightful volume offers a radical reassessment of the infamous "Gulag Archipelago" by exploring the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost originally established in the 1930s as a prison camp complex. Author Alan Barenberg's eye-opening study reveals Vorkuta as an active urban center with a substantial nonprisoner population where the borders separating camp and city were contested and permeable, enabling prisoners to establish social connections that would eventually aid them in their transitions to civilian life. With this book, Barenberg makes an important historical contribution to our understanding of forced labor in the Soviet Union and its enduring legacy.
Gulag Voices
by Anne ApplebaumAnne Applebaum wields her considerable knowledge of a dark chapter in human history and presents a collection of the writings of survivors of the Gulag, the Soviet concentration camps. Although the opening of the Soviet archives to scholars has made it possible to write the history of this notorious concentration camp system, documents tell only one side of the story. Gulag Voicesnow fills in the other half. The backgrounds of the writers reflect the extraordinary diversity of the Gulag itself. Here are the personal stories of such figures as Dmitri Likhachev, a renowned literary scholar; Anatoly Marchenko, the son of illiterate laborers; and Alexander Dolgun, an American citizen. These remembrances--many of them appearing in English for the first time, each chosen for both literary and historical value--collectively spotlight the strange moral universe of the camps, as well as the relationships that prisoners had with one another, with their guards, and with professional criminals who lived beside them. A vital addition to the literature of this era,annotated for a generation that no longer remembers the Soviet Union,Gulag Voiceswill inform, interest, and inspire, offering a source for reflection on human nature itself.
Gulag Voices
by Jehanne M Gheith Katherine R. JolluckIn this volume, the powerful voices of Gulag survivors become accessible to English-speaking audiences for the first time through oral histories, rather than written memoirs. It brings together interviews with men and women, members of the working class and intelligentsia, people who live in the major cities and those from the "provinces," and from an array of corrective hard labor camps and prisons across the former Soviet Union. Its aims are threefold: 1) to give a sense of the range of the Gulag experience and its consequences for Russian society; 2) to make the Gulag relevant to English-speaking readers by offering comparisons to historical catastrophes they are likely to know more about, such as the Holocaust; and 3) to discuss issues of oral history and memory in the cultural context of Soviet and post-Soviet society.
The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
by Jack E. Davis<P>The tragic collision between civilization and nature in the Gulf of Mexico becomes a uniquely American story in this environmental epic. <P>When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America’s sea—bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience—and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the twenty-first century. <P>Significant beyond tragic oil spills and hurricanes, the Gulf has historically been one of the world's most bounteous marine environments, supporting human life for millennia. Davis starts from the premise that nature lies at the center of human existence, and takes readers on a compelling and, at times, wrenching journey from the Florida Keys to the Texas Rio Grande, along marshy shorelines and majestic estuarine bays, profoundly beautiful and life-giving, though fated to exploitation by esurient oil men and real-estate developers. <P>Rich in vivid, previously untold stories, The Gulf tells the larger narrative of the American Sea—from the sportfish that brought the earliest tourists to Gulf shores to Hollywood’s engagement with the first offshore oil wells—as it inspired and empowered, sometimes to its own detriment, the ethnically diverse groups of a growing nation. Davis' pageant of historical characters is vast, including: the presidents who directed western expansion toward its shores, the New England fishers who introduced their own distinct skills to the region, and the industries and big agriculture that sent their contamination downstream into the estuarine wonderland. Nor does Davis neglect the colorfully idiosyncratic individuals: the Tabasco king who devoted his life to wildlife conservation, the Texas shrimper who gave hers to clean water and public health, as well as the New York architect who hooked the “big one” that set the sportfishing world on fire. <P>Ultimately, Davis reminds us that amidst the ruin, beauty awaits its return, as the Gulf is, and has always been, an ongoing story. Sensitive to the imminent effects of climate change, and to the difficult task of rectifying grievous assaults of recent centuries, The Gulf suggests how a penetrating examination of a single region's history can inform the country's path ahead. <P><b>Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History</b>
Gulf County (Images of America)
by Beverly Mount-DoudsCarved out of Calhoun County on June 6, 1925, Gulf County is one of Florida's youngest counties. The county seat, Port St. Joe, was founded in 1913, and construction of the St. Joe Paper Company's plant in 1937 revitalized the area. The popular fishing site Wewahitchka was the county seat until voters elected to relocate it to Port St. Joe in 1964. Until recently, Port St. Joe was a typical company town, anchored by the paper mill headquarters. The town is near St. Joseph, where Florida's first constitution was drafted in 1838, and which was later destroyed by yellow fever and hurricane surge. Today Gulf County is a thriving, growing area of industrial and recreational resources with nostalgic reminders of a glorious past and a promising future. Port St. Joe and Wewahitchka remain away from the hustle and bustle of large cities.
The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History
by John S. Sledge“[Sledge] rightfully celebrates and affirms the southern sea’s enriching past and gives readers reason to want for its wholesome and meaningful future.” —Jack E. Davis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American SeaThe Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the earth’s tenth largest body of water. In this beautifully written and illustrated volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf’s human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf’s viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de León, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee at the helm of the doomed Maine. Gulf events of global historical importance are detailed, such as the only defeat of armed and armored steamships by wooden sailing vessels, the first accurate deep-sea survey and bathymetric map of any ocean basin, the development of shipping containers by a former truck driver frustrated with antiquated loading practices, and the worst environmental disaster in American annals.Occasionally shifting focus ashore, Sledge explains how people representing a gumbo of ethnicities built some of the world’s most exotic cities—Havana, way station for conquistadores and treasure-filled galleons; New Orleans, the Big Easy, famous for its beautiful French Quarter, Mardi Gras, and relaxed morals; and oft-besieged Veracruz, Mexico’s oldest city, founded in 1519 by Hernán Cortés. In the modern era the Gulf has become critical to energy production, fisheries, tourism, and international trade, even as it is threatened by pollution and climate change. The Gulf of Mexico is a work of verve and sweep that illuminates both the risks of life on the water and the riches that come from its bounty.
The Gulf of Tonkin: The United States and the Escalation in the Vietnam War (Critical Moments in American History)
by Tal TovyThe Gulf of Tonkin: The United States and the Escalation in the Vietnam War analyzes the events that led to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam and increased American involvement. On August 4, 1964, the captains of two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, reported that their ships were being attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. This report came on top of a previous report by the captain of the USS Maddox, indicating that he had been attacked by torpedo boats two nights earlier. The text introduces readers to the historiography of these incidents and how the perception of the events changed over time. The attacks, which were collectively called the Gulf of Tonkin incident, are presented in the context not only of the Vietnam War but also of the Cold War and U.S. government powers, enabling students to understand the events’ full ramifications. Using essential primary documents, Tal Tovy provides an accessible introduction to a vital turning point in U.S. and international affairs. This book will be useful to all students of the Vietnam War, American military history, and foreign policy history.