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The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was once the largest country in Europe—a multicultural republic that was home to Belarusians, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ruthenians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and other ethnic and religious groups. Although long since dissolved, the Commonwealth remains a rich resource for mythmakingin its descendent modern-day states, but also a source of contention between those with different understandings of its history.Multicultural Commonwealth brings together the expertise of world-renowned scholars in a range of disciplines to present perspectives on both the Commonwealth's historical diversity and the memory of this diversity. With cutting-edge research on the intermeshed histories and memories of different ethnic and religious groups of the Commonwealth, this volume asks how various contemporary conceptions of multiculturalism can be applied to the region through a critical lens that also seeks to understand the past on its own terms.

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln's promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America's Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

“Regions of memory” are a scale of social and cultural memory that reaches above the national, yet remains narrower than the global or universal. The chapters of this volume analyze transnational constellations of memory across and between several geographical areas, exploring historical, political and cultural interactions between societies. Such a perspective enables a more diverse field of possible comparisons in memory studies, studying a variety of global memory regions in parallel. Moreover, it reveals lesser-known vectors and mechanisms of memory travel, such as across Cold War battle lines, across the Indian Ocean, or between Southeast Asia and western Europe.Chapters 1 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

John Wesley and George Whitefield are remembered as founders of Methodism, one of the most influential movements in the history of modern Christianity. Characterized by open-air and itinerant preaching, eighteenth-century Methodism was a divisive phenomenon, which attracted a torrent of printed opposition, especially from Anglican clergymen. Yet, most of these opponents have been virtually forgotten. Anti-Methodism and Theological Controversy in Eighteenth-Century England is the first large-scale examination of the theological ideas of early anti-Methodist authors. By illuminating a very different perspective on Methodism, Simon Lewis provides a fundamental reappraisal of the eighteenth-century Church of England and its doctrinal priorities. For anti-Methodist authors, attacking Wesley and Whitefield was part of a wider defence of'true religion', which demonstrates the theological vitality of the much-derided Georgian Church. This book, therefore, places Methodism firmly in its contemporary theological context, as part of the Church of England's continuing struggle to define itself theologically.

Belarus is often regarded as'Europe's last dictatorship', a sort-of fossilized leftover from the Soviet Union. However, a key factor in determining Belarus's development, including its likely future development, is its own sense of identity. This book explores the complex debates and competing narratives surrounding Belarus's identity, revealing a far more diverse picture than the widely accepted monolithic post-Soviet nation. It examines in a range of media including historiography, films and literature how visions of Belarus as a nation have been constructed from the nineteenth century to the present day. It outlines a complex picture of contested myths – the'peasant nation'of the nineteenth century, the devoted Soviet republic of the late twentieth century and the revisionist Belarusian nationalism of the present. The author shows that Belarus is characterized by immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic polyphony, both in its lived history and in its cultural imaginary. The book analyses important examples of writing in and about Belarus, in Belarusian, Polish and Russian, revealing how different modes of rooted cosmopolitanism have been articulated.

A collection of scholarly essays exploring the American Civil War from international perspectives.In an attempt to counter the insular narratives of much of the sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War in the United States, editors David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis present this collection of essays that examine the war as more than a North American conflict, one with transnational concerns. The book, while addressing the origins of the Civil War, places the struggle over slavery and sovereignty in the United States in the context of other conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Additionally, Gleeson and Lewis offer an analysis of the impact of the war and its results overseas.Although the Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in US history and arguably its single most defining event, this work underscores the reality that the war was by no means the only conflict that ensnared the global imperial powers in the mid-nineteenth century. In some ways the Civil War was just another part of contemporary conflicts over the definitions of liberty, democracy, and nationhood.The editors have successfully linked numerous provocative themes and convergences of time and space to make the work both coherent and cogent. Subjects include such disparate topics as Florence Nightingale, Gone with the Wind, war crimes and racial violence, and choices of allegiance made by immigrants to the United States. While we now take for granted the nation's values of freedom and democracy, we cannot understand the impact of the Civil War and the victorious “new birth of freedom” without thinking globally.The contributors to The Civil War as Global Conflict reveal that Civil War-era attitudes toward citizenship and democracy were far from fixed or stable. Race, ethnicity, nationhood, and slavery were subjects of fierce controversy. Examining the Civil War in a global context requires us to see the conflict as a seminal event in the continuous struggles of people to achieve liberty and fulfill the potential of human freedom. The book concludes with a coda that reconnects the global with the local and provides ways for Americans to discuss the war and its legacy more productively.Contributors: O. Vernon Burton; Edmund L. Drago; Hugh Dubrulle; Niels Eichhorn; W. Eric Emerson; Amanda Foreman; David T. Gleeson; Matthew Karp; Simon Lewis; Aaron W. Marrs; Lesley Marx; Joseph McGill; James M. McPherson; Alexander Noonan; Theodore N. Rosengarten; Edward B. Rugemer; Jane E. Schultz; Aaron Sheehan-Dean; Christopher Wilkins“The writers of this collection effectively balance local and global contexts to produce a significant text that is invaluable to any scholar interested in research desiring to move away from ‘pantomime-like North-South, black-white, blue-gray binaries.'” —Jesse Tyler Lobbs, Kansas State University

A fast paced, adrenaline ride of a novel:'Lord of the Flies'meets'The Beach'Bored of the'mango smoothie'trail and keen to spice up their Facebook albums, and maybe their sex lives, Jake and Will take a tour into China's jungle borderland with Burma. Their guide, however, has his own agenda and gradually the two gap-year students slip into a nightmarish spiral of murder and moral decay, their chance of survival determined by a game of hide and seek played out with deadly crossbows.

Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21,000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin's emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland's leaders en route to Katyn. Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe's future.

From the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize—nominated Bad Traffic, a fast-paced adventure novel about two young backpackers who find themselves in serious trouble in the jungle of Southeast Asia On the Burmese border, two naïve backpackers, Will and Jake, follow a tour guide into the jungle, tantalized by the possibility of dalliances with the tribal women who live there. At an idyllic waterfall, they discover that nothing is as it seems and their guide has his own agenda. It is not long before the two young men slip into a nightmarish spiral of murder and moral decay, their chance of survival determined by a game of hideand- seek played out with deadly crossbows. As the stakes get increasingly higher, the bonds of friendship are tested and lives are put on the line. Simon Lewis has written a gripping, amphetaminepaced novel about the hidden perils that can lurk in paradise, and the fine line that we draw for ourselves between what is “civilized” and what is not.

'THIS MAN HAVE COME FROM CHINA TO FIND HIS DAUGHTER WHO HAVE SOME TROUBLE. HE DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH'Inspector Jian is a Chinese cop from the Siberian border who thinks he's seen it all. But his search for his missing daughter brings him to the meanest streets he's ever faced -- in rural England. Migrant worker East Wind is distressed -- his gangmaster's making demands, he owes a lot of money to the snakeheads and no one will tell him where his wife has been taken. Maybe England isn't the'gold mountain'he was promised... Two desperate men, uneasy allies in a baffling foreign land, are pitted against a band of ruthless criminals... there's BAD TRAFFIC ahead.

“When I was thirty-five, my wife and I were both reported dead by the first paramedics to arrive at the scene of a seventy-five-mile-an-hour hit-and-run. My wife Marcy died instantly that day. With brain damage from a massive stroke and my body broken, I wasn't expected to survive either.”So begins Rise and Shine, the dramatic story of Simon Lewis and his remarkable recovery from a horrific car accident. Told through the eyes of someone who has “lived through it” and successfully overcome the hurdles of the health insurance maze, Rise and Shine is a first-person account of unexpected tragedy and life-affirming courage, with lessons both medical and spiritual.Rise and Shine shows how much patients can achieve, beyond the limited horizons of insurance-based diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation, to attain maximum regeneration and rebuild their lives. An inspiring story about what it means to return to life after a near-death experience, Rise and Shine is, essentially, an exploration of the nature of consciousness itself, and an impassioned tale about survival and recovery.

The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project (AHOB) funded by the Leverhulme Trust began in 2001 and brought together researchers from a range of disciplines with the aim of investigating the record of human presence in Britain from the earliest occupation until the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago. Study of changes in climate, landscape and biota over the last million years provides the environmental backdrop to understanding human presence and absence together with the development of new technologies. This book brings together the multidisciplinary work of the project. The chapters present the results of new fieldwork and research on old sites from museum collections using an array of new analytical techniques. - Features an up-to-date treatment of the record of human presence in the British Isles during the Palaeolithic period (700,000 - 10,000 years before present) - Takes multidisciplinary approach that includes archaeology, geochemistry, geochronology, stratigraphy and sedimentology - Coincides with the culmination of the AHOB project in 2010, providing a benchmark statement on the record of human occupation in Britain that can be utilized and tested by future research

In this'GREASED-LIGHTNING'crime debut (Kirkus Reviews), Simon Lewis has created two unforgettable characters and a critically acclaimed novel that will stay with you long after the final page is turned.Inspector Jian is a corrupt Chinese cop who thinks he's seen it all. But his search for his missing daughter takes him to the meanest streets he's ever faced—in rural England.Migrant worker Ding Ming is distressed—his gang master is making demands, he owes a lot of money to the snakeheads, and no one will tell him where his wife has been taken. Maybe England isn't the Gold Mountain he was promised.Two desperate men, lost in a baffling foreign land, are pitted against a ruthless band of human traffickers in this breath-taking thriller.