This is the first time that indigenous Papuan administrators share with an international public their experiences governing their country. These administrators were the brokers of development. After graduating from the School for Indigenous Administrators (OSIBA) they served in the Dutch administration until 1962. The period 1962-1969 stands out as turbulent and dangerous, and for many curtaile…
This book is one of the outcomes of the project Cultivated Wilderness: Socio-economic development and environmental change in pre-Columbian Amazonia (http://www.cultivated-wilderness.org/). The project has particularly focused on the previously relatively unknown prehistory of the Amazonian hinterland. Our work has revealed that pre-Columbian settlements in the Santarém region in the State of …
This volume looks at how different physical environments contribute to the reproduction of cultural forms even in the wake of colonization, migration, and other processes of displacement and change. This raises the question of whether cultural practices are altered by changes in physical environment or if a group’s narratives and practices shape their location. Using case studies from North a…
Cuba's first republican era (1902–1959) is principally understood in terms of its failures and discontinuities, its first three decades and the overthrow of Machado seen at best as a prologue to the "real" revolution of 1959. This book brings together scholars from North America, Cuba, and Spain to challenge this narrative, presenting republican Cuba instead as a time of meaningful engagement…
This book is a historical study of the Tajiks in Central Asia from the ancient times to the post-Soviet period. For millennia, these descendants of the original Aryan settlers were part of many different empires set up by Greek, Arab, Turkic and Russian invaders, as well as their own, most notably during the Middle Ages. The emergence of the modern state of Tajikistan began after 1917 under Sov…
The book examines the genesis and development of environmental rights (or the Right to Environment) in international law and discusses their philosophical, theoretical and legal underpinnings in the context of sustainable development and the notion of solidarity rights.
This book presents an ethnographic study of how grassroots activism in Venezuela during the Chávez presidency can be understood in relation to the country's history as a petro-state. Taking the contested relationship between the popular sectors and the Venezuelan state as a point of departure, Iselin Åsedotter Strønen explores how notions such as class, race, state, bureaucracy, popular poli…
The Second World War is omnipresent in contemporary memory debates. As the war fades from living memory, this study is the first to systematically analyze how Second World War museums allow prototypical visitors to comprehend and experience the past. It analyzes twelve permanent exhibitions in Europe and North America – including the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, the Museum o…
The vast shape-shifting continent of Australia enables us to take a long view of history. We consider ways to cross the great divide between the deep past and the present. Australia’s human past is not a short past, so we need to enlarge the scale and scope of history beyond 1788. In ways not so distant, these deeper times happened in the same places where we walk today. Yet, they were not th…
From the monarchical terror of the Middle Ages to the mangled Europe of the Twenty-first Century, A People's History of Modern Europe tracks the history of the continent through the deeds of those whom mainstream history tries to forget. Europe provided the perfect conditions for a great number of political revolutions from below. The German peasant wars of Thomas Müntzer, the bourgeoisie revo…