Continental Ambitions


Book Description

Kevin Starr has achieved a fast-paced evocation of three Roman Catholic civilizations Spain, France, and Recusant England as they explored, evangelized, and settled the North American continent. This book represents the first time this story has been told in one volume. Showing the same narrative verve of Starr's award-winning Americans and the California Dream series, this riveting but sometimes painful history should reach a wide readership. Starr begins this work with the exploration and temporary settlement of North America by recently Christianized Scandinavians. He continues with the destruction of Caribbean peoples by New Spain, the struggle against this tragedy by the great Dominican Bartolom矤e Las Casas, the Jesuit and Franciscan exploration and settlement of the Spanish Borderlands (Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Baja, and Alta California), and the strengths and weaknesses of the mission system. He then turns his attention to New France with its highly developed Catholic and Counter-Reformational cultures of Quebec and Montreal, its encounters with Native American peoples, and its advance southward to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The volume ends with the founding of Maryland as a proprietary colony for Roman Catholic Recusants and Anglicans alike, the rise of Philadelphia and southern Pennsylvania as centers of Catholic life, the Suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, and the return of John Carroll to Maryland the following year. Starr dramatizes the representative personalities and events that illustrate the triumphs and the tragedies, the achievements and the failures, of each of these societies in their explorations, treatment of Native Americans, and translations of religious and social value to new and challenging environments. His history is notable for its honesty and its synoptic success in comparing and contrasting three disparate civilizations, albeit each of them Catholic, with three similar and differing approaches to expansion in the New World.




Continental Achievement


Book Description

In Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America , the first volume of Kevin Starr's magisterial work on American Catholics, the narrative evoked Spain, France, and Recusant England as Europeans explored, evangelized, and settled the North American continent. In Continental Achievement: Roman Catholics in the United States, the focus is on the participation of Catholics, alongside their Protestant and Jewish fellow citizens, in the Revolutionary War and the creation and development of the Republic. With the same panoramic view and cinematic style of Starr's celebrated Americans and the California Dream series, Continental Achievement documents the way in which the American Revolution allowed Roman Catholics of the English colonies of North America to earn a new and better place for themselves in the emergent Republic. John Carroll makes frequent appearances in roles of increasing importance: missionary, constitution writer for his ex-Jesuit colleagues, prefect apostolic, controversialist and defender of the faith, bishop, founder of Georgetown, Cathedral developer, archbishop and metropolitan, and negotiator with the Court of Rome. In him, the Maryland ethos regarding Roman Catholicism reached a point of penultimate fulfillment. Starr also vividly portrays other representative personalities in this formative period, including Charles Carroll, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence; his mother, Elizabeth Brooke Carroll, Sulpician John DuBois, whose escape from France in 1791 was arranged by Robespierre; convert Elizabeth Bayley Seton, founder of the first American sisterhood, the Sisters of Charity;Stephen Moylan, Muster-Master General of the Continental Army; Polish military engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko; Colonel John Fitzgerald, an aide-de-camp to General Washington; Benedict Flaget, the first Bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky; merchant sea captain John Barry, who fought and won the last naval battle of the war; and William DuBourg, Bishop of Louisiana, who offered a Te Deum in a ceremony honoring General Andrew Jackson after his victory in the Battle of New Orleans. With his characteristic honesty and rigorous research, Kevin Starr gives his readers an enduring history of Catholics in the early years of the United States.







Hitler and Nazi Germany


Book Description

Hitler and Nazi Germany provides a concise introduction to Hitler’s rise to power and Nazi domestic and foreign policies through to the end of the Second World War. Combining narrative, the views of different historians, interpretation and a selection of sources, this book provides a concise introduction and study aid for students. This second edition has been extensively revised and expanded and includes new chapters on the Nazi regime, the SS and Gestapo, and the Second World War. Expanded background narratives provide a solid understanding of the period and the analyses and sources have been updated throughout to help students engage with recent historiography and form their own interpretation of events.




Rational Theory of International Politics


Book Description

Within the realist school of international relations, a prevailing view holds that the anarchic structure of the international system invariably forces the great powers to seek security at one another's expense, dooming even peaceful nations to an unrelenting struggle for power and dominance. Rational Theory of International Politics offers a more nuanced alternative to this view, one that provides answers to the most fundamental and pressing questions of international relations. Why do states sometimes compete and wage war while at other times they cooperate and pursue peace? Does competition reflect pressures generated by the anarchic international system or rather states' own expansionist goals? Are the United States and China on a collision course to war, or is continued coexistence possible? Is peace in the Middle East even feasible? Charles Glaser puts forward a major new theory of international politics that identifies three kinds of variables that influence a state's strategy: the state's motives, specifically whether it is motivated by security concerns or "greed"; material variables, which determine its military capabilities; and information variables, most importantly what the state knows about its adversary's motives. Rational Theory of International Politics demonstrates that variation in motives can be key to the choice of strategy; that the international environment sometimes favors cooperation over competition; and that information variables can be as important as material variables in determining the strategy a state should choose.




Routledge Library Editions: History of China


Book Description

This 11-volume set gathers together some key older titles on China’s history. Encompassing China’s political, economic, and cultural development, the books gathered here also deal with contacts with the West both ancient and modern.




The Stateless Market


Book Description

This book offers a broad view of the tension between state and market in the political evolution of the European Union. Contemporary developments and issues are set within the historical context of state formation. Paul Kapteyn argues that states are invariably formed by violent conquest, or by fusion in the face of an external threat; and that markets can emerge only only when the state has been established. He points out that while the histories of France, Britain, The Netherlands and Germany conform to these rules, the European Union does not; and he goes on to explore the reasons why this is not so, and its implications. The second section of the book is based on empirical research. Paul Kapteyn underpins his theoretical and historical argument with an analysis of official documents, newspaper articles and interviews with Eurocrats form the various member states. He concentrates especially on two case studies, of the Treaty of Schengen on judicial cooperation and harmonization, and of the problem of EU fraud. He also looks closely at eh consquences of the Maastricht Treaty. The Stateless Marlet is a thought-provoking text, ideally suited to students on European studies, politics, international relations and sociology courses. it will also be of great interest to those professionally concerned with European integration.




African Military Politics in the Sahel


Book Description

Analyzes the politics around military deployments in the Sahel since 2012 from a critical geopolitics perspective.




Africa-China Cooperation


Book Description

This book offers a range of perspectives on the Africa–China partnership in the context of the Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). Incorporating historical, political, social and cultural dimensions, it offers innovative views on the Africa–China relationship that combine theory and practice, and critically examines the prospects of a Pan-African policy towards China, complementary to China’s comprehensive African policy. The chapters address a number of key questions, including: What steps are being taken to achieve a more coordinated approach and policy towards China on the African continent? Does Africa even need a collective strategy in the first place? How would a coherent policy framework affect Africa’s relations with Europe and other external partners? How do the pillars of the partnership align with the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development?




The Idea of Englishness


Book Description

Ideas of Englishness, and of the English nation, have become a matter of renewed interest in recent years as a result of threats to the integrity of the United Kingdom and the perceived rise of that unusual thing, English nationalism. Interrogating the idea of an English nation, and of how that might compare with other concepts of nationhood, this book enquires into the origins of English national identity, partly by questioning the assumption of its long-standing existence. It investigates the role of the British empire - the largest empire in world history - in the creation of English and British identities, and the results of its disappearance. Considering the ’myths of the English’ - the ideas and images that the English and others have constructed about their history and their sense of themselves as a people - the distinctiveness of English social thought (in comparison with that of other nations), the relationship between English and British identity and the relationship of Englishness to Europe, this wide-ranging, comparative and historical approach to understanding the particular nature of Englishness and English national identity, will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and history with interests in English and British national identity and debates about England’s future place in the United Kingdom.