Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, this book captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. It examines an array of genres - including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music - and well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin.

This book offers a unique analysis of how political representatives construct ideas about the nation in contemporary Indonesian politics. In their struggle to define what the authors call the ‘national narrative’, would-be national leaders seek to develop a story about the nation’s past, present and future. These stories feature a unique plot, set of characters, and a moral that the political narrator hopes will resonate. In contemporary Indonesia, the authors assess two prominent national narratives: the technocratic and populist national narratives. The book concludes with an analysis that considers other potential sources of ideas about the nation, as well as the potential implications for domestic politics and Indonesian grand strategy.

The material effects of World War II, in combination with Eastern Europe's disappointingly undemocratic interwar history, placed radical social change on the postwar agenda across the region and shaped the debates that took place in immediate postwar Czech society. These debates adopted both a cultural form, in struggles over the meaning of the recent past and the nation's position on the East-West continuum, and a directly political form, in battles over the meaning of socialism. The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation examines the most important and politically resonant fields of historical and cultural debate in Czech society immediately after World War II. Bradley Abrams finds that communist public figures were largely successful in controlling debate over the nation's recent past--the interwar First Republic and the experiences of Munich and World War II--and over its location on the East-West continuum. This success preceded and was mirrored in the struggles over the political issue of the times: socialism. The communists engaged their political foes in the democratic socialist and Roman Catholic camps, and, surprisingly, found significant support from a major Protestant church. Abrams's careful reading of major publications re-creates a postwar mood sympathetic to radical social change, questioning the standard view of the communists' rise to power. This book not only contributes to the specific literature on Czech history, but also raises questions about the relationship between war and radical social change, about the communist takeover of the region, and about the role of intellectuals in public life.

A social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean that illustrates the importance of workers' actions in shaping national history.

The collapse of the Portuguese empire in the Americas in the early nineteenth century did not immediately or easily translate into the formation of the independent nation-state of Brazil. While ?Brazil? had geographic meaning, it did not constitute a cohesive political identity that could draw on basic loyalties. The tumultuous struggle to nationhood in Brazil was marked by the interplay of differing social groups, political parties, and regions. A series of violent revolts in Pernambuco, a large slaveholding, sugar-producing province in northeastern Brazil, exposed the tensions accompanying state and nation building. Political Struggle, Ideology, and State Building delves into the complex and engaging history of the contested province of Pernambuco, providing better understanding of the interplay between local and provincial social and political struggles and the construction of the nation-state. ø Jeffrey C. Mosher reevaluates political parties, institutions long assumed to be mere facades for elite factions with identical interests. He demonstrates the importance of both formal political institutions and ideology, as well as the efforts of the lower classes to assert their own visions and values. Resentment of the Portuguese provided common ground for some elite factions and lower-class groups and figured importantly in defining the nation. Mosher?s analysis clarifies how the lower class?s assertiveness?in a society sharply divided by slavery, race, and class?frightened various elite groups into embracing both exclusionary discourses on race and the need for authoritarian, centralized political institutions, a development that proved to be an enduring legacy of the period.

The truths about Iran; quite different truths from versions put forward by Washington, Tehran, and the media. Iran thundered onto the world stage in 1979 with an Islamic revolution that shook the world. Today that revolution has gone astray, a popular democracy movement boldly challenges authority, and young Iranians are more interested in moving to America than in chanting "Death to America." Afshin Molavi, born in Iran and fluent in Persian, traveled widely across his homeland, exploring the legacy of the Iranian revolution and probing the soul of Iran, a land with nearly three millennia of often-glorious history. Like a master Persian carpet maker, Molavi weaves together threads of rich historical insight, political analysis, cultural observation, and the daily realities of life in the Islamic republic to produce a colorful, intricate, and mesmerizing narrative. Originally published in hardcover under the title Persian Pilgrimages, this paperback edition is revised, with a new introduction and epilogue.

This book comprises a rich range of empirical investigations from the Global south highlighting dynamic relationships between local struggles, and global political and economic power, and which are explained with ideas developed by the pioneering anthropologist Eric R. Wolf.

Nations and Capital: The Missing Link in Global Expansion is a groundbreaking analysis of the ultimate reasons for the emergence of nations and nationalism, as a socio-political and geopolitical instrument in the global expansion of capitalism. The author provides the missing link in the relationship between nationalism and capitalism and offers a comprehensive critique of classical theories of nationalism, well illustrated by historical examples. He develops an original theory of nations and nationalism, relying on the assumption that the incessant widening of the gap between the capitalist elites and the labouring masses inevitably makes the endless accumulation of capital socially unsustainable. Bridging that gap without changing the structure of society becomes the paramount task for the system, which has to introduce nationalism as a social glue tailored to conceal, but also to cement, the actual polarisation of society. This book will be of great interest to advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and researchers in political science, sociology, history, international relations, security studies, social and political theory, and nationalism studies.

Indigenous Struggle and the Bolivian National Revolution: Land and Liberty! reinterprets the genesis and contours of the Bolivian National Revolution from an indigenous perspective. In a critical revision of conventional works, the author reappraises and reconfigures the tortuous history of insurrection and revolution, counterrevolution and resurrection, and overthrow and aftermath in Bolivia. Underlying the history of creole conflict between dictatorship and democracy lies another conflict – the unrelenting 500-year struggle of the conquered indigenous peoples to reclaim usurped lands, resist white supremacist dominion, and seize autonomous political agency. The book utilizes a wide array of sources, including interviews and documents to illuminate the thoughts, beliefs, and objectives of an extraordinary cast of indigenous revolutionaries, giving readers a firsthand look at the struggles of the subaltern majority against creole elites and Anglo-American hegemons in South America’s most impoverished nation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of modern Latin American history, peasant movements, the history of U.S. foreign relations, revolutions, counterrevolutions, and revolutionary warfare.