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Not Even Past

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)*

The title of Carey’s best-seller is misleading.  The True History of the Kelly Gang is not a “true history” at all, but rather an imagined autobiography of Australia’s greatest folk-hero, the bushranger Ned Kelly and his band of Irish-Australian outlaws.

Casta Paintings

In 1746 Dr. Andrés Arce y Miranda, a creole attorney from Puebla, Mexico, criticized a series of paintings known as the cuadros de castas or casta paintings. Offended by their depictions of racial mixtures of the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies, Arce y Miranda feared the paintings would send back to Spain the damaging message that creoles, the Mexican-born children of Spanish parents, were of mixed blood.

The Strangest Dream – Reykjavik 1986

College freshmen have no personal knowledge of the Cold War. Born after the Berlin Wall’s fall and the Soviet Union’s collapse, the threat of nuclear Armageddon seems far removed from their experiences, a relic of a bygone age. Yet, today, more countries than ever hold weapons whose scale of destruction can dwarf that of every bomb used in World War II.

The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (2006)

In The Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945, Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper chronicle the war years of the British Empire in its Asian Crescent, which curved from Calcutta to Singapore into Malaysia and Burma.

Lend-Lease

During World War II the United States shipped an enormous amount of aid to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. The significance of this aid to the Soviet war effort has long been debated.

The “Einstein Letter” — A Tipping Point in History

On a mid-July day in 1939, Albert Einstein, still in his slippers, opened the door of his summer cottage in Peconic on the fishtail end of Long Island. There stood his former student and onetime partner in an electromagnetic refrigerator pump, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, and next to him a fellow Hungarian (and fellow physicist), Eugene Wigner. The two had not come to Long Island for a day at the beach with the most famous scientist in the world but on an urgent mission.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

The Pacific is in vogue. After years of attracting little but scholarly attention, the Pacific Theater of the Second World War has captured the popular imagination in a string of books, feature films and an Emmy-award winning television series, aptly called “The Pacific” and written in part by University of Texas and Plan II graduate Robert Schenkkan.

The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam by Eliza Griswold (2010)

There exists a fault line near the tenth parallel north of the equator where the two great proselytizing religions of the last two millennia meet.In centuries past, desert traders and merchant seamen carried Islam along with their goods, halting only where they confronted unsurpassable natural barriers or the expansion of European Christianity in the colonized regions of Asia and Africa.

The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi (2010)

The era of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Levant, became known as the period of the ‘Nahda’- the Arab renaissance.

The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War by Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko (2008)

Any work of history that attributes the start of the Cold War to a single factor will surely invite criticism, but Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko’s The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War makes a compelling case for running that risk.

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