Interwar Crossroads

Studying the entangled histories of the areas conceptualized as Middle Eastern and North Atlantic World in the interwar years is crucial to understanding the two areas' respective and common histories until today. However, many of the manifold connections, exchanges, and entanglements between the areas have not received thorough scholarly attention yet. The contributors to this volume address this by bringing together various innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. They thereby further the understanding of the two areas' entangled histories and diversify prevailing concepts and narratives. Through this, the volume also offers enriching insights into the global history of the early 20th century.

The proceedings and resolutions from three enlarged plenums of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1922–23. Valuable for understanding the world revolutionary movement in Lenin’s time, as well as the subsequent evolution of the Comintern.

This volume provides fresh perspectives on the international strategic environment between the two world wars. At London in 1930, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan concluded an important arms control agreement to manage the international competition in naval armaments. In particular, the major naval powers reached agreement about how many heavy cruisers they could possess. Hailed at the time as a signal achievement in international cooperation, the success at London proved short-lived. France and Italy refused to participate in the treaty. Even worse followed, as within a few years growing antagonisms among the great powers manifested itself in the complete breakdown of the interwar arms control regime negotiated at London. The resulting naval arms race would set Japan and the United States on a collision course toward Pearl Harbor.

Unlike most books on the Atlantic that associate its history with European colonialism and thus end in 1800, this volume demonstrates that the Atlantic connections not only outlasted colonialism, they also reached unprecedented levels in postcolonial times, when the Atlantic truly became the world’s major crossroads and dominant economy. Twice as many Europeans entered New York, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo in 3 years on the eve of WWI as had arrived in all the New World during 300 years of colonial rule. Transatlantic ties surged again with mass movements from the West Indies, Latin America, and Africa to North America and Western Europe from the 1960s to the present. As befits a transnational subject, the 24 contributors in this volume come from 14 different countries. Over half of the chapters are co-authored, an exceptional level of scholarly collaboration, and all but two are explicitly comparative. Comparisons include Congo and Yoruba slaves in Brazil, Irish and Italian mercenaries and adventurers in the New World, German Lutherans in Canada and Argentina, Spanish laborers in Algeria and Cuba, the diasporic nationalism of ethnic groups without nation states, and the transatlantic politics of fascism and anti-fascism in the interwar. Overall, the volume shows the Atlantic World’s distinctiveness rested not on the level or persistence of colonial control but on the density and longevity of human migrations and the resulting high levels of social and cultural contact, circulation, connection, and mixing. This title will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of Atantic and global history, migration, diaspora, slavery, ethnicity, nationalism, citizenship, politics, anthropology, and area studies.

After Dracula tells of films set in London music halls and Yorkshire coal mines, South Sea Islands and Hungarian modernist houses of horror, with narrators that survey the outskirts of contemporary Paris and travel back in time to ancient Egypt. Alison Peirse argues that Dracula (1931) has been canonised to the detriment of other innovative and original 1930s horror films in Europe and America. By casting out the deified vampire, she reveals a cycle of films made over the 1930s that straddle both the pre- and post-regulatory era of the Hays Production Code an stringent censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. These films are indepenedent and studio productions, literary adaptations, folktales and original screenplays, and include Werewolf of London, The Man Who Changed His Mind, Island of Lost Souls and Vampyr. The book considers the horror genre's international evolution during this period, engaging with a number of European horror films that have hitherto received cursory attention. It focuses on the interplay between Continental, British and transatlantic contexts, and particularly on the intriguing, the obscure and the underrated.

The book examines the social life of non-Europeans in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and describes the political outgrowths of their migration to France. It argues that this migration was crucial for decolonization and the rise of a Third World consciousness after World War II.

" Among America's most unusual and successful weapons during the Cold War were Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. RFE-RL had its origins in a post-war America brimming with confidence and secure in its power. Unlike the Voice of America, which conveyed a distinctly American perspective on global events, RFE-RL served as surrogate home radio services and a vital alternative to the controlled, party-dominated domestic press in Eastern Europe. Over twenty stations featured programming tailored to individual countries. They reached millions of listeners ranging from industrial workers to dissident leaders such as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. Broadcasting Freedom draws on rare archival material and offers a penetrating insider history of the radios that helped change the face of Europe. Arch Puddington reveals new information about the connections between RFE-RL and the CIA, which provided covert funding for the stations during the critical start-up years in the early 1950s. He relates in detail the efforts of Soviet and Eastern Bloc officials to thwart the stations; their tactics ranged from jamming attempts, assassinations of radio journalists, the infiltration of spies onto the radios' staffs, and the bombing of the radios' headquarters. Puddington addresses the controversies that engulfed the stations throughout the Cold War, most notably RFE broadcasts during the Hungarian Revolution that were described as inflammatory and irresponsible. He shows how RFE prevented the Communist authorities from establishing a monopoly on the dissemination of information in Poland and describes the crucial roles played by the stations as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union broke apart. Broadcasting Freedom is also a portrait of the Cold War in America. Puddington offers insights into the strategic thinking of the RFE-RL leadership and those in the highest circles of American government, including CIA directors, secretaries of state, and even presidents.