Winner of the 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title Battleground Africa traces the Congo Crisis from post-World War II decolonization efforts through Mobutu's second coup in 1965 from a radically new vantage point. Drawing on recently opened archives in Russia and the United States, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, Lisa Namikas addresses the crisis from the perspectives of the two superpowers and explains with superb clarity the complex web of allies, clients, and neutral states influencing U.S.-Soviet competition. Unlike any other work, Battleground Africa looks at events leading up to independence, then considers the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the series of U.N.-supported constitutional negotiations, and the crises of 1964 and 1965. Finding that the U.S. and the USSR each wanted to avoid a major confrontation, but also misunderstood its opponent's goals and wanted to avoid looking weak or losing its political standing in Africa, Namikas argues that a series of exaggerations and misjudgements helped to militarize the crisis, and ultimately, helped militarize the Cold War on the continent.
On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike...
Beyond the Kumbla: Sylvia Wynter and New Conversations attests to the fact that the literary field dedicated to the study of Caribbean women’s writing, inaugurated by Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990) flourishes and lives up to the excitement of its...
In 1928, El Hajj Sharif Abdul Ali, known to the world as Noble Drew Ali, attended the Pan-American Conference in Havana, Cuba. At said conference, also attended by the not-invited Secretary of State for the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, our...
The 25th Anniversary Edition, with a foreword by Barbara Kingsolver "An enthralling story . . . A work of history that reads like a novel." -- Christian Science Monitor "As Hochschild's brilliant book demonstrates, the great Congo scandal prefigured our own...
rom CNN’s Abby Phillip, a triumphant new look at Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns of the 1980s and how they changed Black political power“A joyful, rich, must-read biography of a politician whose flaws and gifts were in constant, intense competition.” ―Jake...