Suchergebnisse

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic filmThe Third Man(1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

A captivating history of a notorious neighborhood and the first book to reveal why London's East End became synonymous with lawlessness and crime Even before Jack the Ripper haunted its streets for prey, London's East End had earned a reputation for immorality, filth, and vice. John Bennett, a writer and tour guide who has walked and researched the area for more than thirty years, delves into four centuries of history to chronicle the crimes, their perpetrators, and the circumstances that made the East End an ideal breeding ground for illegal activity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain's industrial boom drew thousands of workers to the area, leading to overcrowding and squalor. But crime in the area flourished long past the Victorian period. Drawing on original archival history and featuring a fascinating cast of characters including the infamous Ripper, highwayman Dick Turpin, the Kray brothers, and a host of ordinary evildoers, this gripping and deliciously unsavory volume will fascinate Londonphiles and true crime lovers alike

Series: Africa, missing voices series (Online); 5 ; "Dirty Thirties" is the sobriquet commonly applied to the agricultural crisis in the drylands of southern Saskatchewan in Canada that coincided with the Great Depression, and it is generally assumed that prior to this period healthier, normal conditions prevailed. In Happyland, Curtis McManus contends that the "Dirty Thirties" actually began much earlier and were connected only peripherally to the Depression itself. McManus has mined the rarely consulted records of Rural Municipalities in Saskatchewan, as well as government documents, ministerial correspondence, local community histories, newspapers, and publications of relevant government departments, to tell a story of a quarter-century of stubborn persistence but also of absurdity, despair, social dislocation, moral corrosion, and inconsistent and often inept government policy. Thanks to McManuss rare and welcome blend of sound scholarship and living breathing prose, it is a gripping and evocative story as well. ; Yes

The existence of the search and seizure restrictions encoded in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the result of a two part historical development that took place simultaneously in England and the American colonies. Severe legislative restrictions on the press were largely responsible for the developments in England, while in the colonies it was British tax and trade regulations that spawned the changes. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, the primary catalyst was the government's use of general searches in the enforcement of those laws. It was the continued abuse of general searches despite the public's growing opposition to them that would ultimately prove responsible for the expression of reasonable search and seizure guidelines in the Bill of Rights.