Suchergebnisse

"America has long been criticized for refusing to give harbor to the Jews of Europe as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. Now a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum scholar tells the extraordinary story of the War Refugee Board, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's little-known effort late in the war to save the Jews who remained. In January 1944, a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle accompanied his boss to a meeting with the president. For more than a decade, the Jews of Germany had sought refuge in the United States and had been stymied by Congress's harsh immigration policy. Now the State Department was refusing to authorize relief funds Pehle wanted to use to help Jews escape Nazi territory. At the meeting, Pehle made his best case--and prevailed. Within days, FDR created the War Refugee Board, empowering it to rescue the victims of Nazi persecution, and put John Pehle in charge. Over the next twenty months, Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, pirates, diplomats, millionaires, confidence men, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, smuggled food into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and ships to transport Romanian refugees to Palestine. Altogether, they saved tens of thousands of lives. In Rescue Board, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum scholar Rebecca Erbelding uses unrivaled access to archival materials and fresh interviews with survivors to tell the dramatic unknown story of America's last-ditch effort to save the Jews of Europe"--

"People of African descent have been active in Western art music since its inception. Black performers were valued members of court orchestras starting in the early 1500s, and since the 18th century have been acclaimed as both performers and composers in locales ranging from Europe and the United States to sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. However, this rich legacy remains little known. John Gray's monumental new work seeks to correct that oversight. A long-awaited sequel to his acclaimed Blacks in Classical Music it draws on more than three decades of research to survey the vast amount of print, digital and archival material that has emerged since the late 1980s. Fully annotated and cross-referenced it offers a comprehensive overview of all scholarly writings on the subject as well as a more selective representation of reportage from the mainstream and Black press.This new edition is organized in three easy to navigate sections--General Works; Regional Studies; and Biographical and Critical Studies--allowing users to quickly access the information they need. It covers all forms of chamber and symphonic music as well as every variety of sacred and secular vocal music from art songs and concert spirituals to choral music and opera. The book's large Regional Studies section chronicles developments in more than 30 American states and almost 60 foreign countries, while its even larger biographical section documents the lives and work of some 2000 artists, ensembles, and organizations. More than 600 of these are composers, along with an equally impressive number of singers, instrumentalists, librettists, music educators, and others. The work concludes with a detailed subject index that offers a key to all of the book's sections and another way to quickly pinpoint citations by musical idiom, instrument, topic, place, personal name, and composition."--Publisher's website

The International Atomic Energy Agency, which sends inspectors around the world to prevent states from secretly developing nuclear bombs, has one of the most important jobs in international security. At the same time, the IAEA is a global hub for the exchange of nuclear science and technology for peaceful purposes. Yet spreading nuclear materials and know-how around the world bears the unwanted risk of helping what the agency aims to halt: the emergence of new nuclear weapon states. In this book, Elisabeth Roehrlich unravels the IAEA's paradoxical mission of sharing nuclear knowledge and technology while seeking to deter nuclear weapon programs. Founded in 1957 in an act of unprecedented cooperation between the Cold War superpowers, the agency developed from a small technical bureaucracy in war-torn Vienna to a key organization in the global nuclear order. Roehrlich argues that the IAEA's dual mandate, though apparently contradictory, was pivotal in ensuring the organization's legitimacy, acceptance, and success. For its first decade of existence, the IAEA was primarily a scientific and technical organization; it was not until the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons entered into force in 1970 that the agency took on the far-reaching verification and inspection role for which it is now most widely known. While the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Iran negotiations made the IAEA's name famous, the organization's remarkable history remains strikingly absent from public knowledge. Drawing on extensive archival research, including firsthand access to newly opened records at the IAEA Archives in Vienna, this volume provides the first comprehensive, empirically grounded, and independent study on the history of the IAEA. Roehrlich also interviewed leading policymakers and officials, including Hans Blix and Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency's former heads. This book offers insight not only for students, scholars, and policy experts but for anyone interested in the history of the nuclear age, the Cold War, and the role of international organizations in shaping our world.