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A movement has grown in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia since the 1960s to make mainline churches and their dominant theology a major sanctioning force behind black liberation. This review of 5 books suggests such intellectual conversion, spiritual commitment and enlightened pragmatism are accepted as authentic by black political leaders, and foretell a new pattern of church--state relations. LAB

RECOUNTS HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN POLITICAL THEORY, WITH PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO GROWTH OF RECOGNITION OF RIGHT OF RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION AND SHIFTS OF POSITION OF THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. NOTES CHANGING RELEVANCE OF JUST WAR THEORY AND PACIFISM. CITES FACTORS IN DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY OF REVOLUTION AND LIBERATION. EXAMINES VIEWS OF WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES. COMPARES AFRICAN AND LATIN AMERICAN SITUATIONS.

1 Introduction -- 2 The French Revolution and Napoleonic Era, 1789-1814 -- 3 Restoration, Romanticism, and Emancipatory Impulses, 1815-50 -- 4 Industrialization, Ideological Radicalization, and Empire, 1850-90 -- 5 Nationalism and Alternative Markers of Identity across the Long Nineteenth Century -- 6 European Nationalism between Mass Politics, War, and Peace, 1890-1920 -- 7 Nationalism, Race, and Belonging in an Age of Extremes, 1920-45 -- 8 The Fate of Nationalism in a Divided Europe, 1945-89 -- 9 The Politics of Belonging in Europe after the Cold War -- 10 Conclusion -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation. Max Hastings's graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. Max Hastings deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, top-down analysis, first to paint word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro's Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev's Russia and Kennedy's America; then to describe the nail-biting Thirteen Days in which Armageddon beckoned. Hastings began researching this book believing that he was exploring a past event from twentieth century history. He is as shocked as are millions of us around the world, to discover that the rape of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers. To contend with today's threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss. Only by fearing the worst, he argues, can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.

From the expansionist fervour of the late nineteenth century through the Cold War, dreamers campaigned for Canada's union with the British Caribbean. Dominion over Palm and Pine traces the transnational ebb and flow of these campaigns, situating them in the global history of colonialism and white supremacy, Black activism, and decolonization.

In August 1942, beleaguered Malta was within weeks of surrender to the Axis, because its 300,000 people could no longer be fed. Churchill made a personal decision that at all costs, the 'island fortress' must be saved. This was not merely a matter of strategy, but of national prestige, when Britain's fortunes and morale had fallen to their lowest ebb. The largest fleet the Royal Navy committed to any operation of the western war was assembled to escort fourteen fast merchantmen across a thousand of miles of sea defended by six hundred German and Italian aircraft, together with packs of U-boats and torpedo craft. The Mediterranean battles that ensued between 11 and 15 August were the most brutal of Britain's war at sea, embracing four aircraft-carriers, two battleships, seven cruisers, scores of destroyers and smaller craft. The losses were appalling: defeat seemed to beckon. This is the saga Max Hastings unfolds in his first full length narrative of the Royal Navy, which he believes was the most successful of Britain's wartime services. As always, he blends the 'big picture' of statesmen and admirals with human stories of German U-boat men, Italian torpedo-plane crews, Hurricane pilots, destroyer and merchant-ship captains, ordinary but extraordinary seamen. Operation Pedestal describes catastrophic ship sinkings, including that of the aircraft-carrier Eagle, together with struggles to rescue survivors and salvage stricken ships. Most moving of all is the story of the tanker Ohio, indispensable to Malta's survival, victim of countless Axis attacks. In the last days of the battle, the ravaged hulk was kept under way only by two destroyers, lashed to her sides. Max Hastings describes this as one of the most extraordinary tales he has ever recounted. Until the very last hours, no participant on either side could tell what would be the outcome of an epic of wartime suspense and courage

Vietnam became the Western world's most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh's warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed 2 million people. Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners' victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, Huey pilots from Arkansas. No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings' readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the 21st century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

"'Dreadful murder at Opunake', said the Taranaki Herald, 'Shocking outrage', the Evening Post in Wellington when they learned in November 1880 that a young woman called Mary Dobie had been found lying under a flax bush near Ōpunake on the Taranaki coast with her throat cut so deep her head was almost severed. In the midst of tensions between Māori and Pākehā, the murder ignited questions: Pākehā feared it was an act of political terrorism in response to the state's determination to take the land of the tribes in the region. Māori thought it would be the cue for the state to use force against them, especially the pacifist settlement at Parihaka. Was it rape or robbery, was the killer Māori or Pākehā? In this book, David Hastings takes us back to that lonely road on the Taranaki coast in nineteenth-century New Zealand to unravels the many deaths of Mary Dobie - the murder, the social tensions in Taranaki, the hunt for the killer and the lessons that Māori and Pākehā learnt about the murder and about themselves."--Publisher information