Music has long been an avenue for protest, seen as a way to promote freedom and equality, instill hope, and fight for change. Popular music, in particular, is considered to be an effective form of subversion and resistance under oppressive circumstances. But, as Nomi Dave shows us in The Revolution’s Echoes, the opposite is also true: music can often support, rather than challenge, the powers that be. Dave introduces readers to the music supporting the authoritarian regime of former Guinean president Sékou Touré, and the musicians who, even long after his death, have continued to praise dictators and avoid dissent. Dave shows that this isn’t just the result of state manipulation; even in the absence of coercion, musicians and their audiences take real pleasure in musical praise of leaders. Time and again, whether in traditional music or in newer genres such as rap, Guinean musicians have celebrated state power and authority. With The Revolution’s Echoes, Dave insists that we must grapple with the uncomfortable truth that some forms of music choose to support authoritarianism, generating new pleasures and new politics in the process.

What was the French Revolution? Was it the triumph of Enlightenment humanist principles, or a violent reign of terror? Did it empower the common man, or just the bourgeoisie? And was it a turning point in world history, or a mere anomaly? E.J. Hobsbawm’s classic historiographic study—written at the very moment when a new set of revolutions swept through the Eastern Bloc and brought down the Iron Curtain—explores how the French Revolution was perceived over the following two centuries. He traces how the French Revolution became integral to nineteenth-century political discourse, when everyone from bourgeois liberals to radical socialists cited these historical events, even as they disagreed on what their meaning. And he considers why references to the French Revolution continued to inflame passions into the twentieth century, as a rhetorical touchstone for communist revolutionaries and as a boogeyman for social conservatives. Echoes of the Marseillaise is a stimulating examination of how the same events have been reimagined by different generations and factions to serve various political agendas. It will give readers a new appreciation for how the French Revolution not only made history, but also shaped our fundamental notions about history itself.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition 'America's impressionism: echoes of a revolution' [held at] Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, October 17, 2020-January 10, 2021; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, January 23-April 11, 2021; San Antonio Museum of Art, June 11-September 5, 2021"--Colophon. According to the Brandywine River Museum of Art website (viewed 10/21/2020), their portion of the exhibition appears to have been rescheduled for October 9, 2021-January 9, 2022.

The year “1968” marked the climax of protests that simultaneously captured most industrialized Western countries. The protesters challenged the institutions of Western democracies, confronting powerful, established parties and groups with an opposing force and public presence that negated traditional structures of institutional authority and criticized the basic assumptions of the post-war order. Exploring the effects the protest movement of 1968 had on the political, social, and symbolic order of the societies they called into question, this volume focuses on the consequences and echoes of 1968 from different perspectives, including history, sociology, and linguistics.

From the first anniversary of the revolution in 1918, 7 November was the day of celebrations that marked the founding of the Soviet regime. Through marches, speeches, military parades, carnivals, and the inaugurations of public monuments and plaques, it was on this key date that the peoples and territories of the USSR were brought together in commemoration of the October socialist revolution. Domestically, the object was to foster unity, provide legitimacy, and facilitate popular mobilisations. Commemorative events were also held outside the USSR, and these practices upheld the regime's international prestige, especially when it presented itself as a model for world revolution. This volume brings together a range of international authors exploring those commemorations from the perspective of the 2017 centenary. Contributors address the international echoes of the celebrations by sketching out a map of the diverse territories commemorating October, including the state spaces of the USSR and other socialist regimes; the associational spaces of the communist Western micro-societies; and the symbolic spaces of newspapers, colours, songs and the communists' revolutionary calendar. The collection is therefore valuable for readers interested in Soviet political rituals and their representations and new appropriations through different spaces, from the interwar period to the Cold War. It, as part of the Studies in Twentieth Century Communism series, offers a unique and vital perspective on the history of the twentieth century.--

Conceived in Crisis argues that the American Revolution was not just the product of the Imperial Crisis, brought on by Parliament’s attempt to impose a new idea of empire on the American colonies. To an equal or greater degree, it was a response to the inability of individual colonial governments to deliver basic services, which undermined their legitimacy. Factional bickering over policy, violent extralegal regulations, and the dreadful experiences of conducting an imperial war while governing a demographically growing and geographically expanding population all led colonists and imperial officials to consider reforming the colonial governments into more powerful and coercive entities. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, Christopher Pearl demonstrates how this history of ineffective colonial governance precipitated a process of state formation that was accelerated by the demands of the Revolutionary War. The powerful state governments that resulted dominated the lives of ordinary people well into the nineteenth century. Conceived in Crisis makes sense of the trajectory from weak colonial to strong revolutionary states, and in so doing explains the limited success of efforts to consolidate state power at the national level during the early Republican period.