This study is an attempt to show how religious, kinship and factional ties cut across class alignments, leading to the communalization of class struggle between the peasants and the exploiting classes in East Bengal during 1920-1947. "During a substantial stay in some East Bengal villages in the summer of 1971, when East Pakistan was in the traumatic process of being transformed into Bangladesh, it first dawned upon me that peasants were not stupid, devoid of political consciousness. Discussions with different types of peasants revealed that at least the upper echelons were aware of the implications of the liberation struggle for Bangladesh and the superpower involvement in it. Richard Nixon and Indira Gandhi were familiar names. Ordinary peasants often quoted the Bengali news readers and commentators of the BBC world service and the Voice of America. Well-to-do peasants who owned transistor radio sets regularly tuned into the British, American and Indian radio stations. Many inquisitive and worried peasants asked me (then a fresh graduate from Dhaka University) how their cherished Sonar Bangla (golden Bengal) would improve their socio-economic conditions. Many peasants also took part in the liberation struggle as members of the Mukti Bahini or freedom fighters. Almost everyone, with a few exceptions who collaborated with the Pakistan armed forces, was a keen supporter of Bangladesh. After the emergence of Bangladesh, things did not change to the expectations of the masses, but rather deteriorated so much that Henry Kissinger is said to have coined the phrase ''bottomless basket"" as a denotation for Bangladesh, because of the rampant corruption of a big section of the Bengali bourgeoisie at that time. I was provoked to write the history of the peasants' glorious role in the Liberation Struggle which was being overshadowed by claims and counter-claims of heroism and sacrifice by members of the privileged, parasitical urban elites. This work may be regarded as a prelude to the history of the freedom struggle that eventually led to the creation of Bangladesh. This is an attempt to shed light on the peasant politics, almost synonymous with Muslim politics in the region, during the significant period between 1920 and 194 7 when East Bengal was going through the political process that culminated in the creation of East Pakistan in 194 7."

First published in 1977, The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984 is a significant contribution to history.

Tracing the way in which the agrarian myth has emerged and re-emerged over the past century in ideology shared by populism, postmodernism and the political right, the argument in this book is that at the centre of this discourse about the cultural identity of 'otherness'/ 'difference' lies the concept of and innate 'peasant-ness'. In a variety of contextually-specific discursive forms, the 'old' populism of the 1890s and the nationalism and fascism in Europe, America and Asia during the 1920s and 1930s were all informed by the agrarian myth. The postmodern 'new' populism and the 'new' right, both of which emerged after the 1960s and consolidated during the 1990s, are also structured discursively by the agrarian myth, and with it the ideological reaffirmation of peasant essentialism.

In the tumultuous years after the revolution of 1917, the traditional cutlure of Imperial Russia was both destroyed and preserved, as a new Soviet culture began to take shape. This book focuses on the interaction between the emerging political and cultural policies of the Soviet regime and the deeply held traditional values of the worker and peasant masses.

Because advances made by science and technology far outstripped improvements in human nature, utopian dreams of perfect societies in the twentieth century quickly metamorphosed into dystopian nightmares, which undermined individual identity and threatened the integrity of the family. Armed with technological and scientific tools, totalizing social systems found in literature abolish the distinction between public and private life and thus penetrate and corrupt the very core of all utopian blueprints and visions: the education of future generations. At the heart of the family, mothers as parents transmit their diverse cultural traditions while socializing their children and thus compete with ideologically driven systems that usurp their role as educators. Mothers and Masters in Contemporary Utopian and Dystopian Literature focuses, therefore, on the thematic importance of this and other maternal roles for generic metamorphosis: the shift to dystopia invariably is signaled by the inversion of traditional maternal roles. The longevity of the utopian-dystopian literary tradition and persistence of the maternal model of human relationships serve as points of reference in this post-modern age of relative cultural values. Meta-utopian exploration of this thematic tension between utopia and dystopia reminds us that «no place» may not be home, but we need to keep going there.

The controversial thesis at the center of this study is that, despite the importance of slavery in Athenian society, the most distinctive characteristic of Athenian democracy was the unprecedented prominence it gave to free labor. Wood argues that the emergence of the peasant as citizen, juridically and politically independent, accounts for much that is remarkable in Athenian political institutions and culture. From a survey of historical writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the focus of which distorted later debates, Wood goes on to take issue with influential arguments, such as those of G.E.M. de Ste Croix, about the importance of slavery in agricultural production. The social, political and cultural influence of the peasant-citizen is explored in a way which questions some of the most cherished conventions of Marxist and non-Marxist historiography.

The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.