A compelling look at war and the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom People Power charts the history of the antiwar movement in the United Kingdom from the outbreak of the First World War to present-day conflicts in the Middle East, telling the story of conscientious objectors and others who have been engaged in protest over the past century. Drawing on testimonies from the Imperial War Museum’s vast collection of recordings and documents, the book gives voice to contributors from different backgrounds and explores their wide-ranging reasons for opposing war, as well as the changes and continuity in the movement throughout these years of almost continuous conflict. The book explores the role of key organizations within the movement and tells the personal stories of high-profile individuals, including Sylvia Pankhurst, A. A. Milne, and Vanessa Redgrave, who stood out against conflict. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Imperial War Museum London in 2017, People Power provides an important and compelling look at the most divisive of human undertakings and is an essential part of understanding war as it exists today.

A dramatic account of the Americans who tried to stop their nation from fighting in the First World War—and came close to succeeding. In this “fascinating” (Los Angeles Times) narrative, Michael Kazin brings us into the ranks of one of the largest, most diverse, and most sophisticated peace coalitions in US history. The activists came from a variety of backgrounds: wealthy, middle, and working class; urban and rural; white and black; Christian and Jewish and atheist. They mounted street demonstrations and popular exhibitions, attracted prominent leaders from the labor and suffrage movements, ran peace candidates for local and federal office, met with President Woodrow Wilson to make their case, and founded new organizations that endured beyond the cause. For almost three years, they helped prevent Congress from authorizing a massive increase in the size of the US army—a step advocated by ex-president Theodore Roosevelt. When the Great War’s bitter legacy led to the next world war, the warnings of these peace activists turned into a tragic prophecy—and the beginning of a surveillance state that still endures today. Peopled with unforgettable characters and written with riveting moral urgency, War Against War is a “fine, sorrowful history” (The New York Times) and “a timely reminder of how easily the will of the majority can be thwarted in even the mightiest of democracies” (The New York Times Book Review).

An authoritative, richly illustrated history of six centuries of global protest art Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. From the earliest broadsheets in the 1500s to engravings, photolithographs, prints, posters, murals, graffiti, and political cartoons, these endlessly inventive graphic forms have symbolized and spurred on power struggles, rebellions, spirited causes, and calls to arms. Spanning continents and centuries, Protest! presents a major new chronological look at protest graphics. Beginning in the Reformation, when printed visual matter was first produced in multiples, Liz McQuiston follows the iconic images that have accompanied movements and events around the world. She examines fine art and propaganda, including William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, Thomas Nast’s political caricatures, French and British comics, postcards from the women’s suffrage movement, clothing of the 1960s counterculture, the anti-apartheid illustrated book How to Commit Suicide in South Africa, the “Silence=Death” emblem from the AIDS crisis, murals created during the Arab Spring, electronic graphics from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution, and the front cover of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Providing a visual exploration both joyful and brutal, McQuiston discusses how graphics have been used to protest wars, call for the end to racial discrimination, demand freedom from tyranny, and satirize authority figures and regimes. From the French, Mexican, and Sandinista revolutions to the American civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and the Women’s March of 2017, Protest! documents the integral role of the visual arts in passionate efforts for change.

In this timely and innovative book, Tamar Katriel takes a language and discourse-centred approach to the subject of peace activism in Israel-Palestine, one of the most significant political issues of our time, while also posing more general questions about the role played by language in activist movements – how activists themselves conceptualize their speech and its relationship to action. Viewing activism as a globalized cultural formation that gives shape and meaning to grassroots organizations' struggles for political change, this book explores the relations between the cultural categories of speech and action as constructed and evaluated in activist contexts. It focuses on the specific empirical field of defiant discourse associated with the soldierly role in Israeli culture, using it to offer an in-depth exploration of the cultural underpinnings of defiant speech. Katriel interrogates discourse-centered activism as part of social movements' action repertoires on the one hand, and of the local cultural construction of speech cultures on the other. This is critical reading for all students and scholars studying activism and social movements within linguistics, Middle Eastern studies, peace studies, and communication studies.

'The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound - far more than prayers and anthems - that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we - not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born - will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.' Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Leading historians from around the world reflect on the great revolutions of modern history and explore their lasting legacies. Whether it’s because their rhetoric—“liberty, fraternity, equality”—articulates those ideals to which we most aspire, or because we are shocked by the destructive forces that are unleashed when social conventions break down, revolutions hold a distinct place in the popular imagination. And while all revolutions are born of civil unrest, each is unique in that it’s a product of its time, its society, and its people, and the outcomes vary dramatically, from liberal reform to cruel dictatorship. In Revolutions, the follow-up to the bestselling Histories of Nations, twenty-four leading historians—most writing about their country of origin—consider global revolutions, from England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution in 1776 to the Irish Revolution in the early twentieth century and the Arab Spring of 2011. Reflecting not only on their causes, crises, and outcomes, but also on their legacies and implications in today’s society, these historians answer key questions: What were the main events and dominant ideologies? Who were the leading protagonists? Are revolutionary pasts remembered critically in national history, mythologized, or even hidden? And why? Authoritative and enlightening, Revolutions reflects on the events, ideologies, and legacies of twenty-four revolutions from the seventeenth century to the present day, providing an overview of some of the most politically significant events in modern history.