Fashion Game Changers traces radical innovations in Western fashion design from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Challenging the traditional silhouettes of their day, fashion designers such as Madeleine Vionnet and Cristóbal Balenciaga began to liberate the female body from the close-fitting hourglass forms which dominated European and American fashion, instead enveloping bodies in more autonomous garments which often took inspiration from beyond the West. As the century progressed, new generations of avant-garde designers from Rei Kawakubo to Martin Margiela further developed the ideas instigated by their predecessors to defy established notions of femininity in dress, creating space between body and garment. This way, a new relationship between body and dress emerged for the 21st century. With over 200 images and commentaries from an international range of leading fashion curators and historians, this beautifully illustrated book showcases some of the most revolutionary silhouettes and innovative designs of over 100 years of fashion.

The only substantive study of Plutarco El as Calles and the Mexican Revolution, this book traces the remarkable life story of a complex and little-understood, yet key figure in Mexico's history. J rgen Buchenau draws on a rich array of archival evidence from Mexico, the United States, and Europe to explore Calles's origins and political trajectory. He hailed from Sonora, a border state marked by fundamental social and economic change at the turn of the twentieth century. After dabbling in various careers, Calles found the early years of the revolution (1910-1920) afforded him the chance to rise to local and ultimately national prominence. As president from 1924 to 1928, Calles embarked on an ambitious reform program, modernized the financial system, and defended national sovereignty against an interventionist U.S. government. Yet these reforms failed to eradicate underdevelopment, corruption, and social injustice. Moreover, his unyielding campaigns against the Catholic Church and his political enemies earned him a reputation as a repressive strongman. After his term as president, Calles continued to exert broad influence as his country's foremost political figure while three weaker presidents succeeded each other in an atmosphere of constant political crisis. He played a significant role in founding a ruling party that reined in the destructive ambitions of leading army officers and promised to help campesinos and workers attain better living conditions. This dynastic party and its successors, including the present-day Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, or Party of the Institutional Revolution), remained in power until 2000. Many of the institutions and laws forged during the Calles era survived into the present. Through this comprehensive assessment of a quintessential politician in an era dominated by generals, entrepreneurs, and educated professionals, Buchenau opens an illuminating window into the Mexican Revolution and contemporary Mexico.

This book reinvigorates the debate on the Mexican Revolution, exploring what this pivotal event meant to women. The contributors offer a fresh look at women's participation in their homes and workplaces and through politics and community activism. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the volume illuminates the ways women variously accepted, contested, used, and manipulated the revolutionary project. Recovering narratives that have been virtually written out of the historical record, this book brings us a rich and complex array of women's experiences in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era in Mexico.

A political historian examines five of the twentieth century’s most significant revolutions, and the partnerships that led the way. Successful revolution requires two triggering elements: a crisis or conjuncture and revolutionary actors who are organized in a dedicated revolutionary party, armed with a radical ideology, and poised to act. While previous revolutions were ignited by small collectives, many in the twentieth century relied on strategic relationships between two exceptional leaders: Marx and Engels (Communism), Lenin and Trotsky (Russia), Ghandi and Nehru (India), Mao and Zhou (China), and Castro and Guevara (Cuba). These partnerships changed the world. In Revolutionary Pairs, Larry Ceplair tells the stories of five revolutionary struggles through the lens of famous duos. While each relationship was unique?Castro and Guevara bonded like brothers, Mao and Zhou like enemies?in every case, these leaders seized the opportunity for revolution and recognized they could not succeed without the other. The first cross-cultural exploration of revolutionary pairs, this book reveals the undeniable role of personality in modern political change.

Winner of the 1999 Michael C. Meyer Manuscript Prize! This new book examines the social protests of popular groups in urban Mexico during and after the Mexican Revolution and also shows how the revolution inspired women to become activists in these movements. Andrew Grant Wood's well-researched narrative focuses specifically on the complex negotiation between elites and popular groups over the issue of public housing in post-revolutionary Veracruz, Mexico. Wood then compares the Veracruz experience with other tenant movements throughout Mexico and Latin America. He analyzes what the popular groups wanted, what they got, how they got it, and how the changes wrought by the revolution facilitated their actions. Grassroots organizing by house-renters in Veracruz began at a time of 'multiple sovereignty' when ruling elites found themselves in a process of regime change and political realignment. As the movement took shape, tenants expanded their opportunities through a dynamic repertoire of public demonstration, direct action, networking, and constant negotiation with landlords and public officials. During the height of the movement, protesters forced revolutionary elites to respond by requiring them either to negotiate, co-opt, and/or repress members of independent grassroots organizations in order to maintain their rule. The tenant movements demonstrate how ordinary women and men contributed to the remaking of state and civil society relations in post-revolutionary Mexico. This book analyzes the critical roles that women played as leaders and as rank-and-file agitators to keep the movements alive. The author has used a wide variety of primary sources to provide a vibrant portrayal of these urban social protesters. On a larger scale, this book shows that the voices of the urban poor were able to become part of the revolutionary dialogue and ideology. While others have highlighted the role of rural folk such as the Zapatistas, this work allows readers to appreciate the urban side of the po

This book surveys revolutionary socialist ideas and engages a gallery of contentious political thinkers, offering an indispensable assessment of the place of revolutionary collectives in this radical tradition. Beginning with a broad and informative survey of scholarship on V.I. Lenin and “Leninism,” Le Blanc goes on to explore the multifaceted “collective” qualities of the Russian Bolshevik organization. He then turns his attention to several of its central figures as well as a rich variety of activist-intellectuals who in one way or another continued to engage with Lenin’s perspectives after his death, including Leon Trotsky, Alexander Bogdanov, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, and Daniel Bensaïd. The volume concludes by considering related questions which have more recently posed problems within left-wing organizations, gesturing toward the dynamics and needs of future struggles.