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  [Introduction to] Heroes of Richmond: Four Centuries of Courage, Dignity, and Virtue

  Scott T. Allison

  A gorgeous river city blessed with abundant resources, Richmond, Virginia has also been called the city of “contradictions” and “crises”, a city with a “complicated history” replete with “struggles and wounds”. Richmond has been a magnet for heroism and villainy, a place where the best and worst of human nature have collided over several centuries. This volume, Heroes of Richmond: Four Centuries of Courage, Dignity, and Virtue, captures the complex heroic history of a complex city. Authored by a group of outstanding students at the University of Richmond, this book provides coverage of Richmond’s heroes from the first Euro settlements in the early 1600s to the present day. The book offers a review of heroism in Richmond across a wide variety of domains. The authors provide an analysis of social activists John Mitchell, Jr., and Oliver Hill; groundbreaking educators such as Maggie Walker, Virginia Randolph, and May Keller; political greats such as Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Douglas Wilder, and Mary Sue Terry; selfless heroes such as Mary Elizabeth Browser, E. Claiborne Robins, and Lora Robins; and iconic legends such as Pocahontas, William Byrd II, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Ashe.

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  [Introduction to] Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership

  Scott T. Allison, George R. Goethals, and Roderick M. Kramer

  Over the past decade, research and theory on heroism and heroic leadership has greatly expanded, providing new insights on heroic behavior. The Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership brings together new scholarship in this burgeoning field to build an important foundation for further multidisciplinary developments. In its three parts, "Origins of Heroism," "Types of Heroism," and "Processes of Heroism," distinguished social scientists and researchers explore topics such as morality, resilience, courage, empathy, meaning, altruism, spirituality, and transformation. This handbook provides a much-needed consolidation and synthesis for heroism and heroic leadership scholars and graduate students.

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  [Introduction to] The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America

  Edward L. Ayers

  A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective.

  At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable.

  In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. He does this by setting up at ground level in the Great Valley counties of Augusta, Virginia, and Franklin, Pennsylvania, communities that shared a prosperous landscape but were divided by the Mason-Dixon Line. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union.

  Ayers deftly shows throughout how the dynamics of political opposition drove these momentous events, transforming once unimaginable outcomes into fact. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil

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  [Introduction to] Psychopathology of American Capitalism: Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice

  Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

  This book synthesizes psychoanalytic and Marxist techniques in order to illuminate the resistance to a socialization of the American economy, the protectionist discourses of anomalous American capitalism, and the suppression of the capitalist welfare state. After the Second World War, Democrats and Republicans effectively eliminated the communist and socialist parties from the American political spectrum and suppressed their allied labor movements. The right-wing shift of both parties fabricated a false opposition of left and right that does not correspond to political oppositions in the industrialized democracies. Marxist perspectives can account for the massive inequality of the political economy, but they are insufficient for illuminating its preservation. Psychoanalysis is necessary in order to explain why Americans continue to vote within a two-party system that neglects the lower classes, and why the working class tends to vote against its own interests. The psychoanalytic techniques employed include doubling, repetition, displacement, condensation, inversion, denial, fetishizing, and cognitive repression. In examining the fixation upon the proxy binary of Democrat vs. Republican, which suppresses the true opposition of left vs. right and neutralizes alternatives, the work analyses numerous contemporary political issues through applications of Marxist psychoanalytic theory.

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  [Introduction to] Natsional-Bol'shevizm: stalinskaia massovaia kul'tura i formirovanie russkogo natsional'nogo samosoznaniia, 1931-1956

  David Brandenberger

  During the 1930s, Stalin and his entourage rehabilitated famous names from the Russian national past in a propaganda campaign designed to mobilize Soviet society for the coming war. Legendary heroes like Aleksandr Nevskii and epic events like the Battle of Borodino quickly eclipsed more conventional communist slogans revolving around class struggle and proletarian internationalism. In a provocative study, David Brandenberger traces this populist "national Bolshevism" into the 1950s, highlighting the catalytic effect that it had on Russian national identity formation.

  Beginning with national Bolshevism's origins within Stalin's inner circle, Brandenberger next examines its projection into Soviet society through education and mass culture--from textbooks and belletristic literature to theater, opera, film, and the arts. Brandenberger then turns to the popular reception of this propaganda, uncovering glimpses of Stalin-era public opinion in letters, diaries, and secret police reports.

  Controversial insofar as Soviet social identity is commonly associated with propaganda promoting class consciousness, this study argues that Stalinist ideology was actually more Russian nationalist than it was proletarian internationalist. National Bolshevism helps to explain not only why this genre of populism survived Stalin's death in 1953, but why it continues to resonate among Russians today.

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  Leading Change: George Washington and Establishing the Presidency (Lessons in Leadership Series, Vol. 4)

  Denver Brunsman and George R. Goethals

  On April 14, 1789, George Washington cordially received a weary visitor who had traveled for seven days from New York City to deliver a message from Congress. Reading formally from a letter by Senator John Langdon, Charles Thomson, secretary to Congress, informed Washington (most probably in his private study) that he had been unanimously elected the first President of the United States. Washington accepted the position with a prepared statement of his own. This crucial moment in American history ignited a series of changes to the United States’ new republican system of government – changes that still affect the American political system more than 200 years later. This case details the creation of the executive office by our country’s most influential political leader while discussing how today’s leaders can follow his example and achieve real, positive change.

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  [Introduction to] The Ethics of Ability and Enhancement

  Jessica Flanigan and Terry L. Price

  This book explores our ethical responsibilities regarding health in general and disabilities in particular. Disability studies and human enhancement stand out as two emerging areas of research in medical ethics, prompting debates into ethical questions of identity, embodiment, discrimination, and accommodation, as well as questions concerning distributive justice and limitations on people’s medical rights. Edited by two ethicist philosophers, this book combines their mastery of the theoretical debates surrounding disability and human enhancement with attention to real world questions that health workers and patients may face. By including a wide range of high-quality voices and perspectives, the book provides an invaluable resource for scholars who are working on this important and emerging area of leadership and health care ethics.

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  [Introduction to] Feeding the Flock: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Church and Praxis

  Terryl L. Givens

  Feeding the Flock, the second volume of Terryl L. Givens's landmark study of the foundations of Mormon thought and practice, traces the essential contours of Mormon practice as it developed from Joseph Smith to the present. Despite the stigmatizing fascination with its social innovations (polygamy, communalism), its stark supernaturalism (angels, gold plates, and seer stones), and its most esoteric aspects (a New World Garden of Eden, sacred undergarments), as well as its long-standing outlier status among American Protestants, Givens reminds us that Mormonism remains the most enduring-and thriving-product of the nineteenth-century's religious upheavals and innovations. Because Mormonism is founded on a radically unconventional cosmology, based on unusual doctrines of human nature, deity, and soteriology, a history of its development cannot use conventional theological categories. Givens has structured these volumes in a way that recognizes the implicit logic of Mormon thought. The first book, Wrestling the Angel, centered on the theoretical foundations of Mormon thought and doctrine regarding God, humans, and salvation. Feeding the Flock considers Mormon practice, the authority of the institution of the church and its priesthood, forms of worship, and the function and nature of spiritual gifts in the church's history, revealing that Mormonism is still a tradition very much in the process of formation.

  At once original and provocative, engaging and learned, Givens offers the most sustained account of Mormon thought and practice yet written.

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  [Introduction to] Women and Leadership: History, Theories, and Case Studies

  George R. Goethals and Crystal L. Hoyt

  The compact Women and Leadership: History, Theories, and Case Studies, provides valuable research by experts on leadership and women's history to help students and citizens who want a more nuanced explanation of what we know about women as leaders and about how they have led in different fields, in different parts of the world, and in past centuries.

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  [Introduction to] The Dream is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia

  Julian Maxwell Hayter

  Once the capital of the Confederacy and the industrial hub of slave-based tobacco production, Richmond, Virginia has been largely overlooked in the context of twentieth century urban and political history. By the early 1960s, the city served as an important center for integrated politics, as African Americans fought for fair representation and mobilized voters in order to overcome discriminatory policies. Richmond’s African Americans struggled to serve their growing communities in the face of unyielding discrimination. Yet, due to their dedication to strengthening the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African American politicians held a city council majority by the late 1970s.
  
  In The Dream Is Lost, Julian Maxwell Hayter describes more than three decades of national and local racial politics in Richmond and illuminates the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation. He uses the city’s experience to explain the political abuses that often accompany American electoral reforms and explores the arc of mid-twentieth-century urban history. In so doing, Hayter not only reexamines the civil rights movement’s origins, but also seeks to explain the political, economic, and social implications of the freedom struggle following the major legislation of the 1960s.
  
  Hayter concludes his study in the 1980s and follows black voter mobilization to its rational conclusion—black empowerment and governance. However, he also outlines how Richmond’s black majority council struggled to the meet the challenges of economic forces beyond the realm of politics. The Dream Is Lost vividly illustrates the limits of political power, offering an important view of an underexplored aspect of the post–civil rights era.

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  [Introduction to] The Writing of the Nation: Expressing Identity through Congolese Literary Texts and Films

  Kasongo Mulenda Kapanga

  The book is the study of literary texts and films seen as the manifestations of the Congolese consciousness and a response to the colonial discourse of denial, deletion and co-optation. It is a historical and ideological account of how writers and filmmakers have conceptualized the DRC or Zaire as a space supposedly out of a chaotic mode in need of domestication. Extending back to the precolonial times, it studies the epistemic foundations that underlie literary writings at various historical periods: an area to discover, to evangelize to exploit and to civilize. At the same time, the book addresses the problematic issue of nation-building and national identity that has dominated Postcolonial discourses in the last two decades. It examines postulations of national consciousness formation as a sedimentation drawn from various elements of which the result is a new cultural and political space. In studying literary texts and films, it identifies elements of national identity (political discourse, education system, history, ethnic identification) consciously or unconsciously articulated in the claims of commonality. The book highlights three factors of great importance that paved the way to a national discourse. First, the African hinterland has always proved an impenetrable entity to the outside eye. As a consequence, the hinterland came to be associated with three main characteristics (no man’s land, threat to human reason, chaos) descriptive of an unfathomable abyss that swallow’s life. Secondly, the heart of darkness allegory has acquired a metonymic value on which pronouncements on the Congo, however outrageous, find their foundation. Thirdly, contrary to most literary accounts (Kadima-Nzuji, Ngandu Nkashama, Riva), the book delves into the study of colonial and exotic literatures as historical steps toward the rise of modern Congolese literature. It also looks at the role orality has played in modern Congolese literature and at on the way the consciousness of belonging to the nation has been expressed by mainstream writers (V. Y. Mudimbe, Ngandu Nkashama, Ngal). Finally, it examines the ideological and historical elements of identity construction by Congolese filmmakers (Ngangura, Balufu Kanyinka and Raoul Peck) in their works as instances of agency. The book ends with questions related to recent Congolese writers influenced by conditions of globalization, location and exile.

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  [Introduction to] Augustine's Leaders

  Peter Kaufman

  In Augustine's Leaders, Peter Iver Kaufman works from the premise that appropriations of Augustine endorsing contemporary liberal efforts to mix piety and politics are mistaken--that Augustine was skeptical about the prospects for involving Christianity in meaningful political change. His skepticism raises several questions for historians. What roles did one of the most influential Christian theologians set for religious and political leaders? What expectations did he have for emperors, statesmen, bishops, and pastors? What obstacles did he presume they would face? And what pastoral, polemical, and political challenges shaped Augustine's expectations--and frustrations? Augustine's Leaders answers those questions and underscores the leadership its subject provided as he continued to commend humility and compassion in religious and political cultures that seemed to him to reward, above all, celebrity and self-interest.

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  [Introduction to] Cultural Icons and Cultural Leadership

  Peter Kaufman and Kristin M.S. Bezio

  Contributions to this book probe the contexts–both social and spiritual–from which select iconic figures emerge and discover how to present themselves as innovators and cultural leaders, as well as draw material into forms that subsequent generations consider innovative or emblematic. The overall import of the book is to locate producers of culture such as authors, poets, singers, and artists as leaders, both in their respective genres, and of culture and society more broadly through the influence exerted by their works.

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  Clara turned Blue

  Georgia Leipold-Vitiello and Brooke Inman

  Clara Turned Blue is part of The Picture Book Project collaboration with Richmond Young Writers.
  
  Written by Georgia Leipold-Vitiello. Illustrated by Brooke Inman, 2017.
  
  Summary of Book: No one seems to be able to see something that seems so clear to Clara: she's utterly and totally (and literally) blue. What does it mean? What does it feel like? This important book helps give voice to feelings of sadness when everything's supposed to feel okay.

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  [Introduction to] Escape from Democracy: the Role of Experts and the Public in Economic Policy

  David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart

  The orthodox view of economic policy holds that public deliberation sets the goals or ends, and then experts select the means to implement these goals. This assumes that experts are no more than trustworthy servants of the public interest. David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart examine the historical record to consider cases in which experts were trusted with disastrous results, such as eugenics, the regulatory use of security ratings, and central economic planning. This history suggests that experts have not only the public interest but also their own interests to consider. The authors then recover and extend an alternative view of economic policy that subjects experts' proposals to further discussion, resulting in transparency and ensuring that the public obtains the best insights of experts in economics while avoiding pitfalls such as expert bias.
  
  

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  [Chapter 1 from] African Americans in White Suburbia: Social Networks and Political Behavior

  Ernest McGowen III

  Despite decades of progress, African Americans living in largely white affluent suburbs still often find themselves caught between the two worlds of race and class. High economic status has afforded them considerable employment opportunities and political resources—but not necessarily neighbors, coworkers, or local candidates or office holders who share or even understand their concerns. How does such an environment affect the political behavior of African Americans who have strong racial identifications and policy preferences? This is the question Ernest B. McGowen III asks in African Americans in White Suburbia.

  McGowen uses a combination of surveys to understand the attitudes of affluent suburban African Americans, compare these attitudes to those of their white neighbors, and to African Americans in the city and so-called “black ring” suburbs. This detailed study—which ranges from participation in black churches and other institutions to attitudes towards government and affirmative action—reveals that suburban African Americans feel their minority status acutely. As a result, they tend to seek out more agreeable networks that reinforce their racial identity, such as churches, fraternal organizations, and charities in black neighborhoods they’ve left behind.

  Arriving at a moment of great controversy over racial disparities and division, his timely study offers invaluable insight into the complex nexus of race and class in America.

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  [Introduction to] Crónicas travestis: El periodismo transgresor de Alfonsina Storni, Clarice Lispector y María Moreno

  Mariela Méndez

  En Crónicas travestis Mariela Méndez ilumina las ingeniosas y calculadas estrategias “travestidas” desplegadas en el periodismo y la actividad cultural de Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) y María Moreno (1947) para poner al descubierto, desenredar y desafiar las normas de género sexual vigentes en sus épocas. Aunque las tres son también conocidas por su producción literaria en otros géneros–y en los casos de Storni y Lispector, aún más reconocidas en ellos que por su labor periodística-Méndez demuestra cómo la faceta pública del periodismo, su carácter performativo, y su intrincada relación con el campo cultural más amplio revelan las negociaciones necesarias para que una mujer imaginara y confeccionara una identidad propia como escritora. Aunque el papel del periodismo literario en la compleja relación de las mujeres en un campo cultural empapado de restricciones de género sexual ya se había señalado, Méndez forma parte de una nueva generación de investigadores que profundizan nuestro entendimiento con el rigor conceptual que requiere el trabajo de un extenso e intensivo rescate archivístico. En Crónicas travestis, libro imprescindible en esta nueva tendencia crítica sobre la labor periodística y cultural de mujeres en Latinoamérica, el aporte original de Méndez no se limita a su impresionante entretejido de perspicacias analíticas, hilos teóricos, contextos históricos, y un productivo diálogo con la crítica existente, todo expresado con un estilo accesible y acogedor. Este libro se destaca aún más en la insuperable investigación de Méndez sobre los órganos periodísticos en sí: los editores, los patrocinadores publicitarios, y los públicos lectores tanto reales como imaginados. Esta esmerada labor investigadora incluye un extenso trabajo de archivo además de investigaciones sobre la historia cultural pertinente y los destacados movimientos de mujeres en cada época. El abundante pero siempre eficaz material contextual enriquece y agudiza la siempre lúcida y persuasiva voz crítica de Méndez en un libro que resalta las intrincadas negociaciones de tres consumadas mujeres intelectuales para superar las pautas de la escritura y de los medios periodísticos que pretendían recetar su participación en las dinámicas conversaciones culturales de su momento.
  
  -Composed by Vicky Unruh, Professor Emerita, University of Kansas.

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  [Introduction to] Reasoning Against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944

  Manuella Meyer

  Reasoning against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944 examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry, looking at how its practitioners fashioned themselves as the key architects in the project of national regeneration. The book's narrative involves a cast of varied characters in an unstable context: psychiatrists, Catholic representatives, spiritist leaders, state officials, and the mentally ill, all caught in the shifting landscape of modern state formation. Manuella Meyer investigates the key junctures at which psychiatrists sought to establish their authority and the ways in which their adversaries challenged this authority. These moments serve as productive points from which to explore the moral and political economies of mental health, demonstrating how sociopolitical negotiations shape psychiatric professionalization. Meyer argues that the gradual adoption of punitive configurations of insanity helped sanction during a time of rapid socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformation.

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  [Chapter 1 and 2 from] Partidos políticos y Estado de Bienestar en América Latina

  Jennifer Pribble

  El Estado de bienestar se construyó con el objetivo de ofrecer protección social a todas las personas, especialmente a los grupos más pobres y vulnerables de la sociedad. Sin embargo, no todos los sistemas de protección social son iguales. Históricamente, los sistemas de protección social en América Latina registran grandes brechas de cobertura y altos niveles de desigualdad en la distribución de los beneficios. Desde fines de los años noventa, varios países de la región tratan de afrontar estos retos promulgando una serie de reformas en salud pública, asistencia social y política educativa. Si bien algunas de estas iniciativas han movilizado al Estado de bienestar en dirección de un mayor universalismo, otras han mantenido la segmentación existente, e incluso algunas resultaron en mayor regresividad. Este libro analiza esta variedad de iniciativas para los casos de Argentina, Chile, Uruguay y Venezuela. Entre otros resultados, se muestra cómo el diseño de las políticas previas, la intensidad de la competencia electoral, y el carácter de los partidos políticos influyen en el tipo de reforma que cada país ha adoptado.

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  [Introduction to] Representing Heresy in Early Modern France

  Gabriella Scarlatta and Lidia Radi

  Heresy is a fluid concept, not easy to define or pinpoint, and certainly one that defies religious and political boundaries. Heresy could be said to be a cultural construct manufactured by competing narratives. The articles in this volume examine the varieties of perceptions and representations of heresy in early modern France. In so doing, they reveal that such perceptions and representations have had more of an impact on our understanding of heresy than heresy itself. This, in turn, provides us with new and stimulating viewpoints on how heresy was recognized and depicted at the intersections of faith, art, gender, poetry, history, and politics.

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  [Introduction to] Ambassadors of the Working Class: Argentina's International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas

  Ernesto Seman

  In 1946 Juan Perón launched a populist challenge to the United States, recruiting an army of labor activists to serve as worker attachés at every Argentine embassy. By 1955, over five hundred would serve, representing the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country in history. A meatpacking union leader taught striking workers in Chicago about rising salaries under Perón. A railroad motorist joined the revolution in Bolivia. A baker showed Soviet workers the daily caloric intake of their Argentine counterparts. As Ambassadors of the Working Class shows, the attachés' struggle against US diplomats in Latin America turned the region into a Cold War battlefield for the hearts of the working classes. In this context, Ernesto Semán reveals, for example, how the attachés' brand of transnational populism offered Fidel Castro and Che Guevara their last chance at mass politics before their embrace of revolutionary violence. Fiercely opposed by Washington, the attachés’ project foundered, but not before US policymakers used their opposition to Peronism to rehearse arguments against the New Deal's legacies.

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  [Introduction to] Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights

  David E. Wilkins and Shelly Hulse Wilkins

  While the number of federally recognized Native nations in the United States are increasing, the population figures for existing tribal nations are declining. This depopulation is not being perpetrated by the federal government, but by Native governments that are banishing, denying, or disenrolling Native citizens at an unprecedented rate. Since the 1990s, tribal belonging has become more of a privilege than a sacred right. Political and legal dismemberment has become a national phenomenon with nearly eighty Native nations, in at least twenty states, terminating the rights of indigenous citizens.
  
  The first comprehensive examination of the origins and significance of tribal disenrollment, Dismembered examines this disturbing trend, which often leaves the disenrolled tribal members with no recourse or appeal. At the center of the issue is how Native nations are defined today and who has the fundamental rights to belong. By looking at hundreds of tribal constitutions and talking with both disenrolled members and tribal officials, the authors demonstrate the damage this practice is having across Indian Country and ways to address the problem.

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  [Introduction to] Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England

  Douglas L. Winiarski

  This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors of today's evangelical movement, bitterly assaulted the Congregational establishment.

  The 1740s and 1750s were the dark night of the New England soul, as men and women groped toward a restructured religious order. Conflict transformed inclusive parishes into exclusive networks of combative spiritual seekers. Then as now, evangelicalism emboldened ordinary people to question traditional authorities. Their challenge shattered whole communities.

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  [Introduction to] Frontiers in Spiritual Leadership: Discovering the Better Angels of Our Nature

  Scott T. Allison, Craig T. Kocher, and George R. Goethals

  This book reviews the landscape of spiritual leadership and the spiritual principles that are fundamental to effective and inspired leadership, celebrating the many gifted and enlightened individuals whose leadership embodies the most exquisite qualities of humanity.

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  [Introduction to] Arabia Incognita

  Sheila Carapico

  In 2011, millions of Yemenis calling themselves the Peaceful Youth joyfully joined the “Arab Spring.” Four years later, popular aspirations for social justice and a serious attempt at national dialogue were thwarted by deadly domestic power struggles. When the pro-Saudi, US-supported government fled to Riyadh in April 2015, the Kingdom led a multinational military intervention inside Yemen. By December, daily bombardment had killed thousands of fighters and civilians, injured and displaced hundreds of thousands, and decimated homes and infrastructure. A naval blockade cut off access to fuel, medicine, and food for millions. In addition to this humanitarian catastrophe, the ensuing chaos emboldened al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and led the group ISIS to expand there.
  
  Arabia Incognita helps readers understand this tragic misadventure by tracing the Arabian Peninsula’s modern history from Yemen’s strong anti-imperial movement of the 1960s through the present series of conflicts. The majority of the essays focus on Yemen’s colorful and complex internal socio-political dynamics; others draw attention to parallel, often inter-connected disharmonies inside the Gulf’s petro-kingdoms; wider regional upheavals and movements; and America’s deep, vast and very problematic security involvement in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.