Synopses & Reviews
In this lavishly illustrated volume, Sean Dennis Cashman surveys the history of civil rights in twentieth-century America. The book charts the principal course of civil rights against the dramatic backdrop of two world wars, the Great Depression, the affluent society of the postwar world, the cultural and social agitation of the 1960s, and the emergence of the new conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s.
Cashman describes the profound upheaval that African-Americans experienced as they moved from the outright racism of the South through the Great Migration northward from 1915, and sets the contribution of African-American leaders within their historical context: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and many others. The work also describes the shift in emphasis in the movement from legal cases brought before the courts to mass protest movements and, later, the change in direction from civil rights to Black Power and, later, Pan-Africanism.
Far more than just a history of civil rights leaders, this book explains how the achievements of African-American writers, artists, singers, and athletes contributed to a wider understanding of the humanity and culture of black Americans. Cashman details, among others, the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance, the films of Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson, and the works of Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. Written in an engaging style, the text is accompanied by a wealth of illustrations, some well known, others in print for the first time.
Review
"Schulze's contribution is important to ongoing global political events. In sum, Schulze's work is interesting and highly relevant..comprehensive and convincing."-Journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas,
Synopsis
The Islamic world--defined as those regions in which Islam is the dominant or single most important religion--covers territories as far apart as Morocco and Indonesia, Somalia, and Bosnia and includes an extraordinary range of societies and cultures. In
A Modern History of the Islamic World, eminent scholar Reinhard Schulze charts the history of these societies in the twentieth century, revealing what they have in common as well as their equally profound differences.
Rather than stringing together individual studies of different countries, the book is structured chronologically, tracing political change in the context of culture and society. Schulze opens with a survey of the impact of colonialism and its attendant modernizing effects on the Islamic world. He then moves on to examine the rise of bourgeois nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, the era of independence movements, the relationship between Islamic cultures and the "republican" political culture of the Third World, the reassertion of Islamic ideologies in the 1970s and 1980s and, finally, the issues surrounding the relationship between Islamic culture and civil society that dominated debate in the 1990s.
A Modern History of the Islamic World provides a clear overview of the ways in which twentieth century modernism affected the societies of the Islamic world and how modernism was developed from an Islamic perspective.
About the Author
Sean Dennis Cashman is author of six books on American history, five of them published by New York University Press including America in the Gilded Age, America in the Age of the Titans, America in the Twenties and Thirties, and America, Roosevelt, and World War II.