The Citizen And The Sword

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Democracy's Double-Edged Sword

Author : Catie Snow Bailard
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421415259
Total Pages : 175 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Democracy's Double-Edged Sword by : Catie Snow Bailard

Download or read book Democracy's Double-Edged Sword written by Catie Snow Bailard and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "As digital media becomes more omnipresent in our lives, it becomes ever more important for political scientists and communication scholars to understand its influence on all aspects of the political process--from campaigning to governance. Catie Snow Bailard seeks to determine the Internet's influence on citizens' evaluations of their governments' performance, particularly whether the Internet influences their satisfaction regarding the quality of democratic practices available in their nation. While itis clearly important to understand how the Internet can streamline political organization once people are moved to action, the discipline has afforded less attention to whether the Internet influences citizens at this more foundational, antecedent stage of political action. Bailard originates two theories for democratization specialists to consider: mirror-holding and window-opening. Mirror-holding explores how accessing the Internet allows citizens to see a more detailed and nuanced view of their own government's performance, dirty laundry and all. Window-opening, on the other hand, enables those same citizens to see how other governments' perform in general, particularly in comparison to their own. The author offers a theory of the impact of Internet use on evaluations of government, as well as tests of that theory at the country and individual levels based on survey data collected in 73 countries and two field experiments conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Tanzania"--

The Sword and the Shield

Author : Peniel E. Joseph
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 1541617851
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (416 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sword and the Shield by : Peniel E. Joseph

Download or read book The Sword and the Shield written by Peniel E. Joseph and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century's most iconic African American leaders. To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives. This is a strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define.

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other

Author : Carol Reardon
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807882577
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other by : Carol Reardon

Download or read book With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other written by Carol Reardon and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Civil War began, Northern soldiers and civilians alike sought a framework to help make sense of the chaos that confronted them. Many turned first to the classic European military texts from the Napoleonic era, especially Antoine Henri Jomini's Summary of the Art of War. As Carol Reardon shows, Jomini's work was only one voice in what ultimately became a lively and contentious national discourse about how the North should conduct war at a time when warfare itself was rapidly changing. She argues that the absence of a strong intellectual foundation for the conduct of war at its start--or, indeed, any consensus on the need for such a foundation--ultimately contributed to the length and cost of the conflict. Reardon examines the great profusion of new or newly translated military texts of the Civil War years, intended to fill that intellectual void, and draws as well on the views of the soldiers and civilians who turned to them in the search for a winning strategy. In examining how debates over principles of military thought entered into the question of qualifications of officers entrusted to command the armies of Northern citizen soldiers, she explores the limitations of nineteenth-century military thought in dealing with the human elements of combat.

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith

Author : Andrew Preston
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307957608
Total Pages : 779 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith by : Andrew Preston

Download or read book Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith written by Andrew Preston and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 779 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly detailed, profoundly engrossing story of how religion has influenced American foreign relations, told through the stories of the men and women—from presidents to preachers—who have plotted the country’s course in the world. Ever since John Winthrop argued that the Puritans’ new home would be “a city upon a hill,” Americans’ role in the world has been shaped by their belief that God has something special in mind for them. But this is a story that historians have mostly ignored. Now, in the first authoritative work on the subject, Andrew Preston explores the major strains of religious fervor—liberal and conservative, pacifist and militant, internationalist and isolationist—that framed American thinking on international issues from the earliest colonial wars to the twenty-first century. He arrives at some startling conclusions, among them: Abraham Lincoln’s use of religion in the Civil War became the model for subsequent wars of humanitarian intervention; nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries made up the first NGO to advance a global human rights agenda; religious liberty was the centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt’s strategy to bring the United States into World War II. From George Washington to George W. Bush, from the Puritans to the present, from the colonial wars to the Cold War, religion has been one of America’s most powerful sources of ideas about the wider world. When, just days after 9/11, George W. Bush described America as “a prayerful nation, a nation that prays to an almighty God for protection and for peace,” or when Barack Obama spoke of balancing the “just war and the imperatives of a just peace” in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, they were echoing four hundred years of religious rhetoric. Preston traces this echo back to its source. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith is an unprecedented achievement: no one has yet attempted such a bold synthesis of American history. It is also a remarkable work of balance and fair-mindedness about one of the most fraught subjects in America.

By Sword and Plow

Author : Jennifer E. Sessions
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801454468
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis By Sword and Plow by : Jennifer E. Sessions

Download or read book By Sword and Plow written by Jennifer E. Sessions and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1830, with France's colonial empire in ruins, Charles X ordered his army to invade Ottoman Algiers. Victory did not salvage his regime from revolution, but it began the French conquest of Algeria, which was continued and consolidated by the succeeding July Monarchy. In By Sword and Plow, Jennifer E. Sessions explains why France chose first to conquer Algeria and then to transform it into its only large-scale settler colony. Deftly reconstructing the political culture of mid-nineteenth-century France, she also sheds light on policies whose long-term consequences remain a source of social, cultural, and political tensions in France and its former colony. In Sessions's view, French expansion in North Africa was rooted in contests over sovereignty and male citizenship in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The French monarchy embraced warfare as a means to legitimize new forms of rule, incorporating the Algerian army into royal iconography and public festivals. Colorful broadsides, songs, and plays depicted the men of the Armée d'Afrique as citizen soldiers. Social reformers and colonial theorists formulated plans to settle Algeria with European emigrants. The propaganda used to recruit settlers featured imagery celebrating Algeria's agricultural potential, but the male emigrants who responded were primarily poor, urban laborers who saw the colony as a place to exercise what they saw as their right to work. Generously illustrated with examples of this imperialist iconography, Sessions's work connects a wide-ranging culture of empire to specific policies of colonization during a pivotal period in the genesis of modern France.

The Singing Sword

Author : Jack Whyte
Publisher : Forge Books
ISBN 13 : 146682221X
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (668 download)

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Book Synopsis The Singing Sword by : Jack Whyte

Download or read book The Singing Sword written by Jack Whyte and published by Forge Books. This book was released on 2002-05-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know the legends: Arthur brought justice to a land that had known only cruelty and force; his father, Uther, carved a kingdom out of the chaos of the fallen Roman Empire; the sword Excalibur, drawn from stone by England's greatest king. But legends do not tell the whole tale. Legends do not tell of the despairing Roman soldiers, abandoned by their empire, faced with the choice of fleeing back to Rome, or struggling to create a last stronghold against the barbarian onslaughts from the north and east. Legends do not tell of Arthur's great-grandfather, Publius Varrus, the warrior who marked the boundaries of a reborn empire with his own shed blood; they do not tell of Publius's wife, Luceiia, British-born and Roman-raised, whose fierce beauty burned pale next to her passion for law and honor. With The Camulod Chronicles, Jack Whyte tells us what legend has forgotten: the history of blood and violence, passion and steel, out of which was forged a great sword, and a great nation. The Singing Sword continues the gripping epic begun in The Skystone: As the great night of the Dark Ages falls over Roman Britain, a lone man and woman fight to build a last stronghold of law and learning--a crude hill-fort, which one day, long after their deaths, will become a great city . . . known as Camelot. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Sword of the Lord

Author : Andrew Himes
Publisher : Chiara Press
ISBN 13 : 1453843752
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (538 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sword of the Lord by : Andrew Himes

Download or read book The Sword of the Lord written by Andrew Himes and published by Chiara Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings the story of fundamentalism to life through the generations of the Rice family--immigrants, soldiers, farmers, slaveowners, refugees, and preachers. --from publisher description

Silver, Sword, and Stone

Author : Marie Arana
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1501105019
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Silver, Sword, and Stone by : Marie Arana

Download or read book Silver, Sword, and Stone written by Marie Arana and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, American Library Association Booklist’s Top of the List, 2019 Adult Nonfiction Acclaimed writer Marie Arana delivers a cultural history of Latin America and the three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). “Meticulously researched, [this] book’s greatest strengths are the power of its epic narrative, the beauty of its prose, and its rich portrayals of character…Marvelous” (The Washington Post). Leonor Gonzales lives in a tiny community perched 18,000 feet above sea level in the Andean cordillera of Peru, the highest human habitation on earth. Like her late husband, she works the gold mines much as the Indians were forced to do at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. And now, just as then, a miner’s survival depends on a vast global market whose fluctuations are controlled in faraway places. Carlos Buergos is a Cuban who fought in the civil war in Angola and now lives in a quiet community outside New Orleans. He was among hundreds of criminals Cuba expelled to the US in 1980. His story echoes the violence that has coursed through the Americas since before Columbus to the crushing savagery of the Spanish Conquest, and from 19th- and 20th-century wars and revolutions to the military crackdowns that convulse Latin America to this day. Xavier Albó is a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia, where he works among the indigenous people. He considers himself an Indian in head and heart and, for this, is well known in his adopted country. Although his aim is to learn rather than proselytize, he is an inheritor of a checkered past, where priests marched alongside conquistadors, converting the natives to Christianity, often forcibly, in the effort to win the New World. Ever since, the Catholic Church has played a central role in the political life of Latin America—sometimes for good, sometimes not. In this “timely and excellent volume” (NPR) Marie Arana seamlessly weaves these stories with the history of the past millennium to explain three enduring themes that have defined Latin America since pre-Columbian times: the foreign greed for its mineral riches, an ingrained propensity to violence, and the abiding power of religion. Silver, Sword, and Stone combines “learned historical analysis with in-depth reporting and political commentary...[and] an informed and authoritative voice, one that deserves a wide audience” (The New York Times Book Review).

The Sword and the Shield of the Realm

Author : Florian Stone Wells
Publisher : Florian Stone Wells
ISBN 13 : 0979957702
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (799 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sword and the Shield of the Realm by : Florian Stone Wells

Download or read book The Sword and the Shield of the Realm written by Florian Stone Wells and published by Florian Stone Wells. This book was released on 2008-02 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the rise to dominance of Western Europe, there was a pivotal time in history when the world was consumed by the epic struggle between the Islamic Empire of the Ottomans and the Christian Kingdoms of Eastern Europe. Two civilizations and two very different ways of life confronted each other with the fate of mankind yet to be decided. THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD OF THE REALM debuts MERCHANTS OF TIME A seven-novel tale of mystery and suspenseful adventure, during an epoch marked by turbulence and mayhem. The year is 1448. Transylvania and Wallachia, the sword and the shield of the Kingdom of Hungary, are invaded by an immense army under the banner of Sultan Murad II, the man who calls himself The Shadow of Allah upon the World. Lorian Comosicus, the heir to a mysterious Draconic ring, and his twelve-year-old brother, Silvan, are sent across the border mountains to the fortress of Roter Turm with a secret message from the conspirators who killed Vlad Dracul of Wallachia for pledging allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. Lost in the vast forests of Transylvania, they meet Sir Gregor Dahr Altair, an imperial knight who just escaped from Roter Turm before the Ottomans destroyed it. Gregor is an Excubitor, a powerful secretive fraternity who could change the outcome of the war. He leads Lorian and Silvan ahead of the tempest to the great trading city of Hermannstadt before it is surrounded and destroyed by the Sultan's army.

Forging the Sword

Author : Benjamin Jensen
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804797382
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (47 download)

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Book Synopsis Forging the Sword by : Benjamin Jensen

Download or read book Forging the Sword written by Benjamin Jensen and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As entrenched bureaucracies, military organizations might reasonably be expected to be especially resistant to reform and favor only limited, incremental adjustments. Yet, since 1945, the U.S. Army has rewritten its capstone doctrine manual, Operations, fourteen times. While some modifications have been incremental, collectively they reflect a significant evolution in how the Army approaches warfare—making the U.S. Army a crucial and unique case of a modern land power that is capable of change. So what accounts for this anomaly? What institutional processes have professional officers developed over time to escape bureaucracies' iron cage? Forging the Sword conducts a comparative historical process-tracing of doctrinal reform in the U.S. Army. The findings suggest that there are unaccounted-for institutional facilitators of change within military organizations. Thus, it argues that change in military organizations requires "incubators," designated subunits established outside the normal bureaucratic hierarchy, and "advocacy networks" championing new concepts. Incubators, ranging from special study groups to non-Title 10 war games and field exercises, provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Advocacy networks then connect different constituents and inject them with concepts developed in incubators. This injection makes changes elites would have otherwise rejected a contagious narrative.

Sword of Kings

Author : Bernard Cornwell
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062563238
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Sword of Kings by : Bernard Cornwell

Download or read book Sword of Kings written by Bernard Cornwell and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twelfth installment of Bernard Cornwell’s New York Times bestselling series chronicling the epic saga of the making of England—"superior entertainment that is both engaging and enlightening” (Washington Post), and the basis for The Last Kingdom, the hit Netflix series. It is a time of political turmoil once more as the fading King Edward begins to lose control over his successors and their supporters. There are two potential heirs—possibly more—and doubt over whether the once separate states of Wessex and Mercia will hold together . Despite attempts at pulling him into the political fray, Uhtred of Bebbanburg cares solely about his beloved Northumbria and its continuing independence from southern control. But an oath is a strong, almost sacred commitment and such a promise had been exchanged between Uhtred and Aethelstan, his onetime companion in arms and now a potential king. Uhtred was tempted to ignore the demands of the oath and stay in his northern fastness, leaving the quarrelling Anglo-Saxons to sort out their own issues. But an attack on him by a leading supporter of one of the candidates and an unexpected appeal for help from another, drives Uhtred with a small band of warriors south, into the battle for kingship—and England’s fate.

Citizenship

Author : Dimitry Kochenov
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262537796
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Citizenship by : Dimitry Kochenov

Download or read book Citizenship written by Dimitry Kochenov and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of citizenship as a tale not of liberation, dignity, and nationhood but of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination. The glorification of citizenship is a given in today's world, part of a civic narrative that invokes liberation, dignity, and nationhood. In reality, explains Dimitry Kochenov, citizenship is a story of complacency, hypocrisy, and domination, flattering to citizens and demeaning for noncitizens. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kochenov explains the state of citizenship in the modern world. Kochenov offers a critical introduction to a subject most often regarded uncritically, describing what citizenship is, what it entails, how it came about, and how its role in the world has been changing. He examines four key elements of the concept: status, considering how and why the status of citizenship is extended, what function it serves, and who is left behind; rights, particularly the right to live and work in a state; duties, and what it means to be a “good citizen”; and politics, as enacted in the granting and enjoyment of citizenship. Citizenship promises to apply the attractive ideas of dignity, equality, and human worth—but to strictly separated groups of individuals. Those outside the separation aren't citizens as currently understood, and they do not belong. Citizenship, Kochenov warns, is too often a legal tool that justifies violence, humiliation, and exclusion.

Citizens of Convenience

Author : Lawrence B. A. Hatter
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813939550
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Citizens of Convenience by : Lawrence B. A. Hatter

Download or read book Citizens of Convenience written by Lawrence B. A. Hatter and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like merchant ships flying flags of convenience to navigate foreign waters, traders in the northern borderlands of the early American republic exploited loopholes in the Jay Treaty that allowed them to avoid border regulations by constantly shifting between British and American nationality. In Citizens of Convenience, Lawrence Hatter shows how this practice undermined the United States’ claim to nationhood and threatened the transcontinental imperial aspirations of U.S. policymakers. The U.S.-Canadian border was a critical site of United States nation- and empire-building during the first forty years of the republic. Hatter explains how the difficulty of distinguishing U.S. citizens from British subjects on the border posed a significant challenge to the United States’ founding claim that it formed a separate and unique nation. To establish authority over both its own nationals and an array of non-nationals within its borders, U.S. customs and territorial officials had to tailor policies to local needs while delineating and validating membership in the national community. This type of diplomacy—balancing the local with the transnational—helped to define the American people as a distinct nation within the Revolutionary Atlantic world and stake out the United States’ imperial domain in North America.

The Bamboo Sword

Author : Margi Preus
Publisher : ABRAMS
ISBN 13 : 1613128355
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis The Bamboo Sword by : Margi Preus

Download or read book The Bamboo Sword written by Margi Preus and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in 1853 in Japan, this novel follows Yoshi, a Japanese boy who dreams of someday becoming a samurai. Unfortunately, as part of the serving class, Yoshi can never become a warrior. He is taken up by Manjiro, the protagonist of Preus’s Heart of a Samurai, and becomes his servant and secret watchdog. Meanwhile, Commodore Matthew Perry and his USS Susquehanna squadron of steamships arrive in Edo Bay demanding “diplomatically” that Japan open its ports to foreign trade. Aboard the commodore’s flagship is a cabin boy, Jack, who becomes separated from his American companions while on shore. When he and Yoshi cross paths, they set out on a grand adventure to get Jack back to his ship before he is discovered by the shogun’s samurai.

Almost Citizens

Author : Sam Erman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108415490
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Almost Citizens by : Sam Erman

Download or read book Almost Citizens written by Sam Erman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the tragic story of Puerto Ricans who sought the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood but instead received racist imperial governance.

Freedom of Speech

Author : David K. Shipler
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307947610
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom of Speech by : David K. Shipler

Download or read book Freedom of Speech written by David K. Shipler and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative, timely assessment of the state of free speech in America With his best seller The Working Poor, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times veteran David K. Shipler cemented his place among our most trenchant social commentators. Now he turns his incisive reporting to a critical American ideal: freedom of speech. Anchored in personal stories—sometimes shocking, sometimes absurd, sometimes dishearteningly familiar—Shipler’s investigations of the cultural limits on both expression and the willingness to listen build to expose troubling instabilities in the very foundations of our democracy. Focusing on recent free speech controversies across the nation, Shipler maps a rapidly shifting topography of political and cultural norms: parents in Michigan rallying to teachers vilified for their reading lists; conservative ministers risking their churches’ tax-exempt status to preach politics from the pulpit; national security reporters using techniques more common in dictatorships to avoid leak prosecution; a Washington, D.C., Jewish theater’s struggle for creative control in the face of protests targeting productions critical of Israel; history teachers in Texas quietly bypassing a reactionary curriculum to give students access to unapproved perspectives; the mixed blessings of the Internet as a forum for dialogue about race. These and other stories coalesce to reveal the systemic patterns of both suppression and opportunity that are making today a transitional moment for the future of one of our founding principles. Measured yet sweeping, Freedom of Speech brilliantly reveals the triumphs and challenges of defining and protecting the boundaries of free expression in modern America.

Sword and Scimitar

Author : Raymond Ibrahim
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 0306825562
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis Sword and Scimitar by : Raymond Ibrahim

Download or read book Sword and Scimitar written by Raymond Ibrahim and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilities The West and Islam -- the sword and scimitar -- have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad's order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom. Sword and Scimitar chronicles the decisive battles that arose from this ages-old Islamic jihad, beginning with the first major Islamic attack on Christian land in 636, through the Muslim occupation of nearly three-quarters of Christendom which prompted the Crusades, followed by renewed Muslim conquests by Turks and Tatars, to the European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s, when Islam largely went on the retreat -- until its reemergence in recent times. Using original sources in Arabic and Greek, preeminent historian Raymond Ibrahim describes each battle in vivid detail and explains how these wars and the larger historical currents of the age reflect the cultural fault lines between Islam and the West. The majority of these landmark battles -- including the battles of Yarmuk, Tours, Manzikert, the sieges at Constantinople and Vienna, and the crusades in Syria and Spain--are now forgotten or considered inconsequential. Yet today, as the West faces a resurgence of this enduring Islamic jihad, Sword and Scimitar provides the needed historical context to understand the current relationship between the West and the Islamic world -- and why the Islamic State is merely the latest chapter of an old history.