Showing results for "Mark Lawrence" in History

Russia is famous for its vodka, and its culture of extreme intoxication. But just as vodka is central to the lives of many Russians, it is also central to understanding Russian history and politics. In Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad argues that debilitating societal alcoholism is not hard-wired into Russians' genetic code, but rather their autocratic political system, which has long wielded vodka as a tool of statecraft. Through a series of historical investigations stretching from Ivan the Terrible through Vladimir Putin, Vodka Politics presents the secret history of the Russian state itself.

When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized in Death in Venice had come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about. Mann immediately picked up his pen to compose a paean to the German cause. Soon after, his elder brother and lifelong rival, the novelist Heinrich Mann, responded with a no less determined denunciation.

Hailed as a "pithy and compelling account of an intensely relevant topic" ( Kirkus Reviews), this wide-ranging volume offers a superb account of a key moment in modern U.S. and world history. Drawing upon the latest research in archives in China, Russia, and Vietnam, Mark Lawrence creates an extraordinary, panoramic view of all sides of the war.

At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. With US power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War's "Third World"-developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the United States or Soviet Union.

A gripping day-by-day account of the 1978 Camp David conference, when President Jimmy Carter persuaded Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to sign the first peace treaty in the modern Middle East, one which endures to this day.

When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon.

The Constitution Solution aims to educate the American Public on the true meaning of the US Constitution and the Christian faith that inspired America’s founding. We also explore how the progressive movement is trampling on our God-given rights by ignoring the Law of the Land, that is, our US Constitution.

There have been literally hundreds of books about T. E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia, but never a work quite like Legion. Legion tells the astonishing life story of an man who was far more than a war hero; for Lawrence was also an archaeologist, a linguist and translator, a historian and classicist, a marine engineer, an airman and one of the great English writers of the 20th century. He was also an enigma, even at times to himself, tormented by guilt and shame, by his masochism, self-loathing and his fear of his own sexuality.

Doomsday headlines warn that the age of “killer robots” is upon us, and that new military technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to the annihilation of the human race. What’s fact and what’s fiction? In The Case for Killer Robots: Why America’s Military Needs to Continue Development of Lethal AI, artificial intelligence expert Robert J. Marks investigates the potential military use of lethal AI and examines the practical and ethical challenges.