Marek Thee My Story

Marek Thee was a Jewish Polish journalist, scholar, and activist. This book tells his life from narrowly escaping death in the Holocaust to exile in Palestine, where he became attached to the Polish consular service. On his return to Poland in 1950, he worked for the Foreign Ministry and later for the Polish Institute for International Affairs. He served as Head of the Polish delegation to the International Control Commission in Indochina in the late 1950s. In 1968 he lost his job and his Polish citizenship in a nationalistic and antisemitic campaign. He was able to move to Norway where he worked for twenty years at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), editing an international quarterly journal, Bulletin of Peace Proposals and doing research on the arms race. In retirement, he continued his research and writing at the Norwegian Human Rights Institute. The book vividly relates the drama of his life in Poland, Palestine, Indochina, and Norway. This is an open access book.

Marek Thee was a Jewish Polish journalist, scholar, and activist. This book tells his life from narrowly escaping death in the Holocaust to exile in Palestine, where he became attached to the Polish consular service. On his return to Poland in 1950, he worked for the Foreign Ministry and later for the Polish Institute for International Affairs. He served as Head of the Polish delegation to the International Control Commission in Indochina in the late 1950s. In 1968 he lost his job and his Polish citizenship in a nationalistic and antisemitic campaign. He was able to move to Norway where he worked for twenty years at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), editing an international quarterly journal, Bulletin of Peace Proposals and doing research on the arms race. In retirement, he continued his research and writing at the Norwegian Human Rights Institute. The book vividly relates the drama of his life in Poland, Palestine, Indochina, and Norway. This is an open access book.

This open access book explains how PRIO, the world’s oldest peace research institute, was founded and how it survived through crises. In this book, twenty-four of its researchers and associates, including Johan Galtung, Ingrid Eide, and Mari Holmboe Ruge, who founded the institute back in 1959, tell the stories of their roles in inventing and developing peace research. They reflect on their personal experiences with peace and conflict, tell what drove their peace engagement, and discuss the balance sought in the field between the cold dictates from academic rigor and the hot pursuit of peace, a desire for research to make a positive difference. Most of the chapters are interviews where one colleague interviews another. Some are self-reflective essays, while others are memorial essays written about a peace researcher who has passed away. Taken together, the book presents a lively picture of a thriving world-leading research environment and a wealth of conflicting or mutually reinforcing perspectives on war, violence, conflict, conflict management and resolution, negotiations and mediation, peacemaking, peace building, and the contested concept of peace. “The Oslo Stories is an indispensable source to the history of peace research.” Dr. Olav Njølstad, Director, Nobel Institute, Oslo

Despite the stock market crash of October 1929, thousands of theatregoers still flocked to the Great White Way throughout the country’s darkest years. In keeping with the Depression and the events leading up to World War II, 1930s Broadway was distinguished by numerous political revues and musicals, including three by George Gershwin (Strike Up the Band, Of Thee I Sing, and Let ’Em Eat Cake). The decade also saw the last musicals by Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Vincent Youmans; found Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart in full flower; and introduced both Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen’s music to Broadway. In The Complete Book of 1930s Broadway Musicals, Dan Dietz examines in detail every musical that opened on Broadway from 1930 through 1939. This book discusses the era’s major successes, notorious failures, and musicals that closed during their pre-Broadway tryouts. It includes such shows as Anything Goes, As Thousands Cheer, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, The Cradle Will Rock, The Green Pastures, Hellzapoppin, Hot Mikado, Porgy and Bess, Roberta, and various editions of Ziegfeld Follies. Each entry contains the following information: Plot summary Cast members Names of all important personnel, including writers, composers, directors, choreographers, producers, and musical directors Opening and closing dates Number of performances Critical commentary Musical numbers and the performers who introduced the songs Production data, including information about tryouts Source material Details about London and other foreign productions Besides separate entries for each production, the book offers numerous appendixes, including a discography, filmography, and list of published scripts, as well as lists of black-themed and Jewish-themed productions. This comprehensive book contains a wealth of information and provides a comprehensive view of each show. The Complete Book of 1930s Broadway Musicals will be of use to scholars, historians, and casual fans of one of the greatest decades in musical theatre history.

The gift of peace

"In "Atomic Environments," Neil S. Oatsvall examines how top policymakers in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations used environmental science in their work developing nuclear strategy at the beginning of the Cold War. While many people were involved in research and analysis during the period in question, it was at highest levels of executive decision-making where environmental science and nuclear science most clearly combined to shape the nation's policies. Because making and testing weapons, dealing with fallout and nuclear waste, and finding uses for radioactive byproducts required advanced understanding of how nuclear systems interacted with the world, policymakers utilized existing networks of environmental scientists-particularly meteorologists, geologists, and ecologists-to understand and control the United States' use of nuclear technology. Instead of profiling individuals, Oatsvall focuses on executive institutions, especially the leadership of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and high level officials in the Truman and Eisenhower White Houses, including the presidents, themselves. By scrutinizing institutional policymaking practices and agendas at the birth of the nuclear age, a constant set of values becomes clear: "Atomic Environments" reveals an emerging technocratic class that consistently valued knowledge about the environment to help create and maintain a nuclear arsenal, despite its existential threat to life on earth and the negative effects many nuclear technologies directly had on ecosystems and the American people, alike. "Atomic Environments" is divided into five chapters, each of which probes a different facet of the entanglement between environment, nuclear technologies, and policymaking. The first three chapters form a rough narrative arc about nuclear weapons. Chapter One situates bombs in their "natural habitat" by considering why nuclear tests occurred where they did and what testers thought they revealed about the natural environment and how they influenced it. Focusing on nuclear fallout, Chapter Two argues that nuclear tests actually functioned as a massive, uncontrolled experiment in world environments and human bodies that intermingled medicine, nuclear science, and environmental science. Chapter Three shows how the environmental knowledge gained in the first two chapters led to nuclear test ban treaty talks during the Eisenhower era, when the advancement of environmental knowledge and the natural world itself became crucial grounds of contention in the creation of nuclear test detection and evasion systems. The last two chapters step away from weapons to question how other nuclear technologies and facets of the U.S. nuclear program interacted with the natural world. Chapter Four examines agriculture's place in the U.S. nuclear program, from breakthrough advances in agricultural science including the use of radioisotopes and the direct application of radiation to food, to "atomic agriculture's" public relations value as a peaceful proxy, which shifted the moral calculus and further leveraged the U.S. government's atomic power. Chapter Five shows how knowledge of the natural world and the functioning of its systems proved important to uncovering the most effective ways to dispose of nuclear waste. Running throughout, Oatsvall consistently demonstrates how the natural world and the scientific disciplines that study it became integral parts of nuclear science, rather than adversarial fields of knowledge. But while nuclear technologies heavily depended on environmental science to develop, those same technologies frequently caused great harm to the natural world. Moreover, while some individuals expressed real anxieties about the damage wrought by nuclear technologies, policymakers as a class consistently made choices that privileged nuclear boosterism and secrecy, prioritizing institutional values over the lives and living systems that agencies like the AEC were ostensibly charged to protect. In the end, Oatsvall argues that although policymakers took their charge to protect and advance the welfare of the United States and its people seriously, they often failed to do so because their allegiance to the U.S. nuclear hierarchy blinded them to the real risks and dangers of the nuclear age"--

Proving Grounds brings together a wide range of scholars across disciplines and geographical borders to deepen our understanding of the environmental impact that the U.S. military presence has had at home and abroad. The essays in this collection survey the environmental damage caused by weapons testing and military bases to local residents, animal populations, and landscapes, and they examine the military’s efforts to close and repurpose bases—often as wildlife reserves. Together they present a complex and nuanced view that embraces the ironies, contradictions, and unintended consequences of U.S. militarism around the world. In complicating our understanding of the American military’s worldwide presence, the essayists also reveal the rare cases when the military is actually ahead of the curve on environmental regulation compared to the private sector. The result is the most comprehensive examination to date of the U.S. military’s environmental footprint—for better or worse—across the globe.

In Power, Tom Hastings unpacks the methods, and considers causes and correlatives to violence and nonviolence. Hastings presents an overview of nonviolent power potential, examining it on personal, community, and transnational levels. He provides evidence of theories and historical records of nonviolent power through personal stories and the annals of human kind. Nonviolent alternatives are proposed and considered.

The success of regionalism in Southeast Asia depends on the attitudes of the states within the region but also on the attitude of those outside it. This book is an erudite and stimulating study on the latter. Placing these states in a long term historical context Tarling brings out the way in which the rivalries of those powers within the region and outside it have affected the states within the region. He also shows how divisions within the region, and within states in the region, offered invitations and opportunities for intervention from outside, and so perhaps gave Southeast Asia an importance in international relations it would not otherwise have had. Regional leaders appear in recent decades to have recognised what may be construed as one of the lessons of history; if Southeast Asia can provide security for the Straits route, and stable conditions for trade and investment, it might enjoy both peace and a measure of prosperity. Southeast Asia and the Great Powers is an important read for students and scholars of the history and international relations of Southeast Asia.