Postscripts On Independence

India and South Africa, two states that bookended the process of twentieth-century decolonization, punched above their weight in global politics in their initial years of liberation. Postscripts on Independence analyses and compares the making of foreign policy ideas, identities, and institutions of postcolonial India and South Africa. It shows how both countries have responded to the contradictory demands of their freedom struggles against colonialism and pragmatic challenges of international politics. Vineet Thakur argues that the countries’ geopolitical positioning in South Asia and southern Africa make them regional powers, with similar sets of problems and prospects, as both continue to grapple with the idea of maintaining regional and/or continental hegemony. By undertaking a comparative analysis, Thakur explores a framework to understand the foreign policymaking fears, aspirations, and international behaviour of these two nation states.

Independence Hall is a place Americans think they know well. Within its walls the Continental Congress declared independence in 1776, and in 1787 the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution there. Painstakingly restored to evoke these momentous events, the building appears to have passed through time unscathed, from the heady days of the American Revolution to today. But Independence Hall is more than a symbol of the young nation. Beyond this, according to Charlene Mires, it has a long and varied history of changing uses in an urban environment, almost all of which have been forgotten. In Independence Hall, Mires rediscovers and chronicles the lost history of Independence Hall, in the process exploring the shifting perceptions of this most important building in America's popular imagination. According to Mires, the significance of Independence Hall cannot be fully appreciated without assessing the full range of political, cultural, and social history that has swirled about it for nearly three centuries. During its existence, it has functioned as a civic and cultural center, a political arena and courtroom, and a magnet for public celebrations and demonstrations. Artists such as Thomas Sully frequented Independence Square when Philadelphia served as the nation's capital during the 1790s, and portraitist Charles Willson Peale merged the arts, sciences, and public interest when he transformed a portion of the hall into a center for natural science in 1802. In the 1850s, hearings for accused fugitive slaves who faced the loss of freedom were held, ironically, in this famous birthplace of American independence. Over the years Philadelphians have used the old state house and its public square in a multitude of ways that have transformed it into an arena of conflict: labor grievances have echoed regularly in Independence Square since the 1830s, while civil rights protesters exercised their right to free speech in the turbulent 1960s. As much as the Founding Fathers, these people and events illuminate the building's significance as a cultural symbol.

The book presents the history of Estonia in easily readable form and with compassion for the people whose lives were affected by the events that occurred in the Baltic region. The prolonged occupation of the Baltic region by different European nations not only caused great hardships for the Estonian people, but it also integrated them into the western European cultural community. In that sense, the history of Estonia has had a happy ending. After seven centuries of domination by foreign powers, the people of Estonia are now free, they are well educated, they are creative, they are hard-working, and they are patriotic. The Republic of Estonia has earned the respect and admiration of the people of the world and deserves to be recognized as a modern and successful nation.

This text shows how the principles and technologies of object-oriented programming, distributed processing and internet protocols can be embraced to further the reliability and interoperability of datasets for the professional GIS market. The book describes the central concept of the interface specification between the data consumer and producer - the Virtual Data Set VDS. It then examines how VDS deals with two other classes of model - field representations and modelling uncertainty. The final part of the book looks at implementation, describing how the VDS interacts with PostScript, Java, and Object-oriented modelling environments.

What happens to nationalism after independence is achieved?