After thirty years of anticolonial struggle against Spain and four years of military occupation by the United States, Cuba formally became an independent republic in 1902. The nationalist coalition that fought for Cuba's freedom, a movement in which blacks and mulattoes were well represented, had envisioned an egalitarian and inclusive country--a nation for all, as Jose Marti described it. But did the Cuban republic, and later the Cuban revolution, live up to these expectations? Tracing the formation and reformulation of nationalist ideologies, government policies, and different forms of social and political mobilization in republican and postrevolutionary Cuba, Alejandro de la Fuente explores the opportunities and limitations that Afro-Cubans experienced in such areas as job access, education, and political representation. Challenging assumptions of both underlying racism and racial democracy, he contends that racism and antiracism coexisted within Cuban nationalism and, in turn, Cuban society. This coexistence has persisted to this day, despite significant efforts by the revolutionary government to improve the lot of the poor and build a nation that was truly for all.

G-Zero — \JEE-ZEER-oh\ —n A world order in which no single country or durable alliance of countries can meet the challenges of global leadership. What happens when the G20 doesn’t work and the G7 is history. If the worst threatened—a rogue nuclear state, a major health crisis, the collapse of the global financial system—where would the world look for leadership? For the first time in seven decades, there is no single power or alliance of powers ready to take on the challenges of global leadership. A generation ago, the United States, Europe, and Japan were the world’s powerhouses, the free-market democra­cies that propelled the global economy forward. But today, they struggle just to find their footing. Acclaimed geopolitical analyst Ian Bremmer argues that this leadership vacuum is here to stay, as power is regionalized instead of globalized. Now that so many challenges transcend borders—from the stability of the global economy and climate change to cyber-attacks and terrorism—the need for international cooperation has never been greater.

In this comprehensive account of American foreign relations from the nation's birth through the Obama administration, Warren I. Cohen confronts the concept of American exceptionalism. A Nation Like All Others offers a brisk, argumentative history that decries the lack of moral imagination in American foreign policy.

Compares the United States with other affluent democracies in such areas as health, crime and violence, education, democracy, and equality, and suggests ways the country might improve its standing in these areas.

Spanning 350 years of American history and culture, a collection of more than two hundred letters, many never before published, reveals the personalities and feelings of Americans great and small, from Amelia Earhart to Elvis Presley to Malcolm X. Reprint.

In this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie. By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's film incorporated many new features, including the first full musical score compiled for an American film. It was distributed and advertised by pioneering methods that would quickly become standard. Through the high prices charged for admission and the fact that it was shown, at first, only in "live" theaters with orchestral accompaniment, Birth played a major role in reconfiguring the American movie audience by attracting more middle-class patrons. But if the film was a milestone in the history of cinema, it was also undeniably racist. Stokes shows that the darker side of this classic movie has its origins in the racist ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Griffith's own Kentuckian background and earlier film career. The book reveals how, as the years went by, the campaign against the film became increasingly successful. In the 1920s, for example, the NAACP exploited the fact that the new Ku Klux Klan, which used Griffith's film as a recruiting and retention tool, was not just anti-black, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as a way to mobilize new allies in opposition to the film. This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.

Reveals that many Americans share the same opinions and values about middle class society