How conflicting memories of the nation's origins shaped the political culture of the early American republic

"Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was pushed through the gate and the door was slammed behind me. After more than eight years, here I was, finally, out of jail . . . ." In this haunting account, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi, along with her husband, was imprisoned for nearly a decade and tortured, first under the Shah and later by the Islamic Republic. Writing about her own suffering and survival and sharing the stories of her fellow inmates, she details the painful reality of prison life and offers an intimate look at a critical period of social and political transformation in Iran. Somehow through it all—through resistance and resolute hope, passion and creativity—Talebi shows how one survives. Reflecting now on experiences past, she stays true to her memories, honoring the love of her husband and friends lost in these events, to relate how people can hold to moments of love, resilience, and friendship over the dark forces of torture, violence, and hatred. At once deeply personal yet clearly political, part memoir and part meditation, this work brings to heartbreaking clarity how deeply rooted torture and violence can be in our society. More than a passing judgment of guilt on a monolithic "Islamic State," Talebi's writing asks us to reconsider our own responses to both contemporary debates of interrogation techniques and government responsibility and, more simply, to basic acts of cruelty in daily life. She offers a lasting call to us all. "The art of living in prison becomes possible through imagining life in the very presence of death and observing death in the very existence of life. It is living life so vitally and so fully that you are willing, if necessary, to let that very life go, as one would shed chains on the legs. It is embracing, and flying on the wings of death as though it is the bird of freedom."

Explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in US history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also a site to work out the present, and the future. What are we using the Revolution to debate? In Fighting over the Founders, Andrew M. Schocket explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. Identifying competing “essentialist” and “organicist” interpretations of the American Revolution, Schocket shows how today’s memories of the American Revolution reveal Americans' conflicted ideas about class, about race, and about gender—as well as the nature of history itself. Fighting over the Founders plumbs our views of the past and the present, and illuminates our ideas of what United States means to its citizens in the new millennium.

This work chronicles the ways in which the Irish revolution was remembered in the first two decades of independence by significant nationalist intellectuals: Eimar O'Duffy, P.S. O'Hegarty, George Russell, and Desmond Ryan. It provides a lively account of their controversial critiques of the revolution, and an intimate portrait of their lives and times.

Remembering Revolution constitutes one of the first major studies of women's role and involvement in the late 1960s' radical Left Naxalbari movement of West Bengal, the birthplace of Indian Maoism. relation to women's involvement in the late 1960s' radical Naxalbari movement of West Bengal. Drawing from historiographic, popular, and personal memoirs, it provides an innovative conceptual analysis of the Naxalbari movement principally in terms of gender, violence, and subjectivity.

A classic oral history of the American Revolution, The Revolution Remembered uses 79 first-hand accounts from veterans of the war to provide the reader with the feel of what it must have been like to fight and live through America's bloody battle for independence. "In a book fairly bursting with feats of daring, perhaps the most spectacular accomplishment of them all is this volume's transformation of its readers into the grandchildren of Revolutionary War soldiers. . . . An amazing gathering of 79 surrogate Yankee grandparents who tell us in their own words what they saw with their own eyes."—Elaine F. Weiss, Christian Science Monitor "Fascinating. . . . [The soldiers'] details fill in significant shadows of history."—Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times "It's still good fun two centuries later, overhearing these experiences of the tumult of everyday life and seeing a front-lines view of one of the most unusual armies ever to fight, let alone win."—Richard Martin, Wall Street Journal "One of the most important primary source discoveries from the era. A unique and fresh perspective."—Paul G. Levine, Los Angeles Times

Preserving the childhood memories of some of the last generation of White Russian women to experience the revolution first-hand, this poignant collection of interviews and photographs provides a unique record of life in Russia.