Whisk of the Red Broom: Stalin & Ukraine, 1928-1933

M. Andrew Holowchak

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-860-0
Availability: In stock
262pp. ¦ $72 £58 €67

Once Joseph Stalin took the lead of the Soviet Bolshevists after the death of Vladimir Lenin, he quickly turned away from Lenin’s New Economic Policy, with its many concessions to capitalism, to a policy of one-country socialism, driven by his first Five Year Plan (1928) and a plan that other Bolsheviks like Lenin and Trotsky thought impossible. That shift, radical, forced Stalin to “urbanize” the USSR’s vast rural areas—that is, to impose a factory-like model on the Soviet countryside to maximize its efficiency. That required collectivizing the numerous Soviet farms—making large farms of the numerous small farms. Ukraine was to be the model republic due to its vastness and black, fertile lands. Not only were the republics to be collectivized, they were also to be Russified for the sake of model efficiency and centralization of control. And so, while Stalin, early in his political life, preached respect for the cultural diversity of its many republics and the right of secession of any republic, the need to collectivize the Soviet farms for the sake of one-country socialism demanded compliance. Ukrainian peasant-farmers were non-compliant, for they readily saw that the State was asking them for everything and giving back nothing but the pledge of efficient farms to benefit the State, and non-compliance forced Stalin’s authoritarian hand. He imposed laws that brutally punished non-compliant peasants, called “kulaks.” The plan was dekulakization. The intransigents were dispossessed of their property, alienated from other villagers, exiled, and exterminated. The result in Ukraine was the gross inefficiency of both collective and individual farms. That led to intolerance of Ukrainian culture and theft of Ukrainian grain, and even all other findable foodstuffs, to punish Ukrainians. The end was a great famine in 1932 and 1933 in which some four million Ukrainians died. Did Stalin believe that he could urbanize the Soviet countryside? Did Stalin think that socialism could take root in the backwater Soviet Union without the aid of Western succor? Did Stalin hate Ukrainians because many pressed for a cultural identity separate from that of Russia? Had Stalin’s plan of dekulakization from the beginning been a policy of political genocide? Those are some of the many questions I aim to answer in this book. I focus much on Stalin’s writings in the efforts to ascertain his mindset as a dictator.

The Wizard of Mecosta: Russell Kirk, Gothic Fiction, and the Moral Imagination

Camilo Peralta, Joliet Junior College

March 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-853-2
Availability: In stock
222pp. ¦ $78 £62 €73

"The Wizard of Mecosta" offers an extended analysis of the fiction of Russell Amos Kirk (1918-1994), a central figure in modern American conservatism who is often referred to as “the father” of the same. Born and raised in Michigan, Kirk was also a prolific writer of fiction, who published almost two dozen short stories and three novels over the course of his long career. At the heart of everything Kirk wrote was what he referred to as the “moral imagination,” a phrase he borrowed from Edmund Burke and often used to describe the instructive and enlightening purposes of great literature. Despite his prominent reputation as a public man of letters and the respect of fellow authors including Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, Kirk’s fiction was never very popular, and has fallen into almost complete obscurity in the present. "The Wizard of Mecosta" is the first full-length study ever published about Kirk’s fiction, and the only work of any length to consider the entirety of his output, including all of the stories and novels he wrote. By emphasizing how Kirk’s fiction illuminates certain aspects of his social and political theory, "The Wizard of Mecosta" distinguishes itself from the half-dozen or more studies of the author’s life and work that have been published since his death in 1994. It should appeal to anyone with an interest in American conservatism, as well as fans and scholars of the sort of Gothic horror in which Kirk, unexpectedly, excelled. Through his stories of avenging ghosts and timeless journeys through the afterlife, he reminds us of the existence of “permanent things,” the core values and beliefs of Western society, which he strove all his life to preserve. It is high time that his fiction found a more appreciative, and larger, audience.

Attired: Perspectives on Historical Costume

Edited by Damayanthie Eluwawalage, Delaware State University

March 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-852-5
Availability: In stock
146pp. ¦ $77 £61 €72

This publication explores the integrative narratives of historical costume in the novel universal perspective of literature, leisure, ornamentation, customs/traditions, and theoretical contexts. The adaptation, mutation, and transformation of attire are the result of complex interactions between many factors, such as economic conditions, political conditions, social conditions, psychological conditions, and technology. The meanings encoded in the costume are one of the noticeable hallmarks of any society. This proposed book investigates multidisciplinary topics, for instance, embellishments such as needlework and embroidery; the historical concept of fight, physical encounter, combat, or bout and its connection with related-attire; the contribution of dress to the narrative process of Virgil’s 'Aeneid'; and the theory and philosophy of fashion.

Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America

Edited by Andrea Espinoza Carvajal, University of Exeter and Luis A. Medina Cordova, University of Birmingham

April 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-821-1
Availability: In stock
282pp. ¦ $106 £85 €99

'Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America' sheds light on how, as Covid-19 spread, infecting and killing millions across the world, life not only continued to be experienced but also continued to be narrated. By putting together this volume, we help understand what happened in the region from a perspective in which, unlike most of what we saw during the health emergency, numbers, statistics and percentages are not at the centre of the analysis. The essays gathered here foreground something else: the manifold ways Covid-19 was subjectively and collectively narrated in the news, government reports, political speeches, NGO communications, social media, literature, songs and many other media. From a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this edition pay attention to how fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, documented, represented and shaped the health crisis, laying bare how —in Latin American countries— the spread of the virus intersected with corruption, gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, as with community, solidarity and hope. Readers will find that the focus on narrative provides an alternative source of knowledge on Latin America’s Covid-19 experience. Our perspective contrasts with the usual emphasis on death tolls, infection rates, weekly cases, vaccination counts, and the plethora of statistics that illustrated the gravity of the situation in the build-up to, during, and after the peak of the crisis. While extremely important to understand the situation, numbers do not tell the whole story. A comprehensive picture of the pandemic can only be achieved when the stories of the virus are accounted for. Health, after all, is no stranger to narrative. And neither is Latin America.

Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures

Edited by Jukka Kortti, University of Helsinki, Finland and Heidi Kurvinen, University of Turku, Finland

March 2024 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-851-8
Availability: In stock
252pp. ¦ $101 £81 €94

Ideologies have not been a focus of interest in the field of humanities and social sciences in recent decades, but rethinking the power of ideologies in the media sphere has recently returned to the scholarly discussion. The compilation book “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” participates in this by providing selected yet justified approaches to media history from the point of view of ideological uses of media in the Nordic region. In this book, the role of media – comprising both popular media and news journalism – as a forum for ideologies and their circulation will be analyzed by focusing on the Nordic region. The perceived similarities in the media systems of the Nordic countries constitute a perfect extent for a regional media history against not only a European but also a global backdrop. This does not mean that there have not been many national differences. The book does not provide a chronological narrative of Nordic media history. Still, the ideology of media is approached not only from the standpoints of different media forms – film, television, newspapers, magazines, and periodicals – but also from several historical periods from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century. The chapters show the multidimensional role that the media has in transmitting ideologies to their audiences and the public sphere. They also demonstrate that analyzing the role of different ideologies, such as modernization, nationalism, solidarity, feminism, and peace movement in media history provides wider perspectives in understanding past and present media landscapes and people’s mediated experiences that are fostered by them. “Mediated Ideologies: Nordic Views on the History of the Press and Media Cultures” can be used both as a reference book and as a classroom adaption in the field of media, communication, and history studies.