Civil war has been a recurring feature of human societies throughout history - and an essential catalyst for major international conflict. And since 1945 the number of civil wars in the world has grown steadily, bringing devastation on a scale more traditionally associated with international wars. In spite of this, there is no classic treatise on civil war to compare with the classic works we have on war, revolution, or peace. On the one hand, historians have tended to treat the 'big' civil wars such as the American and the Spanish in isolation. On the other, social scientists have concentrated on identifying common patterns, without looking in too much detail at the specifics of any given conflict. Focusing on the numerous civil conflicts that have occurred throughout the world since the Second World War, Bill Kissane bridges this gap, asking what the recent social science literature adds to what we already know about civil war, but also how insights from the historical literature, from the ancient Greeks onwards, can help explain the violent experience of so many parts of the world since 1945. At its heart is the question of what makes the contemporary challenge posed by civil war so different to that of past periods - and what, if anything, is new about the contemporary experience of civil war at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Following the devastation of the Great War, the Earth lies in ruins. Many of the nations of the world no longer exist. Some have been torn apart, other joined into one new nation. Born out of fears and paranoia, most of the remaining nations as well as the new emerging ones start to pass new rigid laws to ensure the survival of their people. Fifteen year old Alexander Reed falls victim to the now decades old harsh laws of the Northern States of America and is forced into military service. He and others like him become an unwilling part of the established system. But is there more going on than first appears? As Alex and his new teammates struggle to make sense of everything going on around them and survive in the cold and uncaring world they are now part of, decisions will be made that could mean life or death to them all. Can Alex overcome the odds and escape the horrors that await him in the military or will he ultimately be broken and remain a soldier for the rest of his life?

Art historian David Lubin examines the work of six nineteenth-century American artists to show how their paintings both embraced and resisted dominant social values. Lubin argues that artists such as George Bingham and Lily Martin Spencer were aware of the underlying social conflicts of their time and that their work reflected the nation's ambivalence toward domesticity, its conflicting ideas about child rearing, its racial disharmony, and many other issues central to the formation of modern America.--From publisher description.

Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe surveys the intersection of music and nationalism by tracing its historical development and documenting its persistence today. Contrasting different types of music reveals how music expresses core ideas of nationalism, for example, folk music in the nineteenth century and popular music in the twenty-first.

Jennifer Jensen Wallach's nuanced history of black foodways across the twentieth century challenges traditional narratives of "soul food" as a singular style of historical African American cuisine. Wallach investigates the experiences and diverse convictions of several generations of African American activists, ranging from Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Mary Church Terrell, Elijah Muhammad, and Dick Gregory. While differing widely in their approaches to diet and eating, they uniformly made the cultivation of "proper" food habits a significant dimension of their work and their conceptions of racial and national belonging. Tracing their quests for literal sustenance brings together the race, food, and intellectual histories of America. Directly linking black political activism to both material and philosophical practices around food, Wallach frames black identity as a bodily practice, something that conscientious eaters not only thought about but also did through rituals and performances of food preparation, consumption, and digestion. The process of choosing what and how to eat, Wallach argues, played a crucial role in the project of finding one's place as an individual, as an African American, and as a citizen.