BiblioVault - Books about Ethnic relations

Khanty, People of the Taiga

Surviving the 20th Century

Andrew Wiget and Olga Balalaeva

University of Alaska Press, 2011

Drawing on nearly twenty years of fieldwork, as well as ethnohistory, politics, and economics, this volume takes a close look at changes in the lives of the indigenous Siberian Khanty people and draws crucial connections between those changes and the social, cultural, and political transformation that swept Russia during the transition to democracy. Delving deeply into the history of the Khanty—who were almost completely isolated prior to the Russian revolution—the authors show how the customs, traditions, and knowledge of indigenous people interact with and are threatened by events in the larger world.

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The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942

A Documentary History of the Holocaust in Romania's Contested Borderlands

Paul A. Shapiro with chronology by Radu Ioanid and Brewster Chamberlin and translations by Angela Jianu

University of Alabama Press, 2015

The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 offers a wealth of primary sources and insightful commentary about the little-known slaughter of Jewish residents of Kishinev (Chisinau) under the military occupation by Romania under Marshal Ion Antonescu, a Hitler ally.

The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 sheds new light on the little-known historical events surrounding the creation, administration, and liquidation of the Kishinev (Chisinau) ghetto during the first months following the Axis attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in late June 1941. Mass killings during the combined Romanian-German drive toward Kishinev in Bessarabia, after a year of Soviet rule in this Romanian border province, were followed by the shooting of thousands of Jews on the streets of the city during the first days of reestablished Romanian administration. Survivors were driven into a ghetto, persecuted, and liquidated by year’s end. The Kishinev Ghetto, 1941–1942 is the first major study of these events.

Often overshadowed by events in Germany and Poland, the history of the Holocaust in Romania, including what took place in Bessarabia (corresponding in large part with the territory of the modern Republic of Moldova), was obscured during decades of communist rule by denial and by policies that blocked access to wartime documentation. This book is the result of a lengthy research project that began with Paul A. Shapiro’s missions to Romania for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to negotiate access to these documents.

The volume includes:
·        A preface describing the origin of the project in the immediate aftermath of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.
·        A hundred-page study setting the events of the book within the historical context of Eastern European antisemitism, Romanian-Soviet conflict over control of Bessarabia, and Romania’s alliance with Nazi Germany.
·        A thoughtfully curated collection of archival documents linked to the study.
·        A chronology of related historical events.
·        Twenty-one black and white photographs and a map of the ghetto.

Students and scholars of Holocaust history, Judaic studies, twentieth-century Eastern European history, Romania, Moldova, and historical Bessarabia will want to own this important, revealing volume.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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Kosovo and Serbia

Contested Options and Shared Consequences

Leandrit I. Mehmeti

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016

Following the 1992 breakup of Yugoslavia, the region descended into a series of bloody conflicts marked by intense ethnic and religious hatreds. Kosovo emerged at the epicenter of these disputes and the site of innumerable human rights violations, as Serbia, united with Montenegro at the time, sought to remove the Albanian presence. Kosovo (roughly ninety percent Albanian) declared independence in 2008, and although it is recognized by over one hundred UN member states, it is still not recognized by Serbia.
This volume brings together scholars of Serbian, Albanian, Christian, and Muslim backgrounds to examine the Serbian-Albanian dynamic in Kosovo through historical, political, economic, and social perspectives. The contributors offer fresh insights on the consequences of internationalizing the conflict, the impact of international agencies and institutions since the 1999 intervention, the continuing human rights violations, present day party politics, and the prospects for economic cooperation with Serbia, among other topics. Kosovo and Serbia will inform scholars and students of the region, exploring the nature of a tragic political and strategic struggle that has existed for centuries and drawn the attention of the entire international community.

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Kristallnacht 1938

Alan E. Steinweis

Harvard University Press, 2009

On November 7, 1938, a Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, fatally shot a German diplomat in Paris. Within three days anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout Germany, initially incited by local Nazi officials, and ultimately sanctioned by the decisions of Hitler and Goebbels at the pinnacle of the Third Reich. As synagogues burned and Jews were beaten in the streets, police stood aside. Men, women, and children—many neighbors of the victims—participated enthusiastically in acts of violence, rituals of humiliation, and looting. By the night of November 10, a nationwide antisemitic pogrom had inflicted massive destruction on synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish-owned businesses. During and after this spasm of violence and plunder, 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds would perish in the following months.

Kristallnacht revealed to the world the intent and extent of Nazi Judeophobia. However, it was seen essentially as the work of the Nazi leadership. Now, Alan Steinweis counters that view in his vision of Kristallnacht as a veritable pogrom—a popular cathartic convulsion of antisemitic violence that was manipulated from above but executed from below by large numbers of ordinary Germans rioting in the streets, heckling and taunting Jews, cheering Stormtroopers' hostility, and looting Jewish property on a massive scale.

Based on original research in the trials of the pogrom's perpetrators and the testimonies of its Jewish survivors, Steinweis brings to light the evidence of mob action by all sectors of the civilian population. Kristallnacht 1938 reveals the true depth and nature of popular antisemitism in Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.

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Ku Klux Kulture

America and the Klan in the 1920s

Felix Harcourt

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In popular understanding, the Ku Klux Klan is a hateful white supremacist organization. In Ku Klux Kulture, Felix Harcourt argues that in the 1920s the self-proclaimed Invisible Empire had an even wider significance as a cultural movement.

Ku Klux Kulture reveals the extent to which the KKK participated in and penetrated popular American culture, reaching far beyond its paying membership to become part of modern American society. The Klan owned radio stations, newspapers, and sports teams, and its members created popular films, pulp novels, music, and more. Harcourt shows how the Klan’s racist and nativist ideology became subsumed in sunnier popular portrayals of heroic vigilantism. In the process he challenges prevailing depictions of the 1920s, which may be best understood not as the Jazz Age or the Age of Prohibition, but as the Age of the Klan. Ku Klux Kulture gives us an unsettling glimpse into the past, arguing that the Klan did not die so much as melt into America’s prevailing culture.

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The Kurds in Iraq - Second Edition

The Past, Present and Future

Kerim Yildiz

Pluto Press, 2007

This new edition of The Kurds in Iraq brings the book fully up to date in the light of recent events in Iraq and the ever-present danger of civil war. Kerim Yildiz explores the impact of occupation and escalating violence. there is an entirely new chapter on Kirkuk, which continues to be of major strategic interest to the various powers in the region. There is also a new chapter on insurgency and sectarianism that examines the motivations behind the insurgency, the tactics that are used, and an outline of possible ways to deal with it.

The book is a unique account of the problems that all political groups face in bringing stability to the country. It explores Kurdish links to those political groups and their role in international relations in the broader sense. It should be required reading for policymakers and anyone interested in the current position of the Kurds in Iraq.

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