History: New books

Covers the history of the entire African continent, from prehistory to the present day. A companion to African History embraces the diverse regions, subject matter, and disciplines of the African continent, while also providing chronological and geographical coverage of basic historical developments.

Memory is not the same thing as history. Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe-- wrongly-- that under Franco's dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. Treglown argues that in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history, and reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed Fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children. The Wife's Tale is an intimate memoir, both of a life and of a country.

Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa's historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like "work," "marriage," and "land" take shape.

... of the al-Bashir regime. The book also explores how that regime was brought to its knees through its inability to manage the intersecting economic and political crises caused by the secession of South Sudan and the loss...

This book traces three decades of securitization in Angola. As a governing strategy during war and peacetime, it muted the aspirations of those on opposing sides, distorted the state, emboldened elites and redefined the identity of Angolans. Through this lens, Paula Cristina Roque provides an original account of Angola's post-conflict state-building. Securitization protected the interests of President dos Santos, the ruling MPLA party and the elites supporting the regime. Angola's array of security forces and infrastructure provided an alternative to a fully functioning executive, at national, provincial and local levels. The intrusive way in which any form of dissent or activism was crushed allowed the presidency to control the direction and narrative of the post-war years. But the façade of democracy, development and stability hid a very different reality for the majority of Angolans, who remained poor, disenfranchised and marginalized. Roque explores the inner workings of the intelligence services, army and presidential guard, explaining the trajectory of a survivalist and fearful regime presiding over scarcities and injustices. She shows that the survival of national security and governing elites was the highest priority. The "shadows" held far more power than institutions, and weakened them-widening the gap between government and governed.

How has capitalism created or enhanced racism? In what ways do the violent histories of slavery and empire continue to influence the allocation of global resources?