In 1991, the centrifugal forces of ethnic nationalism destroyed the Soviet Union. Religious and ethnic issues will be the defining principles of political life in East Europe, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia for the next decade. Yet when most Americans and Europeans read, for instance, of the Ossetians and Ingush, they have no idea who these peoples are or why they are fighting. This volume will provide a ready reference for students, researchers, and librarians who are trying to sort out the political and social struggles in that part of the world. Focusing on ethnolinguistic groups...

Today when most Americans think of the Great Depression, they imagine desperate hoboes riding the rails in search of work, unemployed men selling pencils to indifferent crowds, bootleggers hustling illegal booze to secrecy-shrouded speakeasies, FDR smiling, or Judy Garland skipping along the yellow brick road. Hard times have become an abstraction. But there was a time when economic suffering was real, when hunger stalked the land, and Americans tried to forget their troubles in movie theaters or in front of a radio.

From the stock market crash of October 1929 to Germany's invasion of...

Today, Americans look back nostalgically at the 1950s, an era when television and rock and roll revolutionized popular culture, and Vietnam, race riots, drug abuse, and protest movements were still in the future. With homes in the suburbs, new automobiles, and the latest electrical gadgets, many Americans believed they were the most prosperous people on earth. Yet the era was tainted by the fear of thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union, deepening racial tensions, and discontent with rigid roles for women and the demands of corporate conformity. A sense of rebellion had begun to brew...

The Industrial Revolution changed the course of American history, accelerated the American economy, and affected the way people lived. This ready-reference encyclopedia offers in-depth coverage of the economic, political, and social developments of the Industrial Revolution in the United States from 1750 to 1920. More than 200 substantial entries cover key individuals--among them entrepreneurs, inventors, captains of industry, and robber barons--significant technologies, inventions, court cases, companies, political institutions, economic events, and legislation. Highlights of the work...

-Breast cancer may very well be history's oldest malaise, known as well to the ancients as it is to us. The women who have endured it share a unique sisterhood. Queen Atossa and Dr. Jerri Nielsen--separated by era and geography, by culture, religion, politics, economics, and world view--could hardly have been more different. Born 2,500 years apart, they stand as opposite bookends on the shelf of human history. One was the most powerful woman in the ancient world, the daughter of an emperor, the mother of a god; the other is a twenty-first-century physician with a streak of adventure...

Christopher Columbus' discovery of the new world launched a process of economic and cultural integration that continues to this day. In the wake of Columbus's voyages, the major powers of Western Europe established imperial systems that shaped global politics and economics for centuries. "The Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism" is designed to provide a ready reference tool for students and scholars of these systems. Its major focus is the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, German, Belgian, and Italian empires during the past 500 years.

"The Dictionary" offers brief...