Public History

In the 1980s the failure of corporate strategies and trickle-down economics led to gross inequalities among many U.S. neighborhoods and cities. By examining and comparing a gentrifying and a low-income neighborhood in two medium-sized cities: Albany, a healthy service sector city, and Schenectady, a declining manufacturing city.

Traditionally, social scientists have assumed that past imperialism hinders the future development prospects of colonized nations. Challenging this widespread belief, Matthew Lange argues in Lineages of Despotism and Development that countries once under direct British imperial control have developed more successfully than those that were ruled indirectly.

In the first published account of the massive U.S. covert intervention in British Guiana between 1953 and 1969, Stephen G. Rabe uncovers a Cold War story of imperialism, gender bias, and racism. When the South American colony now known as Guyana was due to gain independence from Britain in the 1960s, Considering race, gender, religion, and ethnicity along with traditional approaches to diplomatic history, Rabe's analysis of this Cold War tragedy serves as a needed corrective to interpretations that depict the Cold War as an unsullied U.S. triumph.

This book traces the creation of the ethnic groups in the nineteenth century and its ultimate impact on the colony's political constituencies in the run-up to independence. The Construction of the nation in the post colonial period is approached through an analysis of crocket, trade unions and women traders in the late 1970s and early 1980s in an effort to identify patterns in Guyanese nation building. British and US Government documents illuminate the decolonization process, establishing the extent, form and timing of Anglo-American complicity in the events of 19961-64, and indication their impact in ethnic power relations.