The fascinating life story of Ignat Kaneff, one of Canada’s leading builders. When Ignat Kaneff arrived in Canada in 1951, he had five dollars to his name, spoke no English, and had very little education. Yet, this was the beginning of one of Canada’s great immigrant success stories. Having left his native Bulgaria at just fourteen, Kaneff’s journey to Canada was long. It even included a decade spent in wartime Germany, working as a market gardener, before his journey led him to Canada. Kaneff began working in Toronto’s construction industry, where he showed tremendous drive, quickly founding a company and breaking ground on his first subdivision in the early 1950s. He continued on a trajectory toward success, and by the 1970s was ranked among Canada’s top businessmen. Considered a pioneering citizen of the City of Mississauga, in 2017 he was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada. Becoming a Somebody recounts his stunning rise to prominence.
Representing a unique reference tool for readers interested in history, criminology, or terrorism, this book provides the most complete and up-to-date coverage of assassinations of key figures throughout history and around the world. Effecting the death of a political figure, a leader of a nation, or a public figure usually captures people's attention. But how often is assassination effective to achieve the larger objective beyond the death of the targeted individual? Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia offers more than 200 entries on assassinations of all kinds that will allow readers to grasp the often-complex motivating factors behind each event and better understand historical and contemporary social unrest. Each entry identifies the assassination target and summarizes that person's significance; discusses the person's assassination, including the factors that led up to it and its political and cultural contexts; and explains the powerful effects of the assassination in world history. The encyclopedia also includes various sidebars that spotlight relevant individuals, groups, and movements and present intriguing factoids such as the final disposition of notorious assassins' weapons and various films and novels that were inspired by famous assassinations. In addition, 23 primary source documents provide accounts of assassinations throughout world history.
This book provides a comprehensive study of refugee movements and population transfers across Europe during the First World War and the early postwar period. Drawing parallels with contemporary migration issues, the book serves a social and educational purpose by highlighting Europe's history of migration and emphasizing the relevance of past experiences to current challenges. It seeks to enhance understanding, raise social awareness, and contribute to the broader discourse on war refugeeism by applying historical insights to address contemporary migration crises. The authors discuss how issues of refugee movements and population transfers were addressed in different contexts and reflect on refugees as both war-induced migrants and political tools for authorities. The book covers a range of topics including humanitarian systems during the war and the early postwar period, refugee locations, policy influence, national issues, self-organization, and aid for refugees, as well as immigration control in time after bordering the postimperial Europe. It also addresses the composition of populations in postwar reconstruction processes and its population dynamics. This volume will be of value to those interested in modern European history, social and political history.
The interwar period has left a deep impression on later generations. This was an age of crises where representative democracy, itself a relatively recent political invention, seemed unable to cope with the challenges that confronted it. Against the backdrop of the economic crisis that began in 2008 and the rise of populist parties, a new body of scholarship - frequently invoked by the media - has used interwar political developments to warn that even long-established Western democracies are fragile. Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis challenges this 'interwar analogy' based on the fact that a relatively large number of interwar democracies were able to survive the recurrent crises of the 1920s and 1930s. The main aim of this book is to understand the striking resilience of these democracies, and how they differed from the many democracies that broke down in the same period. The authors advance an explanation that emphasizes the importance of democratic legacies and the strength of the associational landscape (i.e., organized civil society and institutionalized political parties). Moreover, they underline that these factors were themselves associated with a set of deeper structural conditions, which on the eve of the interwar period had brought about different political pathways. The authors' empirical strategy consists of a combination of comparative analyses of all interwar democratic spells and illustrative case studies. The book's main takeaway point is that the interwar period shows how resilient democracy is once it has had time to consolidate. On this basis, recent warnings about the fragility of contemporary democracies in Western Europe and North America seem exaggerated - or, at least, that they cannot be sustained by interwar evidence. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.
In 1842 Heinrich Heine, the German poet, wrote that the bourgeoisie, 'obsessed by a nightmare apprehension of disaster' and 'an instinctive dread of communism', were driven against their better instincts into tolerating absolutist government. Theirs was a 'politics motivated by fear'. Over the next 150 years, the middle classes were repeatedly accused of betraying liberty for fear of 'red revolution'. The failure of the revolutions of 1848, conservative nationalism from the 1860s, fascist victories in the first half of the twentieth-century, and repression of national liberation movements during the Cold War - these fateful disasters were all explained by the bourgeoisie's fear of the masses. For their part, conservatives insisted that demagogues and fanatics exploited the desperation of the poor to subvert liberal revolutions, leading to anarchy and tyranny. Only evolutionary reform was enduring. From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain, and NATO became instruments of 'regime change', seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free-market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a 'watershed event in the global democratic revolution'. This was an extraordinary turn-around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hubris still invited nemesis. Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear examines this remarkable story, and the fierce debates it occasioned. It takes in a span from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, covering a wide range of countries and thinkers. Broad in its scope, it presents a clear set of arguments that shed new light on the creation of our modern world.
The volume undertakes a comparative analysis of the various discursive traditions dealing with the connection between modernity and historicity in Southeastern and Northern Europe, reconstructing the ways in which different "temporalities" produced alternative representations of the past and future, of continuity and discontinuity, and identity.
Intellectual Horizons offers a pioneering, transnational and comparative treatment of key thematic areas in the intellectual and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. For most of the twentieth century, Central and Eastern European ideas and cultures constituted an integral part of wider European trends. However, the intellectual and cultural history of this diverse region has rarely been incorporated sufficiently into nominally comprehensive histories of Europe. This volume redresses this underrepresentation and provides a more balanced perspective on the recent past of the continent through original, critical overviews of themes ranging from the social and conceptual history of intellectuals and histories of political thought and historiography, to literary, visual and religious cultures, to perceptions and representations of the region in the twentieth century. While structured thematically, individual contributions are organized chronologically. They emphasize, where relevant, generational experiences, agendas and accomplishments, while taking into account the sharp ruptures that characterize the period. The third in a four-volume set on Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, it is the go-to resource for understanding the intellectual and cultural history of this dynamic region.
Modern Balkan history has traditionally been studied by national historians in terms of separate national histories taking place within bounded state territories. The authors in this volume take a different approach. They all seek to treat the modern history of the region from a transnational and relational perspective in terms of shared and connected, as well as entangled, histories, transfers and crossings. This goes along with an interest in the way ideas, institutions and techniques were selected, transferred and adapted to Balkan conditions and how they interacted with those conditions, resulting in mélanges and hybridization. The volume also invites reflection on the interacting entities in the very process of their creation and consecutive transformations rather than taking them as givens. Contributors include: Diana Mishkova, Alexander Vezenkov, Constantin Iordachi, Roumen Daskalov, Tchavdar Marinov, Blagovest Njagulov.
A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe is a synthetic work, authored by an international team of researchers, covering twenty national cultures and 250 years. It goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narratives and presents a novel vision especially sensitive to the cross-cultural entanglement of political ideas and discourses. Its principal aim is to make these cultures available for the global 'market of ideas' and revisit some of the basic assumptions about the history of modern political thought, and modernity as such. The present volume is a sequel to Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Long Nineteenth Century'. It begins with the end of the Great War, depicting the colorful intellectual landscape of the interwar period and the increasing political and ideological radicalization culminating in the Second World War. Taking the war experience both as a breaking point but in many ways also a transmitter of previous intellectual traditions, it maps the intellectual paradigms and debates of the immediate postwar years, marked by a negotiation between the democratic and communist agendas, as well as the subsequent processes of political and cultural Stalinization. Subsequently, the post-Stalinist period is analyzed with a special focus on the various attempts of de-Stalinization and the rise of revisionist Marxism and other critical projects culminating in the carnivalesque but also extremely dramatic year of 1968. This volume is followed by Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the 'Short Twentieth Century' and Beyond, Part II: 1968-2018.
In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism—illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history "Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide-ranging history defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering. Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour of the various peoples who made Eastern Europe their home over the centuries, including the Roma, Jews, and Muslims; the great kingdoms of the medieval period; the rise and fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the dawn of the modern era; the ravages of fascism and Communism; the birth of the modern nation-state and beyond. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family’s past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity and eclecticism, and of people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating. The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe and Russia, and a powerful corrective that re-centers not only our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape but also the ways in which Eastern Europe has evolved throughout history to become what it is today.
