Started by Italian brothers from North Denver, the high-profile Smaldone crime syndicate began in the bootlegging days of the 1920s and flourished well into the late twentieth century. Connected to such notorious crime figures as Al Capone and Carlos Marcello, as well as to presidents and other politicians, charismatic Clyde Smaldone was the crime family, s leader from the Prohibition era to the rise of gambling to the family, s waning days. Uncovering the good and the bad, best-selling author Dick Kreck captures the complexity of Clyde, brother Checkers, and their crew, who perpetuated a shadowy underworld but exhibited great generosity and commitment to their community, offering food, money, and college funds to struggling families. Through candid interviews and fi rsthand accounts, Kreck reveals the true sense of what it meant to be a Smaldone, and the mix of love and dysfunction that is part of every American family.
This accessible text offers a concise but comprehensive introduction to European socialism, which arose in the maelstrom of the industrial and democratic revolutions launched in the eighteenth century. Striving for sweeping social, economic, cultural, and political change, socialists were a diverse lot. However, they were united by principles asserting the social and political equality of all people, ideas that won the adherence of millions and struck fear in the hearts of their numerous opponents. William Smaldone shows how, over the course of 200 years, socialists successfully promoted the democratization of European society and a more equitable division of wealth. At the same time, he illustrates how conflicts over the means of achieving their aims divided them into rival “socialist” and “communist” currents, a rift that undercut the struggle against fascism and helped lay the groundwork for Europe’s division during the Cold War. Although many predicted the demise of socialism as a potent force after the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s dissolution, and the rise of neo-liberal ideology, recent developments show that such a judgment was premature. The author argues that the growth of new socialist parties across Europe indicates that socialist ideas remain vibrant in the face of capitalism’s failure to solve chronic social and economic problems, especially following the deep global crisis that began in 2008. Combining an analytical narrative with a selection of primary texts and visual images, this book provides undergraduate students with a brief, readable history, including an overview of how socialist political movements have evolved over time and stressing the rich diversity that has characterized socialism’s foundations from its beginning. This new edition brings this text up to date and examines the European socialist movement in the face of 21st century challenges. It includes a new preface, including the 2017 American election, updated bibliographies, two new chapters and an afterword.
Started by Italian brothers from North Denver, the high-profile Smaldone crime syndicate began in the bootlegging days of the 1920s and flourished into the 1980s. Connected to notorious crime figures, politicians, and presidents, Clyde Smaldone was the crime family's leader. Through candid interviews and firsthand accounts, Dick Kreck reveals the true sense of what it meant to be a Smaldone, not only the corrupt but also the virtuous.Dick Kreck retired from The Denver Post after thirty-eight years as a columnist. He is the author of four other books, including Murder at the Brown Palace. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
Until his death in a Gestapo prison cell, Rudolf Hilferding was one of Europe's most prominent socialist theorists and politicians. A leading economic thinker in the European socialist movement and an important politician in the German Social Democratic Party, he served as Weimar finance minister at the height of the inflation of 1923 and again at the onset of the depression in 1928. At a time when Germany faced one economic and political crisis after another, he led social democracy's efforts to strengthen the republic and to achieve its socialist objectives. This finely crafted intellectual biography illustrates how Hilferding's personal and intellectual journey reflected the failures of social democracy in its confrontation with nazism and communism. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Hilferding in exile continued the struggle against the Nazis. Caught in the maelstrom of the French defeat, in 1940 he was arrested by Vichy authorities and treacherously handed over to the Gestapo. Throughout his eventful life Hilferding analyzed the central issues facing modern socialism, including the development of finance capitalism, the nature of imperialism, the path to socialism, and the organization of socialist parties. For Hilferding, democratic freedom was at the heart of the socialist project, and in rejecting the tyranny of both communism and fascism, he made important contributions to the debate on the nature of totalitarianism. His insights into Marxist theory adn practice are still vital for understanding the development of socialism in the twentieth century.
This volume offers the essential theoretical thought of the Austro-Marxist thinkers Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Karl Renner, Friedrich Adler, Rudolf Hilferding, and Otto Neurath over the span of their Austrian Social-Democratic careers, from the decades before World War I until the mid-1930s. Austro-Marxist theoretical perspectives were conceived as social scientific tools for the issues that faced the development of socialism in their time. The relevance of their thought for the contemporary world inheres in this understanding.
The successful jihad of 1804 in Hausaland - perhaps the most important Islamic revolution in West African history, with consequences still apparent in Nigeria today - resulted in the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest and most enduring West African polity in the nineteenth century. The book is a full length study of traditional Sudanic military history, and an authoritative analysis of warfare in its most prominent Islamic state. After a brief survey of the evolution of Sudanic warfare and military organisation before 1800, Dr Smaldone examines the historical development and sociological implications of the two important revolutions in military technology which occurred in the nineteenth century: the adoption of cavalry during the jihad period and the introduction of firearms in the latter half of the century. He argues that these two revolutions were causal factors in producing two structural transformations in the emirates of the Caliphate, first from relatively egalitarian combatant communities to feudal systems, and then to centralised bureaucratic state organisations.
Left-leaning political parties play an important role as representatives of the poor and disempowered. They once did so by promising protections from the forces of capital and the market’s tendencies to produce inequality. But in the 1990s they gave up on protection, asking voters to adapt to a market-driven world. Meanwhile, new, extreme parties began to promise economic protections of their own—albeit in an angry, anti-immigrant tone. To better understand today’s strange new political world, Stephanie L. Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented analyzes the history of the Swedish and German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. Breaking with an assumption that parties simply respond to forces beyond their control, Mudge argues that left parties’ changing promises expressed the worldviews of different kinds of experts. To understand how left parties speak, we have to understand the people who speak for them. Leftism Reinvented shows how Keynesian economists came to speak for left parties by the early 1960s. These economists saw their task in terms of discretionary, politically-sensitive economic management. But in the 1980s a new kind of economist, who viewed the advancement of markets as left parties’ main task, came to the fore. Meanwhile, as voters’ loyalties to left parties waned, professional strategists were called upon to “spin” party messages. Ultimately, left parties undermined themselves, leaving a representative vacuum in their wake. Leftism Reinvented raises new questions about the roles and responsibilities of left parties—and their experts—in politics today.
This collection of essays on pre-colonial sub-Saharan African military history is drawn from a number of academic journals and includes some which are considered milestones in African historiographical discourse, as well as others which, while lesser known, provide remarkable insight into the unique nature of African military history. Selections were made so as to produce an introduction to the understudied field of pre-colonial African military history that will be useful to specialists and non-specialists alike. The volume also contains an introduction which presents one of the first significant reviews of pre-colonial African military historiography ever attempted.
