African Wars

This is a historical narrative and analysis of the unconstitutional changes of government in most West African countries where military rule became institutionalised more than in any other part of the continent from the sixties to the nineties. There is no specific reason why the region has suffered from usurpation of power by soldiers more than any other part of the continent, besides the desire by soldiers to rule, recently demonstrated by coups in Mali in 2020 and 2021, Guinea in 2021, and Burkina Faso in 2022. Governments in West Africa are no more unstable or weaker than their ...

The Roman Provinces of North Africa: The History of the Region and Its Rulers After the Punic Wars looks at Rome’s famous conquests, and what the area was like until the dissolution of history’s most famous empire.

Do Not Disturb is a dramatic recasting of the modern history of Africa’s Great Lakes region, an area blighted by the greatest genocide of the 20th century. This bold retelling, vividly sourced by direct testimony from key participants, tears up the traditional script. In the old version, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrows a genocidal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that makes Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. The new version examines afresh questions which dog the recent past.

Thousands of books and articles have been written about the battles----both great and small----and the major personalities of the American Civil War. The vast majority of these books and articles have concentrated on the battles and personalities of the famous "household names"----the generals and political figures that first caused, and then directed, the tragic conflict to its bloody conclusion. The literature of the Civil War abounds with biographies of the heroes of the South such as Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, James Longstreet and Jefferson Davis as well as those of the ...

In turn-of-the-century South Africa, 14-year-old Lettie, her younger brother, and her mother are Dutch Afrikaner settlers who have been taken from their farm by British soldiers and are being held in a concentration camp. It is early in the Boer War, and Lettie's father, grandfather, and brother are off fighting the British as thousands of Afrikaner women and children are detained. Determined to dictate their own fate, Lettie and her family give each other strength and hope as they fight to survive amid increasingly dire conditions.

The Battle of the Crater is known as one of the Civil War's bloodiest struggles - a Union loss with combined casualties of 5,000, many of whom were members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) under Union Brigadier General Edward Ferrero. The battle was a violent clash of forces as Confederate soldiers fought for the first time against African American soldiers.

Madagascar provided the stunning backdrop for one of the strangest conflicts of the Second World War - when Britain went head to head against one of its closest allies. When British forces landed on the island in 1942, the enemy they faced wasn’t German, Japanese, or even Italian, this time the opposing forces were French.

Godfrey Mwakikagile looks at the African post-colonial state and the challenges it faces. He contends that it is structurally flawed and does not reflect African realities. It is an oppressive machinery and an apparatus of power to serve the interests of the ruling class and the elite at the expense of ordinary citizens and the masses. And it has retained the institutional structure of the colonial state instead of undergoing fundamental transformation to become truly African. Mwakikagile focuses on a number of countries providing case studies whose relevance is continental in scope. He ...

Terrorism is never static. It evolves all the time as one side tries to gain the upper hand over the other and in open conflict, where the terrorist makes a stand, he is usually annihilated by the Security Forces, it is never a good tactic unless the terrorism phase becomes a conventional phase. Terrorism also moves around the world. Without the religious or political changes or compromises that started the terrorism or the insurrection, the war may carry on for decades. This means that the counterterrorism operative should be able to operate in any environment where the terrorist is to be ...

This work is a study of Uganda as a nation during the post-colonial era. Godfrey Mwakikagile looks at the problems the country faced during its first years of independence including the constitutional crisis following the abolition of the kingdoms; the demand by the Buganda kingdom for federal status and its refusal to accept a unitary state; the ouster of Kabaka Mutesa II from the presidency and his subsequent exile to Britain; the paradoxical nature of the demand by Buganda kingdom for federal status under a unitary state and of having a hereditary ruler, Mutesa, the king of Buganda, ...

How did a Black child, growing up in segregationist Mississippi during the early 1900s, become the commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Corps during the brutal Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935? In this gripping, never-before-told tale, biographer Thomas E. Simmons brings to life Robinson’s outstanding success in becoming a pilot, his expertise in building and assembling his own working aircraft, his influence on the establishment of a school of aviation at Tuskegee Institute, and his wartime service.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty did more than offer aid to needy Americans; in some cities, it also sparked both racial conflict and cooperation. Race and the War on Poverty examines the African American and Mexican American community organizations in Los Angeles that emerged to implement War on Poverty programs. It explores how organizers applied democratic vision and political savvy to community action, and how the ongoing African American, Chicano, and feminist movements in turn shaped the contours of the War on Poverty’s goals, programs, and cultural identity.

Through the years, since Apartheid ended officially in 1994, a lot was written about the South African Police Force (SAP), the country’s National Police Force. Not all of the books were true to facts and many with a clear left-wing liberal political motive behind them. Many “anti” books were published, especially by the mainstream publishing houses and although they have a function and fulfilled a financial need, the Mean Streets Series is not like that. This is a story of a man, a junior officer that grew up in Apartheid South Africa and joined the Police at age 18 with the specific ...

In this powerful and timely book, civil rights historian and political analyst Juan Williams denounces Donald Trump for intentionally twisting history to fuel racial tensions for his political advantage. In Williams's lifetime, crusaders for civil rights have braved hatred, violence, and imprisonment. Remarkably, all this progress suddenly seems to have been forgotten - or worse, undone. The stirring history of hard-fought and heroic battles for voting rights, integrated schools, and more is under direct threat from an administration dedicated to restricting these basic freedoms.

In this second volume of the Sgt. Smith World War II trilogy, we find First Squad on the hot and rocky island of Sicily as the Allies plan to take and hold the island in order to better control shipping in the Mediterranean and as a jumping off point for the invasion of Italy. The First Infantry Division, having been bloodied in the fierce fighting in the hills and desert country of Tunisia, has learned a few hard lessons. After receiving some devastating setbacks in the Kasserine Pass from Rommel’s Africa Corps, the First Division stood their ground at El Guettar and came back to beat ...

In 1862, Andrew “Andy” Jackson Smith, son of a white landowner and enslaved woman, es­caped to Union troops operating in Kentucky, made his way to the North, and volunteered for the 55th Massachusetts, one of the newly formed African American regiments. The regiment was deployed to South Carolina, and during a desperate assault on a Confederate battery, the color bearer was killed. Before the flag was lost, Smith quickly retrieved it and under heavy fire, held the colors steady while the decimated regiment withdrew.

On August 7, 1998, three years before President George W. Bush declared the War on Terror, the radical Islamist group al-Qaeda bombed the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where Prudence Bushnell was serving as U.S. ambassador. Terrorism, Betrayal, and Resilience is her account of what happened, how it happened, and its impact 20 years later. When the bombs went off in Kenya and neighboring Tanzania that day, Congress was in recess and the White House, along with the entire country, was focused on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

We've heard the name "Condoleezza Rice" over and over again as the spokesperson for President George W. Bush in matters of national security and foreign affairs. She presented a balanced, firm, unafraid presence to the country after the terrible events of September 11, 2001, as she spoke to the media and the public on behalf of the President. And, when the President has something to say about our friends and foes overseas, "Condi," as she is known to her friends, is usually standing in the background.

In the South of the 1890s, Booker T. Washington stood as the often controversial personification of the aspirations of the Black masses. The Civil War had ended, casting uneducated Blacks adrift or, equally tenuous, creating a class of sharecroppers still dependent on the whims of their former owners. Black Reconstruction, for all its outward trimming, had failed to deliver its promised economic and political empowerment.

This is the story of Dr. Geneva Smitherman, aka "Dr. G," the pioneering linguist often referred to as the "Queen of Black Language." In a series of narrative essays, Dr. G writes eloquently and powerfully about the role of language in social transformation and the academic, intellectual, linguistic, and societal debates that shaped her groundbreaking work as a Black Studies O.G. and a Womanist scholar-activist of African American Language.