За годы т.н. «перестройки» 1985 - 1991 годов в СССР произошло так много событий, стоящих внимания историка, что довольно трудно вычленить главные - те, что в конце концов повлияли на событие итоговое: собственно уничтожение самого Союза ССР. В начале пути стоит так много завязок разного рода тенденций, которые были слабыми, робкими и лишь в конце своем обрушились лавиною, что традиционный путь - от начала к концу - несколько затруднителен для нашего анализа: будет трудно найти это малоуловимое. Поэтому мы лишь оговорим, что автор нашел ответ для решения своей задачи лишь в самом конце хронико-событийной цепочки. Потом я пошел в самое начало пути - причем очень часто ход разветвлялся и приходилось делать возвратные действия к развилке, чтобы снова идти до какого-то тупика - и все лишь для того, чтобы в конце концов найти наиболее общую (но все равно еще далеко не полную) картину явления. Но показать нашу работу читателю невозможно - это запутает его, и поэтому вам я выдаю не мозаику моих поисков, а уже картину результатов.

The British census plays an unquestioned role in governance today, and the recent digitization of nineteenth century census data has allowed millions of amateur and professional researchers to visualize their national and familial past. This study tells the tangled story of how the census took shape over the early decades of its existence, developing from a simple counting of households during the Napoleonic Wars into a centralized undertaking that involved the governmental and intellectual luminaries of Victorian Britain. Along the way, the census intertwined with the pressing questions of the day, including Malthusianism, industrialization, political representation, Irish immigration, women’s employment, reproduction, and empire. The book explores the hotly disputed process by which the census was created and developed and examines how a wide cast of characters, including statisticians, novelists, national and local officials, political and social reformers, and journalists responded to and used the idea of a census. It shows that the act of describing British society in statistical terms was also an act of contestation.

Tourists know Amsterdam as a picturesque city of low-slung brick houses lining tidy canals; student travelers know it for its legal brothels and hash bars; art lovers know it for Rembrandt's glorious portraits. But the deeper history of Amsterdam, what makes it one of the most fascinating places on earth, is bound up in its unique geography-the constant battle of its citizens to keep the sea at bay and the democratic philosophy that this enduring struggle fostered. Amsterdam is the font of liberalism, in both its senses. Tolerance for free thinking and free love make it a place where, in the words of one of its mayors, "craziness is a value." But the city also fostered the deeper meaning of liberalism, one that profoundly influenced America: political and economic freedom. Amsterdam was home not only to religious dissidents and radical thinkers but to the world's first great global corporation. In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam, showing how such disparate elements as herring anatomy, naked Anabaptists parading through the streets, and an intimate gathering in a sixteenth-century wine-tasting room had a profound effect on Dutch-and world-history. Weaving in his own experiences of his adopted home, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually engaging story of Amsterdam from the building of its first canals in the 1300s, through its brutal struggle for independence, its golden age as a vast empire, to its complex present in which its cherished ideals of liberalism are under siege.

The book details population changes in every region of the planet from 400 BC to 1978 AD. McEvedy and Jones used seventy line graphs and accompanying commentary text to describe population changes in seventy regions. The only negative aspect of this book is that the authors estimates of pre-European, Native American populations are considerably lower than most other estimates and seem somewhat outdated. While many books describe population changes, few cover such a huge breadth of space and time and few give so much information so directly. This book is much appreciated and other books like this would certainly be welcome.

Encyclopedia of North American Immigration is a solid, comprehensive one-volume encyclopedia consisting of more than 300 A-to-Z entries on events, themes, people, places, and legislation related to immigration. This valuable reference to a popular and ever-changing topic provides straightforward and concise information on the groups, policies, and events that defined the world's greatest migration of peoples and shaped their reception in North America. Each of the articles includes an extensive, up-to-date bibliography that will provide every reader with the necessary resources for further research. Historical black-and-white photographs, as well as maps and graphs, are enhanced by a general bibliography, a subject index, and a general index. The transformation of the culture of the North American continent since the 15th century is one of the great historical events of the past 500 years. For good or bad, it has shaped the destinies of millions of people of all races, transformed the nature of international politics, and altered the concept of personal possibilities in every country. The magnitude and diversity of the migration to North America has made analysis of the process as a whole quite difficult, mainly because the peopling of North America was not a single movement, but hundreds of separate movements, each with its own story, foundations, rationale, and outcome.

Between 1937 and 1949, Joseph Stalin deported more than two million people of 13 nationalities from their homelands to remote areas of the U.S.S.R. His regime perfected the crime of ethnic cleansing as an adjunct to its security policy during those decades. Based upon material recently released from Soviet archives, this study describes the mass deportation of these minorities, their conditions in exile, and their eventual release. It includes a large amount of statistical data on the number of people deported; deaths and births in exile; and the role of the exiles in developing the economy of remote areas of the Soviet Union. The first wholesale deportation involved the Soviet Koreans, relocated to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to prevent them from assisting Japanese spies and saboteurs. The success of this operation led the secret police to adopt, as standard procedure, the deportation of whole ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty to the Soviet state. In 1941, the policy affected Soviet Finns and Germans; in 1943, the Karachays and Kalmyks were forcibly relocated; in 1944, the massive deportation affected the Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshils; and finally, the Black Sea Greeks were moved in 1949 and 1950.

Опубликованы наиболее важные из тысяч документов о голоде, которые охватывают все республики бывшего СССР. Впоследствии они войдут в готовящийся к публикации многотомный документальный сборник "Голод в СССР, 1929-1934". Нет ничего хуже чем сегодняшнее использование трагических страниц истории, когда-то общей у российского и украинского народов, для политических спекуляций. Однако позиция отстраненного наблюдателя, единственно возможная в этой ситуации для России, в перспективе также может привести к стратегическому проигрышу, не будучи подкрепленной сооветствующей взвешенным и научно обоснованным взглядом на события 1933–1934 гг.

Книга представляет интерес для тех, кто интересуется работой разведывательных служб. Для того, кто читал книги В.Суворова "Аквариум" и "Армия взгляд изнутри" первые семь глав не представляют особого интереса. Они более широко раскрывают главу "Бермудский треугольник" из книги "Армия изнутри".